Dale Brown - Puppet Master

“You know if anything ever happened to me, you would go and live with Uncle Bob and Aunt Lisa, right?”

“What?” Borya practically crossed her eyes as she stared at him.

“I’m not saying something is going to happen,” he added quickly. “But you know them and like them.”

“Yeah.”

Bob and Lisa weren’t actually related to Borya or her father, but were such close friends that they fully earned the title of uncle and aunt. As long as Borya could remember, she had spent at least a week with them every summer in upstate New York, where Uncle Bob owned a radio station and Aunt Lisa had the world’s biggest collection of nail polish, always gladly shared. Their three daughters and son were a few years older than Borya, and all were out of the house now.

“But nothing’s going to happen to me,” added Tolevi. “That I promise.”

Johnny Givens took a deep breath, then lowered himself on his haunches in a squat. He put his two hands on the bar, closed his eyes briefly, then lifted.

The bar with its plates weighed only twenty-five kilos, not a lot of weight; before his injury he was doing military presses with eighty easily.

But this was different.

He came up out of the squat slowly. So much of this was done with your legs, yet he felt nothing there, only a very slight strain in his shoulders.

Hardly any strain.

Up. Up!

He cleaned the bar, pulling it from his waist to his chest with a quick jerk. Too quick a jerk, really; bad form, but he had it and this was no time to critique technique. He paused a moment, then pushed up slowly, shoulders doing the work.

Easy.

He felt a slight tremor at his back, the muscle weak. He fought against it, remembering what the doctor had said about how it would feel. This was all very strange. It was his body and yet it wasn’t his body.

I’m still who I am. Still me. Still Johnny Givens.

But who was Johnny Givens? An FBI agent? No — the Bureau had already put him on permanent disability, the bastards. The one time the bureaucracy actually worked expeditiously, and it was to screw him out of a job.

“Oh don’t worry,” said the idiot HR person, “you’re on full disability. Losing your legs does that.”

He wanted to scream at her. But some inbred courtesy kicked in, and all he did was hang up — gently.

His mother would have been proud; he’d controlled his temper.

But, Mom, you just don’t understand. Being polite, being reasonable — that’s not always the best way to do things. Sometimes if you don’t yell at people, they think what they’re doing or saying is OK.

The world is not a reasonable place. If you’re reasonable, you’re at a disadvantage.

Johnny lowered the weight to his shoulders. He took a deep breath, then slowly lowered himself. He could feel the strain in his thighs.

Really? Strain in your thighs?

You have no thighs! You have no legs! You’re metal and carbon and wires and digital crap and fake stuff. You don’t exist from a few inches below the waist.

He knew he had nothing there, and yet he felt it. He was sure he felt it.

He let go of the weights and stood straight up, head swimming.

“You’re not supposed to be in here!” said Gestapo Bitch.

He glanced up and saw her in the mirror at the side of the room. She had her arms crossed and was staring at him with a look of disgust.

“Who says?” he snapped. He didn’t bother to look at her.

“It’s not on your rehab program. Weights — no.”

“Yeah, well, here I am.” Johnny squatted back down, grabbing the bar.

Up, up up!

He held the bar straight overhead, then lowered it slowly to his shoulders, then pushed back up.

Six reps.

Six — you can do it.

Six.

“Your form sucks,” said Gestapo Bitch as he returned the bar to the ground. “Your tush is too far out. You’re going to strain your back. Then what are you going to do?”

“Bench presses.”

Straightening, he walked over to the dumbbell rack, still refusing to look in her direction.

“You hate me, don’t you?” she asked as he selected a pair of dumbbells.

“Bet your ass.”

“Good.”

Johnny made a fist and slammed his right hand down on the twenty-kilo barbell.

“What turned you into such a bitch?” he shouted, turning to confront her.

But she was gone.

The Mercure Arbat was a well-regarded hotel in central Moscow used by many tourists and a decent number of businessmen, including those who had appointments at the nearby Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Gabor Tolevi booked a room there not because he liked the hotel — he did, in fact, but that was beside the point. He needed a place not only convenient to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but also one that would make it seem that he was doing nothing to hide his trip from any of the intelligence agencies that might be involved in Donetsk, including and especially SVR.

Which meant that he would be followed whenever he left the hotel. He decided to test this with a walk immediately after arriving. Not bothering to change his clothes — he wanted it to be as easy as possible — he left his bag in the room and went out, strolling casually, as if taking in the sights.

A young man in a blue sport coat and faded black jeans followed him out of the lobby. Tolevi wandered a few blocks, then went toward the metro, curious. Ordinarily the Russians used teams to trail anyone of real interest, and their usual procedure would call for a handoff at fairly regular intervals. But his shadow didn’t change, even inside the station; either Tolevi was considered of low value, or he was being followed by a Western service, probably the Americans, who didn’t have the manpower to waste on large teams.

For someone used to the T in Boston, walking into a Moscow metro station was almost always disorienting. The stations, or at least those in the central part of the city, were works of art, temples even, as if the trains running through them were mythical gods. Walking into Smolenskaya metro station, which was hardly the fanciest, was like walking into a nineteenth-century monument. Arched glass fronts welcomed passengers, huge stone blocks made up the walls, and the platform could have been a dance hall at Versailles.

The architectural flourishes and the artwork made it easy to feign interest while checking around, but Tolevi still couldn’t spot anyone tracking him except the man in the blue sport coat. He hesitated when the train came in, almost deciding to turn around and go up in the crowd, which would force the man to show that he was trailing him. But there was no point in that. He wasn’t trying to lose the trail, just make it seem as if he was taking precautions. And so he got on, rode two stops to Aleksandrovsky Sad, and walked to the Russian State Library; he mingled briefly inside, then came out and returned to the subway, heading back to the ministry.

The man in the blue jacket had disappeared, but Tolevi couldn’t figure out if he had been handed off or not. As a final touch, he hailed a cab — more a whim, as he saw one nearby — and had it take him to the ministry.

Even with all of his travel across Moscow, he was still nearly an hour ahead of his appointment. And this being Russia, it was another two and a half hours before an assistant to the deputy he’d been assigned to meet had him ushered in. The man’s name was different from that of the person he’d been told to meet, which was not unusual.

Tolevi could complain about none of this. He sat as patiently as he could, trying not to squirm as the bureaucrat fumbled through some papers on a desk that looked as if it were a receiving station for a recycling operation. Files and loose papers were piled everywhere in the office, including on top of the computer at the side.