The First Billion

She had one call yet to make. As usual, she'd saved the hardest for last. Half a dozen times already, she'd picked up the handset only to slam it right back down. Grushkin had brought her a flight suit and draped it over the door. A helmet with a dark sunshield sat on the desk in front of her, and she could see her reflection in it. She asked herself who she really was, Cate Magnus or Katya Kirov. And who, after all was said and done, she would choose to remain. The answers came more easily than she expected. As Jett said, there was only one direction: straight ahead.

Picking up the phone, she dialed the nine-digit number that she recognized as belonging to the north side of Moscow. It was a hard part of town, and the voice that answered the phone matched it perfectly. "Da?"

Catherine Elizabeth Magnus did not hang up.

***

You ready?" Gavallan asked Cate.

"Yeah," she said, then more certainly, "Yes, I'm ready. Jesus, Jett, what am I supposed to say- hee-hah, let's git? I'm scared, that's what I am. Are you?"

Glancing to his right, he caught sight of her beneath the Perspex bubble next to him. Wearing the oversized helmet, she looked thin and vulnerable. He could see that she was trying to smile and having a hard time of it. Shifting his eyes to the fore, he gazed down the slim strip of asphalt rolling to the horizon. He waited for his heart to beat faster, for the prickly fingers to scratch at the back of his neck, but his heart was calm, and so was his psyche. In the final analysis, he was just flying a plane. Besides, it wasn't takeoffs that frightened him. It was what he'd find up there.

"Am I what?" he asked, a half second later.

"Are you ready?"

"Absolutely," he said, fingering the throttle, inching it ever so slightly forward. Immediately, the engine roared. The aircraft begin to rumble. "Let's go to Germany."

***

Colonel Pyotr Grushkin watched his beloved Mig taxi to the end of the runway, turn slowly, then barrel down the asphalt and take off over the golden fields of wheat swaying in the warm evening breeze. Wings sweeping back toward the fuselage, the aircraft climbed higher and higher into the azure sky. The American rocked the fighter port and starboard, a gentleman's good-bye, and Grushkin's heart went with it.

When the Mig was barely a speck in the sky, he walked into his office and made a phone call.

"Jerzy, this is Pyotr. Listen, I have a student taking the jet out for a long run toward the border. Nothing to worry about- just a training exercise. But in case anything funny happens, maybe you could keep your eyes closed."

"What do you mean, 'keep my eyes closed'?" Jerzy asked.

"Take a short break. Forget you saw anything. If any tough guys ask, say everything's quiet as the grave."

"This is a serious matter you are talking about, Colonel. A question of the motherland's security."

"I think it is more a question of a thousand American dollars, nyet?" There was a pause, and Grushkin pictured his old crew chief seated at his obsolete radar array, a cigarette burning between his fingers, a tepid cup of coffee on his desk. "Please, Jerzy. A favor."

"It is a very quiet evening. I would be surprised if anything of interest appeared on our screens. Good-bye, Pyotr."

When Grushkin returned to the hangar, he was confronted by a pageant of disappointed faces. He stared back, then slowly allowed a broad, shit-eating grin to crack his stoic face.

"Hey, don't look so glum, you dirty bastards," he shouted. "Somebody break out the vodka! We're fucking millionaires!"

62

The safe course was to keep the plane low, respect a two-hundred-foot ceiling, bleed the speed to five hundred miles per hour, well under supersonic, and take the Mig for a sunset cruise over the rooftops of Eastern Europe. A check of the instruments showed what Gavallan thought of the safe course. Speed: 650 knots. Altitude: 30,000 feet and climbing. Screw the safe course. It was long gone anyway. He'd thrown safety to the wind when he'd busted into Ray Luca's home in Delray Beach Friday afternoon. No, he decided, he'd chucked it earlier than that. He even had the date: January 10, somewhere around three o'clock, when after a boozy lunch at Alfred's in the financial district, he'd signed Konstantin Kirov as a client and pledged Black Jet Securities' every effort to make the Mercury offering a grand slam.

Rolling his shoulders, Gavallan tried to get comfortable in the scooped-out seat. One hand fought the stick. He was holding it too rigidly, nudging the aircraft left every few seconds to compensate for a slight oversteer. The other hand rested on the throttle like a leaden weight, keeping his airspeed steady.

A click of his thumb activated the intercom. "How ya doin'?"

Cate sat beside him in her own self-enclosed turret, his airsick RIO, or radar intercept officer, in her sky blue flight suit and pearl white helmet. "Alive," she whispered. "Just barely."

"We're about eleven hundred miles out," he said. "Another two hours and we'll be on friendly soil."