No Survivors

40

Barely a mile away, Piotr Korsakov was sitting in an FSB safe house, while a doctor tended to his nose. His cell phone rang. He checked the number- Moscow, calling on a secure line-and motioned to the doctor to leave the room.

“You had a bad night, Korsakov.” The voice was cool, female, authoritative.

“Yes, Madam Deputy Director.”

“You lost a partner and a target.”

“Yes.”

“Matov paid the price for his incompetence. What happened to you?”

“I was taken unawares. I did not believe that the target, Carver, had spotted me as a potential threat. I was wrong. He assaulted me. I could have retaliated, of course. Doubtless I would have killed him. But there were several witnesses. I felt it more prudent to play the innocent victim.”

“That may have been the correct judgment. We will have a hard enough time covering up the deaths of Matov and the couple you terminated. We do not need any further complications. Did you see where Carver went?”

“No, ma’am. He left the building while I was still inside and I was unable to follow him. But he was not alone. There was another man, very distinctive, almost six and a half feet tall, with long hair. He would be easy to identify again.”

“That will not be necessary. I am already aware of his identity.”

“So what would you like me to do now?”

“Return to Moscow. I will decide what we shall do about Mr. Carver… and his hairy friend.”

She hung up the phone.

And in the meantime, we must get a message to Alix, she thought. The assassination has failed, for now, but there is no reason she should know that. Let’s see how well she does her job when she’s not distracted by thoughts of another man…

Thirteen hundred miles away, alone in her hotel room, Alix was looking across the waters of the Canale della Giudecca toward the lights of Venice. Here she stood, in one of the most romantic cities in the world, and right there in the next-door room was a man who yearned to be her lover. For weeks she had been keeping him at bay, but all her training and professional expertise told her these stalling tactics were rapidly outliving their usefulness. Denying a man what he most desired was an excellent way of keeping him on tenterhooks, but beyond a certain point even the most lovesick male would eventually decide that the effort wasn’t worth it.

If Olga Zhukovskaya could see what was happening now, her orders would be simple: “Sleep with Vermulen, immediately.”

So what was stopping her?

Loyalty to Carver, and a refusal any longer to whore in the service of the state: Those were the obvious answers, but she knew they were just phony self-justifications. The real reason Alix was not in Vermulen’s room right now was precisely the fact that part of her wanted to be there just as much as he did.

She did not love Vermulen the way she loved Carver, or had loved the man he once was. But the general was present in her life, and Carver was now just a memory that seemed to fade a little more into the distance with every passing day. Vermulen was a good, kind man, whose feelings for her were unmistakably real. Just as important, he had money, influence, and a degree of power. He offered her the possibility of protection, some refuge at least if she should ever defy Zhukovskaya, and walk away from the FSB.

Sooner or later, that promise of security would be impossible to resist.