Shadow Watch pp-3 Read online

Gordian turned, and saw Ashley reappear from inside the house to the recorded accompaniment of Fats Waller’s stride piano.

  “Hmmph,” he said, dabbing up the spilled coffee with a paper napkin. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean feeding the dogs off the table,” she said. “Besides being against Julia’s orders, it’s sure to cause a disaster.”

  He frowned.

  “You know how these poor dogs were treated at the track? Before Julia got them from the placement center? They were literally running for their lives.”

  “Yes, I do know, but that’s not the point—” she said.

  “Grayhounds are given six chances to either win, place, or show before being ‘retired.’ Which is generally a euphemism that means they’re put down, unless the rescue people can get hold of them first.”

  “Roger, that’s still beside the—”

  “They spend all their days penned up in something like a three-by-three-foot crate, except for when they’re turned out to eat or relieve themselves. Wind up with pressure sores, swellings on their joints, bald spots from rubbing against the walls of the crates, not to mention—”

  “Roger—”

  “And besides, I’ve seen Julia break her own ‘no table scrap’ rule at least a dozen times this week.”

  Ashley gave him a long-suffering smile and sat in the chair to his right.

  “She’s their mother,” she said. “Which makes that her prerogative.”

  Gordian watched as she reached for the thermal pitcher on the table, and freshened her coffee. She was wearing an open blue denim shirt over a peach-colored T-shirt, jeans, and white tennis sneakers. The smart angular cut of her light brown hair was the latest fashion collaboration between herself and Adrian, her stylist, accenting her high cheekbones and sea-blue eyes in a way that seemed like nature’s consummate design.

  “I wouldn’t feed them off the table if they didn’t beg,” he said.

  “And they wouldn’t be begging if you didn’t feed them. Or haven’t you noticed that they never park themselves anywhere near me while we’re eating.”

  He looked back down at the dogs. They had resumed their positions on either side of his chair, Jill sitting barely at rest and shifting her weight from one front paw to the other, Jack staring at him in rigid and unblinking expectation, his snout tilted upward.

  “It’s a vicious circle,” he said.

  “Or maybe just you being a pushover for any creature in need.” She picked up her muffin and nodded her chin at his plate. “You ought to have some of that food yourself.”

  He turned toward his dish and ate without enthusiasm, still unable to muster an appetite. On the stereo, Waller had launched into “Cash for Your Trash,” his left hand swinging between octaves to lay down rhythmic bass and chord patterns, his right hand running up the scale with a bright introductory melody line.

  Gordian found himself listening to the opening vocals.

  “Haven’t heard this one for ages,” Ashley said, waiting until midway through the song to comment.

  He nodded, took a bite of his eggs.

  “I believe,” she said, “that no other performer has ever been quite so up about being down. If you catch my meaning.”

  Gordian turned and looked at her.

  “I do,” he said. “When you consider that he was a black man in a time of obscene racial inequality, then take into account everything his generation lived through… the first World War, the Depression, World War II. If memory serves, he made his final recordings just as we were about to send our boys to Europe.”

  “Stormy weather,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “His music’s all about surviving bad times with a kind of resolute good humor,” she said. “About having confidence that just being here, and alive, gives us the chance to see better times ahead… trite as that may sound.”

  He nodded again.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “To the trite part, or the other?”

  “Both,” he said. “But mostly the other.”

  They ate quietly and listened to the personnel on the various recordings — Benny Carter, Slam Stewart, Bunny Berigan, and others, in addition to Waller himself — roll through driving versions of “Lulu’s Back in Town” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”

  Ashley watched him awhile, then gestured toward the phone on the table.

  “So,” she asked. “Care to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’m expecting to hear from Dorset at NASA,” Gordian said. “We’ve been working to get the Orion inquiry up and running. I’ve given a lot of attention to its procedural mechanisms, but Alex Nordstrum talked to me yesterday about another aspect of the probe that ought not be neglected.”

  “Alex?” Her eyebrows rose with surprise. “I thought he was busy stroking off on the fairway.”

  Gordian gave her a thin smile.

  “I think you mean teeing off,” he said. “Anyway, I asked him to come to the office as a favor and he did.” He shrugged. “You know.”

  She looked at him.

  “No, I don’t, but I’m assuming it’s a male thing that you can explain to me later,” she said. “Tell me what the two of you discussed.”

  “In a nutshell, he reminded me that we need to earn the confidence of the American people rather than sit back and take it as a given. I’ve got some very definite ideas about how to accomplish that based upon his suggestions, and don’t intend to let this turn into anything resembling the debacle where an outside commission appointed by the White House went head-to-head against the space agency because of skepticism about its in-house probe.”

  “Well-deserved skepticism, as I recall,” Ashley said.

  “Yes,” he said. “There are going to be doubts about the credibility of this investigation’s findings no matter how thorough a job is done. But if we can’t manage to cut them down to size, I don’t think the program will ever recover.”

  She swallowed some of her muffin. “How’s Dorset feel about your input? People get territorial.”

  “Thus far, we’re in synch. Chuck is a reasonable man and has the best interests of NASA at heart.” He turned to face her. “Also, he’s got very little choice but to be receptive to my suggestions. Without UpLink’s technology and access to foreign governments there’s no ISS. Period.”

  She smiled at him.

  “Hard to imagine anyone trying to ignore you when you get that steely look in your eyes,” she said.

  He cleared his throat, lowering his head to study his plate, a boyish sign of embarrassment that Ashley pretended not to notice.

  She decided to wait a few seconds, then asked, “Which of your specific recommendations is Dorset supposed to call about this morning?”

  “I told him who I’d like to head up the investigative task force. Unequivocally.”

  “And?”

  “And his only real problem — or concern, I should say — was that he didn’t want anybody in his organization to feel resentful about being bypassed for the job.”

  “Understandable,” Ashley said. “Turf again. You know how it can be.”

  “I do, Ash. But there’s no time to worry about NASA’s bureaucratic harmony right now. The faster we get things done, the better. There’s the Russian launch at the end of the month, and I want to see it come off without postponement. Because I am concerned about what’ll happen if my old blowhard friend Senator Delacroix, or somebody equally good at being on the wrong side of every issue, starts calling the entire cooperative effort into question on the talk shows.”

  “Delacroix,” she said. “He the one you saw wrestle that big stuffed bear in the hammer-and-sickle trunks?”

  “On the Senate floor.” He exhaled slowly. “Anyway, Dorset’s going to let me know if the person I want is even interested in the appointment. If this pans out the way I’m hoping it will, we’ll have taken a huge step toward gaining the public trust. And it’ll be a deserv
ed step.”

  “Any reason you haven’t named your pick to me?”

  He shrugged, looking slightly awkward.

  “Pure superstition. Another mark of an old flier,” he said. “I’ll tell you if you insist, but—”

  She held up her hand. “Far be it from me to lay on the jinx. Being an old flier’s wife, I know how to sit back and keep my fingers crossed until you’re ready. Just don’t forget that I’m waiting for the dish.”

  They were silent for a bit, eating their breakfasts, Jack and Jill watching Gordian’s fork with undeviating involvement. On the stereo, Fats Waller belted out a line about someone’s pedaling extremities being obnoxious. Gordian smiled almost imperceptibly and ate with increasing relish.

  All at once, Ashley wanted to reach over and hold him tightly in her arms. But she refrained, just as she had chosen not to ask him any questions about what had occurred in Brazil. She would not do that, not yet, though what little she already knew made her suspect it represented an impending threat to her husband’s safety that, like others he’d had to face in the past, would keep her tossing restlessly in bed tonight and for many nights to come, fearing it might take him from her forever.

  Their breakfasts finished now, they sat listening to the stereo in the fresh grass-scented air and sunshine pouring through the veranda’s open louvers. His plate cleaned off except for a single wedge of toast, Gordian glanced down at each of the dogs and then gave Ashley a questioning glance.

  “I don’t think you should,” she said. “But if you go ahead and do it, there’d better be no complaints about the rotten, hungry hounds to me or Julia afterward.”

  He lifted the toast from his plate and portioned it out between the dogs — Jack consuming his half with what appeared to be a single inhalation, Jill accepting hers somewhat more demurely, and then licking Gordian’s fingers as if to make up to him for having bashed the table.

  “Such salivating adoration,” Ashley said.

  He wiped his hand on his pants and looked at her.

  “Mind if I ask you something now?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I was wondering why you put on the stereo.”

  Their eyes met.

  “Easy,” she said with a shrug. “I suddenly remembered that Fats Waller’s always been one of your favorites.”

  He kept looking at her.

  “Well, that explains your choice of music,” he said. “Not your uncharacteristic timing. Since you always say you enjoy your morning peace and quiet.”

  She smiled.

  “Surely you’ve guessed,” she said.

  “No,” he said honestly. “I don’t have a clue.”

  She moved closer beside him.

  “It’s a female thing,” she said, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Now be still, dear husband, and maybe I’ll explain it to you later.”

  EIGHT

  NORTHERN ALBANIA APRIL 18, 2001

  As the groaning, rust-spotted Citroen neared the rendezvous point on the high Balkan pass some thirty miles outside Tirana, Sergei Ilkanovitch considered his two fellow Russians in the car, and suddenly and unexpectedly remembered his father’s oft-repeated maxim that one could always judge a man by the shoes he wore. Rich or poor, it made no difference, he had insisted. A vagrant in rags would take pains to keep his shoes in the best possible condition if he had any character at all, while the most elevated member of the Presidium would be oblivious to their scuff and wear if he were of an inferior caliber.

  The person he’d frequently pointed to as an example of the latter had been Khrushchev, someone he’d held in the lowest esteem, calling him a simpleton who was overly impressed with American capitalism, a coward for yielding to Kennedy’s bluff during the Cuban missile standoff, and an economic and political bungler responsible for the Black Sea uprising of 1963 and America’s early lead in the arms race. When he’d theatrically banged his shoe on the desk before the United Nations General Assembly, it was clearly seen to be shabby and run-down at the heel, providing a repellent insight into his character, and demeaning his country before the eyes of the entire world. In his boyhood, Sergei had heard his father complain endlessly about the Premier’s supposed faux pas and had no idea what to make of it. He had seen the grainy black and white news footage of the event and been able to tell nothing of the shoe’s condition. Nor had he known what it could have signified about Khrushchev or anything else.

  But Sergei had soon given up trying to extract any wisdom from his father’s observations, and remembered him now as a gruff, strident little man who might have been comical for his endless diatribes had he not been so full of anger and sulky frustration. An inspector in a state-operated automotive plant on the Volga, he had been incapable of relaxing after a day’s work without his vodka. Consequently, Sergei’s lasting image of the elder Ilkanovitch was one of him lying passed out drunk on the couch in their austere one-bedroom worker’s flat.

  Sergei had been twelve when his father died of a heart attack in 1969, the youngest of four boys left to be supported by their mother’s earnings as a seamstress and woefully inadequate government maintenance. Six months later, he had been sent to live with an uncle who was a mathematician with the government think tank in Akademgorodoc, the Western Siberian township for the intelligentsia that had been presumptuously known as Science City back in the days when the Communists still held romantic notions about leading the world into some futuristic paradise.

  When he’d asked his mother why he had been chosen to go rather than one of his siblings, she had explained it was because he’d always excelled in school and had the greatest chance of benefitting from his uncle’s tutelage. But despite her stated reasons Sergei had felt discarded, cast off like an undesirable sentenced to the Gulag, and suspected she had been more concerned with the wages his working-age brothers could bring into the household than his academic prospects. In the end, however, he had come to be grateful for her decision. Whatever he knew about life and living he had learned on his own, but to his uncle he credited the scientific curiosity that had led to his becoming a physicist.

  Now the Citroen took a sharp curve in the road, flinging Sergei sideways so that he was bumped against the right passenger door. He peered out his window, where the switchback skirted the very edge of the mountain-side, a dizzying sight that knotted his stomach with tension. Yet his driver had only accelerated as he took the turn, as if never pausing to consider that a single lapse would plunge them over the dropoff into some nameless chasm. How odd, then, for Sergei to still find himself thinking about an absurd paternal injunction to always take notice of men’s shoes — but perhaps it was just a distraction to keep his panic at bay.

  What, he wondered, would his father make of the pair of men who had been his guards and traveling companions for the past several days? Both had on Western-style boots of finely tooled leather, yet both were also adorned with tattoos that literally stamped them as hardened career criminals. The burly, thick-featured one on his left, Molkov, had a cross on each knuckle of his right hand, indicating the number of times he had been imprisoned. The “seal” of the ring tattoo on his middle finger, a dagger entwined in a fanged serpent, denoted a murder conviction. The signet on his index finger resembling an inverted spade on a playing card labeled him as a gangster who had been jailed for a violent offense such as assault or armed robbery. The larger gladiator tattoo on his right arm — its bottom half discernible below the rolled-up sleeve of his khaki shirt — was perhaps the most malign of all, identifying him as an executioner with a passion for inflicting sadistic deaths upon his victims.

  Alexandre, the thin, bony Georgian seated in front of Sergei, wore a similar resume of offenses on his flesh — the knuckle crosses, the symbols boasting of myriad felonies. But there was another that Sergei found of particular interest, a signet-ring tattoo rendered in careful detail, depicting the sun rising above a horizon that was patterned like a checkerboard. This, he knew, was a testament to Alexandre’s
criminal ancestry, a proud declaration that he was upholding a familial tradition of lawlessness.

  Sergei could not help but linger another moment on droll thoughts of his father, who presumably would have considered Molkov and Alexandre exemplary human beings from a glance at their feet, overlooking everything else about them. He, Sergei, appreciated irony the way some men did fine wine, caviar, or Cuban cigars, and there was one of most exquisite flavor to be found in these reflections — for he was also wearing shoes that were scrupulously cared for. Always wore the very best of shoes, in fact. It was a personal compulsion that, not unlike the tattoos of his companions, was a lasting mark of his own upbringing, although imprinted on his psyche rather than his body. But had his father been alive to know the moral threshold he was about to irrevocably cross, it might have been enough to make him rethink his singular method of gauging a man’s worth.

  Preoccupied with these thoughts, Sergei took several moments to realize that the car was finally slowing to a halt, its overstressed motor clanking and knocking as the driver guided it toward the sheer mountain wall rising to some great height on the left. He looked down at the hard-shelled suitcase between his feet and gripped its handle, a sense of unreality washing over him.

  “Is this the place?” he said, leaning toward the man behind the wheel.

  A dark-skinned ethnic Gheg with a black scruff of beard on his cheeks and a knitted white skullcap of the sort favored by his nation’s Moslem majority, the driver shook his head — an affirmative gesture in Albania — his look in the rearview mirror intended to make Sergei feel foolish for having asked an unnecessary question. He possessed the unmistakable scorn of the zealot toward one whose motives were seen to be venal and selfish, although that hadn’t seemed an obstacle to the procurement of the deadly technology Sergei had offered up for sale. There were, he thought, endless degrees of hypocrisy bridging the gap between world and want.

  Sergei studied the heavy brush on the slope as the driver came to a full stop alongside it, pulling close enough for the tangled outgrowth of leaves and stems to rake across the Citroen’s flank. The wait that followed prompted another attack of nerves. Sergei knew the car’s approach would have been observed, and his inability to detect any sign of his hidden watchers made him feel uneasy and vulnerable. Still, he fought to take hold of himself. The Albanian guerrillas had every reason to be cautious. Furthermore, his two comrades were adequate insurance against deceit, and imposing reminders of his own linkage to the organizatsiya, a force whose enmity it would be madness to provoke.