by Greg Rucka
Vadim returned, carrying a bag of his own, this one smaller than Alena’s duffel, black, with a silver Nike swoosh on its side. He gave me a grin, then bent to stow his luggage in one of the lacquered wood cabinets acting as a divider between portions of the cabin. The plane wasn’t terribly large, but a lot of effort had gone into the main cabin design, and there was plenty of space. Slight tears marred the leather upholstery around me, and I could see faint scratches on the lacquer in places, and it struck me that the Gulfstream probably got a lot of use.
Finished, Vadim closed the cabinet once more, then dropped into a seat of his own, pulling an iPod from one of his jacket pockets. From where he stood at the cockpit door, the pilot called out to us, asking if we were ready to go. That surprised me, not because he seemed to actually care, but because he sounded American, and not Russian.
“They’re ready,” Dan said, and he got to his feet. He switched into Russian, asking Alena something, and while I was starting to pick up words here and there, I couldn’t really understand it. But I heard the name “Illya,” and that was enough.
“You know where he is?” I asked.
They both looked at me, Dan with vague hostility, Alena with curiosity.
“Not yet,” Dan admitted. “But we’ll find him. We’ll find him, and we’ll take care of him. I’ll take care of him.”
“But you don’t know where he is.”
“I said that I will find him.”
“And you think he doesn’t know that? There’s no way Illya’s still in New York, Dan. He got out, and he got help to do it, most likely. You’re going to have to cast a very wide net before you find him again.”
Dan clenched his teeth, showing me one of his thick fingers. The anger was an anger I understood, the anger of betrayal, and I didn’t take it personally that he was consequently directing it at me.
“But I will find him, Atticus.” It was a growl, half threat, half oath. “I will find him, and when I do, I will pay him back for what he did. He sold us out, he got two of my boys killed and your Natalie, he goes down for that. For that, he pays.”
“He pays for that,” I agreed. “But not until after I’ve had a chance to talk to him.”
“The fuck—”
Alena interrupted. “It will take you a while to find him, I think, Dan. Atticus is correct.”
“This kind of thing, it has to be answered quickly!”
“Not until after I talk to him,” I said, and I said it deliberately, and I said it softly, and I said it as clearly as I could. In his seat, about to put his ear buds into place, Vadim stopped what he was doing, turning around to look at first me, then his father.
“Tasha, tell this guy—”
“Find him,” I told Dan. “Watch him. Track him. Mark him. But don’t touch him, Dan. And don’t let him make you. Once you have him, you let us know.”
“I have to take care of this!”
“You will. But I’m going to need him first.”
I moved my eyes from Dan to Alena, and I saw she was with me, that she understood what I wanted, and why, and more, why it was important.
She spoke quietly, in Russian, and Dan made a face like he was having trouble controlling his temper, and then he actually did throw his hands in the air. When they came down again, he pointed his finger at me a second time.
“I don’t do this for you,” he said. “And I don’t do this for Tasha, you understand? I do this for Natalie, because I liked her, and she liked you. But because I do this for Natalie, Illya is mine, you understand? His life is now mine, no one else’s. No one kills that walking fuckhole but me, understand?”
“I understand.”
Dan grunted, turned away, slapping Vadim on the shoulder. The younger man got to his feet, and the two of them exchanged a rough hug. Vadim had drawn the short straw on the height gene, because he only reached Dan’s shoulder, which put him at, perhaps, chin height on me and Alena. But he had his father’s body type, the same strength of chin and jaw. When the two of them embraced, it was clear that the blood running between them was thick.
Dan released the young man, this time slapping him lightly on the cheek, then made his way to the front of the aircraft. He stopped at the door, looked back at us.
“I will see you when I see you.”
“You didn’t even see us here,” Alena responded.
Dan turned to the pilot, still waiting at the cockpit door. “How many passengers you carrying?”
“One,” the pilot said. “Some kid I’m taking back to the home country.”
“That’s right. One.”
Dan looked back at us, then at his son, a final time. Then he went out the door, disappearing down the stairs.
“Buckle up,” the pilot told us.
Seven minutes after takeoff, the pilot came over the intercom.
“International waters,” he said.
I shifted carefully on my bench, looked over to where Alena had taken a position opposite me, her legs stretched out in front of her, as if she was imitating my posture. Her head was turned to the window, resting her forehead against the glass. Miata lay curled in the aisle between us.
Without looking at me, Alena asked, “Are you ready to talk about what happened?”
“If you’re asking do I feel up to it, yes, I think so.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
I told her what happened, as best as I could remember. Everything from the moment I’d left the safe house in the Civic to my broken memories upon returning. I ended with her and Vadim taking me to see Natalie where she lay in the yard.
She never stopped looking out the window as I relayed it to her, and her questions were few. She was curious about the AR-15, because she said that had been an anomaly in the weapons load-out. The MP5s were, strictly speaking, MP5SDs, and apparently, all but two of the people who’d been trying to kill us had carried them.
“Tasked from the same source,” Alena murmured, more to herself than to me. “Each group, tasked from the same source for their op.”
“Your turn,” I said. “What happened at the house?”
She drew a deep breath through her nose, exhaling it strong enough that it formed a mist on her window. Then she swung her legs off the bench, turning so she could sit facing me.
“Natalie was trying to protect me,” Alena said. “Remember that, Atticus.”
Then she told me what happened at the safe house.
CHAPTER
SIX
The window in Alena’s room at the house in Cold Spring looked out over the backyard, not the front, and so she had not watched me go. But she had heard the sound of the Civic starting, had heard its wheels turning on the leaf-strewn road, and because she had never had to say good-bye before to anyone she did not wish to see go, she remained motionless, and listened for as long as she could. She listened until the sound of my departure faded into the night.
When she said this to me, she told me that she would have been embarrassed to admit it, except that doing so is what had given the first warning, because by doing so, she heard two things she hadn’t expected.
The first was the sound of an engine, of a vehicle coming down the road (she admitted that, for a moment, she had hoped it was the same vehicle, that I was returning for some reason, but almost as quickly as she’d thought that, she had dismissed the idea: I was not returning). Then she heard another one behind it, and she understood that two vehicles were now approaching the house.
The second was the sound of the front door closing.
It was these things that provided the warning, or, more precisely, provided Alena with the warning at the same time that Vadim, in his tree house and with his rifle and his night-vision goggles and his phone, saw the two Suburbans coming quickly down the road towards the house, their headlights off. Being a good boy, and being trained by his father, he did what he was supposed to do. He got on his radio and told Dan that the house was about to be hit.
It was then that Vadim hear
d the front door closing, and turned just in time to watch Illya run for the trees.
(Vadim, who had disconnected himself from his iPod long enough to listen to what Alena was telling me, was eager to offer his version of events at this point, interrupting to say, “I asked Dan if I should shoot the little shit-eating motherfucker.” His English was flawless, his accent pure Brooklyn. “Dan said not to, he said Illya wasn’t the problem, and he told me to stay down and out of sight until the fuckers who’d arrived started into the house.”)
Many things began happening at once, then, Alena told me. She heard movement downstairs, and Dan shouting for the guard at the back, Yasha, to get ready, that they were about to be hit. She heard Natalie running, already starting to climb the stairs. Miata, too, had realized that something was wrong, and had gotten to his feet, following Alena as she had half hopped, half limped out of her room and into the one of the guard next door, Tamryn.
Alena shouted to Tamryn to get the fuck up, then grabbed his shotgun and spun back around to take a position at the top of the stairs. The shotgun was another Remington 870, the same make and model that Yasha and Illya had been issued by Dan (“He got a deal on them,” Vadim explained), but unlike Illya’s, both Yasha’s and Tamryn’s had been loaded with three-inch double-ought buckshot, which would be more effective at close range, inside the house.
Tamryn had scrambled out of bed, drawing his secondary weapon, a Smith & Wesson 910 semiauto (“How do you know that?” Vadim asked her, and Alena looked at him as if the question was beyond idiotic, and answered, “Because I saw it, Vadim.” She was always very precise in matters of equipment and gear, not because she was particularly obsessive about the tools of the trade, but because she felt it was her professional obligation to know and understand what each tool was, and what it could do), and rushed to follow her out. By the time they’d each left the room, Natalie had reached them, and Dan was close at her heels. On her way to the stairs, Natalie had grabbed Illya’s discarded shotgun, which she now tossed to Dan.
None of them had managed to take any reasonable, or even effective, defensive position at this point, which was unfortunate, because it was at this point that the people who’d arrived to kill them entered the house.
(“They poured out of those Chevys like their dicks were on fire,” Vadim told me. “All gung ho, ‘Let’s go, Marines!’ attitude and shit, but professional about it; they were trying to keep it down, at least until the shooting started. I really don’t think they thought anyone was going to be shooting back at them, you know?”)
They came through the door in good entry formation, Alena said, covering their angles. The lights were still off in the house, and they tried to be quiet about it. From where she, Natalie, Tamryn, and Dan had been trying to take position, they could see the shapes of their attackers in the ambient light. But they had all still been in motion at the breach, and that made them easy to spot, and it was the attacking force that opened fire first.
There was an initial barrage of fire from the MP5s, eerily quiet since the weapons were suppressed, and maybe as a result, their voices had seemed so much louder.
“Target, top of the stairs!” one had shouted. “With the shotgun, take her, take her!”
From the volume of fire that poured in Alena’s direction, she had no doubt they were referring to her, and not to Natalie.
Tamryn went down almost immediately, before he could get a single shot off. He’d been on Alena’s left at the top of the stairs, and one of the first bursts meant for her had gone wide, and taken him instead. Alena, Natalie, and Dan had all returned fire, but none of them had scored hits. This didn’t bother Alena, since it wasn’t the object of the exercise, as far as she was concerned.
The object of the exercise, so to speak, was to get herself, Natalie, Dan, and Miata out of the house alive. If they could force the assault team back out the front door, then they would have secured an effective crossfire, and Vadim could pick their attackers off at his relative leisure.
Outside, in the tree house, Vadim had been lining up his first shot as the assault team had been taking up their formation. Three of the team had broken right, away from him, looking to go around the back of the house, but the rest of the group—there were eight in all—had taken up positions for the entry.
Now Vadim heard the barrage of fire from inside the house, and he felt that qualified as permission to do some shooting of his own. He fired, and put a .308 round through the head of the man furthest back in the assault team. His rifle wasn’t suppressed, and everyone heard the report, and this threw the entry team into chaos. One of them tried to immediately reverse direction and make for the cover provided by the Suburbans. The remaining three continued trying to gain the house.
“They went total bugfuck when I took their first guy down,” Vadim said. “They were all shouting to each other, trying to keep some sort of control of the situation. I only wish I’d been quicker, you know?”
Back on the stairs, Dan, Natalie, and Alena were continuing to lay down fire. The initial furious exchange of bullets had abated, and Dan had dropped his shotgun and dived past Nat and Alena, to where Tamryn had gone down. One of the assault team tried to capitalize on the move, coming around the door frame again, and Alena and Natalie both opened up on him simultaneously.
The man fell, and Alena said she was certain it was Natalie who had made the kill.
(I found that hard to believe, but did not say so. If Alena thought that crediting Natalie with the kill would somehow make me feel better about what happened to her, she was wrong. It didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate the effort, or see it for what it was, but she was wrong.)
Then Dan threw the smoke grenade that Tamryn had been carrying, and it landed in the front hallway just as Yasha entered from the kitchen, firing wildly with his own Remington. The second shooter at the door put a burst straight into his chest, and Yasha fell at almost the same moment the grenade detonated and began filling first the hallway, then the house, with white smoke. Again, Natalie and Alena returned fire, and the man who’d killed Yasha pitched forward and didn’t move again.
At which point Natalie dropped the shotgun, switched to the Sig Sauer I’d returned to her, grabbed hold of Alena’s left arm, and said, “We are getting you out of here now!”
Dan took hold of Alena’s right arm, handing her the little Seecamp .380 he kept in his pocket, and together with Natalie, they hoisted her to her feet, and began working their way down the stairs, planning to exit at the rear of the house. They still didn’t know how many people they were dealing with out front, and they didn’t know if more would be arriving.
What they did know was that Alena had been verbally identified as the shooters’ primary target. To deny the enemy that target meant they had to get out of the house, and that meant going out the back.
In the tree house, Vadim was having trouble getting a good shot on the two shooters he still had to deal with. He’d fired off two more rounds, each to no effect, now leaving him with only four in the rifle before he’d have to switch to the revolver his father had given him. He didn’t have a reload for the rifle in the tree house with him, because none of them had considered that they might need to repel an attack of this magnitude.
To make matters worse, Vadim was getting very worried about the three he’d seen breaking for the side of the house. From his vantage point, with the beginnings of dawn’s light starting to flow out of the forest, he could see the treeline surrounding the backyard, but not much of the yard itself. With the remaining shooters outside, throwing occasional bursts of fire at him, he couldn’t risk switching targets, nor picking up the cell phone resting by his knee.
Then smoke had started pouring from the front of the house, and the two shooters that Vadim couldn’t get a bead on saw it, and one of them wheeled back to the door, bringing his MP5 to his shoulder.
(Vadim wasn’t sure why he did this, and Alena explained the reasoning before I could. Until the smoke began pouring out o
f the house, the shooter could believe that his back was covered. But once the visibility behind him went, there was no way to determine what might be happening inside. More importantly, it meant that there was no way for the shooter to visualize anything that might come at him. Therefore, not wanting to leave his back exposed, he’d turned around, hoping that the Suburbans would provide an adequate defense against Vadim’s sniping.)
Regardless, in turning he showed Vadim the back of his head through the side windows of one of the Suburbans. Vadim fired once, and the man fell forward, the top of his skull turned to mist. The remaining shooter returned fire, trying to suppress Vadim, then broke for the side of the house. Vadim dropped him before he made the corner.
In the house, they’d reached the hallway on the ground floor, and Natalie was leading Alena along, towards the back door. She’d let go of her, holding the Sig with both hands, in a high-ready position, being careful to clear each room before they passed through it. Miata had trotted close beside Alena as she’d struggled along. Her damaged leg made the going much slower than she’d have liked, but the brace running from her ankle to her knee kept it from becoming impossible. Dan stayed at the rear, covering their backs, having switched to his main pistol, a Springfield Armories TRP, which he, too, was holding in the high-ready position. Smoke from the grenade was everywhere, and while it didn’t actually make it harder to breathe, the visibility in the house was next to zero, and it made for a tense trip through the ground floor.
They reached the door into the yard, and Natalie had thrown it open, then stepped back into cover. Nothing happened, and she looked back to Alena and Dan, and they both nodded, and all of them, including Miata, started out into the creeping dawn.
When they were all five, maybe six feet outside, Dan’s Nextel squawked inside his jacket, Vadim trying to raise him over the radio. Almost instantly, probably cued by the sound of the transmission, two of the three who had gone to flank came around the side of the house, on the right, bringing their MP5s to bear. Natalie turned, putting herself in front of Alena, half blocking her with her own body, as Dan stepped forward, each of them preparing to fire. It’s likely, in that instant, all three of them thought they were going to die.