Black Ops

“If you want to think I’m with the agency, suit yourself. But I just saw in Svetlana’s eyes that I hit home when I asked about the Kuhls. . . .”

Berezovsky’s eyes flashed to his sister.

And so did that look, Tom, ol’ buddy.

“So, answer my question: How close behind you are they?”

Berezovsky gave him an icy look.

“We don’t know that they are,” Svetlana repeated evenly.

Castillo met her eyes.

“But the termination of the Kuhls makes it a possibility?”

“It is likely what happened to the Kuhls was intended as a message to somebody. It could be a message to us.”

“Are you a believer in the worst-case scenario, Colonel?” Castillo asked, and then made a clarification: “Colonel Alekseeva?”

“Sometimes that’s useful,” she said.

“Do they know you’re going to Vienna?”

She nodded. “The Hermitage is loaning to the Kunsthistorisches Museum Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s wax statue of Peter the First. Do you know it, by chance?”

Castillo nodded. He had seen the early-eighteenth-century Madam Tussaud-like wax statue in the museum in Saint Petersburg.

“I’m surprised that the Hermitage would let it out the door,” Castillo said.

“As a gesture of friendship and a hope for peace between old enemies,” she said evenly. “Mr. Putin is now a friend of the West, in case you hadn’t heard.”

“I have heard that, now that you mention it.”

She smiled at him again.

“It is very well-packed and traveling under heavy guard by road. From Vienna it will go to Berlin, then Copenhagen . . . and some other cities. This gives us a chance to see people we sometimes don’t often get to see.”

“The worst-case scenario being they will grab you at the Westbahnhof?”

“Or wait for confirmation of our treason when we meet our contact, or our contact tries to contact us. Both scenarios, of course, presume they know our intentions.”

So this Let’s Defect business didn’t start last week, huh?

I should’ve known it didn’t. . . .

“Who’s your contact in Vienna?” Castillo asked.

“I’ve answered all of your questions,” Svetlana said. “Now answer my brother’s question about your airplane.”

“Okay. What was it you wanted to know, Tom?”

“First, is it under your control?”

Castillo nodded.

“Is it available on short notice for a long flight?”

“Define ‘long flight.’ ”

“Twelve thousand kilometers.”

“Not without a fuel stop. The range is about thirty-seven hundred nautical miles. Where do you want to go?”

“Twelve thousand kilometers from Vienna,” Berezovsky said.

“Buenos Aires,” Svetlana added.

That shouldn’t have surprised me—she mentioned Zhdankov—but it did.

“Why there?”

“That’s none of your business,” Berezovsky said.

“It is if I’m going to take you there. . . .”

“We have family there,” Svetlana offered, “who can help us vanish.”

“I’ll need the details of that,” Castillo said.

“When we’re under way,” she said. “At the fuel stop, I’ll tell you.”

Am I supposed to believe that?

“You are going to take us there, aren’t you?” Svetlana asked.

She said, staring soulfully into my eyes.

Nice try, sweetheart.

Somebody must have told you of my reputation for being a sucker when beautiful women in distress stare soulfully into my eyes.

Who was it who said that the most important sex organ is between the ears?

But I’m not a sucker right now, thank you very much.

What I have to do right now is scare them a little.

“What I have to do right now is confer with Mr. Davidson to decide if what I might get out of helping you outweighs what you’re trying to get out of me,” Castillo said.

He saw disappointment in Svetlana’s eyes.

And that makes me feel lousy, sweetheart.

But right now I’m doing what I know I have to.

Castillo went on: “So, what I think you should do now is go back to your compartment. On the way, see if anybody’s tailing you. In twenty minutes, one of you—not both—come back, having decided between you what else you’re going to tell me besides the name of a dead SVR officer’s replacement to entice me to stick my neck out by not only trusting a couple of SVR agents I have never seen before and know nothing about in the first place, and then flying them halfway around the world with their former comrades in hot pursuit.”

He stood, said in Hungarian, “Stay, Max,” then stepped to the door, unlatched it, slid it open, and almost mockingly waved Berezovsky and Svetlana to pass through it.

“Twenty minutes should give you enough time to talk things over,” he said.

Berezovsky gave him a dirty look as he left. Svetlana avoided looking at him.

Castillo slid the door closed after them, then looked at Jack Davidson.

“Give them ninety seconds to get off the car, then we’ll see if Sandor can come up with some way to get them safely off the train.”

“You got thirty seconds to listen to me, Charley?”

“Sure.”

“Prefacing this by saying you did a good job with those two—which, considering the make the lady colonel was putting on you, couldn’t have been easy. . . .”

“If you have something to say, Jack, say it.”

“The only way I could get McNab to send me to work for you, Charley, was to promise on the heads of my children—”

“You don’t have any children.”

“Well, if I did . . . you get the point. I had to promise McNab—and mean it—that I would sit on you when it looked to me like your enthusiasm was about to overwhelm your common sense, as it has been known to do. I think that time has come.”

Castillo looked at him for a moment.

“As a point of order, Jack, when the hell was the last time my enthusiasm overwhelmed my common sense?”

“Oh, come on, Charley! I don’t know when the last time was, but I was there when you stole the helicopter.”

“I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it. And if memory serves, you were enthusiastically manning the Gatling in the door of that helicopter when we went after Dick Miller.”

“I knew I couldn’t stop you, Charley.”

“And you can’t stop me now, Jack. I think those two are just what we’re looking for.”

Davidson met his eyes for a moment, then shrugged.