Simbal had to squeeze out of the way as a couple of young, modish DEA types came laughing through, looking for the ice. Threnody directed them in good-natured fashion.
Simbal felt a pressure against his back and turned around, to find himself staring straight into those violet eyes. "h.e.l.lo, Monica," he said.
He heard Threnody say from behind him, "See you later, Tony." Then with a little laugh, "Maybe."
"It"s been a while." Monica Starr"s voice was just this side of husky. Her midnight hair was long, cascading back from her face, down her shoulders. The effect was breathtaking. When Simbal had known her, she had had short hair and there had been a pixieish quality about her that was now gone. But she had been younger then, he told himself. The hunter-green sweater over the sienna-colored gored tweed skirt showed how she had filled out.
After a while, Simbal became aware that she had begun to lead him out of the jammed kitchen, weaving a path for them through the boisterous crowd.
The lights were off in one of the downstairs back rooms. The bed was piled high with coats, hats, scarves and handbags. A streetlight filtering in through the window provided ghostly illumination.
Monica was wreathed in shadows. She wore little makeup, diamond studs in her ears, like a prima ballerina, he thought, a small gold watch with a green lizard band on one wrist, no other jewelry.
"Monica," he said.
She smiled and slapped him hard across the face. "That"s for walking out on me."
Simbal stood very still. "It was a mission, Monica. Jesus Christ. What did you expect?""To hear from you when you got back. I had to go to Max and ask him if you had gotten back at all." There was a quiver there, and a thickness to her voice as her emotions swelled, threatening to break through her iron resolve. "Do you have any conception of what that cost me? It is Max Threnody"s considered opinion that running is too dangerous for women. We"re too unpredictableI think that was his wordfor field work; too emotional.
"Up until the moment when I burst into his office in tearsin tears over you, you sonofab.i.t.c.hI think I was doing okay with him; wearing him down to the point where he"d give me the go-ahead to do some running on my own.
"Then he saw what you"d done to me and that was the end for me. Do you understand what that means? I put my guts into this job; if I have anywhere else to go, I sure don"t know about it."
Simbal thought he saw a glitter in her eyes, the cusp of tears she had, perhaps, promised herself he would never see.
"Even a dog gets treated better than you treated me."
"Monica, I"m sorry." He reached out but she shook him off.
"That won"t make it right. You know it won"t." He could sense how much it took for her to keep herself together. "Max told me I was mad to feel anything for you. He was right, wasn"t he?"
The silence brought a bubble of laughter bursting in on them, an ironic intruder. Someone came inneither of them saw whosaid, "Oops!" and hastily departed.
"Answer me." She had not raised her voice, only lowered the pitch. The result was akin to an animal"s warning growl.
Simbal recalled his discussion with Rodger Donovan. How could he explain his feelings about civilization to this woman? She had been born in Philadelphia, had been educated in the best Eastern private schools before going to Smith. What kind of experience could she have had with the primitive side of life; how could she possibly understand the lure of the absolutes that civilization sought so hard to dissipate: life and death, love and hate. No trappings, no psychological baggage, no modern jargon. High up in the mountains of the Shan States if someone crossed you, you didn"t say, "f.u.c.k you!" you killed him. Finis. Because it was wild up there. The poppy fields brought danger, secrecy, double-crosses. In the Shan States, the strong survived, feeding off the weak.
He wanted very much to lie to her but just as he was about to do so he paused, biting his lip. Why should he lie? That was the civilized thing to do and he was tired of civilization.
"I saw something in you," he said, "that I thought I"d never see again."
"Why?" She tossed her head. "What do you mean?"
"The last time we made love, the night before I left. I had my eyes open. I saw the look on your face. I wanted it to last. But I knew that good Smith girl that you are, I"d most likely look for that emotion again and never find it."
Monica moved and the streetlight, oblique and opaque, struck her. She was shadow-striped and Simbal recalled another woman, striped in just the same way by the jungle foliage, high up on a mountainside. He could scent again her peculiar muskiness, the animal smell of the jungle itself and, behind them, in her father"s house, the heady perfume of the crates of uncut gems.
"You"re too civilized for me, Monica." It was out before he had a chance to bite his tongue. Oh s.h.i.t, he thought, now I"ve gone and done it.
Monica threw her head back and laughed, a harsh, bitter sound. He watched her long neck, the argon streetlight turning her dusky flesh pale. The arch of her throat made him feel heavy in his chest.
"Is that it?" She was virtually weeping with brittle laughter. "What a schmuck you are, Tony. Really. I went to Smith, sure. For two-and-a-half years. Then I dropped out. It wasn"t the pressure that got to me. I never felt any. It was something else entirely. Something I couldn"t define for a long time, not to my college adviser, not to my parents, not even to myself.
"I worked for a year at a Baskin-Robbins on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. While I was there, we were held up maybe a dozen times, a girl standing right beside me got shot to death. We had b.u.ms coming in and throwing up all over the shiny counter; we had guys come in and make a grab for usserious grabs. They were interested in doing a lot more to our a.s.ses than pinching them.
"But don"t feel sorry for me. I put in my time. I made my own money because I didn"t want to touch my old man"s, I was fed up with that, as well. That was part of it, the feeling I couldn"t quite define.
"So after my year in h.e.l.l, I got out. Of New York, of the U.S. of A., of the world as I knew it. I went to Tahiti and saw a McDonald"s sign. I nearly vomited on the spot. I went further, past Bora Bora, until I got to a beach that had no one on it, where the nearest town was made of bamboo and dried plantain leaves, where n.o.body would bother me.
"For eighteen months I was alone with the blue-green sea and the golden sky. I watched the birds and they, I suppose, watched me. They didn"t care what I looked like or how I felt, which was just fine with me."
"Why did you come back?" Simbal said softly. He could see just a hint of the amethyst in her eyes. He thought her face had never looked more feline or full of energy. "Because I found that you can"tor I can"t, at any ratelive my life without human contactintelligent human contact. Learned people."
"But being away from it all," Simbal began.
"Is what makes coming back all the more fascinating."
"I"m sorry," he said again.
Monica"s eyes went opaque the way they did when she was confused. "Now I think you mean it."
"I suppose I didn"t before," he conceded. "Not really."
"You"re arrogant, Tony." Her soft tone went right through him. "You were so sure you knew me through and through."
"The perfect rich girl. Breeding and schooling, what more could a family ask of its child. You must have broken your mother"s heart."
"My father"s, too." Her full lips were back. The tight compression, another outward sign of her rage, was gone. "I never came out, I never finished college, they don"t even know what I really do. *Government work," my father tells his colleagues, as if he"s describing rat poison. To him, I am something incomprehensible: a bureaucrat."
Tony laughed. "Maybe you should take Max home one day. That would seal your fate."
"On the contrary," she said, "I should really take you home to meet my parents."
He thought she was joking until he saw in her eyes that she was quite serious.
"You would shake daddy"s tree something fierce," she said.
Simbal was abruptly aware of how close Monica was to him. Her perfume hinted of jonquils and jasmine. He reached out and this time she did not brush him away. She made no move at all. Simbal felt his heart beating heavily. This was not why he had come to the party.
There were some things he needed to find out and this was the place to begin; the only place.
He had ferreted around for several days, casually dropping in on known DEA hangouts in Georgetown and Washington"s Northwest sector at lunchtime. Nothing heavy, just a casual beer and a subtle b.u.mp, "Oh, hi, long time no see," that sort of thing.
That"s how he had found out about the party. He knew that Peter Curran would be there if he was in town. If not, someone there would certainly have a line on Curran"s whereabouts. Curran was the man Simbal knew he had to see; Curran had taken over Simbal"s role as chief diqui hunter at the DEA. That meant he had been in Southeast Asia or at least runningDEA-speak for field workwhile Simbal had been in the necessary but frustrating transition period in Washington learning the Quarry system and training at the Movie House, the sprawling farm the Quarry maintained in rural Virginia.
For this reason alone, he had told himself, he had come to the party. Now he knew that he had been at least partially fooling himself. He did not understand how badly until this electric moment.
"Smith wasn"t a complete waste," she was saying now. Her eyes were half mocking. "Here"s something interesting I learned there."
Simbal felt his belt loosening, then his trousers. In an instant her hand had encompa.s.sed him.
Monica made a husky sound. "You never wore these tiny briefs when I knew you. Who"s been buying your underpants lately?"
"Are you crazy?" Simbal was regaining his equilibrium. "What if someone comes in?" But he was already hard and Monica had peeled down his briefs. Now she moved so that she had her back to the doorway. Shadows danced in the room like ghosts spilled over from the party. It could have been in another universe for all the meaning it had for the two of them.
"If someone comes in," Monica said softly, "I"ll give her a reason to leave."
She put one foot on the low window sill and, with her free hand, lifted up her skirt. Drew Simbal against her. He gasped and she smiled. She wore only a garter belt beneath her skirt and he felt the tangle of jungly hair caressing the end of him.
"Let"s get you wet," she said, moving him against her lips.
"Monica a"
"What? Tell me what?" But his eyes were already closed. She took a fierce, greedy delight in watching the emotions play across his face.
His desire had made him a tabula rasa. She no longer recognized him; it was as if the burden of civilization had already been dispelled from him.
The hard streetlight fell across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, rising and falling now with greater energy. The area of her flat stomach was shadowed. And, below, the bunched tweed hid their hot liquid connection from sight.
Just the head of him was inside her. Monica circled her hips, swaying. Her full lips were half-parted and her breath was getting away from her.
Simbal felt intoxicated. He felt the exquisite sensations of her on him, just a brief silken swirl across the most sensitive part of him. He had hold of her shoulders, was urging her on. Max"s house was overheated and the window was open from the bottom. A couple of guests were apparently outside in Max"s garden. They were speaking in soft, whispery tones, the sounds floaty, rising like steam in the night. In Simbal"s mind these half-heard words mingled with Monica"s caresses to create a kind of erotic intoxication, a web of sound and feeling. He shuddered heavily. He wanted to penetrate her more fully but when he thrust he felt her fist encircling him, preventing any forward movement.
"Monica," he whispered. "Kiss me," she breathed.
His lips came down over hers and as their tongues touched she let go of her grip and he slipped all the way in. A great groan escaped him, filling her mouth with vibration. Monica"s hips began to move, then buck against him as he moved out, then all the way in.
His hands slid over the soft wool of her sweater, lifted it, then felt her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They were warm, the nipples hard and so sensitive that she gave a little cry, ground her hips in a circle hard against him when his thumbs touched them.
"Make me come, Tony," she panted in his ear. "I"m dying for you." I"m dying for you. The words reverberated in his head. Is that what he heard wafting in through the window from the sere garden downstairs? I"m dying for you.
He felt her heat suffusing him. There was a great weight in his loins so that he remained on his feet with the greatest difficulty. He felt the muscles in his calves, behind his knees, begin to tremble. He felt as if her weight was on him. He felt, he felt, he felt a In a moment he was aware of her fingertips sliding between his thighs, lifting his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, squeezing in gentle rhythm. I"m dying for you.
"Oh," he groaned. "Oh, Monica!"
"Yes!" Her whisper? The whisper of the couple in the garden?
Simbal raced upward into her as far as he could go. His heartbeat was in his throat and he lost all ability to breathe. He gasped and began to shoot heavily into her.
"Ohh!" Monica"s eyes flew open and she groaned into the side of his neck. The liquid heat at her core began her own spasming. Her face flushed and she felt the ripples spreading outward from the juncture of her thighs. She ground herself into him, feeling the harsh sc.r.a.pe of his pubic hair against her intimate flesh. Strangely, this made her o.r.g.a.s.m blossom to such a point that she lost all control.
Climbing atop him she tumbled them from their precarious stance and they fell backward onto the pile of coats on the bed. One of them began to laugh.
Simbal, covered by the folds of her skirt, looked up into her amethyst eyes. "How could I have been so wrong about you?"
"Like I said, you"re a schmuck." She explored beneath her pooled skirt, found him, wet and still hard. "And what a schmuck."
In the garden below them, the couple had ceased their whispering.
The gleaming black Chaika stood waiting at the side of the runway at Domodedovo Airport. The snow lay pale and gleaming in the moonlight, piled in the aisles between the runways. The winter chill, still deep at this time of the year, turned the exhaust as thick and white as clouds.
Fifteen kilometers to the northwest, the lights of Moscow put the moon to shame, reaching up into the night, banishing the darkness.
Inside the limousine, General Daniella Vorkuta lay back against the leather seat. Her thick sable coat was opened around her like a bedspread. Its opulence contrasted with the severe line and color of her army uniform. It was the dress uniform she had worn to Yuri Lantin"s funeral, the creases pressed to an almost knife-sharp edge. The triple line of medals above her left breast shone dully in the cold blue airport lights.
For the moment her thoughts were far away from Moscow and the man she was here to meet. As usual her brilliant mind was reviewing the latest intelligence Mitre, her main a.s.set in Hong Kong, had transmitted to her. Hong Kong! That great teeming port was all Daniella thought about lately. The money that flowed through the Crown Colony drew her as unerringly as a magnet to true north.
It was not that Daniella Vorkuta was venal. Far from it. She was one of a select few who could see beyond capital"s gleaming immediate value. To her, money was power. Especially in Hong Kong. And she knew that Hong Kong was the key to China, possibly even to all of Asia.
She knew that this was also Shi Zilin"s belief. Shi Zilin! The master strategist whose plan for China she had been attempting to infiltrate for three years now. Even though her best source to Shi Zilin, his a.s.sistant, Zhang Hua, was dead of a heart attack, she had something better: lines of intelligence gathering into his most secret organization, the yuhn-hyun.
And, Daniella thought now, even though she had been thwarted in every effort to infiltrate Shi Zilin"s other secret, the Kam Sang project, she now suspected that Mitre had provided her with another mode of access.
To control Hong Kong, that was Daniella Vorkuta"s most devout wish. For she knew that if she controlled Hong Kong, she would control all of China. Hong Kong was, and always would be, China"s gateway to the West. Without Hong Kong as a middle ground with which to deal with the West, she knew that China would be doomed to return to its backward past. Without Hong Kong, China had no future at all; it could never begin to compete in the modern world. Therefore, Hong Kong was a pricelessand irreplaceablecommodity to China.
And now she knew the best way of gaining control of Hong Kong: wresting the power that now resided in the yuhn-hyun, and making it her own.
This was essentially why she had had to destroy Anatoly Karpov, her predecessor as head of the First Chief Directorate, and his even more powerful ally, Yuri Lantin. The two had concocted a scheme, code-named Moonstone, that involved the military encirclement of China and a puppet war against it using North Vietnamese regiments in Malipo County in Yunnan province.
Her predecessors had wanted the destruction of China. Stupid men! Their scheming had brought Russia dangerously close to a world war that could have devastated the entire planet.
Daniella had a better fate in store for China: subjugation, with its profits funneled into Soviet coffers. That was Hong Kong"s role in her strategy. Hong Kong would bring her enormous wealthand with that wealth, great power, an awesome victory. Only she, a master player of wei qi, was an equal match for Shi Zilin. He was the Jian, the supreme champion of the ancient board game. If one was not weaned on wei qi strategy, one had no chance at all of finding Shi Zilin"s weak spot and exploiting it. She understood the strategy of wei qi.
At last she felt herself in position for taking the breath from Shi Zilin"s wei qi pieces. She would have total victory. Millions of rubles would flow into the Kremlin. And into her pockets. Power undreamed of in Asia would be hers. Soviet supremacy, a dream Russian patriots had nurtured since the emergence of that false Communist, Mao Zedong. And when that was accomplished, what further elevations in rank lay in store for her?
With an effort, she pulled herself away from the seductive multifaceted jewel of her vision. "He"s late," she said.
The driver, a KGB officer permanently a.s.signed to her staff, said, "The storm. They would have hit it on their way over. In any case, the delay can"t be major or I would have been informed."
Daniella turned her beautiful head in his direction. Her thick blond hair fell across her throat and she pushed it back with curled fingers. She disliked his tone, the use of the "I" in his statement. Alexei was not as selfless as she would perhaps like him to be.
"Lyosha," she said now, using the diminutive, "please be smart enough to keep your mouth shut when he gets here."
"Don"t worry," he said, his dark eyes on her in the rearview mirror.
Daniella leaned forward, breathing in his ear, "Don"t give me cause to worry." Her tone was as hard as flint. He merely nodded, his gaze now straight ahead.
"Jahwohl, Herr Comrade General," he said in his best clipped German.
Daniella laughed, ruffled his thick black hair. From her position she could not see his sharply delineated widow"s peak or the precise Serbian features of his face. But she could easily bring to mind his lean, sinewy athlete"s body, the long flat planes of his abdomen and belly that she often painted with sweat.
She looked out the Chaika"s smoked-gla.s.s window. There were more than a dozen men in coa.r.s.e blue overcoats and fur hats. Police, she thought. Not sluzhba. The colloquial term for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the KGB. Daniella was the head of its First Chief Directorate, the largest and most powerful subdivision of Russia"s most feared apparat.
"The plane is down, Comrade General," Alexei said.
Daniella steeled herself. There was already movement among the policemen. She could see more of them now, the blue flashing lights, the glint off the Kulspruta machine pistols, and she thought, Who is the maniac who ordered drawn weapons?
He appeared out of the darkness, his visage made indistinct by runway and airplane lights. Daniella could not as yet see his face but she recognized that walk. It was the walk of a dangerous man, quick and lithe, full of power and hinting at lightning speed. There was nothing of the hulking deliberation one a.s.sociated with most of the high-echelon Kremlin officials.