Charon's landing

shoulder.

“Jesus Christ,” Harry admonished at the entrance of the bar. “I’ve had my leg shot off and you end up with a woman in your arms.”

Aggie gasped when she saw the source of the voice. Harry leaned against the doorjamb between the bar and the library, his body supported by only one leg. The tube of his other pants leg dangled emptily. He held the dismembered limb like a rifle at high port. Mercer couldn’t help but laugh at the demented image.

“You look like an extra from a bad horror film, Night of the Legless Drunks.”

“And fuck you too.” Harry snorted. “What the hell just happened and who the hell is that?” He pointed the leg at Aggie like an accusing finger.

“What happened was the second attempt on my life in the past twenty-four hours and this is Max Johnston’s daughter, Aggie. Aggie, this pathetic excuse is Harry White, my oldest chronological friend and the man we both owe our lives to. Harry, if you hadn’t barged in, those guys would have caught us with our pants down.” Mercer realized his gaffe and quickly added, “Figuratively speaking, of course.”

Aggie waved timidly, smiling a small greeting. Harry caught the direction of her gaze and lowered his artificial leg. “Don’t worry about this. I lost it so long ago I forget what it felt like to have two.”

He hopped across the room, steadying each leap against a piece of furniture until he could plant himself at the bar, leaning his dismembered leg against the footrail like an umbrella. “Are you going to get me a drink while I call the police or do I have to do everything myself?”

His unflappability roused Mercer from the floor. That was the one thing Mercer could depend on Harry for, his ability to break down any situation and place it in a context that couldn’t possibly disturb the pace of his life.

“Good idea.” Mercer grabbed a handful of bar towels and laid them over the body before pouring a Jack Daniel’s and ginger ale for Harry and a heavy slug of brandy for himself. It was a better anesthetic for his shoulder than the pills he would get at the hospital. “Aggie, another stinger? I think you could use it.”

Aggie shot a glance at the body before responding, “No, I have to get out of here, now.” The urgency in her voice jarred Mercer.

“It’s all right,” Harry growled. “He won’t hurt you anymore.”

“That’s not it.” Aggie leaped to her feet and started to the door.

Mercer followed her, catching up at the top of the spiral stairs. “Are you okay?”

It was natural for her to want to put as much distance as possible between herself and the scene of such violence and horror, but Mercer was sure there was something more behind her reaction. He’d been in enough bloody confrontations to know how people react, especially first-time witnesses to a fatal shooting, so he knew that she was fleeing for some other reason, something unrelated to what had just transpired. He put his arms around her.

“What is it?” Concern softened Mercer’s voice to an intimate whisper.

“I can’t be here,” she replied, shaking out of his embrace. “I can’t be found here when the police come.”

She raced from the house, the door slamming with a finality that hurt Mercer more than his shoulder.

Anchorage, Alaska

Kerikov slammed the phone so hard against its cradle that the slim executive handset snapped in two, the halves joined by only a few tendons of wire. His rage not yet vented, he plucked the entire unit from the end table and threw it at the far wall of his hotel suite. The phone disintegrated against the hard oak paneling. In a gesture bordering on manic, he raced across the room and crushed the remains under his heel, grinding them into the carpet until he felt shards jabbing into his foot through the sole of his shoe. His breathing and heart rate had accelerated, and sweat beaded his broad forehead.

He turned to look through the picture window high over Alaska’s largest city. His suite was just one floor below the Captain Cook room of the Anchorage Holiday Inn, arguably the city’s finest hotel. While he’d been in the room only a few hours since returning from the interrogation of Howard Small in California, he’d had time to notice the room’s view of the snow-peaked Brooks Range and the outline of Mt. McKinley making a rare appearance from behind a layer of cloud. Between the city and the mountains were the wide black ribbons of Elmendorf Air Force Base.

When he’d first gotten into the room, Kerikov had seen AWACS radar planes flying out of the base, their distinctive flat-dish antennas clinging to their backs like some engineer’s afterthought. Watching one lumber into the sky, greasy trails of smoke trailing the quadruple engines, Kerikov wondered why the Americans bothered. There was nothing left for them to spy on.

He stood staring across the late afternoon vista for several moments, concentrating on his breathing, clearing his mind, vainly attempting to corral his emotions. He knew he’d just had what he called an “episode,” a period where he lost conscious thought and moved purely on raw emotion. He had lost all control of his actions, his mind blocking out anything that might have occurred. These usually violence-marred times were becoming alarmingly frequent and longer-lasting. When they had first started, during his assignment as an interrogator for the KGB in Afghanistan, they would last only a fraction of a second and occurred maybe once every two or three months.

At the time, he thought they were caused by stress, brought on by fighting on the dirtiest front of an unwinnable war. By war’s end, he would black out for a day at a time, sometimes regaining consciousness in other parts of the country with no knowledge of how he’d gotten there or why. The episodes stopped when the war came to a close. After the conflict ended and the Soviet Union had withdrawn her troops with the ignominy of America’s withdrawal from Saigon, Kerikov was free of blackouts for several years. Even the memories of the occurrences faded. But during the late 1980s and early ’90s, they returned. When the futility of his career at the KGB became apparent, as one by one the Soviet satellite states reformed and westernized and his own beloved Rodina vanished under the capitalist wave, his blackouts came back, their duration and frequency increasing exponentially. By the late 1990s, men were dying during Kerikov’s blind rages. He had come down from one such episode during his final months in Russia to find four subordinates dead by his own hand, each arranged around a conference table with his throat slit. He had no recollection of the acts or how he’d managed to subdue each man as he dispatched the others.

Knowing that he’d just returned from the violent edge of his own mind, Kerikov turned quickly to see if his untethered rage had caused another death. His guest, a thin, academic young man in black jeans and turtleneck, stared at him through thick glasses, his misty eyes registering incomprehension of the display he’d just witnessed.

Ivan Kerikov hid his relief at seeing the young American still alive by recrossing the room and pouring three fingers of Scotch into a thick glass tumbler. Disdaining ice, he forced the drink neat, its fire ripping at his insides like claws. He carefully set the glass back on the coffee table, making sure that it stood precisely in the center of the narrow rim of spilled liquor on the glass top. The tiny ritual was a gesture of the orderliness that was wholly unobtainable in his mind.

He stood over the young man, folding his thick arms across his chest in a gesture that intimidated as strongly as if he were shaking a meaty fist. His voice was well modulated and even, the racking emotions temporarily checked behind his personal facade. “Because of the incompetence of others, your job has just been made much more difficult.”

Ted Mossey said nothing. He perched on the edge of the overstuffed easy chair like a frightened bird about to take flight.

“That was my contact in Washington.” Kerikov nodded in the direction of the destroyed telephone. “There have been two unsuccessful attempts to stop an enemy who will now be coming on the offense. I know him well, and I know that our only chance to defeat him is to step up our timetable. You must be ready within forty-eight hours. Otherwise we may be forced to abandon the project.”

“No!” The anger in Mossey’s voice charged his entire body, squaring his narrow shoulders and firming the soft flesh that passed as a chin.

Ted Mossey had a face shaped like a spade, his weak chin forming its point and his rounded cheeks forming the bowed top. He had no cheekbones to speak of, so his face appeared to slope in on itself; only his small nose added any definition. His glasses were hooked behind wildly recurved ears that were nearly hidden by lank blond