John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

“London?” Andrea asked.

Kovalenko shrugged.

“We’re in the presence of the new Legat,” Freddie explained. “Hasn’t he told you?”

“No.” Andrea looked impressed.

“It isn’t official,” Kovalenko mumbled.

On the monitor, the man with the sling turned away from the girl, and strolled out of the picture.

“That’s it,” Kovalenko announced. “Let there be light.” It was the ninth time he’d watched the tape, and there was nothing more to be learned from it.

Above them, fluorescent lights flickered to life with a staticky hum. Kovalenko got to his feet and crossed the room to a library table, where a pair of Travelpro suitcases lay open. In each of the suitcases was a bundle of newspapers. The newspapers were tied together with twine, and there were no fingerprints. Anywhere.

“Twenty-two pounds,” Kovalenko said. “Each.”

“Ten kilos,” Freddie observed.

“My point, exactly,” Kovalenko said.

Andrea smiled, idly rolling a pearl between her thumb and forefinger. After a moment, she said, “Twenty-two pounds is not what you’d call an American number. Whoever packed the bags was thinking metric.”

The Brit thought about it for a moment, and chuckled. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere. Not only has nothing happened, but… ” He narrowed his eyes, and with a furtive look, glanced left and right. “There’s reason to believe a ‘furriner’ may have been behind it.”

Even Kovalenko laughed. But only for a second. “Actually,” he said, “something has happened.”

Freddie’s voice was thick with skepticism: “Oh? And what was that?”

“There was a test.”

The Brit considered the possibility.

“That’s what this is all about,” Kovalenko announced.

“Possibly,” Freddie said. “Or perhaps it was just a prank.”

“Well, if it was a prank, it was an expensive one. Those carry-ons are new,” Kovalenko told him, “and they don’t come cheap.”

“You’re right, of course, but… why bother? If you want to kill a lot of people at the airport, what’s the point in practicing? Why not just… go in and be done with it?”

“Exactly,” Kovalenko replied.

The MI-6 man made a face. “For that matter, why bother with the airport? The train station is a softer target. Restaurants, theaters…”

Kovalenko turned to his left. “Andrea?”

A little zzzip of nylon as the CIA officer crossed and uncrossed her legs. For a moment, she pursed her lips, and mused. Finally, Andrea said, “I think what Ray’s suggesting is, this isn’t about the airport. It’s about the man with the sling. Someone was testing him, ” she decided. “Not the airport’s security.”

Freddie considered the possibility. After a moment, he asked, “And why would they do that?”

Andrea shrugged. “I guess they wanted to find out how far he’d go.”

Kovalenko nodded. “Well, now they know. He goes all the way.”

Soft.

That’s what the Irish called it when the weather was like this, more mist than rain. Mike Burke stood by the window next to his desk, idly watching the street below. Every so often, a gust of rain rattled the glass, and his focus would shift to the pane itself, where beads of water spattered and ran.

His office was a large room with high ceilings in a rose-brick building at the edge of Temple Bar, a famous maze of narrow streets and alleyways near the River Liffey. From where he sat, Burke could see the roof of Merchants’ Arch, the covered byway in which a fictional character named Leopold Bloom had once stopped to buy a book – a pornographic novel, as it happened – for his wife, Molly.

As cold and wet as it was, Burke wanted to go running. There was a gym bag under the desk with everything he needed – except the chance to use it. He had an appointment with a client, a man named d’Anconia, and d’Anconia was late. The man had telephoned that very morning to ask about forming a company. On the quick, as it were.

Fair play, Burke thought. That’s what we do. But his mind wasn’t on it. He was thinking about Kate’s father, aka “the Old Man,” whose name was engraved on the brass plaque beside the heavy oak doors that gave entrance to the office:

THOMAS AHERNE & ASSOCIATES

Bit of a lie, that. Other than Burke, there were no associates. Nor had there been for months. Not since… well, not since Kate died.

Even now, the words took his breath away. Stuttering senselessly in the back of his mind, they suggested a sentence that had no end, an idea so impossible it could only be stillborn. When Kate died…

Where do you go with a thought like that – a fact like that? Her death was an avalanche. One minute, he was standing in her light, dreaming of the years ahead of them… then the earth fell away from his feet. Blindsided, he was buried alive in his grief. Eventually, the cold found its way to his heart, and slowly took hold. Grief drained to numbness and then he felt nothing at all.

The old man was even worse off. One day he was there, holding forth behind his desk, and then he wasn’t. For years, everyone had said, “The firm is his life. You take the firm away, and Tommy’s a goner.” Not true, as it turned out. The firm was the old man’s way of life, a hobby, and a fascination, but Kate… Kate had been life itself.

He’d raised her from a sprog (his word). Taught her to build sand castles, ride horses, read the Greats, and be wary of boys. Tommy had watched in delight as she took on more and more of her mother’s beauty, the ginger hair and emerald eyes, her skin like an empty sheet of paper – had swelled with pride when she breezed through Cambridge with a first, and came to Dublin for her residency. Then she did the unimaginable, turning her back on the genteel comforts of a surgeon’s life in Ireland to cast her lot with a doctors’ charity that packed her off to a godforsaken clinic on the malarial edge of a never-ending war.

Enter, Mike Burke.

Not right away, of course, but soon enough and quite dramatically. Two years after Kate arrived in Liberia, Burke fell out of the air a few miles from her clinic. And lay there, smoking.

A rebel army recon unit, led by the self-anointed “Colonel Homicide,” found him. They may, in fact, have shot him down. He lay in a ditch at the edge of the forest, one leg broken and half an ear torn off. His chest and shoulders were flayed with burns. The burns were infested with bees, and he was flickering in and out of consciousness.

According to the dreadlocked colonel, Burke looked as if he’d been there for days. “I seen his ride, and the ride’s junk, burned out, it’s cold ! And this white boy, he’s layin’ in the muck like a bad sign, like a signal from Jesus, swimming in bees. Hieronymus, he wants to take the man’s main machine. You know – just reach in and pull it out, like we do sometimes. That way, we sendin’ a message. Like a Hallmark card. Only this man, his passport says ‘America’! Land of the free! So now, we all humanitarian. Show the positive side of the struggle.” Hoping for a reward, the dreadlocked colonel and his men dragged Burke over to the pickup they were driving (a 4 ® 4 technical with a.50-caliber machine gun mounted in the back), and tossed him onto a pile of ammunition belts. Then they drove him to the Irish lady doctor’s clinic in Porkpa.

A moldering shantytown of huts on the flanks of a dirt road, Porkpa was proud of its infirmary. With a dozen beds, a tiny lab, and its own ambulance, the clinic – a concrete box with a rusting tin roof, its walls painted ocher, pink, and teal – was the only “infrastructure” for miles around. In her first year at the clinic, most of Kate’s time had been taken up with pediatric care and midwifery, health education and vaccination. When the war heated up, the clinic’s priorities changed. By the time Burke’s helicopter crashed, killing the pilot, the clinic was a round-the-clock trauma unit, with gunshot and machete wounds at the top of its To Do list.