Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) (8 page)

When the call ended, Liesl remained fixed to the spot, next to the hydrangeas her grandmother had tended so faithfully. Liesl reached over and ruffled the petals of a giant blue mophead, watching some flutter to the ground. After witnessing her mother’s brief but torturous battle with cancer, Liesl had prayed that when it was time for Lottie to pass, God would take her peacefully home to him. And he had.

Watching the petals gather at her feet, Liesl wondered how long it would take for their color to fade once separated from their life source. Then Christ’s words returned to her. “Apart from me you can do nothing.” It had taken her too long to discover that.

A sudden clatter made her spin toward the playhouse, and she smiled at the perennial handyman who’d evidently just launched a new fix-up project. Henry had just dropped a stack of boards next to the child-size porch, and was pulling a tape measure from a clip on his belt. Liesl had recently noticed the rotting wood and knew it wouldn’t be long before her father replaced it. Now, his only child observed him from across the yard. She marveled at the efficiency of him, at his determined stride, how he never carried more tools than he needed for a certain job, never spoke with more words than a telling required. His only excess now was his love for Liesl.

As she watched him work, she burned with the need to protect him. He’d suffered epic loss. She’d pleaded for God to breathe new life into her father and make him whole. But it had to start with him, with surrendering his stubborn conviction that he could repair himself as easily as a rotted porch.

He would learn soon enough that the Russian president Liesl’s sonata code once saved from assassins had finally succumbed to them. The news would hit her father hard. He would look at her and wonder how far down their list she was, and nothing she could say would convince him that Gorev’s killers had never heard of Tidewater Lane. Hadn’t she already convinced herself of that? Hadn’t she scolded herself for fretting over a wayward call to her studio that morning, over the motorist who’d followed her route through town? Yes. And that was that. There was no need to mention those incidents to anyone, even though Max’s words still hung resonantly in the air:
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.

But none of them were here. They couldn’t see how gently the light fell on the flower beds this afternoon. She pivoted to survey each one. They couldn’t hear the familiar cadence of her father’s sawing, or the birdsong high in the trees. They couldn’t understand the …

Liesl sucked in her breath and stared toward the street. Slowly passing the house was a brown SUV with a roof rack.

“I followed her from the college to the marina, then the house,” the man said into his phone. “She is in the back yard with her father. What’s that?” Pause. “No. No sign of Kozlov or anyone else of interest. A couple of bikes parked in front, but Evgeny Kozlov isn’t known to travel by bike.” The man snickered to himself as he turned at the end of Tidewater Lane and headed toward the street behind the Bower home.

“Come again, comrade. Our connection is very poor.” Pause. “No, sir. She has no idea I’m following her.” Pause. “No, sir. I’ve made no contact with her.” The man lied easily to his superiors. Why should they know he derived more pleasure than he should from trailing the beautiful Liesl Bower? Just because he wanted to hear her voice on the phone that morning, to listen to her breathing, why should they deny him that? His was a thankless job. The endless days of canvassing the street, changing up the cars he used, waiting for the signal to finally complete his assignment. On that day, he would find her and do more than listen to her breathe. He would watch the fright contort her exquisite face—so very close to his.

“You will leave Charleston now,” his superior ordered. “I have changed my mind about the setting for Miss Bower’s demise.”

“What?”

“The Nuremberg stage will be a far better venue.”

M
ax removed his sandy shoes before entering the Hafner house. “What’s up?” he asked Ben, now closing the door behind them and sliding the bolts into place.

“New satellite photos,” Ben answered. “Come on.”

Max followed him through the small kitchen where Anna Hafner was scooping ice cream for her two young daughters. She smiled weakly at her husband as he passed. Max watched as Ben nodded reassuringly toward his wife, whose tiny frame seemed not much bigger than her children’s. She flicked a wavy lock of dark hair, as well as the smile, off her face.

From the moment Ben and Jeremy, Anna’s brother, were gunned down by Ivan Volynski’s people, she had retreated into a hiding place within her. Ben had confided to Max that it was a place even her husband couldn’t enter. She had listened as Ben spoke what they both thought were his last words, through the FBI-planted microphone still attached to his bullet-pierced body as he lay sprawled outside an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn. Her brother was already dead.

After slow, excruciating months of healing and therapy, Ben had left for his parents’ homeland, Israel. Knowing the risks his undercover work to infiltrate Volynski’s U.S. network might visit upon his wife and children, he’d sent them ahead to Tel Aviv, before his first clandestine meeting with Jeremy Rubin’s terrorist cell of Russian saboteurs, led by Volynski. Ben’s later decision to offer his services to Israeli intelligence, specifically the Mossad, had knocked the wind from Anna and upended her jubilance over finally getting her husband back. It appeared to Max that she hadn’t yet recovered. He knew Ben had to tread lightly around her.

In an upstairs room off-limits to everyone else in the family, Ben closed the door, turned out the lights, and flicked a few switches at a bank of communications equipment Max found antithetical to the Stradivarius he usually commanded.

“Moshe Singer uplinked this to everyone just minutes ago under flash code, and he wants immediate feedback.” A grainy image appeared on a screen Ben lowered from the ceiling.

Singer, their immediate Mossad chief, was no excitable alarmist. Max knew that this had to be real and pressing. “You’re looking at a Ural mountain range,” Ben informed as he zoomed in on a high mountain plateau pocked and oddly barren for the region. At the top of a switchback trail snaking up from the valley floor was a line of old canvas-covered army trucks that looked like props from a World War II movie. At the front of the line, though, backed up to what appeared to be a broken-down mine shaft, was a late-model tractor-trailer rig with enough antennae on top to rival a NOAH weather station. Only Max didn’t think they were gauging wind and humidity. “Singer doesn’t like the looks of this.”

“What does he think it is?” Max asked.

“He’s not saying. Just wants to know if any of us have come across anything like it in that region.”

Max shook his head. He’d been tasked with searching every available satellite image for signs of his father, whom Israel was eager to chat with. One of the country’s most notorious moles, planted inside the Israeli Defense Department decades ago by Volynski, was ripe for interrogation. But Max had seen nothing with a visual footprint like this.

“There’s no more mining in that area,” Ben informed. “While you were on the phone with Liesl, I did a quick read-through on the region. By the way, is she okay?”

“I believe so. It’s hard to tell with Liesl. She’s got a backbone as rigid as that mountain range.” He looked hard at the screen. “The ground around that mine entrance is pretty well chewed up. Lots of vehicular activity. And not all of it heavy trucks.” He pointed to several small cars parked in the shade of a single stand of gnarled trees. Then he spotted a small cluster of what, from above, looked like flat disks on the ground, but the shadows they cast proved otherwise. “Look at this.” He moved his finger just outside the shade of the trees. “Barrels.”

“Of what?” Ben wondered aloud. Then he glanced at Max with a flash of amusement. “And by the way, just how does a violinist morph into a know-it-all spy?”

Ordinarily, Max would have zinged an apt reply, but his first thought was too sobering. “Genetics.”

Ben’s grin faded and he openly studied this fellow Jew who completed the other half of the notably “odd couple,” or so their Mossad associates had dubbed them. The White House bureaucrat and the symphony hall fiddler. What could they possibly bring to the venerable brotherhood of Israeli intelligence? For starters, the sonata code that stopped the assassinations of two heads of state. Then there was the ferreting out and destruction of the plot’s mastermind, Ivan Volynski, before he could cripple U.S. infrastructure, overthrow the Russian government, and prompt his Middle East accomplices to aim a few warheads at Israel. That’s all.

Of course, Max and Ben both knew that the key player in those missions was missing from their team. But she would be there within the week, as unwilling a participant in such matters as she’d ever been. Yet the name Liesl Bower was still spoken with something close to reverence in the jagged world of Israeli spy craft.

“Oh really,” Ben responded. “So you think the whole time you’ve been stroking genius out of that violin and making audiences swoon with the rhapsody of it all, somewhere inside you this dark little gene from your corrupt father has been secretly transforming you?”

Max thought that over. “Pretty much,” he answered with no expression, then turned his full attention back to the screen. “So you should listen to me.” He pointed again. “I think those are barrels. Stainless steel judging from the reflection off the tops. Probably chemicals.” He lingered on that thought. “They’re probably building a weapon of biological or chemical warfare.”

Ben crimped his lips together and slapped his hand down on the table. “Max, don’t go making hasty judgments like that as if you don’t know any better.”

“What else could it be?” Max replied calmly.

Ben looked back at the screen, but was silent.

“I mean, you haul a bunch of trucks, cars, barrels of something, and probably a mine-load of equipment that evidently these people are using to manufacture something they don’t want anyone else to know about—or else they wouldn’t be shoving it all inside an abandoned mine shaft in the middle of nowhere. So, what else could it be?”

“You idiot! Where is your hazmat suit?”

“In the truck, sir.”

“Well go get it and put it on!”

“Sorry, sir.” The man turned and ran back to his truck, one of four lined up and waiting to discharge their cargo. It was a stifling day in the Urals and all the drivers had complained about having to wear the suffocating suits. Young Vlad Potensky had suffered terribly during his last delivery, sweating so profusely he’d almost collapsed from dehydration before the physician on duty could pump him with fluids. Once the drivers were clear of the site and relieved of the barrels of deadly chemicals, they could strip off the suits and hide them in their trucks, according to strict instructions.

Vlad hated the job, but prized the money, an unheard-of amount for an uneducated laborer with little experience but driving everything from the big rigs to the small flatbeds used to haul chemicals and equipment from the mouth of the tunnel to the reinforced heart of the mountain. Vlad didn’t know what they made inside the high-tech facility that looked more like an old James Bond movie set to him. And he didn’t care.

His boss now approached the truck, his face an indelible scowl. “Now keep it on!” he barked, his eyes roving the zips and snaps of the white suit wrapped head to toe around Vlad, whose water bottle rested in a cup holder in front of him. He’d heard this would be the last delivery for a long time, though he would continue to receive a percentage of his salary. Earn money for doing nothing between jobs? Vlad wouldn’t dream of breaking his contract of silence forced upon him when he signed on three years ago. He’d rather cut out his own tongue than lose that money.

He also wouldn’t jeopardize his job by asking too many questions. He already knew that whatever they were building inside was about to be shipped out and the mountain temporarily sealed off. And he didn’t need to ask where the mystery cargo was headed. He’d overheard one of the inside technicians ask the same question of a supervisor. In answer, the man had simply whistled a tune that Vlad recognized immediately.