Oath of Office

23

Dovzhenko sprang out of the bed, hopping on one foot as he put on his slacks. He was already buttoning his shirt before he realized Maryam wasn’t moving.

“What are you doing?” He slipped the Vostok watch over his wrist, shoving his feet into his shoes. His socks went into his pockets. There was no time to put them on. “Get up! We have to go.”

A lock of dark hair fell across an agate-colored eye. “You are the fire of my heart,” she said. “But if they find us together, we are both dead. They will only interrogate me.”

“No!” Dovzhenko grabbed her arm, dragging her across the sheets. She didn’t struggle, but she didn’t help, either. It was like dragging a dead woman. He felt like crying. “They would not dare harm a Russian intelligence officer. We are allies.”

Her eyes were half closed, sleepy, trancelike. “You could tell them I was your prisoner. Perhaps you could go a little easier on my feet with the truncheon…”

“Why are you doing this?” A sob caught hard in his throat. “Please come with me.”

“Where?” She tore the pendant off her neck and handed it to him. “Please go. You must escape so I can see you again, even if I am in a cell.”

“I won’t leave you.”

She sighed. “My love, if you do not, we will both be killed. Our only chance is for you to go. Now.”

Dovzhenko stuffed the silver necklace in his pocket and then, exasperated, kissed her hard before sliding open the rear window.

“I’ll be right back.”

He switched off his radio and vaulted over the rail, letting his body extend fully so he could drop to the next balcony below. He repeated the process twice more on the second- and first-floor balconies, dropping the last few feet to land among a hedge of thorny shrubs. Tires squealed around the corner as a vehicle turned quickly off 2nd Street and came to a stop in the parking lot out front.

Dovzhenko ran south without looking back, cutting between dark apartment buildings and vaulting several fences to put some distance between him and Sassani’s men. Two minutes later, he turned to the east through a neighborhood of large single-family homes, toward his parked car. Motion lights came on in nearly every yard, blinding him. He narrowly avoided tripping headlong into a backyard pond. He reached his car in less than five minutes, hands on his knees, wheezing for air. He really needed to stop smoking. His hand darted to the pocket of his slacks.

His lighter!

He checked his jacket, feeling like he might pass out at the cold realization that he’d left the lighter at the apartment. Sassani would surely recognize the Azerbaijani crest.

The clatter of gunfire tore at the night.

Dovzhenko choked back a scream. Jumping behind the wheel, he started the little Tiba and threw it into gear, pointing it toward Maryam — and the gunfire. He willed the gutless car to go faster. He had to get inside and retrieve the lighter before Sassani found it. If he could not, then he would at least have the pleasure of shooting the son of a bitch in the face before they arrested him.

Dovzhenko parked and jumped out of the Tiba, sprinting up three flights of stairs.

A young IRGC thug stopped him at the apartment door. “What are you doing here?” It was the same one he’d given the binoculars to, a foolish gesture that only made him look odd — and in the intelligence world, odd was very much akin to guilty.

“I received a tip,” Dovzhenko said, forcing his breath to slow. “I could ask the same question.”

“We have also received a tip.” Sassani strode around the corner, sleeves of his collarless gray shirt rolled up, a tight pair of black leather gloves stretched over his hands.

Dovzhenko shouldered his way past the door guard, biting his tongue when he saw Maryam’s arm trailing off the bed. A rivulet of blood ran from the crook of her elbow to drip from the tips of her fingers. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from giving himself away.

“I am confused, comrade,” Sassani said, head cocked to the side. “Why did you not call us?”

“It was merely a tip,” Dovzhenko said. “I am as surprised to see you as you are me.” He moved around the room, touching as much as he could without looking too obvious. His fingerprints were everywhere. The sunken divot from where he’d sat on the couch to smoke was still in the cushion. He glanced at the ashtray — and thought of the cigarette butt in his pocket. He and Maryam had made love twice — and she’d never gotten out of bed. He was all over this place.

Sassani looked him up and down for a long moment, like a dog looks at a piece of meat it cannot quite reach.

“She resisted?” Dovzhenko heard himself ask, the words hollow, distant though from his own mouth. It was only then that he noticed one of Sassani’s men holding a bandage to his arm.

“The bitch shot me,” the man said.

Bravo, Dovzhenko thought. He’d not known Maryam even had a gun. He moved into the bedroom as if he owned the place — a skill at which Russians were particularly adept. Intelligence training had taught him to swallow his emotions, to lie with his eyes in order to make his words believable. Seeing Maryam’s bullet-riddled body was impossibly difficult, but he dug deep and somehow mustered the wherewithal to appear appropriately shocked at the scene, without breaking down completely.

“What a waste,” he said, forcing himself to approach the bed so he could look for his lost lighter. If it was on the floor, he could find a way past this. If it was tangled in the sheets, he was doomed.

A cursory search revealed nothing, and he leaned over the bed, swallowing the fury that threatened to overpower him.

Most of Maryam’s wounds were to her chest, but there were two to her neck. Blood soaked the sheets and mattress underneath. But when he squinted and blocked out the worst of it, he could almost imagine she was just asleep.

Sassani’s eyes burned holes in the back of his neck. He closed his eyes, controlling his breathing before turning to face the IRGC thug.

“The whore was with someone,” Sassani said. “Just before we arrived.”

Dovzhenko stared at the man, playing out the scene in his mind. The Makarov pistol held eight rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. The little 9x18 was stout enough to do the job, but few pistol calibers were optimum as offensive weapons. They often took time to neutralize a threat. Sassani and three of his men were in the bedroom. Two shots for each of them gave him one to spare. He would shoot Sassani first, once in the face, following up with two shots apiece to the other three. Then Dovzhenko would put a second into Sassani’s groin even if he didn’t need it, because he’d called Maryam a whore. Rather than reload, he’d grab one of the SIG Sauer .45s and shoot the other three IRGC thugs as they came in to investigate. He might even make it as far as the Russian embassy — where his own people would take him into custody.

“Sir,” one of Sassani’s men said from the side of the bed, “look at this.” He held up the gold lighter.

“Thank you,” Dovzhenko said, snatching it away. Only bluster and bravado would do now. If he acted guilty, they would smell it. “It must have fallen out of my pocket when I looked at the body.”

Sassani regarded him with a narrow eye. He said nothing but gave the other officer a small nod, as if to say “Carry on. We will talk later.”

“An autopsy will be performed, as a matter of policy,” Sassani said, lips pulled back in a tight smile. “As I said, she was with someone. DNA tests will tell us the ethnicity of her lover.”

“A wise course of action,” Dovzhenko said.

He looked at Maryam’s lifeless body. It was a mercy that she’d been spared the torment Sassani and his men would have meted out. Rape, bastinado, burning — nothing was too base for these men.

“You know,” Sassani said. “She is not even the name on the lease for this apartment.” He turned to the man that stood nearest the bedroom door. “What is her name?”

“Maryam Farhad, sir.”

“Ah, yes, Maryam,” Sassani said. “A pious name for a whore.”

Dovzhenko suddenly found himself extremely tired. “How did you find her, then?”

“As I said, a tip, just like you. We were lucky. I think we should talk to the actual owner next, don’t you?”

“A wise move.” Dovzhenko groaned inside. He had never met Maryam’s friend, but he knew now that he had to find her and warn her. “I need to piss,” he said. “I won’t touch anything.”

“By all means,” Sassani said. “Piss. I don’t care.”

Dovzhenko started to turn for the bathroom but paused at the bedroom door as if he did not know exactly where it was.

Maryam’s jacket lay on the floor where she’d dropped it earlier that evening. He flushed the toilet, using the noise of swirling water to cover the jingle of her keys as he lifted the jacket to his nose, breathing in the smell of her, blinking back tears. He pulled himself together, then found what he was looking for in the pocket, before gently returning the jacket to the floor.

“What is wrong?” Sassani asked when Dovzhenko came out of the bathroom. He was still grinning. “You look as though the weight of the world is on your shoulders, my friend.”

“We are not friends,” Dovzhenko said.

“That,” Sassani said, “is becoming more obvious to me by the minute. But for argument’s sake, why is that not so? Because I killed a whore?”

“Her?” Dovzhenko remembered he was a spy in time to scoff. “She is nothing. This is a nasty business we are in, and sometimes we must both do nasty things. The difference is you enjoy it too much.”

He turned his back on the IRGC men and walked toward the door. There was only one way forward for him now — a way that, if he were honest with himself, he’d been considering for some time. But first he had to find a woman named Ysabel Kashani.