Thriller: Stories To Keep You Up All Night. Литагент HarperCollins USD

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ veins. He grabbed a snow-covered lawn chair, carried it to the trunk and jumped onto the chair. Reaching up to a hole in the trunk, he pawed through icy layers of leaves until he found his waterproof bundle. In it were rubles, rare U.S. greenbacks and a good fake passport.

      But as he pulled it out, Dmitri heard the quiet click of the gate. He stiffened. Turned awkwardly—and looked at a pistol with a sound suppressor aimed steadily at him. Pulse hammering, he raised his gaze, saw the mustache. The gunman was one of the workers behind him in the underpass.

      “You are Dmitri Garnitsky.” The man spoke Russian with a slight accent and stood with feet planted apart for balance, knees slightly bent. About six feet tall, he was muscular but not heavy, with a bland, expressionless face and nearly colorless eyes. There was something predatory about him that had nothing to do with his weapon.

      Dmitri tried to think. “Nyet. I don’t know—”

      Abruptly, the gate swung open again. The gunman tensed, and his head moved fractionally, watching as the notorious Olenkov marched in, impressive in his mink shapka hat and black cashmere overcoat. He was taller and broader—and smiling. He unbuttoned his coat and removed a pistol, which he, too, pointed at Dmitri.

      “Very good,” he told the first man. “You’ve found him.” Then to Dmitri: “Come along, Comrade Garnitsky.” He held up handcuffs. “We’ll make a good show of it. A lesson for others who would harm our Soviet.”

      Dmitri climbed off the chair and tucked the packet under his arm. “Why bother with handcuffs? You want me dead to scare the others into recanting publicly before you send them to the gulags. You’ll kill me here anyway.”

      “That’s almost true,” Olenkov said easily. “But I see no reason to make myself sweat carrying you. And my specialist was not hired to lug corpses. No, it makes much more sense to shoot you at the van where there’ll be witnesses that you resisted.”

      The other man’s head whipped around. Expressionless, he studied Olenkov.

      Dmitri’s rib cage clenched. Olenkov’s words thundered in his mind “—my specialist was not hired.” The other man must be the Carnivore.

      “What about my wife?” Dmitri demanded.

      “I’ll deal with her later.” Olenkov gestured with his weapon and ordered the other man, “Bring him!”

      The Carnivore did not move. “A man in my business must be careful.” His tones were quiet, commanding. “You’re the only one who was to know who I am, yet you had me followed.”

      “So?” Olenkov asked impatiently.

      “I never do wet work in public.” His eyelids blinked slowly as he considered the KGB officer. “Never on the street. Never where there are witnesses who can identify me. My security rules are absolute. You knew what they were.” It seemed almost as if he was giving Olenkov a chance to come to his senses. “I work alone.”

      But the muscles in Olenkov’s jaw bunched. His face tightened. “Not this time!” he snapped. “The chief’s in a hurry for Garnitsky’s corpse. Get him!”

      Disgust flashed across the Carnivore’s face. His silenced pistol lashed around in a single smooth motion. He fired. Pop. The bullet slammed into Olenkov’s overcoat, burning a hole blacker than the black cashmere. Blood and tissue exploded, spraying the gray air pink.

      Rage twisted Olenkov’s features. As he staggered sideways, he swung his pistol around to aim at the assassin. The Carnivore took two nimble steps and slammed a foot into Olenkov’s knee.

      The KGB man grunted and toppled onto his back, a black Rorschach blot against the white snow. His pistol fell. He stretched for it. The Carnivore smashed a foot down onto the arm, scooped up the gun, and pocketed it, watching as Olenkov struggled to free himself, to sit up, to fight back. But his face drained of color. His eyes closed. Finally, he lay motionless. Air gusted from his lungs.

      Dmitri fought nausea and terror. He waited to be shot, too.

      The Carnivore glanced at him, showing no emotion. “The contract on you is canceled.” He opened the gate and was gone.

      For a long moment, Liz said nothing, suffocated by the past. During the cold war, government officials and private individuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain had alternately used the Carnivore and tried to eliminate him. He was ruthless, a legend. Allegedly, he had only one loyalty—to money. He always worked in disguise, so no one knew what he really looked like, much less his true identity. All of the protocols in the story were accurate.

      Still, his appearance in it was too much of a coincidence. Ignoring Arkady’s gaze, she lifted the blue envelope, examining it closely against the bright light of the floor lamp. There was no hint of a covert French opening—slitting one end of the envelope then gluing it back together. No sign of a roll-out—Soviet tradecraft using two knitting needles on the flap. And no indication of steam or one of the new chemical compounds.

      Breathing shallowly, she lowered the letter. She remembered Arkady’s strange smile before he told her the story. “You know the Carnivore is my father, don’t you?” she asked.

      “How did you figure that out?”

      Liz did not respond. Instead, she peered pointedly across the low table to the bulge in his jacket where his right hand remained near his heart. She had to know.

      Acknowledging her unspoken question, he used the other hand to push aside the lapel.

      Shocked, she stared. As she feared, he held a pistol trained on her. What she had not guessed was that it was hers—her Glock, which had been locked in her bedroom safe. She looked up into the face of the kindly man who was a close friend. A better father. His sweetness had vanished, a mask. Raw hatred burned from his dark eyes.

      A fundamental of survival was to adapt. Liz erased emotion from her face. She had to find a way to take him or escape.

      “It was the envelope,” she told him. “No one opened it before you received it.”

      He inclined his head once. “Where is the Carnivore?”

      “If you know he’s my father, then you know he’s dead.” That was a lie. It was possible he was still alive. When she was CIA, she had discovered his real work when she spotted him in the middle of a wet job in Lisbon. She stopped it, and he promised to let her take him in. But before that could happen, he was apparently killed—yet his body was never found. “Was there any truth in your story?”

      “There was a Dmitri and Nina Garnitsky, an Oleg Olenkov and a Carnivore. Olenkov was shot, and Dmitri Garnitsky escaped.”

      She thought swiftly, trying to understand. Then she remembered his words—Oleg Olenkov…a master of impersonation and recruiting the unsuspecting—and everything made a crazed kind of sense: last January, it had been no accident that “Arkady Albam” sat beside her at the faculty meeting. That was the beginning of his campaign to cultivate her, make her vulnerable to him. At some point, he wrote the “Nina” letter, and on Monday, when he claimed to be sick, he drove down to Los Angeles to mail it to himself. Tonight he set her up so she would worry and come to check on him. That was why he had been waiting, with her Glock hidden under his jacket, pointed at the chair where she always sat.

      “You’re Olenkov!”

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