sixty-eight people simply in order to undermine Peter’s career. If she really wanted to get at him, she would have convinced the terrorists to fly to the West, and then she’d be free. Then again, she knew that if she did that, he would kill her brother, Adrian. She couldn’t have known that he would kill him anyway.
Yet if she knew so many other things, how could she not know this?
He’d considered at first that Brano Sev was behind the explosion, but even Brano would not have gone so far. Theirs was not yet a war of attrition.
Despite everything, it had been a good run. Three years of a perfectly oiled trap that lured enemy agents into their territory and then crushed them. Unlike Romania or Poland, theirs was a country that the West would think twice about before invading with intelligence agents.
And he still had his career. Room 305 by now had multiple departments controlling many types of disruption services; there was plenty of work for him to return to. This particular department, dealing with Rokosyn, would be quietly covered up, the last remaining threads disposed of, and he could go on to the next project. Or he could take a well-earned vacation, take Ilza and Iulian to the Black Sea. They’d spent too long in the cloistered world he’d built for them; it was time to show them around.
As he climbed the stairs to the lobby and took the vibrating elevator back up to his room, he again thought through the mechanism of Adrian Martrich’s death. It was simple. In a few hours, the desk clerk would call up to their room and say that a package was being delivered for Gavra Noukas and needed to be signed for. A package from Brano Sev. While Gavra was downstairs, looking for the absent deliveryman, Peter would be upstairs. Gavra would return to a dead lover.
Peter stepped out of the elevator and unlocked his door, glancing once up the empty corridor, then went inside. As he packed his bag, he began humming unconsciously, then realized what it was. Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo.” He even laughed to himself. A bit of Mozart to see him off.
From the side pocket of his suitcase he took out the hunting knife, which he’d kept sharp over the years. He’d used it twice in the last three years, to dispose of a French agent and an American one. Now, when he looked at it, he could hardly remember the young private he’d taken it from.
What he did remember clearly, and could never forget, was the lesson of that night. He’d felt the unarticulated knowledge on the long train ride from Prague to the Capital, felt it again after that final night with the girl, but only during that week answering Brano Sev’s questions did the words gather and give voice to the most important lesson he would ever learn: The first step to complete independence, the first step to asserting your free will, is to seek out and bring to light all your own darkest secrets. You must act on your bleakest impulses before true freedom becomes yours, before you can take control of your life.
Sometimes he considered writing this down.
There was a knock at the door. Instinctively, he slipped the knife under the wardrobe, where he kept his money, then stepped over to the door.
“Yes?”
“Sir, for you a letter,” a woman said in difficult English.
“Slip it under.”
The woman paused, then said, “Is big. Is too big, sir.”
“Okay. Just a second.” He turned the lock, then opened the door.
The woman looking back at him was not Turkish. She was white, attractive despite the heavy, sleep-deprived eyes, and familiar. But from where? He reached to accept the letter, staring into those eyes, but there was no letter at all.
Katja
I shoot him once in the stomach when he opens the door. A sharp explosion rings in my ears. The recoil goes through to my elbow, jerking it. He stumbles back a few feet, then falls as if he’s slipped on a banana peel.
Really, that’s how it looks.
Lying on the floor, he covers the hole in his stomach with a hand, but the blood comes out between his fingers. His face-up close it’s older than I remember; it’s been through things-is contorted, his lips loose and flapping with his quick, stunned breaths.
That’s when my head clears. Cordite burns in my nostrils as I check the empty corridor, then come inside and close the door. He tries to cry for help, but he can’t get enough breath for anything more than quiet groans and the occasional whisper.
“What?” I say, standing over him. “Did you say something?”
It’s difficult to read that twisted face. There’s pain, but it seems to be masking something. Surprise, perhaps.
He whispers, “What do you want?”
It’s just like the voice on the recording, just like the voice I remember.
But he’s asked me a question, and I’m not sure what I want. A part of me wonders if I’m done now, if seven years have led to that one bullet, and perhaps I should just leave.
He coughs, shooting pink spittle across the beige carpet.
I open his suitcase on the bed. Nothing except clothes.
“Money,” he whispers.
I come around to look at him. “Money?”
His eyes are very large. Blood drains from the corner of his lips as he says, “Wardrobe…under.” Then: “Hospital.”
I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’ve shot a man in the stomach, but there’s a hysterical lightness to my step as I hop over him to look beneath the wardrobe. This lightness will leave me, I know, but now I’m almost giddy. Crouching, I find a plastic bag filled with Deutschmarks and, beside it, a hunting knife.
Only when I pick it up and look at the hawk burned into its leather sheath does the adrenaline lessen. The dying man is now trying to roll onto his side.
“Hospital,” he whispers.
Time slows again as I remember this knife, the hilt that I saw coming out of my stomach. Stanislav’s knife, the one his father, weeping, presented him before he was shipped off to Prague. I was there to see the exchange. So were my mother and father. We all drank plum brandy.
“I have family,” he whispers.
I crawl over to him because my legs are not working well. He’s rolled to his side in the pool of his blood. I’m in that pool myself, my forearms sticky.
As if he can understand, I say, “Maybe it’s too simple, but yes, I blame you for everything.”
He blinks and whispers: “Who…are…you?”
I don’t understand, because it’s an impossible question. He must know me. How could I carry his face with me for seven years and he just-
I unsheathe the knife.
“No,” he whispers, his confused eyes growing again.
I climb behind him, place the point against his Adam’s apple and my knee behind his head. He tries to swat it with his hands, but his arms won’t rise that far.
Just before I push it in, he says the word that will remain with me for some time to come, in that whispered, dying tone.
He says, “Katja.”
From the look on your face I’m guessing you didn’t know what I did to her. If so, you wouldn’t have called me here. But let me tell you this, Comrade Sev. I’m not random. I’m a man who knows what is required at any moment. You told me that if I was interested in working for the Ministry, I should meet you in Victory Park on Friday. I was interested. I am interested. And I knew that if I was to be of proper service to the Ministry, I had to tie up my loose ends. An agent is no good if there are others out there who wish him ill, who know too much about him. No. It’s unacceptable. So that’s what I did. I tied up my loose ends. I got rid of that girl. And now I’m here, ready to serve the Ministry with all the cunning I can muster.
