his employee will no longer be reporting back to him. Good-bye.”
A few seconds of silence passed before I realized that the connection had been severed.
I had a sick feeling. I knew the worst had happened. So did Navrozov. He hurled the phone across the room. It hit a bedside lamp, knocking it to the carpeted floor. His face was dark, mottled. He let loose a string of Russian obscenities.
“The bastard thinks he can defy me!” Navrozov said, spittle flying.
The door to the room came open, and his security guards burst in. The one in front had a weapon in his right hand, a keycard in his left. They’d managed to get one from the front desk.
“This bastard murders my employee!”
The security men did a quick assessment, assured themselves that I wasn’t doing harm to their boss. They muttered hasty apologies, I guessed, and retreated from the room.
“Who was that?” I said.
“This is the whole point of cutouts!” he shouted. “I don’t know who it is.”
“Where is he, then?”
“I told you, somewhere in New Hampshire!”
“Within a thirty-minute drive from the Maine border,” I said. “Right? We know that much. But do you know if he was based in the north part of the state, or the south, or what? You have no idea?”
He didn’t answer, and I could tell that he didn’t know. That he was experiencing something he rarely felt: defeat.
“Wait,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I do have something. A photograph.”
I looked at him, waited.
“The cutout was able to take a covert photograph of the contractor. For insurance purposes.”
“A face?”
He nodded. “But no name.”
“I want it.”
“But this man’s face is not in any of your law-enforcement databases. It will not be easy to find him.”
“I want it,” I repeated. “And I want one more thing.”
Navrozov just looked at me.
“I want to know what Mercury really is.”
He told me.
Thirty minutes later, still numb with shock, I found my way to the street and into a cab.
PART THREE
If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
—ÉMILE ZOLA
80.
Just before six in the morning, the FedEx cargo flight landed in Boston.
I desperately needed sleep.
If I was to have any hope of locating Alexa Marcus, I needed a little rest. Just a few hours of downtime so I could think clearly again. I was at the point where I could be mainlining caffeine and it still wouldn’t keep me awake.
My phone rang as I was parking the Defender.
It was Tolya Vasilenko. “The picture you just sent me,” he said. “I am very sorry for you. This is a particularly bad egg.”
“Tell me.”
“You remember this terrible murder of the family in Connecticut I told you about?” He was still pronouncing it wrong.
“He was the one who survived? The one who escaped?”
“So I am told.”
“Name?”
“We still haven’t discussed a price.”
“How much do you want?” I said wearily.
“It’s not money I want. It’s … let’s call it a swap of intelligence.”
He told me his demand, and I agreed to it without a moment’s hesitation.
Then he said: “Dragomir Vladimirovich Zhukov.”
I mulled over the name, tried to connect it to the snapshot that Navrozov’s security chief, Eugene, had e-mailed me: the hard-looking man with the shaven head and the fierce expression. Dragomir, I mentally rehearsed. Dragomir Zhukov. A hard-sounding name.
“An unusual name for a Russian,” I said.
“Uncommon. His mother’s a Serb.”
“What else do you have on him?”
“Besides the fact that he is a sociopath and a monster and an extremely clever man? There is maybe more you need to know?”
“Specifics about his background. His childhood, his family.”
“You have decided to become a psychoanalyst in your spare time?”
“It’s how I work. The more I know about a target’s personal life, the more effective I can be.”
“Unfortunately we have very little, Nicholas, apart from the arrest files and his military records and a few interviews with family members and witnesses.”
“Witnesses?”
“You don’t think this home invasion in Connecticut was his first murder, do you? When he served in Chechnya with the Russian ground forces, he was disciplined for excess zeal.”
“What kind of ‘zeal’?”
“He took part in a zachistka—a ‘cleansing operation’—in Grozny, and did certain things that even his commanders couldn’t bring themselves to talk about, and these are not sensitive souls. Acts of torture. I know of only a few things. He captured three Chechen brothers and dismembered them so thoroughly that nothing remained but