Honeytrap Read online

  Then he sagged like a pricked balloon. He didn’t even try to run as Daniel closed in on him, although Gennady moved to block the end of the aisle of hats (a whole aisle of hats!) just in case. “I’ll come quietly, I promise,” Peter Abbott said. “Please don’t make a scene. If this gets into the papers…”

  “We don’t have any intention of making a scene,” Daniel assured him, taking one of Peter’s elbows in a death grip that might look friendly to an untrained eye. He checked Peter’s pocket, and removed the pocketknife. “Just come on out to the parking lot.”

  Peter Abbott let out a little gasp, almost a cry, as Gennady came up beside him.

  “No one’s going to assassinate you,” Gennady scolded him. He took Peter’s other elbow. “If the KGB wanted you dead, you never would have seen them coming.”

  ***

  Gennady rather expected Peter to try to escape once they left the department store, but he came quietly as promised, even to the point of holding out his wrists to be cuffed after Daniel put him in the backseat. Gennady slid into the seat beside him and glared, just in case Peter had any ideas about trying anything, but Peter just stared at his big wrists in their handcuffs and looked about ready to cry.

  He stirred only when Daniel piloted the car out of its parking space. “Couldn’t you just kill me, after all? Maybe we could make it look like a hit-and-run accident.”

  “Are you serious?” Daniel asked.

  Peter’s leg jiggled. “Dad’s going to be so mad at me. It’s going to look so bad for his campaign when news of my arrest gets out. Whereas if I died, it might bring out the sympathy vote.”

  “Why should we help your father?” Gennady asked. “Probably he put you up to kill Khrushchev.”

  He did not really believe this: he just wanted to see if Peter denied it. Sure enough, Peter cried, “No! No! He had nothing to do with it! It was my idea. I acted on my own. I thought it would make Dad proud, but then when Khrushchev came to town Dad went and – and shook his hand, so I guess I got it wrong, as usual. Dad always says I can’t do anything right. You’d think he’d be used to it by now, but he always gets so mad… And this will be all over the papers.” Peter sounded like he might suffocate. “He’s going to be so mad.”

  “Peter,” Daniel said, his voice oddly gentle, “You’ve got bigger problems right now than what your dad thinks, you know that, right? You’ve just been arrested for attempting to assassinate a world leader.”

  “But I didn’t hit him!” Peter cried.

  “But you still shot at him,” Daniel said, more gently still.

  “But I didn’t hit him,” Peter insisted, like that made everything all right.

  “How did you expect to hit anything,” Gennady asked, exasperated, “when you took a long-range shot with a pistol?”

  “I knew a pistol wasn’t the right gun for a long-range shot,” Peter replied sullenly. “I’m not stupid. No matter what Dad thinks.” He bit his lip, then turned to Gennady with a new wild light in his eyes. “Couldn’t you take me to the KGB?” he asked. “They probably want to send me to a labor camp or something, right? Couldn’t we do that?”

  Gennady stared at him. “Peter. Your first idea is better. Let’s run you over with the car, that would be a quick death.”

  “Gennady!” Daniel protested.

  “He stabbed me! And I can’t tell one murder joke?” Gennady protested. Then he added to Peter: “I’m sorry. I would give you your request if I could, throw you off a cliff, but Agent Hawthorne – he believes in the rule of law. Arrests, trials. The free press. Though we have been trying very hard to keep all this out of the press,” he added.

  Peter gazed at Gennady as if Gennady were his hope of heaven. “You have?”

  “Yes, yes. Assassination attempts are very bad for relations between countries. But,” Gennady said, “still, even if this stays out of the papers, your father will hear of it. And, I think, he will come running to see what has happened, just as he did when you were arrested for the possession of his Mauser.”

  Peter moaned.

  “What can your father say to you that is so bad, Peter?” Gennady asked. Then he answered himself: “What Stalin said, probably, when he heard that his son tried to shoot himself, and failed: ‘Ha! You missed!’”

  “Gennady,” Daniel protested.

  “I wanted to go in for a closer shot,” Peter insisted. “Only there were so many police there that I couldn’t, and… How did you find me, anyway? I didn’t even hit the train.”

  “Well,” said Daniel. “Actually, you did.”

  There was a slight pause. Then Peter said, almost dazed: “I hit the train? But I can’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

  “Well, a train’s longer than a barn, I suppose,” Daniel said. “It just keeps going.”

  “And I hit it? You’ll tell my dad I hit it?” Peter said.

  Gennady looked at him in some exasperation. “This is what you care about?” he demanded. “You could have started a war. If you had hit Chairman Khrushchev, we would all be dead right now, the whole earth just a radioactive rock.”

  Peter twisted his big hands together so tightly that his knuckles showed white against his skin. “I didn’t think of that,” he muttered, and then, louder: “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “That,” Gennady told him, “would not have stopped the war. We are all very lucky that you are such a bad shot.”

  Chapter 16

  Daniel and Gennady got roaring drunk that night, more or less on the orders of Daniel’s boss Mr. Gilman. They called him from the FBI field office to tell him the good news. “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Mr. Gilman said, his elation coming through despite the tinny quality of the long-distance line. “You caught him? A confession you say?”

  “Naturally we’ll want him executed,” Gennady said, leaning over the phone. He tried to sound serious, but the happiness bubbled out in his voice: it was thrilling to be young and alive and to have solved an impossible case. Stepan Pavlovich would be pleased. It meant a promotion for sure, no more Arkady ever.

  Mr. Gilman laughed good-naturedly. “A congressman’s son? You’ll be lucky if he sees the inside of a prison.”

  Gennady had expected this. His comment about execution had been merely for form.

  “Report back to DC to tell me the details, Hawthorne,” Mr. Gilman said. “No reason to hurry. You boys hit the town and have a good time tonight.”

  Of course they could not go at once. Peter’s arrest had to be processed, Mack informed in detail of all that had happened (“Did you pay for the suit?” Mack asked, when they reached the part about finding Peter in the department store. Daniel smacked his forehead, so aghast that Mack let out a rasping belly laugh. “I’ll send someone down to Younkers to take care of it. Sanders! Get over here!”). Much paperwork to be completed, which Daniel took care of while Gennady slept on Mack’s couch.

  He felt much better by the time they hit the bar that evening: sleep and happiness were both great healers. But his blood still felt thin, so he drank only sparingly, and laughed a great deal as Daniel got rip-roaring drunk.

  “Do you know,” Daniel told him, peering somberly into Gennady’s face, “I wasn’t even sure you’d have a personality?”

  Gennady laughed at him.

  “No, really,” Daniel insisted. “After all the brainwashing, and dictatorship, and…” A roar over by the dartboard drowned out the rest of his sentence.

  “This is your Hollywood brainwashing,” Gennady told him. “They’ve made you think we are all faceless drones.”

  “I know.” Daniel’s gaze was unnervingly intense. “You have more personality than just about anyone I’ve ever met.”

  Gennady knocked Daniel’s hat playfully over his eyes. “You’re drunk, tovarisch.”

  Daniel tried to straighten his hat, and left it more crooked than before, and smiled with such pleasure that it hurt Gennady in a funny way. The word tovarisch was so overused in his own country that it meant noth
ing, you called people comrade even if you wished they were dead, and it was strange to see Daniel take it as an affectionate nickname.

  Although it was, in a way. Gennady would not have called any other American comrade.

  “Gennady,” Daniel said.

  “What?”

  Daniel opened his mouth, then shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Gennady put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a shake. “Well, what? What is it you want to tell me, my friend?”

  Another roar from the dartboard.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Daniel said.

  “All right.” Gennady was still sober enough to drive.

  Daniel, on the other hand, nearly fell off his barstool when he tried to stand up. He burst into the immoderate laughter of a drunken man, and Gennady put his hand on his elbow to steer him out of the bar.

  When they reached the parking lot, Gennady removed the keys from Daniel’s pocket. “I’m going to drive,” he said.

  Daniel made a feeble grab for the shiny keys. But he let Gennady bundle him into the passenger seat, and did not complain when Gennady got in on the driver’s side and started the engine.

  Gennady drove slowly through the quiet streets. In the silvery moonlight it all looked very beautiful, even the Coca-Cola ad chipping off the brick wall of a hardware store, and tears came into his eyes. Now that they had caught Peter Abbott, this trip would end. They wouldn’t want him traipsing around the United States to no purpose.

  He stopped at a stoplight and brushed the back of his hand over his eyes, and glanced at Daniel just in case he had seen. But Daniel was gazing in drunken fascination at the shining red traffic light. “It’s so beautiful.”

  “Red is the most beautiful color,” Gennady agreed.

  “Krasnii and prikrasnii,” Daniel said. The car behind them honked – the light had turned green – and Gennady hit the gas without properly engaging the clutch, and flooded the engine.

  The other car went around him. Gennady swore and restarted the car and drove on. They passed the edge of town, the last of the streetlights, and drove out into broad dark open country.

  “You’re not a very good driver,” Daniel confided.

  “It’s not too late to leave you by the roadside,” Gennady told him, but despite himself he was smiling again. His throat hurt with sadness. “I’m going to miss you, my friend.”

  “You don’t have to leave me by the roadside,” Daniel said.

  Gennady opened his mouth, and then decided not to correct Daniel’s misconception. Daniel was drunk enough that he might cry when Gennady pointed out their partnership was almost over, and Gennady wanted to enjoy this happiness while it lasted.

  Suddenly, much too close, another pair of headlights plunged out of the blackness. Gennady jerked the wheel to the right. The car lurched as it left the pavement for the grassy shoulder, and lurched again when Gennady hit the brakes. Daniel slipped off his seat into the seat well.

  The other car flashed past. Gennady clutched the wheel, panting. The wound in his side throbbed.

  “We’ll get out and rest,” Gennady decided. “We’ll look at the stars.”

  The cool night air felt good on his face when he got out of the car. Out here, so far from electric lights, a hundred thousand stars dappled the sky: not just the bright ones that you saw in towns, but so many others fainter and smaller. It gave the night sky a look of depth, as if you could fall upward into it and keep on falling forever.

  Gennady felt for a moment that he was falling, and grabbed the handle of the car to steady himself. Oh, Gennady, you’re drunk, drunk.

  “I bet you can’t see stars like this in Moscow,” Daniel said, as if the Milky Way was an American invention.

  Gennady looked over at Daniel. He looked pale and handsome in the moonlight, like a movie star in black-and-white. “In Moscow, no,” Gennady said. “Out at the dacha, the sky is just like this, and very beautiful.”

  Daniel was looking at him with a peculiar intensity. Gennady pressed his palms flat against the car door and did not look away.

  That was when Daniel kissed him.

  It was unexpected and yet not surprising. After all, they were both very drunk, and when you were drunk lips were lips and hands were hands and it felt good, the warmth of Daniel’s mouth after the cool night air, the warmth of his hands touching Gennady’s jaw, Gennady’s hair, the soft spaces behind Gennady’s ears. Gennady’s hands rose to Daniel’s chest, fingers bunching in his shirt, holding him at bay without pushing him away. Thinking: by the roadside, in the open? Careless, careless…

  But the thought seemed small and distant, and Daniel’s lips warm and close. Gennady made a tiny noise in his throat.

  Daniel broke the kiss. He rested his forehead against Gennady’s, laughing a little, his breath soft on Gennady’s face as he murmured, “Tovarisch.”

  Reality crashed over Gennady like ice water. Daniel was an American FBI agent. Could he truly be so careless as to fling himself at a Soviet agent’s head?

  Perhaps he really had been assigned to honeytrap Gennady.

  Gennady swung Daniel around and slammed him against the car. “Idiot!” he yelled. “Idiot! What are you doing?”

  Daniel’s hands rose to protect his face. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I’m sorry!”

  Gennady smacked his hand against the car frame. “How could you be so careless? Kissing an enemy agent! Why do you think I was assigned to work with you?”

  “To… to investigate the assassination attempt on Khrushchev…”

  “No!” Gennady smacked his palm against the car again. “That’s only part of it. I’m supposed to gather intelligence on the United States and blackmail material on you.” Daniel blinked at him, his face crumpling with confusion, and Gennady yelled, “Idiot! I’ve been sent to honeytrap you!”

  Gennady gave him a final shove, and Daniel slid to the ground. Gennady stood over him for a moment, then walked a few paces to the edge of the cornfield. His side ached abominably. He felt he might be sick.

  How could he have confessed his secret mission to Daniel? That was a shooting offense, surely, telling official secrets to an enemy agent. Stupid, stupid, unnecessary and stupid. He had not needed to tell Daniel about the honeytrap. He could have just pushed him away.

  “Are you going to blackmail me, then?” Daniel’s voice was painfully steady.

  “No,” Gennady snapped. “I would have let you incriminate yourself further if I were.”

  “Oh.” Daniel laughed a little wildly. “Yes, I suppose fucking in the backseat would be better blackmail material than a kiss.”

  Gennady swung back toward Daniel. The movement tugged at his injured side, and tears rose in his eyes, from pain and unhappiness and a sense of the bitter unfairness of the world. It occurred to him only now that he could have let Daniel kiss him and then just not told.

  Well, but he hadn’t been sure that Daniel wasn’t trying to honeytrap him. No. It had been necessary to put a stop to things.

  Daniel sat on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest. “Do you hate me now?”

  “Why would I hate you?”

  “Oh, you know.” Daniel let out a trembling sigh. “Most decent people are disgusted by deviancy and…” A sickly smile touched his mouth. “Perversion.”

  Gennady’s heart melted. He went back over to Daniel and put a hand on his head. Daniel’s hair was very soft, and Gennady ruffled it gently. “You’ve never been this drunk before in your life, have you?” Gennady asked. Poor Daniel with his teetotal upbringing. “When you’re very drunk, this sort of thing just happens sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Daniel gave another brief wild laugh. He knocked Gennady’s hand away. “Do you know why I got assigned to work with you? Mr. Gilman reassigned me after he discovered Paul and I were lovers. Can’t have two FBI agents fucking around the countryside.” Daniel laughed again. “The Soviets are e-nor-mous prudes, he said. I guess he thought even I couldn’t fuck this
up. Pun intended. Christ!” He buried his face in his hands.

  Gennady looked at him, baffled, uncertain. Getting drunk and fucking around, that was normal, it was just a thing that happened. But calling a man your lover…

  Well, so, so, so? So what if Daniel wasn’t quite normal. Lots of normal people were terrible. They were two separate axes entirely, goodness and normality, and goodness was more important even if most people didn’t believe that.

  Daniel lifted his head. The tears on his eyelashes gleamed in the moonlight. “I thought it was just Mr. Gilman who knew,” he said. “But if the KGB knows, then the whole FBI has to know too.”

  “No, no,” Gennady said. “No one knows. This honeytrap, it was…” He paused. His mouth tasted sour. “It was just my boss’s idea, not a directive from on high. A long shot, as you Americans say. Arkady wanted his own source in the FBI. Your dossier describes you as a womanizer, not…”

  A homosexual? Gennady shied away from the word. It was too insulting to apply to a friend, even if it might be technically accurate.

  Could it be accurate if Daniel slept with that many women, anyway?

  Gennady shouldn’t be divulging the contents of a secret GRU dossier to an American agent anyway. Fuck.

  “Paul used to get mad about it.” Daniel sounded weary. “The manly love of comrades ought to be enough for me, et cetera, I shouldn’t even look at women. Maybe you’re right and love is just a pretty word for fucking.”

  “Daniel!” Gennady said. He knelt down beside Daniel and grabbed both his hands, which startled Daniel into silence. “Listen to me. If things were different, Daniel, if we could be friends – ”

  Daniel’s eyes widened. “Can’t we still be friends? I’m sorry I kissed you, Gennady. I won’t do it again.”

  “I’m not talking about that at all. We can’t be friends because our countries are enemies. Oh, they are getting along right now, but it won’t last. The interests of the USSR and the USA are inherently opposed.”

  “But don’t you like me?”