unlined, but her body looked ancient and frail. It was her eyes that absorbed Lugovoy. They were an intense blue and blazed with a ferocity that made him uncomfortable.
“You are prompt,” she said simply. Her voice was soft and clear without the usual hesitation of advanced age.
“I came as soon as I received the coded telephone call.”
“Are you prepared to conduct your brainwashing project?”
“Brainwashing is an ugly term. I prefer mind intervention.”
“Academic terminology is irrelevant,” she said indifferently.
“My staff has been assembled for months. With the proper facilities we can begin in two days.”
“You’ll begin tomorrow morning.”
“So soon?”
“I’ve been informed by my grandson that ideal conditions have turned in our favor. The transfer will take place tonight.”
Lugovoy instinctively looked at his watch. “You don’t give me much time.”
“The opportunity has to be snatched when it arrives,” she said firmly. “I made a bargain with your government, and I am about to fulfill the first half of it. Everything depends on speed. You and your staff have ten days to finish your part of the project—”
“Ten days!” he gasped.
“Ten days,” she repeated. “That is your deadline. Beyond that I will cast you adrift.”
A shiver ran up Lugovoy’s spine. He didn’t need a detailed picture. It was plain that if something went wrong, he and his people would conveniently vanish— probably in the ocean.
A quiet muffled the huge boardroom. Then Madame Bougainville leaned forward in the wheelchair. “Would you like some tea?”
Lugovoy hated tea, but he nodded. “Yes, thank you.”
“The finest blend of Chinese herbs. It costs over a hundred dollars a pound on the retail market.”
He took the offered cup and made a polite sip before he set it on the table. “You’ve been informed, I assume, that my work is still in the research stage. My experiments have only been proven successful eleven times out of fifteen. I cannot guarantee perfect results within a set time limit.”
“Smarter minds than yours have calculated how long White House advisers can stall the news media.”
Lugovoy’s eyebrows rose. “My understanding was that my subject was to be a minor American congressman whose temporary disappearance would go unnoticed.”
“You were misled,” she explained matter-of-factly. “Your General Secretary and President thought it best you should not know your subject’s identity until we were ready.”
“If I’d been given time to study his personality traits, I could have been better prepared.”
“I shouldn’t have to lecture on security requirements to a Russian,” she said, her eyes burning into him. “Why do you think we’ve had no contact between us until tonight?”
Unsure of what to answer, Lugovoy took a long swallow of the tea. To his peasant taste it was like drinking watered-down perfume.
“I must know who my subject is,” he said finally, mustering his courage and returning her stare.
Her answer burst like a bomb in the cavernous room, reverberated in Lugovoy’s brain and left him stunned. He felt as though he’d been thrown into a bottomless pit with no hope of escape.
10
After years of buffeting by storms at sea, the drums containing the nerve agent had broken the chains holding them to wooden cradles and now they lay scattered about the deck of the cargo hold. The one-ton standard shipping containers, as approved by the Department of Transportation, measured exactly 81? inches in length by 30? inches in diameter. They had concave ends and were silver in color. Neatly stenciled on the sides in green paint were the Army code letters “GS.”
“I make the count twenty drums,” said Pitt.
“That tallies with the inventory of the missing shipment,” Mendoza said, the relief audible in her voice.
They stood in the hold’s depths, now brightly lit by floodlights connected to a portable generator from the
An EPA chemist made a violent pointing motion with his gloved hand. “Here’s the drum responsible for the leak!” he said excitedly. “The valve is broken off its threads.”
“Satisfied, Mendoza?” Pitt asked her.
“You bet your sweet ass,” she exclaimed happily. Pitt moved toward her until their faceplates were almost touching. “Have you given any thought to my reward?”
“Reward?”
“Our bargain,” he said, trying to sound earnest. “I found your nerve agent thirty-six hours ahead of schedule.”
“You’re not going to hold me to a silly proposition?”
“I’d be foolish not to.”
She was glad he couldn’t see her face redden under the helmet. They were on an open radio frequency and every man in the room could hear what they were saying.
“You pick strange places to make a date.”
“What I thought,” Pitt continued, “was dinner in Anchorage, cocktails chilled by glacier ice, smoked salmon, elk Remington, baked Alaska. After that—”
“That’s enough,” she said, her embarrassment growing.
“Are you a party girl?”
“Only when the occasion demands,” she replied, coming back on even keel. “And this is definitely not the occasion.”
He threw up his arms and then let them drop dejectedly. “A sad day for Pitt, a lucky day for NUMA.”
“Why NUMA?”
“The contamination is on dry land. No need for an underwater salvage job. My crew and I can pack up and head for home.”
Her helmet nodded imperceptibly. “A neat sidestep, Mr. Pitt, dropping the problem straight into the Army’s lap.”
“Do they know?” he asked seriously.
“Alaskan Command was alerted seconds after you reported discovering the
“The world applauds efficiency.”
“It’s not important to you, is it?”
“Of course it’s important,” Pitt said. “But my job is finished, and unless you have another spill and more dead bodies, I’m going home.”
“Talk about a hard-nosed cynic.”
“Say ‘yes.’ “
Thrust, parry, lunge. He caught her on an exposed flank. She felt trapped, impaled, and was annoyed with herself for enjoying it. She answered before she could form a negative thought. “Yes.”
The men in the hold stopped their work amid enough poison to kill half the earth’s population and clapped muted gloves together, cheering and whistling into their transmitters. She suddenly realized that her stock had shot up on the Dow Jones. Men admired a woman who could ramrod a dirty job and not be a bitch.
Later, Dover found Pitt thoughtfully studying a small open hatchway, shining his flashlight inside. The glow diminished into the darkness within, reflecting on dull sparkles on the oil-slicked water rippling from the cargo
