Jack Du Brul - Vulcan's forge

The other Oriental flashed a silver badge in a cheap vinyl covering. “Airport security. Your passport.”

Lurbud fished it from inside his suit coat and handed it over. “What’s this all about?”

“Routine, Mr. Schmidt,” one agent said, reading through the passport. “Would you come with us?”

Lurbud followed the two security men through a set of double doors and down a well-lit flight of stairs. They passed a couple of airport employees plodding upward as Lurbud and his two minders made their way down. At the base of the stairs they turned down a long hallway to the last doorway on the left.

As he stepped over the threshold, Lurbud’s instincts told him that this was an interrogation room and his being here was far from routine. In the stark room, two chairs stood behind a unitarian trestle table, with a third chair set in the center of the neutral beige carpet. The room smelled of stale cigarettes and fear.

The moment the door closed, one of the men shoved Lurbud, propelling him across the room. He exaggerated his momentum and slammed himself against the far wall, sliding to the floor with a moan.

One of the security agents walked over to Lurbud, probably intending to throw him into the chair and begin the formal interrogation of this Gai-Jin , foreigner. The instant the man’s hand touched Lurbud’s shoulder, the Russian uncoiled himself from the floor, clutching an undetectable Teflon knife in his fist. He buried the knife between the Oriental’s ribs, piercing his heart.

Lurbud pulled the knife from the dying man’s chest, ignoring the fountain of blood that pumped from the obscene wound, and dove across the room.

The other agent was just going for his shoulder-holstered pistol when Lurbud reached him. The impetus of Lurbud’s charge threw them both against the table, the Russian’s body pinning the other man. Lurbud raised the knife over his head and stabbed down viciously, slicing into skin and cartilage, severing the carotid artery of the shocked security man.

The man died hard, gasping and choking and clutching at his punctured throat. His writhing body smeared blood across the table and onto the carpet and white walls.

After the man had stilled, Lurbud cleaned his knife against his victim’s suit and stashed it back in its ankle sheath. He checked himself quickly. A few red splashes of blood were invisible against the dark tropical wool of his suit. He opened the door and, seeing that the hall was empty, made his escape. At the opposite end of the hall Lurbud reentered the public part of the airport just off the main concourse.

Outside, he passed banks of beautiful tropical flowers and ponds loaded with huge goldfish. He hailed a cab and gave the driver an address in downtown Honolulu, confident that he wouldn’t be followed.

Ten minutes into the cab ride his hands began to quiver and his stomach knotted up. He wished he could pass it off as a reaction to the sleeping pill he’d taken during the flight, but knew in his heart that his close brush with the authorities had shaken him. He’d been living on adrenaline his entire adult life and, like any addict, his drug of choice was beginning to wear him away.

At the Cairo airport, Lurbud had been given a sealed envelope by an embassy courier. It had contained a briefing from Ivan Kerikov. The top sheet had outlined the current situation in Hawaii, so Lurbud knew that Honolulu was under martial law, with a strictly enforced eight p.m. curfew. It had been a calculated risk bringing the packet into the state, but there was too much information to memorize. He read through some of it in the taxi to distract himself from the disturbing cityscape outside the Ford’s windows. The envelope contained Lurbud’s final orders, names of the critical targets, opposition strength, and codes for contacting the John Dory . Lurbud assumed that Kerikov had an agent in place near Ohnishi because the orders contained a detailed map of Ohnishi’s house, and also stated that Mayor David Takamora was already dead. Yet the KGB master made no provisions for sparing his agent’s life. Lurbud furtively wondered if he too would be considered a loose end after Ohnishi and the mole had been eliminated.

Although it was just midafternoon, the city seemed nearly deserted. Only groups of National Guard troops and armed cadres of students wandered the streets. The citizens were hidden in their homes, fearful or expectant, depending on their loyalty. The scene outside the cab’s windows reminded Lurbud of the time he’d spent in war-ravaged Beirut, where religion-intoxicated youths systematically ripped the Mediterranean’s most beautiful city into minute strips of terror.

Columns of smoke lifted from numerous fires to mingle in a murky haze over the city. The rocky outcrop of Diamond Head was invisible in the gloom. Near the commercial port, thick black smoke belched from two burning oil storage tanks, their noxious fumes reaching Lurbud’s cab many miles away. Buildings had been riddled with small-arms fire and the cab passed numerous husks of burned-out cars and buses. The area over Pearl Harbor resembled a bee’s nest, angry helicopters buzzing in frenzied flight as federal and National Guard choppers performed a dizzying Danse Macabre .

After the uneasy forty-minute drive, Lurbud paid off the driver and left the taxi in one of Honolulu’s worst neighborhoods. His destination was a flat-fronted, three-story edifice with a liquor store on the ground floor and apartments on the other two. The building had been bought by Department 7 when they had brought Takahiro Ohnishi into Vulcan’s Forge in case they ever needed a safehouse to monitor the local situation. This was the first time that members of the operation had ever used the building.

Lurbud surveyed the decayed neighborhood, the vacant, rubble strewn lots, the peeling paint, the empty looks in the eyes of the few passersby, and knew that this location had never been compromised. In the humid air, his jacket was already beginning to stick to his body.

On the top floor, he knocked twice on the stout metal door at the head of the stairs, paused, then knocked once more.

“Yes?” a voice called from within.

“United Parcel Service, I have a package for Charles Haines,” Lurbud replied, beginning a recognition code he’d learned from Kerikov’s packet.

“Who’s it from?” The voice behind the door responded suspiciously.

“Kyle Leblanc,” Lurbud finished the code, and the bolts were thrown open.

The man who’d opened the door kept his automatic pistol in view as Lurbud entered the safehouse. Only after Sergeant Dimitri Demanov spoke from across the vast room did he reholster it. “So, what have you been doing since you can no longer rape boys with heated pokers?” Demanov was referring to one of Lurbud’s more effective interrogation techniques from his time working for Kerikov in Afghanistan.

“Cutting off testicles of disrespectful sergeants,” Lurbud retorted. The two men crashed together in the center of the room like sea lions, pounding each other’s backs in reunion.

“How have you been, Dimitri?” Lurbud asked, smiling for the first time since killing Suleiman.

“Bored in Minsk until I got a call to meet you here,” replied Demanov, kissing Lurbud in the traditional Russian way. “It is good to see you again, Evad.”

“And you too, old friend.”

Lurbud and Demanov had fought side by side in Afghanistan. They had shared more freezing nights and narrow escapes than either could remember.

Demanov had stayed in the field after Lurbud’s promotion and ended the war as the Soviet Union’s third most decorated soldier. Since that time, he had gone on to be an instructor of the Spetnez, Russia’s special forces, but had recently retired to a deteriorating existence. The stout, grizzled sergeant was a warrior in the truest sense of the word.