by Greg Rucka
Not anymore. Not after my passport application—submitted in my real name, and with the photographs to prove it—reached the State Department. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that my name had been flagged, that I was on a watch-list someplace. Whoever it was giving Matthew Bowles his orders would learn of it, and he or she or they would learn that I had listed an address on Iron Horse Road in Whitefish, Montana, as my place of residence.
There would be a response; there would have to be. Whoever wanted us dead didn’t have a choice.
The same way that, because of what had happened in Cold Spring, I didn’t have one, either.
“It’s done?” Alena asked as I moved past her into the faux flagstone entryway of the house. She had a pistol in her hand, practically an afterthought, and by the time I’d turned back from shutting and locking the door, she’d made it disappear. I removed my hat, knocked snow from my shoulders and stamped it off my boots. Spatter caught her bare feet, and she hissed at me, dancing back onto the safer warmth of the carpet.
“Signed, sealed, and delivered,” I told her. “You should put some shoes on, you might need to move fast.”
“It will be the end of the day before your application is sent to the offices in Bozeman, and tomorrow morning—at the earliest—before it’s processed.” She headed away from me, towards the kitchen, adding over her shoulder, “We have time.”
I removed my coat, and the sweatshirt I was wearing beneath it, and hung both from the row of pegs on the wall. When I’d told Laura the Dumpling that I was a resident I’d been lying, inasmuch as the house was a rental. It was, like many of the homes in the vicinity of Whitefish Lake, a recent construction, not more than five years old, and everything in it and about it still felt new, from the spring in the carpet to the smell in the bedrooms. Architecturally, it was of that same open-plan, high-ceilinged family that seemed to be the modern equivalent of posh-log-cabin, and in an odd way, it reminded me of Alena’s home in Bequia before I’d burnt it to the ground.
Alena was at the counter in the kitchen when I caught up, the kettle on the gas stove spewing forth a column of steam. On the table was a MacBook, the Web browser open. We’d bought the laptop at the Apple Store in Seattle after clearing the cache in Burien, just south of the city. Alena had established the Burien cache years earlier, along with dozens of others around the world, when she’d worked as one of The Ten. Most were in Western Europe or the United States, since those were the places she’d most often visited in pursuit of her targets, and each was designed to be used once and never again, and each held the same things: weapons, cash, alternate identities. The Burien cache had contained sixty-three thousand in American dollars, two sets of false identities, including driver’s licenses (one for the state of Washington, one for the state of Idaho), companion credit cards (Visa and American Express), and passports, four pistols (all of them semiautos), ammunition for the same, and two sets of clothes. Everything had been tailored for Alena’s use, which meant the IDs and clothes were useless to me, since I suffered the obvious gender disadvantage.
Seattle had been our last real stop before Whitefish, an overnight that had followed our leaving Vadim and Dan in Sunriver. Given what Illya had told us, taking airplanes seemed an unnecessary risk.
Alena turned off the flame beneath the kettle. She used a dish towel decorated with leaping fish to take the handle, then proceeded to fill the two mugs she’d prepared. When she’d finished, I indicated the laptop with my head. “No joy?”
She glanced to the computer, her expression flickering sour. “Nothing. No one I recognize, no one I recollect.”
I took my mug and sniffed at the liquid within. The tea she’d made had a citrus, floral scent, and for the first time in a long while, I wished I was drinking coffee, instead.
“Not to insult your vanity, but it is possible that whoever wants us dead is someone I’ve offended, and not you,” I said.
“I find that unlikely.” She was watching my examination of the tea. “You are not, and were not, ever counted as one of The Ten. If it is someone in the White House, someone in the current administration, who pursues us, then the odds are far greater that it is someone I have had dealings with, either directly or indirectly. Someone I did a job for. That is the only plausible explanation for this vendetta.”
I used two fingers to pluck the tea bag from the mug, dropped it into the sink. The splash it made on impact was the color of ketchup. “Vendetta makes it sound like it’s personal.”
Alena shook her head, opened her mouth, then closed it, looking at me with the mug still in my hand. I sighed and took a sip, and was profoundly relieved to find the tea tasted nothing like ketchup. If it tasted like oranges and hibiscus, however, I couldn’t tell.
“That was not my intent. Only that the strike in Cold Spring indicated a certain…zealotry, perhaps.”
“Assuming you’re correct, that this goes back to work you did as one of The Ten, work you did for the CIA or the Pentagon, we’re talking about a job you did four years ago, at least.”
“It would be six, I think.”
“You think?”
“The contracts are always initiated through cutouts, Atticus, you know that.”
“Yeah, but you vet the source on each job, that’s just common sense.”
She nodded her agreement, almost absently. “But it is possible I missed something. That the person, the people, I was working for in one or more instances were not the people I thought they were. Mistakes happen. Governments subcontract the work. It is possible that someone discovered the contact procedures for me, the ones used by your government, and employed that method for their own ends.”
“There’s our answer,” I said.
She nodded slightly. “I did consider that. That someone in the White House is someone I did a job for might be motive enough. Before he died, Agent Fowler, you, and I had a long conversation about what I did and who I did it for. If he reported that information back to his superiors, if he was, perhaps, not as discreet as he should have been, it is possible that whoever our adversary is took alarm, saw that potentially his or her relationship with me was in danger of being exposed. Wishing to protect himself or herself, they have taken steps to silence both of us.”
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s not Scott’s fault,” I said. “Don’t blame the dead man.”
“I’m not insulting the memory of your friend,” Alena said, carefully. “Simply stating a fact, however unpleasant it may be to hear. What matters is not how the information reached our adversary in the White House; what matters is that once it did, he or she deemed us a threat that needed to be addressed, immediately and completely.”
“Which means we’re being hunted for something you know that you don’t know you know.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you should try to remember.”
“I have been.”
“Maybe you should try harder.”
Alena took another sip of her tea, then set the mug down and moved the two steps required to stand in front of me. She put her hands on my forearms, her expression serious, meeting my eyes.
“There are other ways to do this, Atticus,” she said, gently. “We can leave here right now, and the passport application will have done no more harm than has been done already with the death of Illya. We can withdraw, try to find another way.”
“No,” I said. “We really can’t.”
“It is a big planet. There are many places to hide.”
“I don’t want to hide anymore.”
Her grip on my arms tightened slightly, almost imperceptibly. “And what if they do not wish to question you? What if we are mistaken, and their desire to find me is not more powerful than their desire to silence you?”
“Then you’ll keep me alive,” I said.
The fear was easy to miss, just a flash in her eyes, hinting at her doubt and the pain that it brought. It wasn’t much at all. In Kobule
ti, when I’d angered her or annoyed her or delighted her, she’d been willing to show it, though it was still something she was learning to allow herself. Since our return to the U.S., that had begun to fade. The professional emerging to subsume the personal.
Except the problem here, the problem for both of us, was that they were the same. Nothing was personal, and everything was. Every move we made had to be as professionals, and yet the motives behind them were anything but. We could have argued that what we were doing was for self-defense and survival, nothing more, and maybe for Alena, that would even have been true. But it wasn’t for me, and we both understood that; it was about the future as much as the past, about the home we had made for ourselves in Kobuleti as much as about what had happened three years earlier in Cold Spring on a New England autumn’s dawn.
“It has to be answered,” I told her. “And if the way to find out who needs to answer is by bringing them to me, then that’s what I’ll do.”
Her hands moved up my arms, then stopped, fell away, and I could read the conflict in each movement, the struggle she was having. Then she stepped past me, leaving the kitchen to disappear further into the house.
“I have to pack,” Alena said.
We made love that night, and it was all need, cathartic and hungry, and when we were finished we clung to each other as we had during our passion. The night was utterly silent, the quiet of the snow broken only by the hiss of the forced air trying vainly to keep the chill from the house.
Her lips against my cheek, Alena said, “They will hurt you.”
“I know.”
“I will come as soon as I can.”
“I know.”
“I will come for you.”
I kissed her.
“I know,” I told her.
She was gone in the morning.
I made the surveillance four days later.
Two days after that, as the last of the sunlight slid away from Big Mountain to the north and the valley was turning to darkness, there was a knock at the door. I’d built a fire in the fireplace, half to stave off the chill, half to stave off the apprehension and loneliness I was feeling. I’d been reading a book of Kurt Vonnegut essays that I’d bought in town, and they had done nothing to improve my mood.
Then the knock at the door, three quick raps, no doorbell to follow, and I knew it was time. I marked the book and set it on the coffee table beside one of the guns from the Burien cache, a Walther that was resting there. For a moment, I considered taking the weapon up, carrying it with me, but then I thought that the last thing I really wanted to do was give them another reason to shoot first and ask questions later.
If they were knocking on the front door, it meant that there was a team already in position at the back. I hadn’t heard any glass breaking, hadn’t felt a shift in the air inside the house in answer to a sudden draught. So no penetration, not yet, which meant they were covering the perimeter; they’d wait to enter until they were certain I wasn’t going to try to bolt in their direction.
Assuming, of course, that the object of their exercise was to capture and not to kill.
There was a second set of raps on the front door, this a little brisker.
I left the gun where it was, and went to answer the door.
Three men stood waiting for me on the porch outside, none of them obviously presenting weapons, but if two of them hadn’t come heavy, it was because they’d been ordered not to. Those two wore blue jeans, boots, and bulky down parkas, flanking the third on either side. The third one broke the mold, in a suit and overcoat and gloves.
Of the three, I recognized two, one of them immediately. One took a second to place, and it wasn’t his appearance so much as the shared recognition that came from his eyes when they met mine. The last time I’d seen him, he’d worn a black watch cap and been flat on his back in a Citgo lot.
“Sean,” I said, surprising myself that I could recall his name so easily, and he started, possibly just as stunned by my use of it. “How’s the shoulder?”
Then Matthew Bowles, in his navy blue suit and black overcoat, stepped forward and looked me up and down, as if checking stock in a back room.
“Son of a bitch,” Bowles said. “It really is you.”
“It really is,” I said.
Bowles smiled at me, and it was the same strained, thin-lipped smile I remembered him using when Scott Fowler and I had seen him last, three and a half years earlier. It was the smile he’d produced while listening to us explain everything we knew about Oxford. It was the same smile he’d used when he’d picked up the phone, and given the order to cut Oxford loose. It was the kind of smile smug in its assurance that he knew more than you, that all of your assumptions were incorrect, and that he’d be there to see it when you learned so yourself.
I hated that fucking smile.
I hated it all the more when Bowles said, “Take him.”
Sean and the other one came forward, and I heard a crack, then a crash, from inside the house, and I didn’t resist, just raised my arms to my sides. I thought they’d go for cuffs, but it turned out that was naïve of me, and Sean eagerly set me straight with a punch to my left side, just beneath my ribs. It came hard and mean, but I’d like to think I could have shaken it off if I’d wanted to.
Then the other one got in on the act, and I went down on my knees on the porch. From behind me I could hear movement, voices, the perimeter team reaching us. Someone put a boot in, and then a second one followed the first, and another fist, or maybe a baton, and my vision flared and the familiar taste of my own blood came into my mouth, and then there was nothing else but the cold of the snow that had settled in drifts on my front porch.
CHAPTER
TWO
“Patriot,” Bowles said. “How’s that for a fucking irony?”
I used my tongue to probe the inside of my mouth. All of my teeth seemed to be intact and in place, though blood still leaked from what felt like a good-sized tear on the inside of my right cheek. I spat what had gathered onto the floor, and discovered in the process that my lower lip was numb, and consequently it wasn’t so much a spit as a dribble. The floor was wood, finished planks, rustic and shiny. My blood and saliva shone where it landed.
Matthew Bowles moved into the seat opposite where I’d been positioned at the table, unloading his laptop from its black nylon case and setting the machine beside him. He always had a laptop; it was his security blanket. It chimed as he switched it on, began to hum into the boot cycle.
I looked around the room. My vision was clear, and I was mildly surprised to discover that my contacts hadn’t been knocked free in the beat down. The beat down, as much as I could recall of it, had been sincere, and I suspected there’d been a few extra free shots added as a bonus after I’d lost consciousness. Most of me ached, and I was pretty sure that the parts of me that didn’t only declined to do so because, like my lower lip, they’d gone numb. That said, I didn’t think anything had been broken. At least, not yet.
The room itself wasn’t much to look at, ill furnished, walls finished with knotted pine planks and a floor that hadn’t known care. Not much in the way of furniture, a couch with upholstery that had started as red and had since faded to a pinkish brown, a couple of wooden craftsman chairs, and the rickety table I was seated at now. Sconces were set irregularly on the wall, their dusty glass in the shape of large candle flames, the wattage of the bulbs weak. To my left were two small windows, curtains drawn, and through the gaps in the fabric I could see nothing beyond. Presumably it was night outside, though I supposed the windows could have been painted over. Opposite me, to the right of the couch, what was either the front or back door to the cabin.
Sitting on the couch were the two who’d been with Bowles when I’d answered the door, Sean and the other one. Both had their jackets off, and each wore a holster with a pistol at his hip, and against Sean’s side of the couch had been propped a shotgun. Of them, Sean had the clean seniority, both in age and manner. When my ey
es ran over them, the eyefucking I received from each in return was severe.
I continued to look around as Bowles continued to tap on his keyboard. A moth-eaten Indian rug hung on the wall over the fireplace, its colors faded. There were no tools for the fire, and I wondered if that was because they’d been moved, or because they’d simply never been. That was it for the décor.
Off to my right ran a short hallway, carpeted in a thick orange and brown shag, doors along either side. There was a kitchen down that way; I could make out the sounds of movement, the scrape of a pan on a stove. The scent of frying bacon reached me, mixing with the weaker scent of dust and disuse. Behind it all lurked the cloying musk of mold, probably from the carpet.
The cabin was, in its own way, oddly reminiscent of the one to which we’d taken Illya in Sunriver, and that made sense to me. Far easier to keep me in Montana, perhaps to move south, further from the Canadian border. Certainly deeper into the woods, to someplace secluded, and God knew there were plenty enough places like that to be found. In the steady throb of pain, I couldn’t discern anything that felt like a narcotic trying to wash out of me. So I hadn’t been drugged, which made it more likely that we hadn’t left Whitefish that far behind.
“So,” said Bowles, still focused on the laptop. “Are you? Are you a patriot?”
One of the doors on the hall opened, and two men emerged, both apparently acquired from the same supplier who had delivered the two on the couch. The variations were cosmetic. They were zipping closed their down parkas, and one already had a watch cap on his head. Both were armed, another shotgun and an AR-15. They passed the table without sparing me a glance, moving straight to Sean, who was getting to his feet. There was a brief exchange, kept to whispering so I couldn’t overhear, and then Sean led them to the door. When he opened it, a puff of snow blew inside, driven by the icy air. He let the two out, closed the door once more, and resumed his seat.