Page 144 of The Oligarch's Daughter

The blood looked fresh. It glistened; it hadn’t dried yet.

His head was spinning. The terrible odor stayed in his nose, the horror of the gruesome images imprinted on his mind’s eye. He looked around again. The hallway was dark and empty.

The sirens were closer, louder. Now he heard shouts: “FBI!”

They were entering the building. Vehicle doors slammed. He heard the crackle of walkie-talkie transmission. Feet thundered up the stairwell.

He knew he had to run, to get away from this nightmarish scene, or he might somehow be implicated, be questioned, be detained—and that couldn’t happen. He ran down the stairs to the rear exit, so he wouldn’t encounter law enforcement.

Where, he wondered, was Trombley? She was safe, unharmed. Maybe she knew what had happened. Maybe she’d know what to do. He had to trust her. Addison had trusted her, after all. He remembered, briefly, Geraldine Dempsey, the CIA woman from Texas, but he instinctively didn’t trust her.

The building was narrow but deep. He finally found the back exit, a steel door with a crash bar and a sign warning that an alarm would sound if the door were opened. He decided to chance it. Sirens were going off everywhere; who would notice? He pushed the door open and nothing happened. The exit gave onto a small alley that led him to Avenue A.

Standing on the street, he pulled out the business card Trombley had given him and called the number using the burner phone he’d bought that morning. It was her direct line at the FBI office at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan. A male voice came on the line and said that Agent Trombley had been transferred to FBI Headquarters in D.C. Paul asked to be connected to her new office. The phone rang five times and went to voicemail. He called the number she’d jotted down on the back of her business card, her cell phone, and that line rang and rang as well and then went to voicemail.

About a minute later, his own phone rang. An unfamiliar number. He picked it up, said, “Yes?”

A woman’s voice, loud. “Brightman?”

“Yes, is this Trombley?”

“Where are you?”

He stumbled on the words. “Near the office—East Houston Street and Avenue A—”

“Get out of there.”

“You know about—?”

“A goddamn massacre!” Trombley rasped. “I just saw the flash. My God. Jesus!”

“Who did it?” Paul asked.

“I—I can’t tell you anything. Right now, I can only speculate—probably GRU.”

“InAmerica?” Was it possible, he wondered, that agents of Russian intelligence had just wiped out an FBI office in order to keep them from uncovering Arkady Galkin as a Kremlin agent? Did that kind of thing actually happen within the borders of the United States?

“Who the hell knows? Just—get the hell out of there, Brightman.”

“I need protection,” Paul said.

She sounded nearly hysterical. “You want protection?Iwant protection.”

Paul felt a chill as he ended the call.

He hailed a passing cab. The cab swerved over to the side of the street, and Paul hustled into it.

“Where to?” the driver said.

For a moment, Paul didn’t know what to say. He cleared his throat. “Port Authority, please.”

96

As the taxicab barreled down FDR Drive, Paul wedged his iPhone into the horizontal crease in the seat cushion. He couldn’t shove it all the way in and out of sight, so part of it stuck out. But that was okay. The phone was black and the seat cushion was black. You had to really look to notice it. And maybe someone would steal it. That would be okay, too.

Let Berzin’s guys ping the phone and think he was traveling all around the streets of Manhattan, wherever the cab went.

He was laying down a false trail. Just as he’d googled real estate in Ecuador, in the capital city of Quito, on his home laptop—which he assumed was also bugged. He’d even bought a book on Ecuador and left it in a desk drawer in his office, where it could be quickly found.

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