Mirage

CHAPTER TEN

He saw the punch coming from the way his opponent torqued his hips. It gave him the third piece of the puzzle. In any fight, a good boxer could deduce from where the punch was coming and how the punch was coming. The great ones figured out the big question: when it was coming. When he saw the shift, he had perhaps a half second to react. The left came at his head with everything the man had to throw. It wasn’t a knockout blow. It was a killing strike.

For him, that half second was a lifetime, and he actually used a portion of it to admire his opponent’s daring.

To throw such a punch meant you knew that when it landed, the fight was over. It was an act of supreme confidence.

Or, in this case, arrogance.

He brought his right around just enough to deflect the punch and leaned back, his opponent’s glove taking off a layer of skin from the tip of his nose. It was all his opponent would ever claim — a tiny patch of skin — because his left came up in a hammer strike that hit with the force of a hurricane. He no longer had the wind for a long match, age had robbed him of that, but he could exploit an opening. His punch, fired from close range and out of defense, still shattered his sparring partner’s nose as though they were fighting bare-knuckle. Blood flew in a spraying arc as the other man corkscrewed to the canvas, his brain so short-circuited that eight sticks of ammonia would be needed to rouse him.

Three hours in a surgeon’s care would be needed to restore his appearance.

Pytor Kenin didn’t even wait for the ring workers to wake this morning’s sparring partner. He ducked under the ropes and held up his gloves for a trainer to unlace them from his hands. He’d only been in the ring a few minutes, but, as part of his training program, the gym’s owner kept the facility near eighty-five degrees. Sweat poured through the dense coils of hair that covered his chest, back, and shoulders.

“Where ever did you find that man?” Kenin jerked his head back to indicate the prone figure still lying on the canvas.

His trainer, a veteran of the Olympics back when the Soviet Union dominated the games, shrugged. “He claimed to be the champion boxer at the truck factory where he worked. I’d never heard of him but took his word for it.”

“Fateful boast,” the admiral remarked as his second glove came free and his trainer went to work on the tape. “He had power, but that man telegraphed his moves like Samuel Morse.”

The trainer chuckled at the turn of phrase. “He had you by two inches and twenty pounds, but, as we’ve both learned over the years, youth and vigor are no match for age and treachery.”

It was Kenin’s turn to smile. “All too true.”

The admiral was bent over a sink in the gymnasium’s bathroom, razoring his face, a towel wrapped around his waist, when a newly assigned aide came through wearing his full uniform. Kenin cocked an eyebrow at the young sailor, who was seeing the scar that ran down Kenin’s rib cage for the first time. It was a souvenir from a helicopter crash early on in Kenin’s career.

“Sorry, sir,” the aide stammered. “Commander Gogol’s compliments. He would like you to phone him right away.”

Kenin had a good idea what the call was about, so he quickly rinsed away the little lather still on his face with a double palmful of water. “Thank you. Go back to the car and tell the driver we’ll be going back to my apartment rather than the office.”

Kenin put on his uniform, adjusting several of the decorations that covered a sizable portion of his jacket, and strode out of the bathroom, an encrypted phone to his ear. In the boxing ring, the trainers had his sparring partner on one of the corner stools with a mess of bloodied towels at his feet and a fresh one pressed against his face.

He only noticed the smell of the gym when he first stepped into its heat or when he stepped out onto the Moscow streets. The city air was not clean by any stretch of the imagination, but he drew air deep into his lungs to purge them of the smell of sweat and blood and old leather.

“Viktor, it’s Kenin. Are the men in place?”

“They just called. They’re ready.”

The admiral ducked into the backseat of his Mercedes limo, and his veteran driver closed the door. The young aide rode in front with him. So confident of his position within the government, Kenin didn’t bother with a coterie of security men.

“Good. I’m on my way home to make the call. Meet me there so we can make our plan.”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes, Admiral.”

Kenin’s luxury apartment was only a ten-minute drive from the gym where he regularly trained. The palatial flat had its own exercise room equipped with the latest gear, but he preferred to work out in the dank gymnasium surrounded by other men whose single dedication to the pugilist arts was an inspiration.

He could never have afforded the ten-thousand-square-foot floor of the high-rise building overlooking the river. His was but an admiral’s salary, after all. No, the apartment had been a gift of one of his many benefactors, an oligarch who had made his fortune in the Wild West days following the collapse of the Soviet Union and now backed several political and military up-and-comers in order to preserve it.

In the building’s lobby, he slotted his key into the elevator controls, telling it to take him to his private floor. There, the doors opened to the apartment’s entry foyer, a marble-and-gilt affair that looked like it had been stripped out of the palace at Versailles. Kenin ignored the opulence. He was a man interested in only one trapping of wealth and that was power. The material side of the equation meant nothing to him.

A moment later, he was in his office, staring at a flat-panel monitor mounted on a wall to the left of his desk. Most of the screen was black, though one corner showed an image of himself taken from a camera placed to make him appear massive behind his desk. He hit a button on his desktop computer when he was satisfied with how he looked on the monitor.

The screen came to life. In the foreground sat a man behind his own desk. Behind him was a casement window, looking out over the ocean. The weather appeared cloudy where the man was; the sky leaden, and the ocean churned as it raced for shore. Kenin had spoken to this man enough over the years that his physical form was something he no longer noticed.

No one knew the origin of the fire that had robbed the man of so much. Some claimed it was an assassination attempt, others said his mother deliberately set him on fire when he was a child. Still others said it was an accident from the days when he made bombs for Turkish separatists on Cyprus. His left hand was nothing more than a pair of lobster-like pincers, though the right had been spared. He had no hair. The scar tissue that covered his skull had the tight sheen of a Halloween mask pulled too tight. Both ears were burned away, as was his nose. The skin on his neck looked like the scaly hide of a desert lizard. One eye was covered with a simple black patch, though the other glittered with intellect.

“Admiral Kenin, so delighted you wished to call me this fine morning,” the man known in intelligence circles as L’Enfant said.

Kenin was certain that Yuri Borodin and his bootlick, Mikhail Kasporov, hadn’t used a Russian team to break him out of prison. Kenin knew all the groups capable of such a sophisticated operation and all of them eventually reported to him. That meant Kasporov had gone to foreign operators for the extraction. There were few such groups, and each of them guarded their identity well. These weren’t the big security contractors that had gained notoriety during America’s forays into Iraq and Afghanistan. No, these were smaller elite forces that operated far beneath the radar. But there was one constant in the shadow world and that was if anyone needed discreet information, they would eventually have to deal with L’Enfant.

“How are you, my old friend?” They were not friends, and the levity Kenin put into his voice was for appearances only. L’Enfant was as happy to take this call as he was to discuss his own funeral arrangements with the undertaker.

“I can complain, dear Admiral, but would you really like to listen?” The fire and smoke had damaged L’Enfant’s lungs so he spoke in a graveled rasp. An oxygen cannula ran under the ruin of his nose, held in place by surgical tape, and every few minutes he took a hit off a separate clear-plastic mask. The damage also garbled any accent the man might have spoken with. Details of his national origin were as elusive as the cause of the disfiguring fire.

Kenin gave him a disingenuous smile. “Your well-being is always in my interest.”

L’Enfant inclined his misshapen head. “Strange thing,” he croaked. “Your name came up just the other day.”

“Really.” The information broker had spies all over the globe who siphoned up more intelligence than the CIA. Kenin had no idea in what context his name would have come up to interest L’Enfant other than Borodin’s escape, and it was too early in the conversation for either man to mention the true purpose of the call.

“Indeed. It seems some Colombian gentlemen reportedly purchased a decommissioned submarine, and its crew has missed two scheduled reports on their return voyage.”

Kenin’s expression didn’t change. He was too good for that, but inside he was seething at the fact this little toad knew about that operation. The leak had to have come from the Colombians, but the fact that it was out there was a severe blow.

“I hadn’t heard Colombia wanted to purchase a sub for their Navy,” he said evenly.

“Oh, you misunderstood me, Admiral. It wasn’t their Navy at all. Just some businessmen who’d formed a… let’s call it a syndicate. I believe they had some unusual cargo to transport and thought the submarine would make their job a little easier. I only mention this because one member of the syndicate who was responsible for procuring the sub was killed by his partners over its loss, and upon his death he said the queerest thing. He said he got the boat from you.”

Kenin smiled. “There you go. How can you trust anything said under duress? He must have heard of me when I helped broker the deal for the Chinese to buy a few of our old Kilo-class subs and, most recently, the aircraft carrier Varyag.”

“I bet that’s it,” L’Enfant agreed readily. “I do recall your prominence in that transaction, and I bet this poor fellow blurted out your name by mistake.”

Both men nodded at the lies given and accepted. This was just L’Enfant’s way of showing off his knowledge and reminding Kenin that he knew where every body was buried and in which closet every skeleton had been hidden.

“Shall we get down to business,” L’Enfant invited.

“Very well.” The fake bonhomie vanished from Kenin’s expression, and his voice hardened.

“Before you say anything, let me assure you I had nothing to do with Yuri Borodin’s escape.”

“So you know of it?” Kenin asked.

L’Enfant didn’t deign to answer.

“I believe that you didn’t broker his rescue, but I wager you still know who pulled it off.” When L’Enfant didn’t protest, Kenin continued. “As a sign of our long-standing dealings, I would please ask that you tell me.”

This was a line one never crossed. L’Enfant had been so successful for so many years because he kept confidences with the vigor of a Swiss banker. To even ask to divulge something like this was a mark of disrespect, and both men fully understood that their relationship was over from this moment on.

L’Enfant sucked off his oxygen mask, his chest heaving to fill his damaged lungs. “An unusual but not unexpected request. How do you wish me to respond?”

“By answering another question first.”

“By all means.”

“Who do you fear more? Me or the man who masterminded Borodin’s escape?”

“I fear neither, though in all candor I admit that I admire and respect him more.”

“That is the wrong answer.” Kenin looked down at his keyboard and typed a quick IM. When he spoke, a little of the earlier brevity was back, but now it was more genuine. “The secret to your success has always been two things. Your discretion, which I can do little about, and your physical location, which I can.” Kenin paused as if something occurred to him. “Actually, three things. There is what is referred to as a dead man’s switch. Upon your death, information that you’ve gathered over the years will be disseminated to interested parties. I imagine it will ignite assassination after assassination, and perhaps even trigger a few wars. I guess I should have said switches, since there are four separate people tasked with carrying out your final orders should any harm befall you.”

Had L’Enfant’s scarred visage been able to show emotion, fear would have crept across his face. That he had a dead man as protection against betrayal was known to all. That he had four was not.

The video monitor both men could see split into four quadrants at a command from Pytor Kenin. In each, a man dressed in black tactical gear and wearing a dark mask held a pistol to the head of another person — three men and a woman. Two were dressed in suits, and it looked as though they had been at their offices or commuting to them. Of the other two, the woman wore workout clothes, and behind her were several pieces of fitness gear in a home gym. The third man was next to his bed and wore nothing but a pair of boxers, his gut sagging over the waistband by a good six inches.

All four were lawyers. None of them lived on the same continent or knew one another and yet all had been hired in secret by L’Enfant to divulge upon his death all of the information he’d gathered on his clients and their enemies.

“My only real risk,” Kenin said airily, “is that I’m not certain if these people have people of their own who will carry out your final command. But I think I’m safe.” He then turned deadly serious. “As to your location, my friend, you are currently in the southeast corner of the one hundred eighteenth floor of the Burj Khalifa tower. The ocean vista behind you is a live webcam from Italy’s Amalfi Coast, and while you own the floors immediately above and below yours, I have packed the suite on one sixteen with enough explosives to take down the entire building.

“I will now repeat the question. Who do you fear more, me or him? And let me remind you that I will trigger the charges in, say, twenty seconds.”

L’Enfant took a draw off his oxygen mask. “If this was a level playing field, I would still fear him more than you.”

“The playing field is no longer level,” Kenin said, waving at the monitor to indicate how his men held weapons on L’Enfant’s people.

“I see that.”

“Here’s how this is going to work. You are going to give me his name and the name of his outfit, and then we will never speak again. You will not warn him. Maybe your betrayal will become public and maybe not. It is possible you will be able to salvage something of your career after this. The choice is yours, and you now have five seconds.”

L’Enfant hesitated for as long as he dared and then for the first time in his life he gave up one of his clients. “Juan Cabrillo. He is the chairman of the Corporation. They are based on a ship called the Oregon, although that name is rarely painted on her fantail.”

“See? That wasn’t so hard.”

“Screw you, Kenin.”

Kenin ignored that remark. “Now, my good friend, tell me everything you know about this Cabrillo and his ship.”