Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

Katrina was rolling her eyes. “You should see the shit we went through to have this dinner with you. What’s with these people?”

“It’s this whole concept of friendship. Very mysterious to them, trust me.”

Did I sound bitter or what?

Katrina said, “They’ve been treating us like little kids. We’ve been living in safe houses for months, while Alexi was getting debriefed.”

“I’ll bet that was fun.”

“Fun, my ass,” she replied, pushing a strand of hair off her forehead as she looked me over from head to toe. “But we obviously got the better part of the deal. You look like shit. Why didn’t you follow us out of that bakery? We waited until Jackler insisted we couldn’t wait any longer.”

I briefly thought of telling her the truth. I considered saying, “Hey, remember when that lady said to abort, and you blew her off? Oh, and you blew me off when I reminded you? Well, guess what? These last five months of my life, that was the result.”

I didn’t, though. I wasn’t about to. The truth was, I’d just spent five months being ridiculously envious of Alexi. Corny as I know this sounds, Katrina was the kind of girl I should’ve fallen in love with, because she believed in her man, and because she was willing to risk her life for him. I, on the other hand, had been in love with a manipulative schemer who chose a complete jerk over me and still had the gall to bring me back into the picture, so she could use me like a dishrag.

So instead, I said, “There was this really cute girl over at the next table, and she, uh… ah, Christ, you don’t want to hear about it.”

She looked at me like I was crazy as hell.

I gave them both a big smile. “So are you two getting married or something silly like that?”

Alexi grinned proudly. “I asked Katrina two months ago.”

“And she told you no, right? She said she’d fallen head over heels for this very dashing, extraordinarily handsome Army lawyer, and she could never settle for a lesser man.”

Alexi obviously had a long way to go before he’d understand American sarcasm. “Uh, no, Sean, this was not what she was saying.”

Katrina took his arm and shot me a bullet of a look. “He’s joking, Alexi. And for Godsakes, don’t copy his sense of humor.”

“Ah, I see,” said Alexi, trying to manufacture a polite laugh.

“So have you set a date?” I asked.

“We must wait until we are resettled and have new identities.”

“Well, I’m very pleased for both of you. I really am.”

And I really was. Real life doesn’t always produce storybook endings the way movies do. And I felt a certain grim satisfaction in being the Cupid who gave these two a chance-I just never realized that Cupid had to go through so much shit to make these romances work.

We sat down and a waiter immediately appeared. I ordered a steak and a prime rib and a lobster, with three or four side orders, and four desserts, and made an obscene pig out of myself. The CIA was paying for this dinner. I wanted to make it a night they’d remember for a long time.

Between shoveling forkfuls of food down my throat, I told Alexi and Katrina all about Viktor and his cabal, and Alexi said he and the CIA had already figured it out. The second he escaped, they had put two and two together and it all fell into place. I tried to fill in a few details they hadn’t guessed, and he looked surprised, but I suspect he was only being polite. He knew Viktor better than anybody. And with that brain of Alexi’s, he probably guessed things Viktor had done that even I didn’t know about.

He finally said, “So you have heard what happened to Milton Martin?”

“No, my barracks at Camp 18 didn’t have a satellite dish,” I replied, stuffing another slice of steak through my lips. “The next one over did, but it was filled with real selfish bastards who wouldn’t let us come over and watch.”

“A week after Katrina and I arrived, Martin jumped off a thirty-story building in Manhattan.”

“He jumped?”

“There was suicide note left on rooftop saying he was most unhappy with life and professionally disappointed. Was of course phony. Viktor was eliminating loose ends. Martin had completed his purpose, yes? Was of no more use to Russia… and was time to eliminate source of possible embarrassment.”

“Gee, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, wondering if maybe Yurichenko and the CIA had cooked up some kind of deal to keep Martin from becoming the newest sensation. “I hope the concrete he landed on was damned hard.”

By eleven o’clock my three plates were empty, and I’d finished my dessert. I’d also generously helped Imelda and Katrina finish theirs, and the third champagne bottle was empty. I was drunk, and hugging and kissing both of them, and saying all kinds of goofy shit, and was right on the verge of puking my guts out.

One of the security agents knocked on the door and stuck his head in. He politely said it was time for Alexi and Katrina to go, because they had a late flight to catch. We exchanged more hugs and kisses, knowing we’d never see one another again.

Imelda drove me back to my apartment. When I let myself in, I noticed that somebody had paid my rent and electricity and phone bills, because everything was in working order. It had to be Imelda, of course. She never misses a beat. Of course, there’d be a big IOU on my desk in the morning. With compounded interest, too, since, like I said, she never misses a beat.

I slept in till ten, when I heard a knocking on my door. I was in my pajama bottoms when I opened it.

Mary was standing there with that awesome smile. “Hey skinny, welcome back.”

“I, uh, well, it, uh… thank you.”

She walked in without asking. She looked better than I’d ever seen her, and I noted that being separated from Bill obviously agreed with her. Her cheeks had a healthy glow, and she had on another miniskirt and a blouse tight enough to show what great uptoppers and shapely legs God loaned her. Her eyes shifted around my apartment, which was small enough to fit into the maid’s bathroom in Homer’s house.

“Nice place,” she said.

“Bullshit,” I replied. “It’s an armpit. This a personal or professional visit?”

“A bit of both,” she said, then leaned against a wall and studied me with those luminous blue eyes. “How bad was it over there?”

“Bad enough. Let’s just say I doubt they have much of a recidivism problem. The odds against surviving that first prison tour just ain’t that high.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she did look sorry. “When you didn’t come back to the plane, I was frantic. There just wasn’t anything I could do, Sean.”

“It wasn’t your fault. I didn’t blame you.”

“We tried to abort.”

“I know.”

We’d exhausted that subject, and I was fairly sure she’d already read through my debriefing materials, so she knew everything that had happened. She walked over to a bookshelf and began staring at titles-the point was, she wasn’t looking at me.

Her voice sounded nervous. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“You’d be surprised what I’d believe these days.”

“I received a promotion. After the operation ended, I was made an SES 2. I’m Johnson’s new deputy.”

I shook my head, but not in disbelief. “Well that’s really something.”

“Nobody was more surprised than me,” she said, pretending that it was true, which it obviously wasn’t. She’d turned on her own husband to get ahead, and when that had fallen apart, she’d covered her own ass better than anybody. She had great instincts and wonderful reflexes. Why wouldn’t they promote her?

“So how’s your husband?” I asked, since there was still this five-month gap in my knowledge of anything that had happened outside the frozen wasteland called Camp 18.