Mirage

“If you go blind, it’ll be for other reasons,” Hanley shot back. He looked to the Chairman. “We’ve got a pilot scheduled to take us out at eleven.”

“So you meet Linda and the Emir in Bermuda the day after tomorrow?”

“Actually, they’ve made good time. We’re going to have to kick the old girl into high gear and reach Bermuda in twenty hours in order to meet them.”

Juan considered timing for a moment. “Once I’m done with Professor Te

CHAPTER TEN

He saw the punch coming from the way his opponent torqued his hips. It gave him the third piece of the puzzle. In any fight, a good boxer could deduce from where the punch was coming and how the punch was coming. The great ones figured out the big question: when it was coming. When he saw the shift, he had perhaps a half second to react. The left came at his head with everything the man had to throw. It wasn’t a knockout blow. It was a killing strike.

For him, that half second was a lifetime, and he actually used a portion of it to admire his opponent’s daring.

To throw such a punch meant you knew that when it landed, the fight was over. It was an act of supreme confidence.

Or, in this case, arrogance.

He brought his right around just enough to deflect the punch and leaned back, his opponent’s glove taking off a layer of skin from the tip of his nose. It was all his opponent would ever claim — a tiny patch of skin — because his left came up in a hammer strike that hit with the force of a hurricane. He no longer had the wind for a long match, age had robbed him of that, but he could exploit an opening. His punch, fired from close range and out of defense, still shattered his sparring partner’s nose as though they were fighting bare-knuckle. Blood flew in a spraying arc as the other man corkscrewed to the canvas, his brain so short-circuited that eight sticks of ammonia would be needed to rouse him.

Three hours in a surgeon’s care would be needed to restore his appearance.

Pytor Kenin didn’t even wait for the ring workers to wake this morning’s sparring partner. He ducked under the ropes and held up his gloves for a trainer to unlace them from his hands. He’d only been in the ring a few minutes, but, as part of his training program, the gym’s owner kept the facility near eighty-five degrees. Sweat poured through the dense coils of hair that covered his chest, back, and shoulders.

“Where ever did you find that man?” Kenin jerked his head back to indicate the prone figure still lying on the canvas.

His trainer, a veteran of the Olympics back when the Soviet Union dominated the games, shrugged. “He claimed to be the champion boxer at the truck factory where he worked. I’d never heard of him but took his word for it.”

“Fateful boast,” the admiral remarked as his second glove came free and his trainer went to work on the tape. “He had power, but that man telegraphed his moves like Samuel Morse.”

The trainer chuckled at the turn of phrase. “He had you by two inches and twenty pounds, but, as we’ve both learned over the years, youth and vigor are no match for age and treachery.”

It was Kenin’s turn to smile. “All too true.”

The admiral was bent over a sink in the gymnasium’s bathroom, razoring his face, a towel wrapped around his waist, when a newly assigned aide came through wearing his full uniform. Kenin cocked an eyebrow at the young sailor, who was seeing the scar that ran down Kenin’s rib cage for the first time. It was a souvenir from a helicopter crash early on in Kenin’s career.

“Sorry, sir,” the aide stammered. “Commander Gogol’s compliments. He would like you to phone him right away.”

Kenin had a good idea what the call was about, so he quickly rinsed away the little lather still on his face with a double palmful of water. “Thank you. Go back to the car and tell the driver we’ll be going back to my apartment rather than the office.”

Kenin put on his uniform, adjusting several of the decorations that covered a sizable portion of his jacket, and strode out of the bathroom, an encrypted phone to his ear. In the boxing ring, the trainers had his sparring partner on one of the corner stools with a mess of bloodied towels at his feet and a fresh one pressed against his face.

He only noticed the smell of the gym when he first stepped into its heat or when he stepped out onto the Moscow streets. The city air was not clean by any stretch of the imagination, but he drew air deep into his lungs to purge them of the smell of sweat and blood and old leather.

“Viktor, it’s Kenin. Are the men in place?”

“They just called. They’re ready.”

The admiral ducked into the backseat of his Mercedes limo, and his veteran driver closed the door. The young aide rode in front with him. So confident of his position within the government, Kenin didn’t bother with a coterie of security men.

“Good. I’m on my way home to make the call. Meet me there so we can make our plan.”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes, Admiral.”

Kenin’s luxury apartment was only a ten-minute drive from the gym where he regularly trained. The palatial flat had its own exercise room equipped with the latest gear, but he preferred to work out in the dank gymnasium surrounded by other men whose single dedication to the pugilist arts was an inspiration.

He could never have afforded the ten-thousand-square-foot floor of the high-rise building overlooking the river. His was but an admiral’s salary, after all. No, the apartment had been a gift of one of his many benefactors, an oligarch who had made his fortune in the Wild West days following the collapse of the Soviet Union and now backed several political and military up-and-comers in order to preserve it.

In the building’s lobby, he slotted his key into the elevator controls, telling it to take him to his private floor. There, the doors opened to the apartment’s entry foyer, a marble-and-gilt affair that looked like it had been stripped out of the palace at Versailles. Kenin ignored the opulence. He was a man interested in only one trapping of wealth and that was power. The material side of the equation meant nothing to him.

A moment later, he was in his office, staring at a flat-panel monitor mounted on a wall to the left of his desk. Most of the screen was black, though one corner showed an image of himself taken from a camera placed to make him appear massive behind his desk. He hit a button on his desktop computer when he was satisfied with how he looked on the monitor.

The screen came to life. In the foreground sat a man behind his own desk. Behind him was a casement window, looking out over the ocean. The weather appeared cloudy where the man was; the sky leaden, and the ocean churned as it raced for shore. Kenin had spoken to this man enough over the years that his physical form was something he no longer noticed.

No one knew the origin of the fire that had robbed the man of so much. Some claimed it was an assassination attempt, others said his mother deliberately set him on fire when he was a child. Still others said it was an accident from the days when he made bombs for Turkish separatists on Cyprus. His left hand was nothing more than a pair of lobster-like pincers, though the right had been spared. He had no hair. The scar tissue that covered his skull had the tight sheen of a Halloween mask pulled too tight. Both ears were burned away, as was his nose. The skin on his neck looked like the scaly hide of a desert lizard. One eye was covered with a simple black patch, though the other glittered with intellect.