The Istanbul Decision

Sixteen

"You and your father must have planned this little surprise right from the beginning," said Carter with a forced laugh. A chill sweat glistened on his forehead in spite of the cold. He had to think, to assess the situation. Kobelev had an hour's head start on a two-hour trip back to the train. Carter would have to make an all-out push to beat him there, but first he was going to have to get the gun away from Tatiana.

"Actually, it was my idea," she said. "Papa wanted to take the train back by force, but when I saw that that girl looked just like me, had my exact face, same eyes, teeth, hair — everything the same — I persuaded him to help me create this little ruse to get you out here alone."

"Vengeance means a great deal to you, doesn't it?"

"I've wanted you dead for a long time, Carter. Ever since…"

"Ever since that night we slept together in your father's dacha?" Carter said, finishing her thought. "Don't give yourself away any too easily, do you, Tatiana? See a man you like, feel some attraction for, and you're threatened down to the soles of your shoes, isn't that so?"

"I never really liked you, Carter. I hated you on sight."

"Really? As I remember, I didn't come to you that night, you came to me. And don't try to tell me your father put you up to it, because you almost bollixed his plans by doing it. No, you wanted me all right, and you still want me, and because you think you can never have me, you want to kill me. Isn't that true?"

"No," she said firmly. "I hate you."

"A dying man has a right to find out the truth before he meets his end, doesn't he? If I'm to be killed by an insanely jealous woman, I have a right to know it, haven't I?"

"I am not jealous!" she shouted, rising to her feet. "You… you are trying to provoke me, to get me to make a mistake. You see? I know all your tricks."

"I'm not tricking you," Carter said calmly. "If there's no truth to what I'm saying, why are you so angry?"

"I am not angry!" she snapped.

"Let's face it, Tatiana, you've been in love with me right from the start. You haven't been able to think of anything else. And you hate me because you think I could never return those feelings. You think I laugh at you behind your back."

She stopped pacing and scrutinized him closely. "You do laugh at me. I know it. But very soon you will not laugh anymore."

"You are wrong, Tatiana. I don't laugh. Not at all. I rather enjoyed that night we spent together. I've thought about it often."

"You are lying!" she shouted.

"What reason would I have to lie now? I'm a dead man, remember? You misjudge yourself. You are far more beautiful than you imagine. Although I can understand how you might not know it. With a father as powerful as yours, how could you be sure any man would tell you the truth?"

This last sentence had an almost physical effect. Her head rose slightly, and her expression sobered. "At least there are some things you understand," she said.

Carter sensed she'd taken the bait. The trick now was to keep the line taut and let her reel herself in. "Where is Cynthia now?" he asked, changing the subject. "Still with your father?"

"Yes. I think she amuses him. She looks exactly like me, you know." There was a pause, then she asked: "Did you ever make love to her, Carter?"

"Yes, several times."

"And did you notice she looked like me?"

"The thought crossed my mind."

"And did it stimulate you?"

"You mean, did I find it erotic that she reminded me of you? I don't think you have any right to ask that."

"No right? I have the gun, you forget. I have all the right in the world. Now answer the question."

"All right," said Carter after a short pause, "it was stimulating. I remembered the night we were together, the things you liked to do, the way you are…" He gestured vaguely, implying this was too vast to describe.

"And what way is that?"

"Oh," he said, looking off down the mountain as though written there somewhere were a way to describe her wondrousness but noticing, as he did so, that she'd come several steps closer, "one has the feeling that there is much untapped in you, Tatiana. A volcano just below the surface. One wonders what might happen if that fire were ever unleashed."

"And did it drive you to new heights of passion?" she asked, staring down at him, breathing heavily.

"Yes." He said the word softly as though she had torn it from his heart, so softly, in fact, she couldn't hear it.

"What?" she asked, leaning closer.

He saw his chance and he took it. Grabbing his snowshoe by its edge, he swung hard, aiming for her head. She pulled back, but he made contact with the pistol and knocked it aside. It went off, burying a bullet in the trunk of a nearby tree.

She fell back and he fell on top of her, desperately trying to grab the gun before she could point it at him again. Unfortunately, she was right-handed, and his right was the only hand Carter had. He was forced to reach across her, which left her left hand open to scratch and pull and hit.

He managed to finally get a hold of her wrist, but she was a good deal stronger than he supposed. Although he could prevent her from twisting it toward him, he couldn't get her to drop it, no matter how much pressure he applied. She suddenly wrenched her leg away and brought it back sharply.

A flood of nauseating pain welled up from his bowels, the world spun, and his stomach turned inside out. The strength drained from his arms, and he felt the gun slip from his grasp.

In desperation he realized he had only one option. He settled on top of her, praying she was more interested in killing him with the gun than trying to kick his balls off again.

She made muffled shouts against his parka. He still fumbled for the gun even though he'd lost track of it. Then he found it, pressed against his chest, just as it discharged with a muted pop between them.

He lay there wondering if he were hit and if so, how bad. How would he know with waves of agony coursing up his spine and out to every finger and toe? Then he realized Tatiana wasn't moving, hadn't moved, and wasn't breathing either.

He roiled off her. The pearl-handled gun lay across her chest, and a growing stain of blood seeped from her coat. He guessed the bullet had gone straight into her heart, she'd died so fast.

He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet, leaned back on the stone where he'd been sitting, and put his head between his knees to try to keep from being sick.

Kobelev was an hour from the train. He had no snowshoes and was probably dragging Cynthia, who would be doing her best to slow him down. Still, it would be impossible for Carter to overtake him. Only a miracle would get him back there in time.

A spasm twisted in his gut, and his worries about Kobelev, the tension he'd felt in front of Tatiana's gunsight, and the rolls he'd eaten with Roberta back at the train all ended up in a steaming puddle in front of him. When it passed, he wiped his mouth and washed his face with snow and told himself he felt better, even if he wasn't sure it was true.

He went over and took the pistol from Tatiana's hand and stuffed it in his coat pocket. Then he stood for a moment, staring down at the monk who had given his life to bring this little rendezvous about. What had Kobelev promised him that was worth killing himself for? Carter wondered.

He passed it off with a shrug, located his wayward snowshoe, and stooped down to strap it on. Then he looked down the long line of snowshoe prints that started at the top of the hill and extended better than ten miles back to the railroad and the Orient Express. There was no way he'd be able to trudge all that distance in less than an hour.

Then he wondered what would have happened if Tatiana had killed him as planned? She certainly wasn't going to walk all the way back to meet her father. And he wasn't going to pick her up with the train. There was no sign of a railroad track anywhere.

On a hunch he circled the area around the big rock that now served as a headstone. On the western side of the trail about a hundred feet out he came across a line of partially brushed-out footprints. He followed them to a pair of cross-country skis behind a tree. The monk had apparently stashed them here for Tatiana before blowing his brains out.

They were a woman's size. Consequently, the boots accompanying them were hopelessly small. But the bindings could be adjusted around his own snow boots and in a few minutes, he was poling his way one-handed to the top of the hill.

He stood at the crest for a moment, surveying the expanse of snow that stretched out before him, then with a thrust, he pushed himself out onto the mountain, kicking at first to gain speed, then curling into the aerodynamically efficient «egg» position for minimum wind resistance. It was a good thing, he thought, one never forgot how to ski.

For Lieutenant Commander j.g. Roberta Stewart, waiting had always been an anathema. As a child of five she remembered the long hours of delay while bureaucratic wranglings kept her father in the Hungarian State Prison long after his sentence as an insurgent during the revolution of 1956 had been put down. She remembered the long plane ride and the hours of questioning by immigration authorities before they finally let her father and herself out of the terminal at Idlewild. And later on, she'd waited three days longer than any OCS candidate to get her commission — only to discover to her joy and trepidation that she'd been assigned back to the country of her birth. There had been many anxious moments of waiting since then, waiting for messages to be picked up in letter drops around the American consulate, waiting in alleys to talk to contacts, the disgruntled dock worker, the Soviet official cheating on his wife who thought she would make a fetching sexual trophy (and who never succeeded but, in trying, always spilled his guts of everything he knew). Waiting had become her life, and yet of all the nervous hours she had spent in anticipation of things both good and bad, none of them held a candle to the hours she spent waiting for Nick Carter to return to the Orient Express.

Outside the train the wind whistled up from the valley below with a low, mournful moan that set her teeth on edge. The old wooden cars creaked and settled on the track, and every stray noise made her jump and clutch her machine gun.

She sat on the floor of the engine room, her back to the fire doors, the machine gun resting across her knees. From time to time she would crawl the few feet to the coal supply, retrieve an armful, and toss them into the furnace. Then she would slam the doors and resume the same tense, watchful pose as before.

The boiler became more than just a source of warmth. It was her ticket out of here, she told herself, and if she took care of it, it would take care of her. She believed this, and the hot metal became a benign, almost friendly, sensation at her back, like the warm lap of a parent when all the world around has turned hostile and cold.

Her thoughts centered mostly on Nick, on how he was doing, if he would ever come back to her, and what she would do if he didn't. She told herself she definitely didn't love him, although even before the words had fully formed in her mind, she knew it was a lie. And yet she knew, too, that love between them was impossible. They were two professionals, each with his job to do. They would love briefly, and they would say good-bye, and their love would be sweeter and more poignant because of it. These were her thoughts, but in the cold darkness of the engine cabin, her heart spun out fantasies of the two of them running, laughing into a pounding tropical surf as though they hadn't a care in the world.

Minutes crept by. Time seemed to pass like sand in an hourglass, one infinitesimal grain at a time. Occasionally she would think she couldn't stand it any longer, and she would pace the cabin and strain to see if there weren't two figures trudging toward her at the head of a long column of footprints that would signal her vigil had finally come to an end. Once, by some convoluted reasoning, she even fired a machine gun burst into the air, thinking it might help lead them home. It was only frustration expressing itself, and when she thought of the possibility of the gunshots starting another avalanche, she was horrified. She took up her position in front of the furnace again and vowed not to leave it until Nick himself pried her away.

The hours marched by and sleep tempted her, although the ache in her stomach kept it from being much of a threat. She hadn't eaten since Nick had found the lunch box with the rolls, and although since then she'd gone back and licked the wrappers, it had far from satisfied her, and her stomach had groaned for more. But when nothing was forthcoming, it eventually grew quiet until it lay dormant between her ribs and she forgot about it. Then sleep tugged on her more and more insistently, so that when she heard the first of the cries, she wasn't sure whether it was real or she'd been asleep and dreamed it.

By the second cry, there was no possibility of mistake. Someone was out there in the dark. A woman in trouble. She first thought it was Cynthia returning without Nick, and a stab of cold went through her. But then she realized whoever it was didn't know her name, and she felt confused and afraid.

She pressed herself against the wall by the brakeman's window and quickly glanced outside. In the snow one hundred feet away stood a woman about the same height and general coloring as Cynthia, only dressed in furs. "Help!" she yelled for what was now the third time.

"Who is it?" Roberta shouted, being careful to keep her head well back out of any line of fire.

"Cynthia Barnes. A friend of Nick Carter's. You speak English?"

"Of course I speak English. But you're lying. You're not Cynthia Barnes. Nick left here with Cynthia Barnes about three hours ago. You must be…"

"No! Nick was fooled! I'm Cynthia Barnes. When he came to get me to take this assignment, I was working on a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Shall I do a few lines to prove it to you?"

At this moment, against all her training, Lieutenant Commander j.g. Roberta Stewart committed a momentary lapse of security. In the parlance, she "dropped her guard." The thought of Nick out somewhere on the mountain at the mercy of Tatiana Kobelev (for who else could it have been masquerading as Cynthia?) so startled her, she stepped into full view in the window. A shot sounded, like a brief thunderclap, somewhere below and to her right. There was a sharp sensation on her head, as though she'd stepped into a whirling propeller blade, and she flew backward.

She lay on the floor, conscious but unable to move, listening as powerful footsteps mounted the metal ladder into the compartment.

"My God, she's still alive!" cried Cynthia, her voice strident. She was scared out of her wits.

"It's of no matter," said another voice, masculine this time, and while there was no accent, Roberta noticed school-book English.

Strong hands took hold of her arms at the elbows and dragged her to the opening. Then she plummeted to the snow.

"You can't just leave her like that!" said Cynthia, tears filling her eyes.

There was a short derisive laugh from the man. "You're quite right. It's most uncivilized of me. But there simply isn't time to call an ambulance. We must be going."

"Aren't you going to wait for your daughter?"

More laughter amid the cranking of valves being opened and the hiss of steam. "You understand nothing of what I've been telling you. I've trained Tatiana to master any situation. Did she not escape the United States under the heaviest security possible? Did she not find me on the Orient Express in the middle of western Hungary? It is a game we play, she and I. It keeps us strong."

The engine whistle sounded, signifying the boiler was ready. The enormous pushrods extended and fell to, and the ground beneath Roberta shook as the huge train began to move down the trade.