The Lioness(62)

“Why would my father tell me anything?” He raised his voice, and Terrance thought he might break down and cry. “I know he’s CIA, but nothing else!”

“Do you know what we call him? Your father?”

David waited.

“The brain fucker. That’s your esteemed father. He gives people LSD. He restrains them the way we tied you up. Exactly that way. He tries to empty their heads so he can fill them up with whatever nonsense he wants.”

“My father is just…just a bureaucrat. He works in personnel.”

“Desk job. Bologna sandwich at noon. Low security clearance.” The sarcasm was thick.

“Yes! He’s not even sure what he’s going to live on when he retires!”

He sighed. “You know what, David Hill? I want to believe you.”

“Thank you.”

“But it’s not up to me. Maybe you do know nothing about what your father does or Frank Olson or MK-ULTRA. Maybe. But we can let the experts at the Lubyanka decide for themselves.” He gazed at David with disapproval, and no one said a word. David’s eyes had gone wide and were darting back and forth among the Russians. Until a moment ago, Terrance had never heard of the Lubyanka, but two words had registered: KGB and prison.

Finally, the one who was going by Glenn started to speak, but his voice trailed off. “I need to tell you something…” he began.

“Go ahead.”

“This one”—he pointed at Terrance—“killed Grissom.”

“Killed him?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Shot him. When Grissom took him out to piss.”

He nodded, absorbing the news.

“Cooper?” It was Glenn who had spoken, and that’s when it clicked for Terrance: the names. Glenn. Grissom. Now Cooper. Astronaut names. American astronaut names. Whoever these Russians were, they were identifying each other by using the names of the Mercury astronauts. John Glenn. Gus Grissom. Gordon Cooper. And Cooper, the one with cobalt marbles for eyes, was the leader.

“Yes?” said Cooper.

“I just…I just wanted to be sure you heard me,” Glenn continued.

“I heard you,” Cooper mumbled, before squatting to look directly into Terrance’s face. “I guess that makes us even,” he told him. Then he stood and kicked him in the stomach, and Terrance curled up, though he felt more winded than in pain. Yes, it hurt, but not like his skull, which was excruciating, or his neck, which still burned. For a long moment, Cooper did nothing but breathe heavily. Everyone waited.

“What do you mean by ‘even’?” David asked, breaking the silence, and the unease in his voice was especially manifest in those last two syllables. That last word.

“Your friend,” Cooper answered. “Your sister-in-law. Margie Stepanov. She didn’t make it. She died before we could get her help. Just kept bleeding and bleeding.”

“Oh, God, no. We were all supposed to go home and—”

“No. I just told you. You were never going home, David Hill. You were always going to Moscow. We need to find out how much you really know about your father. And the value of seven is not substantially less than the value of eight. Especially when we have movie stars to send back to America and that eighth is the son of the CIA’s respected brain fucker—and we have that boy in the Lubyanka.”

Cooper again offered that enigmatic smile, and Terrance thought it was over. They would take David and him back to their huts and tie them up. But something in David snapped, and he lunged at Cooper, frenzied and febrile, and managed to grab the pistol in Cooper’s belt before Glenn could seize him by the shoulders and yank him off the other man. David spun away and held up the revolver, and for a split second Terrance couldn’t tell whether he was going to shoot Cooper or was too surprised that he had managed to commandeer the weapon. But it didn’t matter, because Glenn had a gun too, and he fired first and his shot instantly dropped Katie Barstow’s husband. The body collapsed into the dust, his left hand falling limply on Terrance’s thigh, and Terrance saw how quickly the blood was saturating his shirt. Just like that. The bullet had hit him in the side. The rib cage. It’d had to travel maybe six feet.

“I’m sorry,” Glenn said, and initially Terrance thought he was apologizing to David. But, no. He was speaking to his boss.

Cooper glared at his comrade for a moment, but then calmed. He shook his head. “It’s fine. You might have just saved my life. We’ll say…it doesn’t matter what we say. He was eaten, for all I care.” He reached down for the pistol, which was beside David’s right hand. David was still conscious, his eyes wide and alert, but his breathing was labored and weak. Then Cooper raised up his arm with the handgun and planted a bullet in the gallerist’s forehead, putting him out of his misery exactly as Terrance had finished off the Russian he’d shot in the stomach. Cooper relaxed and said something in Russian to his men.

Straight away, the two of them lifted Terrance up off the ground, each grabbing him under an arm.

“Terrance Dutton,” Cooper said to him. Terrance waited.

“Yes, your friend was going to Moscow. But you? You’re just a movie star. You can still make it out of here alive. You can go home. But don’t fuck with me again.” Then, though Terrance could walk, the pair dragged him toward the dungeon of his hut. He looked back once at David’s corpse, already as indistinct in the dusk as a fallen tree or one of those massive anthills that dotted the plains, haunted and mystified by the reality that they had called the man’s father a brain fucker.