The Right Hand (12 page)

He waited down the street from the Spanish embassy, watching the traffic flow in and out like bees in a hive. The Russians and Spanish have a tight if tenuous history, dating back to the Spanish Civil War, when Stalin sent men and munitions to Franco’s Republicans, and it has grown much more complicated since. As such, the embassy was a hub of activity, and Clay waited patiently in a stolen truck, reading
Izvestiya
and watching the cars buzz in and out of the garage. It was patient work, but Clay had learned patience from a childhood of watching endless waves pitch and roll toward his boat.

Finally, he recognized the dark-haired, dark-complexioned Spanish man driving a small sedan out of the lot, threw on his blinker, and followed. Away from Marika, his thoughts had shifted, blackened. The right hand of Zeus was back, ready to hurl a few thunderbolts.

Gregory Molina parked in a compact lot near Mayakovskaya Street and slipped over to one of the omnipresent Bavarian-style beer halls that were springing up all over Moscow like kudzu. The outside of the place looked like a Disney façade, with fake stone walls and a string of blue-and-white balloons made out of plastic lining the wooden eaves. All of this was centered in a Communist-era block building so it resembled a puff of pink bubble gum popped on an ugly face.

Clay parked nearby and followed Molina inside. The room was musty and dark and smelled of stale tobacco and embarrassed desperation. The pub looked like a blind date who was trying too hard, affecting an effusive personality so no one would notice her warts and bad teeth.

Molina took a table in the corner, ordered a beer and a roasted chicken, pulled a tablet computer out of his leather satchel, and tucked in to read while he waited for his food. Clay ordered a pint at the bar and waited to see whether Molina was meeting someone or dining alone. Normally, he would look for some sort of pattern to emerge before he made a move, wait for the best possible time to intercept his target, but he didn’t have that luxury. Patience was an effective weapon if you could afford to use it; otherwise, blunt force worked well, too.

Convinced Molina was eating alone, Clay crossed to his table and sat down. Absorbed in whatever document he was reading on his tablet, Molina didn’t look up, just shifted his weight and twisted in his seat while chewing absently on a morsel of bread.

“Hello, Gregory,” Clay said in Spanish. The words had the intended effect: Molina’s face flushed and he jerked upright.

Speaking Spanish, he said, “Yes do I know you what’s this about?” in a rapid-fire, guttural voice that rose in pitch as it accelerated. Now that he looked up, Clay thought there was something a bit walrus-like about the man’s features.

Switching to English, Clay said, “I was sent here to kill you.”

The walrus turned green. “I don’t excuse me what are you why are you what did you say—”

“Here’s the way it works,” Clay interrupted, if only to stop that barrage of meaningless words. “You work for Gutierrez, who serves as US-Spanish liaison sharing classified military strategy, weaponry, and technology between the two allies. You, in turn, copy these sensitive documents and sell them to Russian Intelligence at twenty-five thousand a pop, sometimes more if the information is particularly revelatory.”

The walrus started to sputter again, but Clay kept the harpoon in his side. “You’ve gotten away with it for just under a year, and like all creatures who fall into a routine, you grew fat, complacent, and sloppy. So I was sent here to put my thumb in the dyke and stop the flood by putting a bullet in your head.”

“How did you you couldn’t but how could you—”

“A squat Spaniard named Beto sold you down the river for a fistful of silver.”

Clay watched Molina’s face shake as though he had palsy. His tongue actually flicked out to moisten his lips, but no moisture came.

“What do you what do you how can I…” he started, and this time Clay didn’t interrupt. As he suspected, Molina didn’t even finish his thought. The words just dissipated in the air like puffs of smoke.

“I don’t want to kill you, Gregory. I want to give you a way out.”

Molina’s eyes darted to Clay’s, looking for a lifeline, a flash of hope.

“An American spy is being held in Moscow, awaiting an exchange. His name is Nelson. I need to know where he’s being held and the route he’s going to take to arrive at the exchange.”

Molina sputtered again, “But how can I how would I even begin—”

“You make an exchange, but the currency is information. Then I give you forty-eight hours to disappear and I promise not to come looking for you. Otherwise, if you can’t tell me what I need to know by this time tomorrow, if you run instead, or tell me you failed, then I’m going to cut you up and deliver little pieces of you to your family back in Madrid so they’ll know you’re alive but also know that each day when the post comes, you’ll be more and more disfigured, until they won’t even want you back.

“Twenty-four hours. Set out from the embassy in your car and head north. I’ll flash my lights when it’s safe to pull over. Don’t fuck this up.”

Clay got up and left before the chicken came.

He spent that night at the Vega Hotel near Izmailovsky Park, the kind of high-rise hotel built for the 1980 Olympics with so many rooms, more than seventy-five hundred, that each customer was scrutinized with the same attentiveness with which you might look at an individual blade of grass on a lawn. He stayed in the room, with the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hung on the door handle, and thought of Marika. Had he been rash to dump her in such a place? Was he foolish not to keep her where he could see her? No, it was the right thing to do. The next bit was going to get messy, and if he was caught, or worse, she would have a fighting chance. He slept, and woke with muddy memories of unsettling dreams.

Molina had dark circles under his eyes when he handed over the folder. He peered at his feet and said, “It’s there all of it it’s there.”

Clay took it from him without looking at the contents and headed back to his car.

Molina shouted, “You won’t see me again thank you I’m sorry for what I did thank you I’m—” but his words were cut off when Clay shut his car door, indifferent. Maybe his next assignment would be to track down Molina and kill him. If so, he would show no remorse, and the promise not to come looking for him would prove as empty as his mercy.

They already had Nelson in Moscow and were holding him at a well-armed, well-guarded safe house on Teatralny Porezd. The plan was to transfer him to the exchange via the popular Novoryazanskoye Highway, which would include a short trip through a double-lane tunnel. The exchange would take place on a closed runway at Domodedovo Airport. The Americans would have a G5 already parked on the tarmac, waiting to whisk Nelson away. The Russians would load Marika into the same Suburban that Nelson had just occupied, and she would evaporate from the world as quickly as dew on a meadow. They would use two black Suburbans for the transit. The entire trip, from safe house to airport, would take less than twelve minutes.

Clay made a phone call to Stedding and asked for two things, two things that gave his handler an upset stomach and little doubt as to Clay’s intentions. First, he asked that the exchange be negotiated for the following afternoon at 5 p.m.—when traffic would be at its thickest—and that the US side put up every sign that they were negotiating forcefully but acquiesce as to the location and terms of the exchange.

The second thing he asked for was a car full of guns.

Sometimes things went terribly wrong. If you can plan appropriately, you can whittle chance down to a fine powder. You can fortify your position with backup plans and alternatives, with reinforcements and fallbacks, but when you try to do this shit by the seat of your pants, when time is of the essence, when the mission changes and then changes again, when you make decisions based on emotion—and how the fuck did that happen, anyway?—well, it had happened even before Clay stepped into that apartment in Vladivostok, when she had just been an image in his mind’s eye and then it had solidified on the long road to Moscow, when she showed courage and depth and grit and mettle—and it wasn’t reason driving him, it wasn’t sense, it wasn’t calculation; it was a raw, terrible hungry idea that he could prevent injustice from happening. He could act quickly, he could do the right thing, he could protect an innocent girl who had listened to a blathering dolt who should’ve known to keep his mouth shut. And now he had not to act but to react, not to plan but to improvise, not to think but to move. It was aleatory anarchy, a flash mob, as ugly as a blunt-force instrument when a sniper’s rifle would’ve been so, so clean. It was out of character, but it was his character, an oxymoron that couldn’t be halved, reconciled. Sometimes you lit dynamite and the fuse burned too quickly and it exploded in your face. Forget the left hand, the
right
hand wasn’t quite fucking sure what the right hand was doing. And sometimes things went terribly wrong.

When attempting to intercept a target, when planning an ambush, it’s best to strike while the asset is in transit. Clay knew the route they’d be coming by, thanks to Molina’s file. He knew the approximate time they would take that route. He knew how many of them there would be, and he knew where they would be positioned. There was a lot he didn’t know: how they were trained, how responsive they were to extreme stress, whether or not they would kill their prisoner the moment they knew they were under attack. He preferred not to think about what he didn’t know, because sometimes things went terribly wrong.

Nelson wondered about the exchange. He believed they really were willing to deal him—why would they go through the motions of collecting him in a black Suburban while its twin led the way to the airport? They were incredibly advanced at psychological warfare—he had been the subject of that particular experiment for longer than he’d thought he could endure—but what more could they gain from faking his release?

No, this had the feel of a real exchange. He wondered what his side had been willing to give up to get him back. There was a famous story that King Edward III had exchanged a few horses and a trifling sum to ransom a young page named Geoffrey Chaucer back from the French after the Battle of Rheims. He wondered what captured low-level Russian agent was on his way to the scene right now.

As he rode the highway to the airport, he thought for the first time of his future. What would the CIA do with him? What do you do with compromised agents? Give him an analyst position? Let him teach a class on how
not
to stand up to torture? Egorov sat in the passenger seat, looking small in the large Suburban. Behind the wheel was a young man Nelson hadn’t met before. On either side of him were the two large Russians who had put on the gloves and executed Egorov’s bidding. It would all be over soon. How much would he tell his own handler of what he’d endured?

Clay spotted them creeping toward the tunnel and eased from the service road on the hill into the oncoming lanes. In about fifteen minutes, they would meet in the center of the tunnel, traveling in opposite directions, surrounded by congestion, boxed in on all sides. He would step out of his car and shoot the two drivers, then everyone else inside the Suburbans other than Nelson. He would use the inevitable commotion inside the tunnel to get back into his SUV and plow over to the emergency lane to get the hell out of there. That was the plan. It wasn’t flawless; hell, it wasn’t even sound, but he had surprise on his side, and he had his skills, and he hoped Nelson would pitch in, but sometimes things, well, they went terribly wrong.

He eased toward the tunnel and watched it happen. In the oncoming lane, a delivery truck clipped a Fiat and it spun like a top, popping into a tiny Niva next to it before flipping over onto its side. Several drivers exited their vehicles to see where they could help, and the already thick traffic on that side of the tunnel shut down completely.

Shit,
Clay thought.

Egorov clucked his tongue just as they approached the tunnel. Nelson could see through the front windshield that an accident had brought traffic to a standstill. The driver pulled up a phone, and Nelson heard him say something about sending police to help them through the jam.

Egorov fidgeted and finally demanded they turn around and find an alternate route. The driver relayed this to the security patrol in the lead Suburban, and they banked into the emergency lane and headed into the flow.

Nelson’s pulse quickened. Was this some sort of staged accident so the Americans could free him? His hand tightened around the handle of his cane, which he held absently between his knees.

Clay was already ensnared on the inside lane just outside the tunnel, and only the downslope on his side allowed him to see what the Suburbans were doing. He threw on his blinker, but there was nowhere to go. He felt like an animal in a cage, and he could feel blood rushing to his face, hot. He swiveled his head, but both sides of the traffic were equally stuck. The Suburbans continued to move away, back against the traffic, like salmon swimming upstream.

Clay saw a flash in his side-view mirror as a motorcycle buzzed by, zipping through the spaces between cars. He switched to the rearview and saw more motorcyclists with the same idea heading his way. He reached over his shoulder, unzipped a black canvas bag, snatched up a pair of Beretta compact Cheetah .380s. Each had a clip of thirteen rounds, and he hoped it would be enough in a firefight. He didn’t have time to pocket the spare clips.

His driver’s-side mirror showed a Voskhod rider with a black helmet rapidly approaching. Clay eased his sedan a foot toward the center barrier to narrow the space in which the motorcycle could pass and then timed it perfectly. As the cycle went by, he put his shoulder into his door and whipped it open like a battering ram. He caught the back tire flush, and the unprepared rider somersaulted over the handlebars as the bike bucked and then fell. Clay was out of the car and throttling the bike before the rider could climb to his knees and curse him. Cruising between cars as easily as rainwater finding a rivulet, Clay pegged the Voskhod. He handled it better than the bike he’d stolen back in Stepnoy, and he was thankful he had put some miles on a two-wheeler recently. He slipped back into the balanced feel as if he were putting on comfortable shoes after a few days of hiking in work boots.