Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) (7 page)

Henry reached over and released the large clip securing the knot of hair to the top of her head. “That looks better,” he said. Liesl caught the disguised apology and smiled up at him. “Now, you look like your mother.” And suddenly his eyes hooded and Liesl felt a familiar tremor in the air. She wasn’t going to let him slip away again.

“Dad, let’s go into the playhouse.” She began pulling him onto the small porch whose white paint had mostly peeled away.

He looked at her curiously. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you have no choice.” She beamed and tugged harder.

Inside the one-room little house, where neither of them could straighten to full height, there were a couple of folding chairs. Rusted, their webbing shredded here and there, they protested the weight now imposed on them as Liesl and her dad sat down.

Henry looked around. “Remember the party we had when I finally finished this place?”

Liesl gauged him warily, but saw no outward signs of despair. “I’ll never forget it, Dad. Or the feast we had on Lottie’s best china.”

She had always used her grandmother’s first name, which Lottie Bower had preferred to Granny or any other such moniker. “I’m relic enough without being called one,” her grandmother had said. Now it was Liesl’s turn to slip off just a moment, thinking of the woman who’d held the world together for the child of tragedy. When Alzheimer’s finally snuffed out Lottie’s remaining life a few months ago, Liesl and her dad mourned from a depth only they could know.

Henry reached for Liesl’s hand, but said nothing.

“Hey, speaking of feasts,” she hurriedly offered, veering from yet another brooding subject, “Ava has invited us all for dinner tonight.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I just—”

“Look, Dad, you and Ian work so hard on that charter boat of his. When you’re not at sea, you’re sanding or painting the boat and getting it ready to take you there. Loosen up one night and come with us.”

“Ian going?”

“To see his best girl and chow down on her amazing food? What do you think?”

Henry snickered. “The old coot. Do you think he’s in love?”

“Nothing else explains his following her every lead. You heard about the bike?”

“Who do you think helped him climb onto it?” Henry chuckled with ease and Liesl marveled again at the effect Ian had on him. Soon after Henry had rejoined the Bower household, Ian bought a used sport-fishing boat and started a charter business like the one he’d run in the Florida Keys. Liesl was quite sure it was more for Henry’s good than the old sea dog’s. She believed it had saved her dad from a precarious future. He had needed a purpose to get up every morning. A boatload of paying customers and the harvest of the Gulf Stream had provided abundantly.

“For someone who’d spent his whole life on a boat, Ian had next to no balance on that bike.” Henry shook his head and grinned. “Watching him wobble off on that flaming orange two-wheeler with that crazy helmet strapped through his beard—man, it just doesn’t get any better than that.”

“Yeah, it could have—if he’d worn the Spandex pants Ava bought him.”

Henry looked at her in surprise, slapped his knee, and howled. “I didn’t know about that.” Now he was laughing so hard he had to lean over in his chair to catch his breath.

The phone in Liesl’s pocket beeped the code, again.

M
ax Morozov shoved his feet into the warm sand and gazed at the setting sun. The Mediterranean lay before him like a slate-gray tablet awaiting a scrawled message. He wished it were that easy, that some authoritative hand would clearly pen the directions for him, for he didn’t know what to do next. Only where he—and Liesl—shouldn’t go.

Scanning this remote stretch of beach in Haifa, Israel, he could see only a few swimmers to the south and nothing moving north to the bend. Down the coast was Tel Aviv, where he’d recently crafted a double life for himself: violinist with the Israel Philharmonic and Mossad undercover agent. Ludicrous! All because his father had chosen to be a Russian spy. Why not a veterinarian or a soft-drink salesman?

Max turned to look behind him at the plain, cement-block house shielded by a few palm trees and a squad of security agents, compliments of the Israeli government. It was the recently inherited home of President Travis Noland’s former domestic policy chief, Ben Hafner, who now awaited news of Max’s phone call to Liesl. But he hadn’t placed the call yet.

The last person Max wanted to trouble was the woman he’d loved since they were young conservatory students romping carefree together through Moscow, blind to what was heading their way. No, she’d never returned the kind of love he had for her. Yes, she was married to someone else, but that didn’t change the way he felt about her. If he ever loved that way again, he guessed there would be two equal chambers of his heart devoted to two different women. It wasn’t a healthy prospect and he knew it.

He thought of Erica and wondered if she might one day fill that other chamber. The young woman who’d recently moved into Max’s building had immediately caught his interest. She was lovely, in an unadorned way, yet seemingly unconvinced by what her mirror told her. Or just didn’t care that she turned heads. She was a serious photographer with a flippant notion about her person, shunning all things fashionably pretentious. Max had become enthralled.

But quickly, the image of Erica faded into the surf sliding toward him, reminding him of the advancing hour. His hand squeezed around the phone and he finally lifted it before him. He tapped in the coded number and waited. He hadn’t spoken to Liesl since they’d settled on the programs they would perform in Tel Aviv and Nuremberg. That was almost two months ago. Since her January wedding, Max had restricted his calls to her, wishing not to intrude on what was now Cade O’Brien’s private domain.

It was taking too long for her to answer. Max was about to hang up when the line clicked open. “Hello?” came the halting voice in his ear.

Could that be Liesl? “Say something else. I don’t believe this is really Liesl Bower.”

But the voice was still hesitant, almost fearful. “Max, is that you?”

Now he was worried. “Liesl, what’s wrong?”

“Why are you calling me on this phone?”

He hadn’t expected such a reaction. His mistake. Liesl knew the easygoing Max Morozov of her youth had crossed into Mossad’s subterranean world of intelligence gathering, but she didn’t know how far he’d roamed through its treacherous labyrinths. Perhaps he should have told her, but blowing your cover to anyone was severely frowned upon by his superiors. Still, the woman had been shot at just six months ago by some of his father’s colleagues. That’s why he was calling. That’s why she was about to hear more than she wanted to.

“I just received clearance to access your secure line, Liesl. And before you ask, I had to leap through a blazing CIA hoop to get it.” Hearing her sudden intake of breath, he knew he had to lighten his approach. “Because me and the Blues Brothers are, you know, ‘on a mission from God’ and God doesn’t like people who shoot at piano players. Or fiddlers, for that matter.”

The line was dead silent. Then, “You’re CIA now?” she asked.

“Better than DOA, which someone in Israeli intelligence feared I might be if I didn’t help find my murdering, vengeful father. But, no, I’m not CIA. I just get to supplement my limited intelligence with theirs and use their gadgetry. Impressed?”

Finally, he heard the music of laughter from his old friend. “The Blues Brothers?”

“Hey, Belushi’s gone and Aykroyd’s too old for this. God picked me to carry on.”

“Hmm. Maybe he did. But what is it you’re supposed to do?”

The cold-sober question ended the repartee. There was work to be done. “Liesl, I’m just going to dive straight to the bottom of this, so listen up. I’ve been told that you already know about President Gorev’s assassination.”

“How did you know that?”

“I read it in my tea leaves this morning. Come on now, stay with me.” He drew a quick breath and was about to proceed when he shifted direction a moment. “By the way, where are you?”

“In Charleston, in the yard. Why?”

“Anyone with you?”

“I was talking to Dad when the code sounded on this phone. He’s back there stewing over what’s going on.”

“He doesn’t know about the assassination?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, there’s more, so here it is.” He heard her sigh. “I think you know that Evgeny Kozlov witnessed some part of the attack on Gorev.”

“Yes, I was told.”

“But what you don’t know is that just before daylight this morning in Gorev’s little hometown on the Volga—almost twelve hours
before
the attack—one of the locals saw a man, a stranger, tape something to the door of the post office on the village square, then run away.” Max paused. “It was a copy of the flyer that’s been circulating throughout Germany, the one announcing
our
appearance onstage at the Nuremberg Music Festival. Only someone had crossed out the name of the festival and written in bold letters:
A Memorial Concert for the Late Dimitri Gorev.”

The moments grew leaden before she answered. “The killer.” Her voice was chilled.

“At least one of them. There were others.” Max paused. “Now why do you think they chose our concert ad—a German ad at that—to deliver their message?”

No response. Then, “Maybe one or more of them were German.”

“Interesting thought. So one of them just happened to have a flyer from home folded into the breast pocket of his favorite assassination shirt and thought it was as good as anything to write on. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t like your tone or where this conversation is headed. Are you getting close to suggesting we abort our concerts over this incident?”

“I’m suggesting we do exactly that.”

“No, Max. I quit running when Ivan Volynski went down in that helicopter. Long before, actually, but others insisted I keep ducking my head. Yes, it saved my life a couple of times. And yes, I was foolish to resist protection other times. But now? I can’t run away because of something that proves nothing.”

Max knew it was rational thinking. Perhaps the flyer really had been the handiest thing for some local crackpot with a grievance against Gorev to write on. Could it be mere coincidence that it involved the one pianist and the one violinist who’d stopped the music long enough to dismantle a launch-ready revolution in Russia? Twice? Who could be sure?

“Promise me this, Liesl. If anything else surfaces anywhere in your hemisphere that doesn’t look or sound right to you, you’ll notify me, Ava, or the president himself if need be. I never knew he was such a hands-on kind of guy.”

“He was embedded deep in this even before he discovered that Volynski was his half brother.”

“And that was a nine on the Richter Scale. The global intelligence community is still quaking from that one. Didn’t see it coming.”

“Least of all the president. But Max, you and I aren’t going to react to a false reading on that scale. And that’s what I believe this is. Now, tell me where you are.”

“At Ben’s.”

“The beach house?”

“Yeah. I drove up last night.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just shop talk.”

She seemed to wait for more, but Max couldn’t tell her the real reason for this visit with Ben Hafner, another of the Mossad’s newest recruits. Fresh from an assassination attempt on his own life, Ben was also Liesl’s brotherly best friend since their Harvard days together. It didn’t matter that as Noland’s domestic policy chief and Liesl’s confidante throughout the hunt for the sonata code, Ben trusted her to hold state secrets to herself. The thing that had suddenly plunged Max and Ben into a nightlong furor of communications with their Mossad chief would remain off-limits to Liesl.

Max bridged his brief, half-truth answer to a more pleasant topic. “Even though I just told you not to come, everyone here anxiously awaits your arrival next week. You should see the bedroom I’ve prepared for you and Cade. Like an Old South B&B with all that potpourri stuff sitting around in little antique bowls. It’s enough to make anyone break into that magnolia-speak of yours.” And there it came again, finally. Liesl laughter.

“You’ve been on that magnolia kick ever since I’ve known you. Have I ever once swiped at your Yiddish?”

“So, what’s to swipe?” he intoned in his best Tevye accent.

Liesl’s laugh seemed to restore her somehow. “Max, we’ll be there soon. It will be good to decompress with you in Israel before we leave for Nuremberg. And by the way, is your new friend coming too?”

Max stared at the fireball sunset spread over the horizon and wished he could see into tomorrow, to see if there would be something good to hold onto. Was it Erica? “Yes, she’ll join us.”

“I’m anxious to meet her.”

“I am, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t know someone in just a few months.” Max heard the back door of the house behind him open and close. He stood up and saw Ben wave him inside. It wasn’t a take-your-time summons, and Max quickly returned the wave.

“Well does she—” Liesl began, but was cut short.

“Liesl, honey, I’m sorry but I’ve got to go. Call me when you and Cade are inbound.”

“Okay, Max. I understand. Give my love to Big Ben and the family. I can’t wait to see you all.”

Max pocketed the phone and sprinted over a low dune toward the house. The sinking sun wasn’t going gently into darkness. Like the spitfire finale of a fireworks display, it lit up the drab little house with an intensity that Max found wholly unsettling. The look on Ben’s face did nothing to dispel the foreboding.