“Tire marks in the dirt,” said Karr.
“We can scan it,” suggested Lia. “Probably it was just someone looking to steal it.”
“Not worth the risk,” said Karr. “We’ll just drive this to Surgut.”
“Fuel tank is just a regular tank,” said Fashona.
“So we stop,” said Karr.
“A long haul,” Lia said.
“Well, you can click your ruby slippers anytime you want,” he told her.
Lia slid around and plopped down on the floor. “How’s your hip?” she asked Dean.
“It’s all right.”
She frowned at him, then pushed along the metal floor to look at it.
“Pull down your pants,” she ordered.
“Yeah, right.”
“Oh, don’t be a sissy,” she said, reaching for his waist.
Dean let her undo the button at his waist and leaned over to make it easier for her to slide the top of his pants down. Her hands felt warm.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore, really,” he said.
“You’re burned and cut up a bit,” she said. “You’ll live.”
“Gee, thanks, nurse.”
She let go of his leg abruptly. Now that he had it exposed, Dean figured he might as well clean it and asked if they had anything to do so. She seemed almost reluctant to get the first-aid kit, which was under the passenger seat. Dean took it from her, using the hydrogen peroxide to clean the wound. It burned and frothed immediately, which he took as a sign that the stuff was doing something. Then he daubed Mercurochrome on the wound.
“That shit doesn’t do anything, you know,” said Lia.
“It’s an antiseptic,” said Dean.
She waved at his hand. “You’ll be fine.”
“Thanks for the sympathy.”
“I didn’t know you wanted sympathy.” She seemed genuinely puzzled. “You don’t seem like the type.”
“You guys might as well try and get some sleep,” said Karr from the front. “As soon as we get to Surgut, we’re taking a plane to Moscow.”
“Then home,” said Dean. He lay back on the truck floor, feeling very old and very tired, glad the mission was over.
52
A metal desk dominated the office, sitting precisely in the center of the small space. The desk itself measured no more than a meter and a half across; its shallow bank of drawers barely accommodated a full pad of paper. Photographs and citations had once covered the walls of the office, but now only their shadows remained, spots of cream against the dull yellow mass. It had been years since the office was occupied; its last owner had reviewed farm reports for a defense secretary, his identity now as obscure as his job had once been.
The bank of offices here was regarded as unlucky by some of the building staff, not because they were small and had limited electrical and phone services, but because a jilted lover had tried to commit suicide by setting herself on fire in the hallway. She had not succeeded, but even so, there were rumors that her ghost walked here at night.
The assassin did not care for such rumors, nor did he contemplate the size of the room or the simplicity of its furnishings. He cared only for the window, which looked over the courtyard of the building where his target would be two days hence.
The room connected to the hallway via another room the exact same size. The hallway door and most of this outer room could not be seen from the room with the window the assassin needed. This was a problem; it made it possible for someone to enter the outer room and ambush him while he was at his post. The glass panel on the door made a dead bolt impractical; it would be child’s play to cut through the glass. Keying the dead bolt would delay his escape, and besides, the glass panel was large enough for someone to climb through.
Difficult, surely, but then, the assassin was himself an expert in difficult things.
There was a solution. From one of the two large bags he’d brought, he removed a large oval lock that looked precisely the same as the others on the hallway. Five buttons made a circle around a central switch; the buttons had to be pressed in a certain order to open.
Except that here, pressing any of the buttons would ignite a small C-4 charge in the lock. As would breaking the thin wire tape he placed around the window. The only way to safely open the door was with the inside latch.
Door secured, the assassin went back into the room with the window he wanted. He climbed on top of the desk and sat with his legs crisscrossed. He did not think about his task; the job was simplicity defined and did not require thought. He did not think about his surroundings; they were not worthy of thought. He gave himself over entirely to thinking about his young son, who was now five.
He had not seen the boy for nearly a year. As he stared now at the light patches on the wall, he reviewed the boy’s entire life, or at least what he had known of it. He smiled at the mischief, berated himself for losing his temper three times. It occurred to the assassin, as it had occurred to him before, that his outbursts of anger were his own fault and not the boy’s; he regretted yelling at him. He could take solace in the fact that he had never spanked the little one in his entire life — though perhaps many would see that as a personal flaw. The assassin did not mind such opinions; to him, being known as an indulgent father was hardly a disgrace.
When his reverie reached the boy’s last birthday, the assassin began to laugh. He remembered how his son tried in vain to push a large piece of cake into his mouth. The as sassin laughed, remembering the little boy’s tears when he finally realized he could not have it all.
And then, for a moment, the assassin cried as well.
He sat on the desk a few minutes longer. Then he slowly unfurled his legs and began setting up his post. He would now think of nothing except his mission for the next two days, or as long as it took.
53
Sherlock Holmes once used the absence of a dog’s bark to solve a crime. One of Bib’s teams had used the absence of communications to provide another list of possible ringleaders of the coup, presenting it to Rubens on his return to Crypto City.
Unfortunately, the technique worked better on the page than in real life. The analysis pegged two possible military leaders as the top choices. But neither had made the earlier lists of likely conspirators — Oleg Babin, the equivalent of an American four-star general in the Far East command, and Ilya Petrosberg, a defense ministry official who had been with the Marines.
Rubens still favored Vladimir Perovskaya, the defense minister himself. So did the CIA and nearly everyone else who had an opinion.
They could plan to freeze out all of the top suspects, but that would spread their resources. And there was always the problem of inadvertently freezing out loyalists who might be useful.
Rubens stared at the paper on his desk. As so often in intelligence, the problem wasn’t so much getting information — there were reams and reams of it. The problem was sorting through and analyzing it, then making the right guess on what to do about it.
He had no choice. He’d freeze everyone on both the main list and this new one. In the meantime, he’d give Bib another push. Had they looked for patterns in the use of ciphers or communications devices? Something had to stand out.
There were other developments. British MI6 was starting to make discreet inquiries. The damn Brits were
