Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

No answer from Tesla.

“And even if it was, I bet Nokia doesn’t sell much there.”

The red icon was still flashing.

Chang said, “OK, I know, it’s only a hunch, but I think I’m right. I think the software failed, just briefly. I think Kashmir is the true location.”

“We’ve got to tell Harold.”

“Still no word on my end. You?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s more.”

“Be quick.”

“I have other programs running. Mostly for fun, but they’re all linked. I got a flag from a Federal Aviation Authority database. There’s a flight plan filed from D.C. airspace to Lahore, which is the nearest long runway to the Kashmir region. The tail number comes back to a crop duster in Kansas.”

“Wiki, make your damn point, will you? We have no time.”

“OK, a crop duster from Kansas doesn’t need to file a flight plan and it certainly can’t fly intercontinental. So it’s bogus. It’s something I’ve seen before. It’s what they do when one of the Air Force Ones is prepping to fly.”

“What do you mean, one of? There’s only one Air Force One.”

“No, there are three. Whichever, if the president is on board, that’s called Air Force One. Otherwise it’s just a government plane.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Either the president or some big-shot cabinet member is going to Kashmir. Soon. And that’s where the bad guy is.”

The laptop screen died.

The helicopter came low over an outer Moscow suburb and banked and turned toward an airfield a mile away to the east. Not Domodedovo. A private field. Maybe once military and now civilian. Or shared. But it was a big place. Runways and taxiways were laid out in a huge triangle. There were enormous hangars and long low buildings. There were parked planes of every size. Small Gulfstreams and Lears and Grummans, big Airbuses and Boeings. Nothing less than twenty million dollars. The biggest was a wide-body Boeing 777. Two hundred feet long, two hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip, probably two hundred million to buy. Chernayev’s, Middleton thought. It was a definitive Russian-rich-guy statement, and the helicopter was heading straight for it.

The transfer was fast. Chernayev and Middleton ducked low under the beating rotor and ran bent over to a set of steps set on a pick-up platform. They hustled up and entered through the Boeing’s forward door and stepped into a space that reminded Middleton of the house off Pyatnitskaya Street, where he had met Korovin, which in turn had reminded him of Boodle’s Club in London. There was oak paneling everywhere and dark patterned carpet and oil paintings and heavy leather furniture and the smell of Cuban cigars.

“Business must be good,” he said.

Chernayev said, “I can’t complain.”

The door sucked shut behind them and the world went quiet, except for the hiss of air and the whir and tick of the spooling engines. The cabin PA was relaying the cockpit chatter, every statement made first in Russian and then again in English, world aviation’s default language. Clearance for takeoff was immediate. Middleton guessed that no one ever kept Chernayev waiting. The engine noise got louder and the plane started to taxi. No delay. It turned onto the runway and didn’t even pause. It just accelerated hard and bucked and strained and then took off, carrying two men in a space fit for three hundred.

Chernayev said, “Enjoy the flight, Harry.”

Which Middleton was prepared to do, except that his musicologist’s sense of harmony was disrupted by two things. First, the oil paintings were wrong. They were Renoirs. Beautiful canvases, no question, rich, glowing, intimate, and worth probably thirty million each. But inappropriate. London club decor was frozen in a time before Renoir ever picked up a brush. Gainsborough or Stubbs or Constable would have been more authentic.

The second thing on Middleton’s mind was exactly the way the plane’s interior recalled the club in the house off Pyatnitskaya Street. He couldn’t get over the way he had pulled the SIG’s trigger and nothing had happened. He had been ripped off. Which wasn’t the end of the world, although it might have been. But it could be the end of the world for Chernayev and people like him.

Middleton said, “Do you own a guy called Volodya?”

“Own?” Chernayev said. “I don’t own people.”

“He’s a gun dealer in an antiques store on the Old Arbat. Right across from where the Praga restaurant was. A guy like that in the new Moscow, someone owns him. Could be you.”

“I know him. That’s all I’ll admit. Did he displease you in some way?”

“He sold me a SIG P229 for two grand. Plus five hundred for the ammunition. The gun didn’t work.”

“That’s not good.”

“Damn right it’s not. Business requires trust. You’ll suffer in the end. You’ll be back in a plain old Gulfstream before you know it.”

“I apologize. I’ll make it up to you. When we’re done I’ll give you a SIG that works.”

“I don’t want a SIG. I prefer Berettas.”

“The American military always did. But you must let me give you something.”

Middleton smiled. “There was a stall selling Russian nesting dolls with foreign leaders’ faces on them. My daughter would like them.”

“Those things? They’re just crude attempts at humor. You know how paranoid Russians are. The assumption is that behind our leaders are other leaders. And behind them, others still. Who do you suppose they paint at the very center?”

“I don’t know,” Middleton said.

The other trouble with stolen laptop computers was that people generally wanted them back. The student from the Sorbonne sure did. Not really because of the euro value of the hardware. But because of the value of the files it stored. His poems were on there. His play. The start of his novel. The stuff that would win him the Prix Goncourt one day. Plus some term papers. Like everyone else in the world, his back-up routine was haphazard.

He went to the cops. He took witnesses. No one had seen the actual snatch. But three friends recalled two American women. The cops weren’t very interested. Paris was full of bigger stuff-Muslim unrest, terrorism, heists, dope. But then one of the three friends said that one of the two American women had been pale and moving awkwardly, like she was in pain, and she had a dark stain all over her shirt, like blood.

A possible gunshot wound, in a city where guns were still rare, and in a city where two victims had just turned up shot to death.

The cops weren’t dumb. They knew the chances were that the laptop would be trashed when the battery ran out. On the other hand, the MacBook Air was an attractive thing. Very desirable. So maybe the thieves would try to buy a charger. Which gave them a limited number of destinations in Paris. Easy enough to stake them all out. No shortage of young officers willing to hang around such places. When they were bored with the shiny toys, they could look at the tourist girls.

Archer looked again at the picture of Charley Middleton, dead. He revered it, because he liked dead people, and because it came from Jana. It was like a love letter. It showed the girl down and crumpled, in a bloody shirt. The resolution wasn’t great. But it was good enough to be interesting.

And good enough to be a little unsettling.

There were two things Archer wasn’t quite sure about. The first was the dead girl’s posture. Archer had seen plenty of dead people, some quite recently. There was nothing like the slackness and the emptiness of a corpse. And he wasn’t sure those characteristics were there, in Charley Middleton’s body. And the bloodstained shirt didn’t look… organic. It didn’t look like she had been wearing it at the time of death. It looked… thrown on, maybe afterward.