Lee Child - The Enemy

He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out where it was.

His next available free time was the evening of January fourth. He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centered around the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends within driving distance.

“Still got the letter?” I asked.

He nodded. “But you won’t be able to read it, because it’s written in Bulgarian.”

“What were you wearing that night?”

“Plain clothes. I’m not stupid.”

“What kind of plain clothes?”

“Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. American. They’re all the plain clothes I’ve got.”

“What did you do to the guy?”

He shook his head. Wouldn’t answer.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s all go to Cape Fear.”

We keptTrifonov cuffed and put him in the back of the MP Humvee. Summer drove. Cape Fear was on the Atlantic coast, south and east, maybe a hundred miles. It was a tedious ride, in a Humvee. It would have been different in a Corvette. Although I couldn’t remember ever being in a Corvette. I had never known anyone who owned one.

And I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, though. Couldn’t remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

It was full dark before we got anywhere near where we were going. We passed a sign near the outer part of Wilmington that billed the town as a historic and picturesque old port city but we ignored it because Trifonov called through from the rear and told us to make a left through some kind of a swamp. We drove out through the darkness into the middle of nowhere and made another left toward a place called Southport.

“Cape Fear is off of Southport,” Summer said. “It’s an island in the ocean. I think there’s a bridge.”

But we stopped well short of the coast. We didn’t even get to Southport itself. Trifonov called through again as we passed a trailer park on our right. It was a large flat rectangular area of reclaimed land. It looked like someone had dredged part of the swamp to make a lake and then spread the fill over an area the size of a couple of football fields. The land was bordered by drainage ditches. There were power lines coming in on poles and maybe a hundred trailers studded all over the rectangle. Our headlights showed that some of them were fancy double-wide affairs with add-ons and planted gardens and picket fences. Some of them were plain and battered. A couple had fallen off their blocks and were abandoned. We were maybe ten miles inland, but the ocean storms had a long reach.

“Here,” Trifonov said. “Make a right.”

There was a wide center track with narrower tracks branching left and right. Trifonov directed us through the maze and we stopped outside a sagging lime-green trailer that had seen better days. Its paint was peeling and the tar-paper roof was curling. It had a smoking chimney and the blue light of a television behind its windows.

“Her name is Elena,” Trifonov said.

We left him locked in the Humvee. Knocked on Elena’s door. The woman who opened it could have stepped straight into the encyclopedia under B for Battered Woman . She was a mess. She had old yellow bruises all around her eyes and along her jaw and her nose was broken. She was holding herself in a way that suggested old aches and pains and maybe even newly broken ribs. She was wearing a thin housedress and men’s shoes. But she was clean and bathed and her hair was tied back neatly. There was a spark of something in her eyes. Some kind of pride, maybe, or satisfaction at having survived. She peered out at us nervously, from behind the triple oppressions of poverty and suffering and foreign status.

“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?” Her accent was like Trifonov’s, but much higher-pitched. It was quite appealing.

“We need to talk to you,” Summer said, gently.

“What about?”

“About what Slavi Trifonov did for you,” I said.

“He didn’t do anything,” she said.

“But you know the name.”

She paused.

“Please come in,” she said.

I guessed I was expecting some kind of mayhem inside. Maybe empty bottles strewn about, full ashtrays, dirt and confusion. But the trailer was neat and clean. There was nothing out of place. It was cold, but it was OK. And there was nobody else in it.

“Your husband not here?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Where is he?”

She didn’t answer.

“My guess is he’s in the hospital,” Summer said. “Am I right?”

Elena just looked at her.

“Mr. Trifonov helped you,” I said. “Now you need to help him.”

She said nothing.

“If he wasn’t here doing something good, he was somewhere else doing something bad. That’s the situation. So I need to know which it was.”

She said nothing.

“This is very, very important,” I said.

“What if both things were bad?” she asked.

“The two things don’t compare,” I said. “Believe me. Not even close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?”

She didn’t answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and education on the tube.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” she said. “Mr. Trifonov just came here and took my husband away.”

“When?”

“The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a letter from my brother in Sofia.”

I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette . I glanced at Summer. She nodded. Easy .

“How long was he here?”

“Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why.”

“And that was it?”

She nodded.

“What was he wearing?”

“A leather jacket. Jeans.”

“What kind of car was he in?”

“I don’t know what it’s called. Red, and low. A sports car. It made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes.”

“OK,” I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved toward the door.

“Will my husband come back?” Elena said.

I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty, shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes, and the five years with GRU.

“I seriously doubt it,” I said.

We climbedback into the Humvee. Summer started the engine. I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire cage.

“Where did you leave the guy?” I asked him.

“On the road to Wilmington,” he said.

“When?”

“Three o’clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and called 911. I didn’t give my name.”

“You spent three hours on him?”

He nodded, slowly. “I wanted to be sure he understood the message.”