Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

She lit the cigarette and exhaled. “But we’re losing the election. The latest polls… they’re going to elect that idiot, Davydenko. Can you imagine?”

“Idiots get elected all the time. Welcome to democracy.”

“What do we do now?” she said, and it was like opening a floodgate. He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask it.

“If we hadn’t been captured, would you have come to Krakow?”

She got up, tossed the cigarette on the floor and stepped on it.

“Damn you,” she said. “Don’t you understand anything besides yourself? Can’t you see what’s happening? This isn’t America. Once Gorobets takes over, democracy is dead. Ukraine is finished. Viktor is a fool! He’s listening more to Slavo than to me these days. If I leave, there’s no opposition. Only Gorobets. My father,” she choked, “would roll over in his grave. I can’t.”

She grabbed both his hands tightly. Her eyes burned like blue fire. “Stay here. Stay with me. We’ll fight it together.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’d always be on the run. Too many people want me dead.” That was true enough, he thought. Mogilenko and the Syndikat, even with their deal. Gorobets. Kulyakov and the SBU, the SVR, even the CIA. “A whole alphabet wants me dead. Even worse, they would use me against you.” He looked into her eyes. “It won’t work. Either you get on the plane to Frankfurt with me or we’re done. I can’t stay.”

She leaned back and let go of his hands.

“You work for the CIA, don’t you? That’s what they could use against you, us, isn’t it?”

“No, I told you. I’m independent.”

“But you were with the CIA at one time?”

He nodded.

“Of course. It had to be something like that,” she said. “Politically, it’s impossible. We’re impossible.”

It’s worse than that, Scorpion thought. It was the CIA that betrayed them to Kulyakov.

She put her hand to his cheek. “You look like hell,” she said. “So why am I so damned attracted to you?”

“Maybe you just like men who are trouble. It’s very Slavic.”

She looked at him curiously. “We never fought, did we? Does that mean we don’t love each other? Not even enough to fight?”

“I don’t know what it means. Right now I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.”

“I’d have walked to Krakow to be with you if I wasn’t tied hand and foot to this country,” she said, and a shiver went through him. “I’d’ve crawled,” she said softly.

“It would have been worse if the Russians had come in. We saved a lot of lives,” he told her.

“Not everyone,” she said, and he knew she was thinking of Alyona.

“No, not everyone.”

One of the FSB men who had been in the car with him and Ivanov came in.

“ Gospodin Reinert, the plane is boarding,” he said.

Iryna came close to Scorpion. She smelled of cigarettes and Hermes 24 Faubourg, and it took everything he had not to put his hands all over her. The FSB man watched them from the open doorway, the sounds of the terminal flooding in. A boarding call for group two for the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt came over the loudspeaker.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“Someone tipped the SBU to where we were,” Scorpion said.

“Do you know who?”

“Yes, but not why,” he said, thinking he was going to find out if it killed him.

Tysons Corner

Virginia, U.S.

There were two up, two down, four outside, and two cars mobile. Bob Harris was taking no chances, Scorpion thought. They were to meet at the Tysons Corner mall, just off the Beltway outside Washington, D.C. Not that all the firepower and agents doing surveillance from every angle surprised him. Harris was the CIA’s National Clandestine Service deputy director, and their meetings hadn’t always been friendly. Scorpion watched from the second floor of the mall as Harris looked around, checking that his men were in position before getting on the escalator.

He hadn’t changed much. A touch older, a little sleeker, but still the fair-hair-just-starting-to-gray postgraduate in a Jermyn Street style blue pinstripe suit that screamed Capitol Hill. He watched Harris come toward him, a determined smile painted on his face, like he wanted to sell him a condo.

“Are you wired?” Scorpion asked.

Harris grimaced. “You didn’t have to be so skittish,” he said. “We could have done this at Langley.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Scorpion said. Not that it made much difference whether Harris was wired. He had to assume that several of the agents had mobile receivers and that anything he said was being recorded.

“Now what? Do we walk or go sit at a California Pizza Kitchen?” Harris letting his snobbery show.

“Don’t be a prick. We walk,” Scorpion said.

“How are you doing?” Harris asked, glancing sideways at him. “Are you all right?”

“Please don’t pretend you give a damn. Lying always gets things off on the wrong foot.”

Harris stopped walking and looked at him. “I don’t think you realize what’s been going on here. The President himself has been involved. He wants to know, are you okay?”

“He’s feeling guilty?”

“He said it was the toughest decision he’s ever had to make. I think it really got to him.”

“Tell him I’m fine.” That was true enough. He had spent the last three weeks in Lausanne, Switzerland. The clinique was very private, very discreet; the kind of place where movie stars and dictators went when they didn’t want anyone to know where they were. Thanks to Akhnetzov paying him the rest of his fee, he could afford it.

From his room he could see Lake Geneva and the snow-covered Alps in a jagged line across the horizon. During the day he worked with the physical therapist, doing rehab. The doctors said he had been lucky. There were no scars on his genitals, and as the pain receded, he would be sexually active again. He also spent some time with a dentist replacing the teeth that had been knocked out. At night he would walk up the steep rue du Petit-Chene to the Place St. Francois in the old town, stopping at a bistro for dinner. It was there that he read in the International Herald Tribune that Davydenko had won the election in Ukraine.

That night, thinking about Kiev and Iryna, he couldn’t get to sleep. Several times, he started to call her, then stopped. Toward the end of the second week he met a French female graduate student studying at the Ecole Polytechnique. She was pretty and funny and approached sex as if it were an equation she was dying to solve, and he was able to prove to himself that sexually, at least, he was still functional.

Harris frowned as a trio of teenage girls walked by. They wore tight jeans and tops and talked nonstop, all three on their cell phones, with eyes only for the shop windows and any boys as they passed the video games store.

“What about the girl? This Iryna Shevchenko?”

“What about her?”

“You had an affair?”

“Christ, you take it to the edge, don’t you?” Scorpion said, walking so rapidly Harris had to hurry to keep up.

“Take it easy,” Harris said.

“It’s none of your damn business!”

“You’re wrong,” Harris said, his voice cold. “It is business.” He looked around the mall as if scouting a battlefield. “Look, if you promise not to go crazy on me or throw whiskey in my face,” referring to the last time he and Scorpion had met, “can we find someplace civilized and get a drink?”

“Someone tipped the SBU about where I was in Kiev. I need to know why.”

“I know. But it’s a problem,” Harris said, trying his most winning smile, the one that got half the female interns in Washington to drop their pants when he was younger. “What do you say? Truce?”