pushed the Disconnect button on the phone. Then she put her head in her hands and sobbed as though there were no tomorrow. Because for her and Roger, that might just be the case.
THIRTY-ONE
Anton Zachary was a solid believer in routine. In structure and regimentation. Without it, he felt, the minutes and hours of the day turned to sludge, the significance of actions paled, diligence turned to sloth, nothing meant anything, and everything fell apart. For him, life without margins was a valueless blur of inconsequential events.
He hadn’t always held this outlook; it had grown and developed over many years, and more or less in tandem with his professional responsibilities. Zachary was a busy man, a man Nick Roma frequently called upon to perform impossible tasks within unimaginable deadlines. This was not done out of disrespect, not really, but, as with most overlords, Roma’s mind lacked the fine appreciation, so to speak, that would allow him to understand the hard work, the painstaking discipline and attention to detail, that went into the creation of a convincing fake, a successful lie, a counterfeit passport, visa, marriage license, or birth certificate that would deceive even the most careful and discerning eye. To Roma, Zachary was little more than a forger of papers, a duplicator of documents, a living stamp pad, a photocopy machine that happened to be made of flesh and blood, a tinkerer who did what anyone else could do if only he had the spare time. By Roma, craftsmanship was appreciated only insofar as it translated into instant results; fail to meet his demands just once and you were labeled incompetent, inept, a fool who could not perform a task that could have been assigned to any dilettante, perhaps even some drunk who had been dragged out of the gutter by his collar.
Zachary knew and accepted this as the lot of the artist. What incomprehensible pressures must Michelangelo have faced under the demands of his patrons? Or Shakespeare? Paint that ceiling now! Finish that play by tonight and give us some damn good lines! Make us laugh, cry, gasp with awe and excitement, and hurry, hurry, hurry! Ah, how they must have despaired. Yet where would they have been without those financial supporters? What would they have done for a livelihood? The tension between art and commerce was a vital if maddening constant. The fuel of productivity. The yin and yang — yes, yes! — the
If only it didn’t result in insomnia, heart palpitations, ulcers, and premature hair loss.
Now, as he walked across the boardwalk on Brighton Twelfth Street, the weathered wooden planks under his feet bare of snow due to some vagary of the ocean gusts, gulls wheeling and scissoring above his head, the roiling gray sea to his left, Brighton Beach Avenue to his right, his apartment building behind him, the newsstand where he bought his Russian-language newspaper two blocks ahead, the bakery where he would pick up his breakfast rolls two blocks farther on, his travel agency a block beyond that across from the elevated D train tracks… as he walked to work this morning along the route he took every morning at six o’clock on the dot, never a second shaved — never, never a second — Zachary told himself it was time to push these useless, egocentric musings, these petulant blips of dissatisfaction, out of his mind and get down to thinking about the important business of the day.
Roma had placed an order for a half dozen student entry visas that were to go to some women a local pimp and strip club manager was bringing over from Moscow. For whatever reason, Roma needed to have these forgeries completed and delivered to the flesh peddler by one o’clock in the afternoon. Roma had placed the order late the previous night and had been in no mood to be negotiated with. In fact, Roma had been unusually excitable for weeks now, and he’d gotten worse in the past several days. Rumor had it that he’d been badly affected by something that had happened at his club some nights ago, though none of his closest men would say what the event was, or even confirm
Well, Zachary told himself as he stepped off the boardwalk, Roma had his worries and responsibilities, and he had his own. He did not pretend to be interested in the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of Roma’s operation, had no time to be interested, no time to think, no time to do anything but what was required of him. Six entry visas, six hours to complete the order. That was all he—
“Excuse me.”
Zachary stopped short on the pavement, looking at the man who had stepped in front of him, actually bumped into him seemingly out of nowhere. Where had he come from?
“Yes?” he said, startled. The man was thin, sinewy, with hair cut almost to the scalp. He wore a long trench coat and had his right hand in its pocket.
“I want to talk to you, Mr. Zachary,” the man said. And dipped his head slightly to his left. “In there.”
Zachary glanced over in that direction, saw a car sitting at the curb with its rear door ajar. There was someone huddled behind the wheel.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Shifting his gaze back to the man. To the bulge made by his right hand pressing against the inner lining of his pocket. Could he be holding a gun?
“What do you want from—”
“Get in the car,” the man said. He noticed where Zachary’s eyes had landed and jabbed whatever was in his pocket against his stomach. It felt hard. “This won’t take long. And nobody’s going to hurt you if you cooperate and answer some questions.”
“But I have a
“In the car, now!” the man snapped, shoving the hard object against his belly again. “You go first.”
Suddenly trembling all over, Zachary nodded and turned toward the partly open rear door of the vehicle, the trench-coated man falling in behind him, the thing in the man’s hand jabbing against his back.
Climbing in the backseat after him, Nimec nodded for Noriko to drive off.
He kept his hand on the roll of Certs in his pocket, kept pressing it against Zachary, wondering if he’d just given new definition to the term “non-lethal weapon.”
Sadov had made them as law enforcement agents moments after passing through the security check. FBI, he suspected, though it was just as easily possible they belonged to one of the other covert organizations. He was accustomed to keeping a wary eye out for stalkers and had recognized their colors and markings immediately.
What first alerted him was the way they had positioned themselves. One by the magazine stand in the corridor, another beside the entry to the waiting area, a third near the gate. It was where they stood and how they stood: the lift of their chins, their straight postures, their discreetly observant eyes, taking everything in without seeming to move. It was their dark suits and overcoats, their pastel ties, the slight catches in the fabric of their pants several inches above the hemline, giveaway signs of ankle holsters. It was their scrubbed, clipped, efficient appearance.
He lowered himself into a contoured plastic chair and glanced up at the bank of monitors displaying estimated arrival and departure schedules. His flight to Stockholm was to take off in half an hour, and he expected to hear the boarding announcement very shortly.
Normally the surveillance wouldn’t have ruffled his calm. He had spent many years masking his trail across scores of countries, and was wise to the ways of eluding pursuit. And while the cast of the net was wider now than in the past, the spaces one could slip through remained as large as ever. Larger, in fact, than it had been in some previous instances. The national origin of the bombing suspects was unknown. What was more, their sponsor had not been identified, and even the connection to Russia remained uncertain. He should have felt secure in being a faceless, invisible presence, camouflaged like the mantis. And would have, had it not been for the photograph.
It had appeared in the
