Pissing off the Kremlin just to come up with a jumble of unintelligible clues — all leading nowhere — was another story.
On the surface, Charlie Spiegel was right. Their investigation had reached a dead-end. Every witness and every potential suspect they’d turned up had been murdered — first Grushtin, then the entire crew of that Russian tramp freighter, and now Serov.
And, with Alexei Koniev dead, she and Peter had not only lost a partner and friend, they’d also lost their access to anybody they could trust in Russian law enforcement. So what else could they do but slink home to America with their tails between their legs?
Helen sat bolt upright in bed and thumped her fist onto the mattress with a muttered, “No way!”
“Thought you were awake,” Peter Thorn said softly, pushing himself up to sit beside her.
Peter had visited the broom-closet-sized room offered him as temporary accommodations by the embassy staff just long enough to drop off his travel kit. Then he’d come straight to her own cramped quarters to help her pack. Several hours of steady work had left her life in Moscow jumbled up in cardboard boxes all over the floor. At her invitation, he’d stayed for the night.
Both of them were too drained and exhausted to make love, but neither wanted to leave the other’s side. And neither of them gave a damn anymore about the gossip that might race through the chancery building.
Helen turned her head toward him, seeing his eyes gleaming in the dark.
“You can’t sleep, either?”
“Nope.” Peter sighed. “I just keep running things over and over in my mind — trying to see where we screwed up.” Then he shrugged ruefully.
“And trying to avoid thinking about what happens next. Once we’re home, I mean.”
Helen sat silent, struck by a sudden sense of shame. She’d been thinking too much about herself. No matter where they stuck hen-whether in Mudville or the Hoover Building’s basement records office — she would still carry a badge. She would still be an FBI special agent. But Peter … Peter had lost everything.
The United States Army had been his home — his real family, in fact for all of Peter Thorn’s life. His father had been a career soldier, a highly decorated senior sergeant in the Special Forces.
Peter’s boyhood had been spent on military bases around the country and around the world. And, after his wayward mother abandoned them when he was eleven years old, he and his father had grown still closer — closer to each other and closer to the Army they both loved.
Now he was forty and faced with the prospect of … what?
Helen wondered. Retirement? Shuffling papers as a manager in some corporate hive? Living hand-to-mouth as a freelance counterterrorism consultant in a world crowded with other ex-soldiers chasing the same degrading contracts?
She felt tears well up in her eyes and turned toward him. “Oh, Peter …” she whispered brokenly.
His arms tightened around her. One strong hand softly stroked her hair. He kissed her forehead gently, brushing his lips across her skin. “It’ll be all right, Helen,” he promised. “We’ll see this thing through together. No matter what happens.”
“Side by side?” she asked.
“Come hell, high water, earthquake, or congressional committee,” Peter said flatly.
Helen felt her fatigue, her pain, all her doubts, and all her fears fly away — vanishing in a single, convulsive instant. Her lips met his fiercely and parted. Her body molded to his in a flowing, moving, pulsing rhythm that swept time and trouble aside.
Sometime later, exactly how long she wasn’t sure and didn’t really care, she lay still in the comforting circle of his arms. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest, feeling her eyelids growing heavier by the second. “Wow.”
“Wow, yourself,” Peter agreed gladly. But then he shifted slightly beneath her. “Who knows? Maybe retirement won’t be so bad, after all.”
Helen heard the worried undertone in his voice and felt sleep fade out of her reach again. She raised herself up on one elbow and tapped him on the ribs. “You don’t mean that, Peter, do you?”
He sighed. “No, not really.” His eyes looked over her head — off toward a horizon she couldn’t see. “I know what I am, Helen.
I can’t dodge it. I was born to follow the LIFE and the drum — not the lute and the tambourine. If I can’t be a soldier …” He fell silent.
“Then we have to find a way to beat these guys. To win our honor back.
To prove we were right to chase after Grushtin and Serov, and whoever murdered them,” Helen said angrily, feeling her mind starting to come fully alive for the first time since she’d left Randolph Clifford’s ornate office.
“Nice sentiment in theory. But probably impossible to carry out in fact,” he said reluctantly. “I think we’re licked, Helen.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“No,” Peter said finally. Then he shrugged. “But I really don’t know where the hell we go from here.”
“Back to the basics,” Helen suggested.
“Okay,” he said. He sat up in bed again. “The basics being: What’s worth sabotaging a passenger plane, murdering a high-ranking Air Force officer, and slaughtering an entire ship’s crew to keep secret?”
“Heroin?” she speculated. “Bulk quantities of heroin? Stashed inside one or more of those Su-24 engines Serov and his officers sold?”
“Maybe. It fits most of what we know,” Peter said slowly. “And the Russians and our own people have sure bought that as the motive behind all this.”
She heard the doubt in his voice. “But you haven’t?”
He shook his head. “Christ, Helen, I don’t know. Not for sure.” He grimaced. “All I do know is that I’m really tired of having heroin smuggling shoved in my face as a motive at every possible opportunity.”
She nodded. The same thing had been bothering her. The ambush aboard the Star of the White Sea made it clear that the bad guys had been one step ahead of them all the way. If that were so, and they were smuggling drugs, why hadn’t they tried harder to clear away the evidence?
When she asked that question aloud, Peter nodded himself.
“Good point. God knows those guys had plenty of time to themselves aboard that freighter-once they murdered the crew.” He leaned back against the pillow. “No, the more I think about it, the less I believe this whole thing is really about heroin smuggling.”’ “But what about the stuff we found in Gasparov’s suitcase?” Helen asked.
“Coincidence?” Peter suggested. “It could be a coincidence that the bad guys have been running with ever since — leading us down a bunch of blind alleys.”
Helen thought that over. “Maybe. The only real link we had between Captain Grushtin and Colonel Gasparov was that suicide note …”
“Which they forced Grushtin to write under torture,” Peter finished for her.
Helen grimaced. “Well, then, if we’re not chasing smuggled heroin — what the hell are we looking for?”
“Something else kept at Kandalaksha. Something valuable.”
“Su-24 bombers, maybe?” Helen wondered. “What if General Serov wasn’t just selling engines? What if he was selling whole aircraft?”
Peter shook his head. “I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“Because Avery and his team weren’t there to count planes.
They’d have no reason to go anywhere near the flight line or the hangars. If Serov and his commanders were selling off their aircraft inventory, John and his inspection team would never have spotted it.”
“So there’d be no reason for Serov to have Captain Grushtin sabotage their transport plane,” Helen concluded.
“Exactly.”
“Then what do you think the inspection team could have uncovered that spooked Serov?” she asked again.
Peter hesitated for several seconds and then said, “Well, I keep thinking about that circle in John Avery’s inspection logbook.”
