Palace of Treason

10

Dusk. Nate and Dominika walked in separately on the way to the meeting with Jamshidi. They came from different directions, checking their six, using the lengthening shadows on the street for contrast and to pick out repeat pedestrians and vehicles that didn’t belong. Nate had to loiter at the far end of Langobardenstrasse to wait for Dominika — she had had to build in an additional loop to her surveillance detection route to clear a “possible” and it took an extra half hour. Nate watched her approach from halfway down the block, his TALON in a strapped case over one shoulder.

He knew her elegant stride, the nearly undetectable limp, how she held her head straight, how she wore her hair pinned up. She didn’t look around, but he knew those blue eyes didn’t miss much on the street. Nate was dressed as he had been before — nondescript and neutral — but she was dressed in a dark pleated woolen skirt with a belted tweed jacket over a black blouse. She wore black suede ankle-high boots with a low heel, not her usual style. He looked at the boots as she approached.

“What?” she said, noticing his look.

“Nothing,” said Nate.

“You are looking at my shoes,” she said. She may have been a spy, a mole, a clairvoyant synesthete, but she also liked shoes.

“They’re nice,” said Nate.

“What do you mean ‘nice,’” said Dominika. “What is wrong with them?”

“Very stylish,” said Nate. This was insane: Two spooks headed to a clandestine, coercive debrief with a hostile agent, and they were standing on the sidewalk arguing about shoes.

“You’re obviously quite the expert. I will have you know they are the latest style,” said Dominika. “And Line T has modified them.”

“Your shoes have television reception?” said Nate.

“Nevezhda, ignoramus. Steel toes. For self-defense. Shall I kick you to show you?”

“Look, they’re very nice. You look very nice. Do you mind if I ask you whether you’re clear?” Dominika looked down at her shoes, then at Nate, and nodded. He looked at his watch. “We’re running late; let’s go. Our boy may be there already.” Dominika walked beside him.

“That is okay, Udranka can relax him before our arrival.”

They entered the apartment building and walked silently up the curving staircase, both using supinating, heel-to-toe steps on the landings, to ease past the closed apartment doors without a sound. Second floor, third floor. Small bulbs in wall sconces in the stairwell had come on, casting shadows against the marble walls.

“I just cannot believe you do not like these boots,” whispered Dominika, half turning toward Nate as they climbed the last flight of stairs.

Her key was in the lock and they entered the apartment — lamps were already on and soft music came from the bedroom. They had assumed their operational faces, but that ended when they saw the flies on the walls — lots of flies, the wall was black with them — and the leading edge of the blood pool coming out of the kitchen. Dominika grabbed Nate’s arm and sidled up to the kitchen doorway and they looked in. Jamshidi was lying on his back, half under the table, his head propped upright against the wall, which was covered widely with blood spray. His face looked like dropped pie: Half his skull was gone, hollow and rimmed with bloody hair. The other side of his face was intact, but his remaining eye was filled with blood in an eight-ball fracture. Blood had come out of his mouth and down his chin, soaking his goatee and shirtfront. He lay completely in a pool of black blood around the edges of which settled scores of flies, drinking until they fell over onto their backs.

Nate bent to look at Jamshidi. There was no question about feeling for a pulse. He flicked open his suit coat, patted the pockets. He shook his head at Dominika: nothing.

“Weapons,” he whispered, and Dominika quietly pulled open a kitchen drawer and took out two thin-handled steak knives with serrated edges. She tucked one in the belt of her jacket — like a blue-eyed pirate, thought Nate — and handed him the other knife. They straightened and Dominika tapped his arm and pointed toward the stove. The merest plastic corner of something stuck out from under the appliance. Dominika stepped over the blood and eased it out. Jamshidi’s laptop case. Had it slid under the stove when he had been shot? They looked at each other. The laptop was inside. Had he brought what they had asked? Missing data on the Hall C cascade? Procurement plans for the seismic floor? No time to check now. Dominika put the strap around her neck and across her chest.

Music playing, no other sound. Dominika nodded toward the living room and the bedroom beyond. “Udranka,” she whispered, eyes wide, fearing the worst. Nate motioned with a downward palm — go slow — and they inched along the living room wall and peeked around the corner into that implausible pink bedroom. They stood stock still. Dominika put her hand over her mouth.

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! oozed out of a player in the corner of the room. A small electric fan, also candy pink, oscillated back and forth, stirring the pink fringe on the two lamps that cast an even pink glow on the bed and across Udranka’s naked body. She was on her back, with the top half of her body hanging off the end of the bed, head upside down, arms trailing on the floor, eyes staring at the far wall. The graceful curve of her neck was marred by a knotted cord — Dominika recognized it as the belt to that ridiculous pink kimono — cinched tight across bulging veins, which had turned her face purple and her scar white. Her mouth was narrowly opened, those remarkable teeth partially visible. When the little fan pointed at her, loose ringlets of her paprika-colored hair moved slightly. Her breasts and stomach were crisscrossed with red welts — they looked like burns, but Nate saw a wire hanger that had been unfolded straight into a buggy whip lying discarded on the rug.

Dominika’s breath caught as she noticed the bottom of a wine bottle protruding between Udranka’s wide-spread legs. Dominika bent to take it away. Lips compressed and white, she flipped the bottle into the far corner of the room, where it bounced off the wall and spun on the carpet. She bent to loosen the belt from Udranka’s neck, brushing the hair off her mottled forehead, but her hands were shaking and the knot was tight. She took one of the Sparrow’s trailing wrists.

“Neyt,” she whispered, “help me lift her on the bed.”

This is bad, thought Nate. We’re in a red zone. They had blown Jamshidi up, then gone into the bedroom, tortured Udranka, raped her with the bottle, then bent her back off the bed and strangled her. Russians? No. Iranians? Who else? How long had they worked on her and Jamshidi? What questions did they ask, and what answers did they get?

“Neyt,” hissed Dominika, “help me with her.”

Most important, thought Nate, where the fuck are they now? Did they just leave? Do they know the laptop is missing? Do they know there are two intelligence officers in the mix? Or did they back off and are waiting for round two?

“Neyt!” said Dominika. “Lift her up.” Nate took a cold wrist and they lifted Udranka up and onto the bed. Her head flopped toward Dominika, as if asking her what came next, and Dominika’s trembling fingers worked at the knot around her throat. She drew the kimono belt from around her neck and covered her with a blanket. Udranka’s red toenails and the top of her magenta hair stuck out at either end. Nate stood in the entryway until Dominika came out of the bedroom, eyes red. He held her for a second, one ear cocked toward the door and the stairwell. He didn’t know how much time they had. He put his hands on her shoulders.

“Listen to me,” he said. “We’ve got to get clear of here.”

Dominika looked at him blankly. “I say we wait for them,” she said. Her voice was uneven and gritty, like a cracked piston.

“Wait for them with steak knives?” said Nate, knowing she was serious.

“They’ll be back,” she said, “for this.” She touched the strap of Jamshidi’s laptop.

“Which is exactly what we’re going to give them,” said Nate. “We copy what’s on his hard drive, and we leave the laptop where we found it. The Iranians must think that no one has seen their plans. We need time for our covert action. You have to return empty-handed. You have to let Zyuganov win this one.”

“Zyuganov. This was his work,” said Dominika. “He killed Udranka.” She searched Nate’s face, weighing his willingness for revenge. His purple halo was pulsing, but not for blood, she knew. He was thinking furiously.

“Give me the laptop,” said Nate. He set it on the coffee table, turned it on, and aimed the TALON infrared reader at the remote USB port on Jamshidi’s computer. Fourteen seconds later, an LED winked on the TALON. Nate stuffed the laptop back in its case, went into the kitchen, stepped over the blood pool, and replaced it under the stove, careful not to smear any gore. Flies were everywhere; he brushed them off his sleeve like blue bottle snow. When he came back out Dominika was standing at the doorway to the bedroom, looking at Udranka’s covered body. Nate turned her by the shoulders to face him.

“We’ve got to get out, now,” Nate said. “Is there anything you need to take out of here?” Dominika shook her head.

“We walk away together,” said Nate. “If things feel right after an hour, we can split up. But only if we’re black. No taxis, no trams, we’ve got to clean ourselves on foot first. All right?” Dominika nodded again.

Nate shook her gently. “Domi, focus. I need you with me out there,” said Nate. “I don’t know what we’re up against.” Dominika closed her eyes and took a breath.

“We’re on the wrong side of the river,” she said. “This is Donaustadt, the area is part residential — houses, buildings, alleys — and industrial warehouses.”

“We don’t cross the river until we know we’re clean,” said Nate. “You can’t go back to your apartment if we’re still covered in ticks. And if the Iranians find out who you are, and that there were two of us at the debriefing, you cannot go back to Moscow.” Dominika looked back at the bedroom.

“There is a bridge with a walkway,” she said absently. “But near the river there is, how do you say, bolota?”

“Marshes?” said Nate. “We’ll have to wade through them.”

“I was going to get her out after this,” said Dominika. The hand that brushed a strand of hair off her forehead shook.

“Listen, there may be a whole team,” said Nate, ignoring her. “They’ll want to identify us.”

“She wouldn’t tell them anything,” said Dominika. “She was too strong.” Dominika remembered the brandy and tears. “She would send them to hell.”

“Worst case, they may not care where we’re going,” said Nate. “They may just want to finish what they started here.” Dominika turned and walked back to the bedroom. She lifted a corner of the blanket and looked at Udranka’s face, then laid the blanket over her again.

“Domi, we have to move,” said Nate. She walked back to Nate as he opened the door a crack and peeked down the hallway. Dominika pushed the door closed.

“Before we go…,” she whispered, and put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Her mouth collapsed and she buried her face in his shoulder. After a minute she lifted her head and wiped her wet cheeks. “If they get close enough, they will pay.”

Nate hugged her again. “Listen to me. We have one objective: to get clear of here and get black.”

“Two objectives,” said Dominika. Nate’s face darkened, and his halo flashed. He eased her up against the door and pinned her arms at her sides. She had never seen him like this. His voice was steady, but it was not his own.

“I’m telling you this once,” he said. “Stop being a Russian. Be a professional. Maybe we’ll survive the night.”

“What do you mean stop being a Rus—”

“Zatknis,” said Nate softly. Shut the fuck up. Dominika saw his eyes; she didn’t have to read the colors. She tamped down her anger and nodded at him, registering that she loved him even more than before.

As if to announce their departure, the front door of the apartment building squeaked when they opened it and stepped outside. Both spies used one-second eye shifts to check either side of the street. Are you bastards there? We’re coming out. They turned right immediately and moved down the sidewalk. Nate kept his hand on Dominika’s arm and reined her in from walking too fast. Nothing triggers the pack-pursuit instinct of a surveillance team faster than a rabbit bolting. Keep it slow, consistent, and reassuring.

There was a chill in the air — or was it them shivering? — and the night sky was covered in clouds bleached chalky by the mild city-glow of Vienna. It was relatively early, the streets not quite empty — a car passed, and a few last pedestrians hurried home. Lamplight from apartment windows cast inky shadows between the cars parked tightly along either curb. Dominika squeezed Nate’s arm and unobtrusively pointed her nose at a man walking slightly ahead of them on the other side of the street. No bells went off — it was the way he walked, the set of his shoulders — and Nate shook his head slightly. A casual, drop him. They continued walking straight, shielded by parked cars and the loom of middle-class apartment buildings. Nate wanted to walk straight — no turns, no reverses, yet — to lock in whatever was following and stretch them out.

Nate’s thoughts raced. If there were Iranians out there — had to be them — it would be a special surveillance team, maybe Qods Force or that Unit 400, which did its own version of mokroye delo, wet work, for the mullahs. If they were going to try something, it wouldn’t be before they verified who Nate and Dominika were, and that would be the end of DIVA’s career as CIA’s penetration of the SVR.

Time check. Almost 2300. The street grew quiet, and there were fewer lights on in the buildings. Nate walked, listening for footsteps on the pavement behind them, for the soft squeal of tires ahead at the next corner, for the ill-timed scratch of a match ahead of them. Nothing. He could see Dominika spotting to her right and left, quick glances made without turning her head or shoulders. He caught her eye; she looked worried. Nate was worried. They had been out for fifty minutes, and they hadn’t seen what top pros call anomalies — not a single demeanor error, no car caught out of position, no three men smoking on a street corner then hurriedly separating, as if strangers. The trouble was that Nate and Dominika both knew what they felt: There was coverage out there. And two dead people in that candy-cane apartment, with the blood, and the flies, and the lampshade fringe stirring. And the nuclear secrets of Iran in the tablet around Nate’s neck. And Dominika’s single-shot lipstick gun effective out to two meters, first developed on Stalin’s orders in 1951 to shoot an East German traitor in Berlin. And two cheap steak knives.

They approached a corner — Langobardenstrasse and Hardeggasse — and the shadow of a man stepped out of a doorway and walked ahead of them, keeping a half-block distance. At the next corner, he peeled off down a cross street and disappeared. A woman with a long coat and headscarf on the opposite side of the street hurried past them, and Dominika whispered without moving her lips that the woman carried no purse, or string bag, or parcel. Maybe we’re stretching them a little, thought Nate, and they had to throw some feet closer in.

They picked a narrow little street — Kliviengasse — that ended in a set of steps down to a path through backyard gardens. Nate stopped Dominika with an arm, and they stood in the shadows and listened. Nothing. They were tight with the tension, weary from the stress. The night wind had come up a little and there were wind chimes on someone’s back porch, and a dog barked, and a wooden gate swung in the breeze, clattering as it hit the latch. Nate looked at Dominika and she shrugged, I don’t know. He leaned toward her and put his mouth next to her ear.

“Time to go provocative,” he whispered. Ratchet up the pace, complicate the route, make them choose between hanging back, staying discreet, and losing the eye or moving closer and showing themselves. Dominika turned her lips to his ear.

“How provocative?” she said. It was insane to be flirting out here, with some amorphous black beast stalking them, but the tension was making her jittery. Nate’s halo flared, not in anger, she noted, but he took her by the hand and pulled. They turned south on Augentrostegasse, stopped for thirty seconds, then ran west on Orchisgasse, crouched behind a fence for two minutes, then ran south again on Strohblumengasse, narrow little lanes with smaller buildings, and more garden plots. At one turn, they saw the silhouette of a woman under a tree. How? The night was very quiet as Nate and Dominika walked past a boarded-up swimming camp with a log cabin and furled umbrellas — Strand Stadlau beach was a miserable grassy plot on the Danube canal, but the bare bulb over the cabin cast a shadow of a man standing stock still, the toes of his shoes showing from around the corner. Jesus Christ, thought Nate, for two hours we’ve been pushing an aggressive, stair-stepping foot route, turning corners, changing directions, and this guy is here ahead of us.

It was getting colder. They could smell the river, and the mud, and the spilled fuel oil in the marshes ahead. They walked south on Kanalstrasse, then jogged west on Múhlwasserstrasse, heading toward the green and red lights of a rail semaphore about a half mile away. Let them get around a rail yard, Nate thought, but he was feeling a little nervous now, a little impatient — it’s not panic unless you start screaming — and he hurried a little more, listening for the sound of running, or the bumblebee buzz of a motorbike, or the squelch break of a radio. They high-stepped over a single set of rails, then two, then five, slipping on black tarry ties, the smell of diesel in their noses. Standpipes throughout the rail yard — curved pipes coming out of the gravel — vented dripping steam that was blown sideways in the rising wind, and they ran through the sour plumes, and over more rails, toward a group of warehouses in a row.

There was runny mud around the warehouses, and rusted engine parts, and tilted rolling-stock axles, and cracked iron wheels on their sides; they saw the black maw of an open warehouse door and ran up the sloped ramp and inside, then sat on a wet cement floor with their backs to a splintered wooden crate and eased their aching legs. Nate was thirsty and cursed himself for not thinking of bringing water. A leak in the roof dripped rainwater into a large puddle on the floor with a metronome plop-plop.

“How many of them?” said Dominika, her head back and resting. Her designer boots were muddy and scuffed.

“I don’t know,” said Nate. “More than a dozen. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“How are we going to get across the river?” said Dominika. Nate looked at her and thought wildly about making a run for the front gate of the US Embassy. No. Impossible. It would burn Dominika and be the end of the DIVA case. But at least they would be alive. Jesus, no. Nate could already hear Gable screaming at him.

“Gable told me something once,” said Nate, sitting up. “What the Iranians did in Beirut, what they taught Hezbollah.” Dominika was too tired to turn her head.

“They used surveillance to drive a target into a funnel — a street or an alley or a deserted square — where they could use a scope.”

“What does that mean?” said Dominika, looking over at him.

“A rifle, a sniper, who has the position and range already dialed in.”

“Do you think we are being herded?” said Dominika. “How could they?”

“Every turn we’ve taken since the apartment, we’ve gotten a hit. They’re putting people in our way, and we’ve responded by moving away from them. In the direction they want.”

“So where are they pushing us?” said Dominika. The clank of metal on metal came from outside. Dominika got to her feet and looked at the entrance to the warehouse, then motioned him to move. Nate followed Dominika to flatten against the warehouse wall, partially behind a rusted electrical conduit. They did not breathe. There was no moonlight, yet a faint shadow preceded the single figure as it walked up the ramp and stopped, hands on hips, to survey the dim, sprawling interior of the warehouse. Dressed in dark jeans and a nondescript jacket, the figure turned directly toward Nate and Dominika — they were invisible in the shadows — and started walking toward them. Nate reached for Dominika’s sleeve to signal her not to move, but as the person drew even with them, Dominika’s arm shot out in a backhand strike to the base of the nose with the sullen slap of a bat hitting a side of meat.

A surprised grunt morphed into a liquid gurgling as the man staggered back a few steps and sat down heavily on the floor, hands holding his ruined nose, now flowing with blood and swelling closed. Dominika squatted beside the choking man, grabbed a fistful of hair, and turned his head to look directly into her face. Beneath furry dark eyebrows, the man’s wide-open eyes were jet black. His chin was covered in blood, mouth open to breathe. Dominika leaned close to him.

“Hvatit, enough,” said Nate.

Dominika ignored him. “Her name was Udranka,” said Dominika, shaking the man’s head by the hair.

The man knew. He looked at Dominika and whispered Morder shooreto bebaran, curse the person who washes your dead body, go straight to hell, as Dominika wrenched his head violently to one side, exposing his throat, and shivered the tip of the steak knife into the crook between his neck and collarbone, holding his head still. Be about right, thought Nate, carotid artery, four seconds. The man’s eyes went wide, his legs twitched, and his head went back. Dominika took her hand out of his hair and let him fall backward to the floor with a thud.

Dominika straightened and looked at Nate. “Do not tell me anything,” she said. “I do not care what you think.”

The man’s eyes looked up at the ceiling. “Udranka,” said Dominika again, looking down at him. Dominika unzipped his jacket, flipped it open, and felt the man’s pockets. She held up a phone, which Nate took, powered off, and tossed into the darkness. They could not speak or understand Farsi, and they didn’t need to carry what was essentially a beacon to make it easier to track them. Dominika wiggled a small handgun out of an inner pocket and handed it to Nate. A German Walther, mag fully loaded; it looked like .380 caliber, what Gable would call a purse gun, but Nate checked the safety and put it in his pants pocket. Nate regretted interrupting this biblical moment, but he grabbed Dominika by the shoulder and pulled her away before she began sawing the Iranian man’s head off with the steak knife for a trophy. She shrugged off his hand and glared at him.

They slipped out a broken back door and through a fenced supply yard, weaving through twenty derelict engine blocks tumbled widely in the mud like giant dice strewn in melted chocolate. The last warehouse in the row was close to a stand of trees, and they quickly got into the shadows and stopped to listen. They could hear the roar of the traffic crossing the Praterbrücke over the Danube; the hulk of the bridge loomed beyond the trees.

“When they find that man they will all come,” said Dominika. Her face was ashen and determined. Nate peered into the night, looking for movement. She put her hand out to stroke his cheek, an unspoken apology. He was fighting to protect her, and she had been out of her head.

“I think we have to risk crossing the bridge,” said Nate. “I thought we could wait, but we can’t stay out here in the dark. We can’t last out here.” He put his arms around Dominika’s shoulders. “We have to get into the city.”

Dominika nodded.

“We work our way through the trees to the bridge,” said Nate. “You say there’s a walkway underneath?”

Dominika nodded, then looked up at him in alarm. “Neyt. No. That is where they will shoot. It is a straight catwalk under the bridge. It is lit with neon bulbs. Of course. It is a zasada, an ambush. They can shoot from either end, and there is no cover when crossing.” It was then that they heard the sound of footsteps crunching on the forest floor, several pairs of footsteps, coming quickly. Had they found the man in the warehouse so soon? They were coming for blood. Nate gestured with his head and they both started running through the trees, around clumps of brush and vines, over forest litter, Nate all the time feeling the icy patch between his shoulder blades where the bullet would hit. Dominika was three steps ahead of him, running well, when she ran hip deep into a marshy patch and fell face forward into brackish water. She got up spluttering, and was about to grasp Nate’s extended hand when she instead clasped her hand over his mouth and pulled him down among the tall weeds at the edge of the little bog. The stinking water seeped into their clothes, and got into their noses. Dominika held her lipstick gun out of the water, and Nate quietly shook his pistol dry. A misfire would kill them both.

“They are coming through the trees,” said Dominika. “Two of them.” Nate could see two silhouettes moving forward. There had been a plague of silhouettes tonight, phantoms all around them — on the street, behind buildings, under trees — herding them as delicately as a collie curls around a flock of sheep. It was getting late and Nate knew they were in considerable danger. The approaching silhouettes were spaced a little apart. By their size and shape, Nate estimated they were a woman and a large man, dressed in black jeans and dark jackets. He saw a glint of metal in the woman’s hand. They approached with purpose, making enough sound to be heard, looking to the sides and behind — these two were driving them toward the bridge. Nate knew he and Dominika were running out of space — they had to begin moving in the opposite direction, maybe lay flat in the water and reeds and let these two walk past and try to break through.

Dominika’s tactical solution was somewhat more Gothic. She whispered in Nate’s ear, “I will eliminate the one on the left. Can you shoot the other one?” She looked at him as if she were discussing a recipe for raisin bread. Nate hefted the little automatic in his hand, then looked at the approaching surveillants, now about seven feet away, and tried to remember the precepts of shooting. Combat pistol distance, focus on the front sight, lock the wrist, press the trigger, don’t jerk it.

In the instant before she moved, Dominika bizarrely thought of her father, and Korchnoi; she turned and looked at Nate, reaching out and squeezing his hand briefly. He was adjusting his crouch to time his jump to hers — he was intense, pale, determined. His purple aura pulsed with his heartbeat, and Dominika told herself she would not let him be harmed.

The woman in front of Dominika was wearing a motorcycle helmet, and Dominika lifted herself out of the cattails, streaming water. Smoothly and without haste she stepped forward and put the lipstick tube against the clear visor of the helmet and pushed the plunger. There was a click and the plastic instantly looked like the bowl of a blender processing tomatoes and tofu. Her frontal lobe now the consistency of summer gazpacho, the woman collapsed in a heap.

Meanwhile, Nate also stood up from behind the tall grass, raised the pistol in both hands, put the little white dot of the sight on the bridge of the man’s nose, and squeezed the trigger three times. There were three indistinct pops — the little gun did not buck in his hand and Nate was able to keep the barrel level. He looked up at the Persian. The big man shook his head and a knee began to buckle, but there was an ugly automatic in his hand coming up slowly, so Nate got down over his sights again and shot him twice more in the forehead. The man fell backward, arms flung to the side, reflexively squeezing the trigger twice, the rounds going into the night sky. “Lady’s gun,” Gable would have said. Nate walked over to the man with the pistol ready, but he was down.

Terrific. Now Nate had a story to tell some young case officer, just as Gable had told him stories about his shootouts. The Persian’s face was marked by four small black dots ringed in red — two in one cheek and two in his forehead. Nate’s hands were shaking, and he had an overarching sense of having screwed up — he could have run the SDR better, kept these people away from them, evaded them more cleverly. Shut the fuck up, Gable told him in his head. They had had to defend themselves, this was not some cat-and-mouse surveillance in Moscow or Washington. This night was supposed to end with Nate and Dominika facedown in the marsh water, or flopping sodden over the downriver floor weirs, or crumpled backward on top of one another on the walkway under the Praterbrücke. And the evening was still young. There were more silhouettes moving around out there, and a shooter lying on a mat, smelling the gun oil on his hands, resting his chin on his arm, face green from the tritium-illuminated reticle in his scope.

Nate turned to Dominika and saw her lying facedown on the ground, arms underneath her, legs crossed at the ankles. Disaster. He lifted her, wiped the dirt from her cheek, and roamed his hands over her body, the familiar contours, the sweet curves, looking for wounds, questing for pumping blood. Nothing. Her head lolled back, loose on her neck, and Nate shook her gently, frantically. She groaned. Nate supported her head and felt her skull, his fingers came away red and wet. Scalp wound. The 9mm round had creased her head, a matter of a millimeter from death, the width of the metal jacket on the slug. The contraction from the dead trigger finger of the man had clipped his agent, this blue-eyed gladiator, this passionate woman with uncommon courage and a volatile temper, the woman he loved. She could be dead in his arms, but they’d had a little luck and he was going to get her to safety. He cradled her head and spoke into her ear. Another groan, and her eyes fluttered open.

“Domi,” said Nate urgently, in Russian, “Vstan’, come on, get up!” She looked at him vacantly, then her eyes focused and she took a deep breath. She nodded.

“Help me up, dushka,” she said, but she was slurring her words. He lifted her carefully and put her arm around his neck, stooping to pick up his TALON case and looping it over his shoulder.

“Come on,” said Nate, “we can backtrack, get away from the river.” Dominika stiffened up.

“Do not go near the big bridge,” she slurred. “Another bridge,” she said, pointing limply downriver. “Railroad, five hundred meters downriver. We can walk on the rails. We can reach my safe house. It is not too far, I can make it.” She stumbled as she said it and slipped out of his grasp. She was on her hands and knees, head bowed, and Nate leaned over again and picked her up.

“Come on, baby,” said Nate automatically. A fierce determination to save her welled up in him with exceptional clarity. If she were not hurt, she would have given him hell at being called baby. Nate took an oblique direction away from the bridge, paralleling the river. They pushed through the trees and the reeds, sloshing through unseen black water. When he stopped to listen, Dominika slumped against him, shaking from shock and the cool night air on her wet clothes. No more silhouettes, no snapping twigs — maybe they had broken out of the net, or maybe the Iranian team had pulled back, confident that the rabbits were headed to the bridge and were already stoppered in the bottle.

Nate trudged ahead, with the big Persian’s heavy pistol in his belt. The TALON was banging against his hip, Dominika’s arm was around his neck, and he held her by the waist. She was racked with fits of trembling, and periodically sagged against him. Nate sat her on a patch of dry ground and felt her hair. Sticky, but the wound didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore. Dominika tilted her head up at him; in the starlight her lips looked black and were shaking.

“Neyt, take your tablet and go ahead,” she said. “We have to protect the intelligence. I will meet you at my apartment.” Nate smiled at her and brushed a strand of hair off her face.

“Domi, we go together. I’m not leaving you.”

Dominika closed her eyes for a moment, struggling. “The Iranian information is too valuable,” she slurred.

“You’re too valuable… to me,” said Nate.

Dominika opened her eyes and looked at him. The purple cloud around his head swirled and expanded. “Your color is so beautiful,” she whispered in Russian, closing her eyes again.

Hallucinating, he thought. Got to get her dry and warm fast. “What are you saying?” he whispered back.

“So beautiful,” Dominika mumbled.

He led her through another thicket — they had to step high as vines tugged at their ankles. The Danube marshes didn’t want to let them go. Nate peeled the dripping-wet tweed coat off Dominika and put his thinner jacket over her shoulders. The hand that curled around his neck was icy cold. They had to get out of these woods.

They pushed through brush and the stone block pier of the railroad bridge suddenly towered above them. As they looked up, a flat-nosed, silver and blue S-Bahn train on the S80 line rumbled overhead, the arc-light snaps and pops from the overhead catenary lines lighting up their faces — Dominika’s heavy-lidded eyes barely registered the passing cars. Nate led her up a slope to the rail bed and let her rest. He walked a little way out onto the bridge along the rails. The curved upper trusses of the bridge were close alongside the double tracks — inches of clearance on either side — with only a narrow structural girder running outside above the water. They would have to cross the entire bridge before another train passed, otherwise they would have to step out onto the knobby, riveted girder above the black river and hold on until the train passed. Even odds that Dominika in her mazy condition would teeter and fall off. Once in the water, she would be gone as completely as if she had fallen overboard at night during a gale in the middle of the ocean.

Nate looked upriver. The Praterbrucke buzzed with late-night vehicular traffic. The pedestrian walkway underneath the roadway was a soft glowing gallery — it contrasted with the darkly wooded left bank, where two bodies stiffened in the night air, and where a patient sniper in a hole waited for them to enter the neon-flavored kill box. For an instant, Nate wondered whether the sniper could cover both bridges from a shooting position somewhere in between the bridges, but that would mean dealing with traversing targets instead of a straight shot. There was no alternative in any case: He had to get Dominika inside and warm if she was going to survive.

They were halfway across the bridge when the box girders started vibrating and the overhead electric lines began humming — a noise like blowing across the mouth of a bottle produces — and the reflection from the big headlight came at them along the shiny rails like a fast-burning fuse, curving and speeding up. Nate helped Dominika under a slanted truss and balanced her on the girder, holding on to her with one hand while she gripped the steel with icy fingers. Their protruding heels hung over the flowing night-black river from which a bass note rose — millions of bucking brown Danube gallons racing to the Black Sea. The steel around them shook and Nate tightened his grip on Dominika as the pressure wave in front of the train buffeted them and then tried to suck them in, and the kinetoscope cabin lights as they whizzed by turned Dominika’s face into a sooty-eyed, eldritch witch, but their eyes met and Nate smiled at her, and she started laughing, and he started laughing, and they hung on until the bridge stopped vibrating.

The kaleidoscope lights of the Prater in the distance called to them, offering cover and safety. The colder air over the river seemed to revive her, but halfway across the rail bridge, Dominika stopped, hugged a girder with white-knuckled hands, and leaned out over the roiling water. She vomited into the black, her body racked by tremors interrupted only by shivers. He held her close now, helped her walk over the rest of the bridge. Nate kept listening for the trains, but he also started surveying the approaching bank and riverside drive of Handelskai, looking for a dark lingering figure, or a stationary vehicle emitting a white plume of exhaust, or a fleeting glint of a scope over the blued barrel of a Dragunov sniper rifle. All clear, until it wasn’t. They walked through the park along Hauptallee to stay away from the river, Nate steering Dominika straight, occasionally boosting her up when her legs sagged.

They reached the amusement park as it was closing — it felt as if they’d been out all night — and they heard the sirens across the river. They walked along the esplanade, keeping out of the brightest pools of light so no one could see the blood in Dominika’s hair and on her shirt, listening to the music and smelling the food. Dominika wobbled a little. Too much wine, thought the old ladies in the stalls. The wobbling hid the shivering, which was coming in waves. Music from the rides and the wind rumble of the Ferris wheel was in their ears.

Blend country bread, ripe tomatoes, and seeded cucumber in a food processor with a splash of red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, and cumin. Process until smooth. Push liquid through a medium sieve for a velvety consistency. Chill and served with diced green pepper, cucumber, and white onion.