by Greg Rucka
“So why should we let you do that?” Alena demanded.
“It’ll come out either way. You’re not going out there to dispose of the bodies, not in the snow and the daylight, at least. Whoever it is that wants you, they’re going to know we blew the job, that you’re still on the loose. You kill me or you let me go, that won’t change.”
“Unless this gets covered up. The way Cold Spring was covered up,” I said.
Sean considered that. “Yeah, that’s a possibility. Not sure how much it alters, though. They’ll still know what happened.”
I finished the sugar water, thinking that Sean was right. “What’s your name, your full name?”
“Sean Baron.”
“What were you before? Delta?”
He looked a little indignant. “Force Recon.”
“Marine.”
“Semper Fi.”
I chose not to remark on the irony of that, used the arm of the couch to get to my feet. “We’re leaving, Sean Baron. If you could give us a couple of hours before you call Gorman-North and tell them that the job’s gone tango uniform, I’d appreciate it.”
His surprise was minor, and quickly concealed. “I can hold off on it until this evening, say that’s how long it took me to get clear.”
“You won’t take it the wrong way if I say I hope never to see you again,” I told him.
“Honest to God,” Sean Baron said, “I have it my way, I wouldn’t have seen you in the first place.”
In his chair in our room at the Grove Hotel, Nicolas Sargenti opened his eyes.
“The man in Cape Fear,” he told us. “He has passed on a message for Mr. Collins four times in the last two and a half years.”
“You’re certain?” Alena asked.
“Of course.”
“The man in Cape Fear?” I asked.
“Nicolas can explain,” Alena said, dropping back into her thoughts.
“The man in Cape Fear is named Louis Woodburn,” the lawyer told me. “He sells yachts. For the last decade or so, he has received, every Christmas, an annual gift in the form of a porcelain doll of the kind that is popular in France. Upon breaking apart the doll, he has discovered ten thousand dollars for him to spend as he might choose, and a telephone number. The number changes each year, of course. Currently, it is for a private voice mail box run by a singles-matching service in London.
“In return for this annual gift, Louis Woodburn takes a message should anyone ever call his business, asking to speak to Mr. Jacob Collins. Mr. Collins is the name of a schoolmate of Mr. Woodburn’s, one he has not had any contact with since he was twelve years old. The caller asks if Mr. Woodburn knows where Mr. Collins might be reached. Mr. Woodburn explains that he has not had any dealings with Mr. Collins since they were in school together, but should he run into him, he can take a name and a number to pass along. Whatever name and number he takes is then forwarded to the voice mail box to be collected by me.”
“At which point you do what?”
Sargenti checked on Alena, who gave no indication that she was even hearing us. Taking that as permission, he continued. “Were Elizavet still seeking new clients, I would then call the number that had been left. In every case it is another cutout, and I would leave a message in turn, with a name and a number to be contacted at, and a time. Assuming that I was then contacted as described, Elizavet would direct me to arrange a personal meeting, at the time and place of her choosing. The client would then be collected at the stated time and place, and taken to a location not unlike this one, for a personal interview to be conducted by me. In some cases, Elizavet would attend, though her presence would be concealed or otherwise obfuscated.”
I nodded my understanding. If each of the five initial contacts led to procedures as convoluted and insulated as this, there was almost no chance of the communication being traced back to either Sargenti or Alena until they were certain it was legitimate. Whichever of them established the initial contact point certainly had done so under an assumed name, so even should that be discovered, it would lead only to a dead end.
Much like where we were now.
Alena abruptly rose, saying, “Thank you for coming, Nicolas. You have the paper?”
Sargenti straightened in his seat, and if he was bothered by the abruptness with which she was terminating the meeting, he did not, like everything else, reveal it. He took his attaché from where it stood beside the chair, moving it onto his lap, then worked the combination on each latch with deliberation before snapping them open. From inside the case he produced a slate-gray mailer, slightly smaller than the standard American business size, bulging with its contents. He offered it to Alena, then closed his case and got to his feet and reached for his overcoat.
“Do you wish me to look into Mr. Collins?” he asked us.
“No,” she told him, then added, “You’re flying back tonight?”
“I spend tonight in Montreal. I should be home the day after tomorrow.”
“We need reservations for a hotel in Wilmington, North Carolina.” Alena gestured with the mailer, then tossed it to me on the bed. “In one of these names, please.”
“For how long?”
“Three weeks.”
“You shall have it before I leave for Montreal,” he assured her, then leaned forward and gave Alena a kiss on each cheek, which she returned. He nodded good-bye to me, then went with her to the door. I listened for the sound of the locks falling back into place, then dumped out the contents of the mailer beside me on the bed. There were four identities, two for each of us, and in each set we were husband and wife, and it was the full battery, from driver’s licenses to credit and library cards. One set said we were Canadian, from Toronto; the other identified us as Americans, from St. Louis. Passports for each identity had been provided.
Alena returned, stopping at the room service cart to pour herself the last of the orange juice.
“Wilmington?”
“I do not know what else to do, Atticus.” She turned to me, draining the glass and setting it back on the cart. Frustration was evident in her voice. “It is a very long shot that the person or persons who has been trying to reach Mr. Collins is the same person or persons who is trying to kill us. But I do not know what else to do.”
“Gorman-North uses the Mr. Collins contact?” I asked her.
“I do not believe I have ever done any work for Gorman-North. Of course, I could be mistaken in that. I believe the two jobs I did for the CIA before my retirement came through the Collins contact. Given the relationship between the government and its civilian contractors, the people who move between those two sectors, it is reasonable to believe that someone at Gorman-North knows of it. But that is incidental, perhaps.”
“Because it doesn’t go back to the White House?”
“It presumes that Gorman-North is the connection with the White House, yes, and we have no evidence of that.”
“No reason to think there isn’t.”
“But no reason to think that there is, either.”
“So we go to Cape Fear, and we watch Mr. Woodburn, and we hope that whoever has been trying to reach you through him pays him a call?”
“Or is watching him already, and we can make the surveillance, double back on it.”
“And then try to get out of whoever might be watching him what we hoped we’d get from Bowles.”
She looked almost stricken. “I didn’t have a choice, Atticus.”
“I’m not blaming you.”
“He was going to kill you, I had to—”
“I’m not blaming you, Alena.”
Her mouth closed tightly, and I saw her hands ball into fists. Her expression contracted, filling with her anger and her frustration and her fears.
“Come here,” I said.
She shook her head, almost childlike.
I thought for a moment, then said, “You’re not who you were. Don’t think that you are.”
The anger in her voice matched the anger in her ey
es, still directed more at herself than anyone or anything else. “You can’t say that. You don’t know. You can’t say that.”
“If it had been you,” I said. “If it had been you in the snow, half naked and taking that beating, if it had been your head that Bowles was pointing the gun at, I would have done the same thing.”
She shook her head, refusing me, saying, “No, no, I cut him, Atticus, do you hear me? I needed to announce myself, I needed to draw them away from you. The two men on patrol—I killed the first one, but the second, I kept him alive so I could cut him, so I could make him scream, so they would know that I was there. I cut him so it would hurt, so they could all hear.”
Her voice trailed off. She wasn’t looking at me, perhaps she felt she couldn’t, and maybe if I was someone else, she’d have been right in that.
I brought myself forward on the bed, wincing as I swung my legs onto the floor. She refused to look at me still, even when I put my hands on her shoulders, brought her around to face me. There were things I could say, things I could offer to try to make her feel better about what she had done, what she once was, what she was afraid she always would be. I could have told her that her guilt was the thing that declared she had changed, that her self-loathing at this moment was the mark of her relearned humanity, that what she had told Dan in Portland had been true, that what she once was wouldn’t have batted an eye.
There were a lot of things I could have said to try and help her through it, to try to make her feel better, but I didn’t say any of them. I just took her in my arms and I held her, and she let me do it.
I certainly didn’t tell her that what she’d told me didn’t change anything I’d said.
Had the positions been reversed, I would have done exactly the same thing.
Including cutting strips off a man to make him scream.
CHAPTER
SIX
We were on I-84 heading east by ten the next morning, Alena driving the Subaru Outback she’d bought off a used-car lot the previous evening. The Outback was five years old, dark green, ran fine, and smelled faintly of cat’s urine, which explained why she’d gotten it for a steal. She’d bought it on the same ID we’d used to get from Portland to Whitefish, the same ID we used to settle up before checking out of the Grove. Before leaving Boise, we’d destroyed each of our sets. For the trip cross-country, we’d use the St. Louis ones that Sargenti had provided. Once in Wilmington, we’d switch to the Canadian, since that had been the name Sargenti had used for the reservations we’d requested.
Aside from the smell, the drive went just fine, and we didn’t push it, because neither of us saw an immediate need to. We were driving cross-country on a long shot, and neither of us had much hope that it would play out. Driving gave us both time to think, to try to come up with a better plan. I’m sure that’s what Alena did, at least; mostly, I tried to sleep and convince my body to speed along in its recovery.
It was late afternoon when we reached Lynch, Wyoming, and that seemed a fine time to call it a day. There was a Best Western not far from the Interstate, called the Outlaw Inn, and that was too good to pass up, so we pulled into the lot and parked. It was typical Best Western, long and two-storied. A minimall was across the street, replete with dry cleaner, video rental, and convenience store. It was cold, the air dry and sharp, and a crust of ice had filmed over everything, including the snow.
I was getting very tired of snow.
We pulled our bags from the car, anxious to get fresh air in our lungs and more importantly, our nostrils, then picked our way carefully across the lot to the office. The bags weren’t holding much—Alena’s laptop, the new clothes she’d bought for us after acquiring the car, toiletries, vitamins, and the spare IDs. Each of us had a gun, taken from the bodies we’d left outside the cabin in Montana. The contractors had all carried extra clips, so between us we had somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty rounds if we encountered anything that required that much dissuasion.
The office had a cowboy motif going, from the wood carving of a bucking bronco to the laminated lariat that hung on the wall beside the front desk. There was a coffeemaker with complimentary coffee, stained with the dregs it had spilled over the years, and a couch that wasn’t leather but wanted to be. Behind the counter was a display of travel-sized amenities—aspirin, toothpaste, shampoo, everything you might need if you’d forgotten to pack before meeting your mistress. A television hung nearby on the wall, burbling news softly, but instead of aiming out so the guests could enjoy it, it had been turned the other way, to service the management.
The management, such as we could see, consisted of an over-weight man who could have been anywhere from early twenties to late thirties. He watched us come through the door with an absolute lack of interest, perhaps even the hope that we would change our minds at the last minute and maybe try to find another place to rest our heads. His interest perked up a bit when we actually made it inside and he saw Alena, but then diminished when he realized that, yes, I was probably sleeping with her.
We took a room on the second floor, settled our things and ourselves, and then talked about what we would do for dinner.
“Wyoming,” I said. “Beef.”
“There must be another choice.”
“You want to try the fish they’re serving in Lynch, be my guest,” I said. “I’m thinking there’s got to be someplace with a salad bar.”
“Salad bars are worse.” She looked honestly horrified. “They’re breeding grounds for bacteria and disease.”
I looked at the clock by the bed, digital and frail. If it was to be believed, it wasn’t yet five. “I’ll see if I can find a grocery store,” I told her, and headed back down to the office.
The same man was behind the counter when I came in, speaking on the phone, but as soon as he saw me he cut off whatever it was he was saying and hung up. He hung up hard, the handset clattering into the base.
“There a grocery store nearby?” I asked.
“There’s the Get N Go,” he said, then pointed past me, out the windows and to the lot across the street. “That’s nearby.”
I followed the direction of his finger, nodded, then looked back at him.
“Yes,” I agreed. “It is, though it’s not really what I had in mind. I was hoping for something with a wider selection.”
“There’s Boschetto’s, down Elk a ways. Imported stuff, if you like that kind of thing.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but it seemed that he meant something.
“And there’s a Smith’s, out on Foothill, but you probably don’t want to go that far,” he added.
“Thanks,” I said, and walked out of the office, making sure to clear his line of sight through the windows. I looked up at the sky, the darkening gray, and began counting off slowly in my head.
When I reached thirty, I turned and went back into the office.
This time, the handset was back in its cradle before I was through the door.
“What time’s checkout again?” I asked.
“Eleven,” he said. “It’s eleven.”
“Right, thanks,” I said, and left the office a last time, climbing the stairs back up to our room. I knocked on the door before using my key to enter, found that Alena had moved the furniture around, and was now in the corner by the closet, doing yoga.
“I think we’ve got a problem,” I told her.
She was in an abdominal stretch, her back arched and her head on the floor, her feet folded back beneath her buttocks, looking at me upside down. “What kind of problem?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. There was a remote control for the television on the bed stand, and I picked it up, switching on the set that was bolted to the bureau at the foot of the bed. It came on with genuine reluctance. I began searching for a cable news channel.
Alena exhaled, then flipped out of her position, to her feet, and I thought that was maybe just maybe showing off for my benefit. I found a twenty-four-hour news channel as she came
to my side.
“What happened?” she asked.
I started to answer, then stopped myself, staring at the television. On the screen was footage of the cabin in Montana or, at least, what the cabin in Montana looked like when graced with daylight. There were police and state troopers and men wearing parkas that had letters like “DHS” and “FBI” stenciled on their backs. There were crime-scene people taking photographs, and more people moving body bags.
Then the picture cut to a talking head behind his desk, and he said the words, “terrorist cell” and then, on the screen, appeared two pictures, side by side.
The same two pictures Bowles had shown me in his Interpol file four nights before, the file photos of Alena and myself.
“…considered armed and extremely dangerous,” the talking head was saying. “It is unknown, at this time, if they still have any quantity of ricin in their possession….”
“Oh,” said Alena softly. “That kind of trouble.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
There were sirens, and they were most definitely headed our way.
Alena and I looked at each other, thinking the same things. Running was out of the question; every cop, sheriff’s deputy, and reserve officer in a hundred square miles was currently converging on our position. Getting onto the open road would lead to a high-speed pursuit, and that was a game we would lose. Once on the Interstate, there was only one direction we could go, and that was whatever direction we started in. Too easy to drop spikes on the asphalt, to roadblock us, to force us to a stop. Factor in the weather, that with night falling the roads would be that much more treacherous, and it just wasn’t an option. If we were going to die, I didn’t want it to be because we’d lost control of our car on a patch of black ice.
Shooting our way out was an option, but I didn’t like it, for a number of reasons. With the contractors in Cold Spring and again in Montana, the situation had been different. They’d come to the game with violence, their intentions plain; for lack of a better phrase, they’d known what they were getting into. But the idea of shooting some poor S.O.B. cop who was doing his job, that didn’t sit well with me. There were a lot of things I already had on my conscience, and many more that I would have to learn to live with. Bringing about the death of a police officer in the line of his duty wasn’t going to be one of them.