Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

I stripped down to my underwear and said, “The point is, Arbatov says he’s got no idea what happened to Morrison. He claims Morrison wasn’t a traitor, and the arrest puts him at great peril.”

Katrina was stepping out of her skirt. “That was it?”

“No. He said I’m an amateur and that worried him.”

“Did you trust him?” she asked, yanking off her stockings and getting down to her panties and bra. Compartmentalize, I reminded myself-good thoughts to the frontal lobe, naughty thoughts to the rear. By the way, did I mention that she wore a thong?

Not quite tearing my eyes away, I said, “There’s something trustworthy about him. Of course, Morrison thought so, too, and look where it got him.”

She pulled the new dress over her shoulders. “You think Arbatov was behind the attack?”

“Yes. I didn’t think he’d recognize me, but he did. I made a big blunder. I wanted to smoke him out, only I didn’t think it through.”

She sat down to pull on her stockings. “You put a scare in him? Is that it?”

“Best guess-he showed up to see who had Morrison’s meeting signs, discovered it was me, that I knew about him, and he immediately rushed back to the office and arranged my assassination.”

“Our assassination.”

“Right.”

She stopped rolling up her stockings and looked up at me. “And now, because of the police report, Arbatov knows about me, too.”

“Well, yes, I think so,” I admitted.

I mean, this was some poor Washington attorney I’d hired for one-fifty a day, and now I was telling her that as a result of my appalling impulsiveness the number two guy in Russia’s notoriously deadly spy apparatus wanted her buried.

You watch all those great Hollywood spy movies and think how cool it is that the hero or heroine can outwit all those assassins and kill the bad guys, and save the world, and then end the movie in bed with the beautiful girl or dashing guy. That’s Hollywood for you. Back to the real world, the closing scene would be a bunch of people weeping over a grave, and it wouldn’t be the bad guys’.

She contemplated the possibilities and then asked, “You think he’ll try again?”

“Probably,” I admitted, standing in my underpants. “It won’t be so coarse next time… a car accident or a plane crash, something that can be explained as simple bad fortune. Like, ‘Gosh, those poor bastards; they survive a terrorist attack only to climb aboard a plane that loses an engine and plows into the ground. Talk about crappy luck.’ ”

“Put your pants on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, you are sorry. Put your pants on,” she insisted.

“I really am sorry,” I persisted.

She looked me dead in the eye. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot you. Put your goddamned pants on.”

So I did. “Okay,” she said, straightening her dress and adopting a very businesslike expression. “What are we going to tell them at the embassy?”

“We can’t tell them about Arbatov.”

“No, we can’t, can we?” You could tell that her wheels were really starting to crank, because this was no longer just a law case, because now, she was fighting for her life. I threw some cold water on my face and washed down two aspirins. I turned off the shower and the sink, and she followed me out.

We climbed back into the sedan, and I told Harry to stick with major boulevards-no side streets, no alleyways, nothing but the most traffic-clogged arteries he could find. He nodded like, yeah, exactly what he was thinking, too.

We arrived in twenty minutes, and the receptionist at the entrance told us to go straight up to the ambassador’s office. His secretary ushered us right in, and there were the ambassador, two guys I didn’t know from Adam, and that bone-chilling inquisitor, Mr. Jackler. The two guys I didn’t know from Adam made no effort to identify themselves, maybe because they never intended to, or maybe because Riser instantly bellowed, “You two sit right there,” pointing at two chairs across from two couches.

As Katrina and I complied, Riser and the others arranged themselves on the couches and faced us like an Admiral’s Mast. Riser squirmed around a moment, comfortably arranging his ass while he prepared to grill ours.

“You okay?” he finally asked, looking first at Katrina.

“I’m fine.” She stiffly added, “Just a little scraped up.”

He looked at me. “And you saw the doctor?”

“Yes sir,” I said, “and I can’t thank you enough for getting us out of that police station. I really can’t. It was really very kind.”

He bent forward. “Drummond, don’t try sucking up to me.”

“No sir,” I lied. “Furthest thing from my mind.”

His face was reddening. “I have a dead officer on my hands. I have another American officer and an American citizen involved in a shootout in the capital of Russia. And the worst thing is, I haven’t got a goddamn clue why. You see where that puts me in a very foul mood?”

I said, “The police told us it was a Chechen thing, a simple terrorist attack, and we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Bullshit! They always blame these things on Chechens. What were you two up to?”

I bent forward to answer, but Katrina lunged forward faster. “That’s the same damn thing I was going to ask you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What am I talking about?” Her voice rose with outrage, and I have to admit I was waiting breathlessly to hear her story as well. “We come here to conduct our investigation and you assign us a driver who nearly gets us killed.”

Jackler lurched forward in his chair. “This Torianski guy?”

She replied, “That attack was directed at him. That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

All four men were now regarding her with inquisitive expressions. For their joint benefit, Jackler asked, “Why’s it obvious?”

“Mel told us he was sorry he got us into this only a second before he was shot.”

“He said he was sorry?” the ambassador asked.

“Didn’t I just say that?” Katrina demanded.

All eyes turned to me, and Jackler asked, “That right, Drummond?”

“I remember he said he was sorry. And he mentioned something… something…” I scratched my head and looked up at the ceiling, trying to recall what he said-that he didn’t really say. But that’s beside the point.

Katrina said, “About the SVR?”

“Right, that part. Something about SVR bastards.”

“He said that?” the ambassador asked.

“Bullets were flying through the window, so I couldn’t hear real distinctly. But yeah, SVR bastards, or buzzards, or something. Anyway, Mr. Ambassador, I’m registering an official protest. My associate and I had our lives put at risk by your people.”

Riser turned to one of the two men I didn’t know from Adam. “Could that be possible?”

The man hunched his shoulders. “We, well, um, we hadn’t even considered it. We’ll have to comb through everything he was working on to see if it’s a possibility.”

Riser’s face flushed. “Why didn’t you already consider it? It’s your damned job to consider it. Why do I have to sit in front of these poor people looking like a horse’s ass?”

“Uh, sir,” said the other unidentified man, “Phil meant we considered it… we just ruled it as… well, as a lower possibility.”

“A lower possibility?”

The unnamed guy looked cunningly at Phil and said, “Yes sir. Torianski was involved in a few things; we just… didn’t think they were worth bringing to your attention yet. We wanted to hear Drummond’s side first. We’re narrowing the possibilities. Now we intend to look more deeply.”

“Right,” said the guy I didn’t know from Adam, whose name turned out to be Phil. “We don’t like giving you half-cocked theories. But now that we’ve ruled out these two,” he said, indicating us, “we know exactly where to look.”