Mars looked in the Russian’s eyes now, any last vestige of protocol gone. “You recognized her, didn’t you? You know who she is.”
“I do. David . . . it was . . . it was Zoya.”
David Mars blinked once, hard, then grunted angrily. “What the fuck were you and your hooker drinking last night, Vladi? You know as well as I do that Zoya was killed by the Americans four months ago in Thailand.”
Belyakov shook his head. “Apparently the Thailand story was disinformation. She’s not dead. Far from. I swear.”
David Mars looked away, out through the rain to the swans in the pond, swimming languidly. His eyes were unfixed, but quickly they began filling with tears.
From twenty yards away Fox stared at him, but Mars ignored the younger man.
His voice broke a little as he spoke. “Is there any way you could have been mistaken? Or that this was some sort of a trick by the Americans?”
Vladimir Belyakov pointed to a long, shallow cut on his thick neck. “She was close enough to do this to me. She was in my face for five, ten minutes. Of course I know Zoya when I see her. Even after all these years.”
Mars wiped tears away with his shirtsleeve. “Did she . . . did she seem all right? Is she hurt?”
“Same old Zoya. Somehow she broke into my Belgravia home that I spent millions to secure. She had to be a world-class operative . . . a gymnast even, to get through my security. I’d say she’s as healthy as ever.”
David Mars wiped away more tears now, and he smiled. After several seconds he spoke hoarsely. “My beautiful . . . beautiful . . . little Zoyushka. She is alive.”
Belyakov put a hand on Mars’s shoulder and switched to Russian. “Da.” He spoke softly now. “Da, Feodor Ivanovich, your precious daughter is alive and well.”
The man who had called himself David Mars for the last fourteen years let his umbrella drop into the path, then put his face in his hands and wept openly.
* * *
• • •
It was a full minute before he got hold of himself, and Belyakov just sat there the entire time, averting his eyes from his old friend’s emotion and watching the ducks and swans.
Fox, Hines, and Mars’s bodyguard had taken up positions around the bench, but they all stole glances at the last scene they ever thought they’d set eyes on. David Mars broken down in tears.
Finally Mars wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, picked his umbrella back up, and covered himself with it, although he was all but soaked now. He said, “What . . . what was she doing there? With you?”
“She wanted me to tell her about you.”
“What about me?”
“She knows you’re alive, Feo.”
“But . . . how?”
“Somehow she saw the photos of you back in Dagestan. The ones used to prove your death on the battlefield. The ones we staged with you lying next to that poor bastard colonel who caught the mortar round . . . what was his name?”
Mars answered distractedly, as if this were not an important point to Belyakov’s story. “Sokolov. Field Artillery.”
“Yes, right. She saw your pictures, and she said something about hives. What the fuck, David? You get welts on your neck when you’re nervous? How did I never know this?”
David Mars brought his right hand up to his neck and rubbed the exact spot Zoya had indicated. “She knew to look for them.”
Belyakov waited for a response, but when none came he said, “Those files were sealed by GRU as soon as your death was announced. I don’t know how she saw them, but she did.”
David Mars, once known as Feodor Zakharov, now understood without question that Zoya, his only daughter, was the woman in the CIA safe house he’d ordered raided two nights earlier.
She was alive, which made his heart soar, but only until he connected the rest of the dots. She had to have been working for the Americans now. They’d made it look like she’d died in a raid on a yacht off the coast of Thailand, they’d brought her back to America, they’d brainwashed her and turned her, and now they were directing her back out, sending her to find her own father, whom they’d determined was alive and in play.
Belyakov said, “I know where she’s going next.”
“Where?”
“Terry Cassidy’s office. Tonight, would be my guess.”