Patriot acts ak-6 Page 16

  Sargenti cocked his head, perhaps trying to parse the question. "I'm not certain I understand your meaning, Michael."

  "It's an insulated process, right? It starts the same way, say, uses the same initial point, but it's the cutouts that change, the steps necessary for the initial inquiry to reach you?"

  "Ah, yes. Yes, though there are several possible points of initiation."

  "And when you've received these, when you've checked, you've simply ignored them, right?"

  "Disregarded, I would rather say."

  "Disregarded, then. No response."

  "Correct."

  "But you're still receiving requests. So someone isn't getting the message, or is ignoring it."

  Sargenti frowned. "Perhaps so. I had presumed that the requests were being made by different individuals, not by the same individual again and again. But it is possible."

  "How many points of contact are there?" I asked. "How many starts to the chain?"

  "Five," both Alena and Sargenti said, together.

  I looked at her. "Is it likely they know more than one point of contact?"

  She shook her head.

  "So we're looking for multiple attempts stemming from the same point of contact."

  "Possibly."

  In his chair, Nicolas Sargenti closed his eyes, combing his memory. "A moment," he murmured.

  Alena moved back to where I was on the bed, taking a seat beside me. Her right hand moved to find mine, simply to rest her fingers against my own. She looked tired, and she looked worried, and she looked guilty, and none were states I was used to seeing on her.

  Our experience at the cabin in the Montana woods had, in its way, been far worse on her. While Bowles and the others had worked over my body, what Alena had done to secure my freedom had worked over her soul, fragile as it was. It had forced her to step backwards to what she once had been, and it made her doubt she could ever change.

  Sitting on the side of the bed, not looking at me, afraid to even hold my hand, I knew what she was thinking. It didn't matter what changes the last three years had wrought upon her; she now believed it was only an illusion.

  She was still an instrument of killing, still an empty thing, and she always would be. Bowles died, and I went for the pistol he dropped, my fingers too numb to manage the task easily. It took me too long to do it, I was too slow, and all I was thinking was that if Sean wanted to finish what Bowles had put into motion, I wasn't going to be able to stop him. I didn't know where he was, and that meant that Alena most likely didn't, either.

  With the pistol in my swollen, useless hands, I fought myself to my feet, slipping in the snow. My teeth had stopped chattering, and I was beginning to feel warm again, and I still had enough wherewithal to recognize that was a very bad thing; it meant I was turning hypothermic, and that I wouldn't last for much longer in the cold.

  Then I saw Sean, standing at the door to the cabin, and I brought the gun up much too slowly, but he didn't move, and I realized why. He'd disarmed, dropping his weapon, standing with his hands raised to either side. Between two of his fingers something sparkled.

  "Just a job," Sean said. Slowly, he moved his hand, showing me what he was holding. "I've got the key for the cuffs. It's yours."

  I lurched forward a couple of steps. "You speak Russian?"

  The confusion lasted only an instant. "No."

  In Russian, as loud as I could, I shouted for Alena not to shoot him, that we were going into the cabin, that I had to get warm. Sean flinched slightly at the abruptness of my voice, but that was it for movement until I reached him.

  "Inside," I told him.

  We went into the wreckage of the front room. The table had busted during the fight, as had one of the two chairs. I all but fell onto the couch, not feeling the room's warmth at all. Sean turned to close the door.

  "Bad idea," I said.

  "The heat's going out."

  "She'll kill you."

  He stopped, watched me as I held out my hands, still holding the pistol. I doubted I could actually get my finger to contract on the trigger if I needed to, and I suspect he doubted it, too. He put the key in the small lock on the Flexi-Cuffs and twisted.

  "Take them off me."

  When he dug his fingers between my skin and the plastic, I didn't feel it. He pulled the cuffs free, careful to draw them over the pistol without touching it, then threw them aside onto the floor. As soon as he'd finished, he unzipped his parka, then draped it around my shoulders.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "There are blankets in the bedroom. If I go and get them will she kill me?"

  I shook my head.

  He went to get the blankets, returning with three dark wool ones that smelled of mothballs and must. He was wrapping the second one around my legs, tucking its end beneath my feet, when Alena entered. He didn't hear her come inside, and the only reason I knew she was there was because I'd been watching the door.

  She'd dressed for the work and the weather, winter camouflage in the form of overwhites. Her hair was hidden beneath a black watch cap, and that was barely visible beneath the drawn hood of her white parka. Grime and mud peppered her clothes, and the blood that soaked her right arm and spattered her right side was bright in contrast. The rifle across her back was a monster, a Winchester, the kind the locals used for hunting big buck, and in her hands she held one of the guns we'd taken from the Burien cache, a modified Ruger with an integrated suppressor.

  She had the pistol pointed at the back of Sean's head before she'd finished crossing the threshold, and the look on her face made it clear that shooting him was not only what she intended to do, it was what she needed to do. If she was seeing me at all, I couldn't tell.

  "No," I told her. "Friendly."

  Alena didn't move and neither did Sean, and it was a struggle for each of them, because each of them wanted to. Yet neither did, Alena keeping the gun and her vision fixed on the back of Sean's head, and Sean, perfectly still with the last blanket in his hand.

  "He's helping," I said to her. "You can close the door."

  Sean brought his eyes up to mine, and that was the extent of his motion. His eyes were so brown they might as well have been black. He didn't seem afraid, but he wasn't happy.

  "The door," I said again.

  Without shifting her aim or looking away from Sean, Alena stepped back, extended her right foot, and used her boot to close the door.

  "Who is he?" she asked in Georgian.

  It took me a moment to parse the switch in languages. I was beginning to feel drowsy, another symptom of the hypothermia. "Sean. I shot him back in Cold Spring."

  She thought about that. "We will have to kill him."

  "I'm hoping we won't."

  She thought about that, too. Then she lowered her aim, still with the gun in both hands, just no longer pointing it at Sean's head.

  "Move away from him," she said to him, switching back to English.

  With the caution reserved for handling poisonous snakes, Sean raised his hands and got up, stepping carefully away from me. He went to the side, avoiding the debris on the floor, giving Alena space. She watched him move, staring at him like he was a window and she wanted only the view beyond. For nearly thirty seconds more, none of us moved.

  Then she came to my side at the couch, and looked down at me.

  "I'm sorry I made you wait," she said.

  "You're here now," I said. "I'm going to pass out, okay?"

  I didn't hear her response, and when Alena woke me some time later, I found that I was still on the couch, but somehow I'd been dressed in dry clothes. The pain that surged in rising clamor throughout my extremities told me that I was going to recover.

  "It will be dawn soon," she said, speaking in Georgian. "We must go."

  I blinked the world back into focus, saw that Sean was seated on the chair, the Flexi-Cuffs now around his wrists. He was watching us impassively. As far as I could tell she hadn't actually harmed him, but there were ways she could
have done it that I wouldn't have been able to see.

  I sat up, and Alena pushed a mug of something hot into my hands. She'd stripped off the overwhites and cleaned off any of the blood that might have reached her skin. "Why'd you do that?"

  She didn't bother looking at him. "To be safe."

  "Well, I'm awake now," I said, switching to English. "Uncuff him."

  Alena's lips compressed, the taste of my words unpleasant. She did it anyway, though, brusquely working the lock on the cuffs and then whipping them away from his wrists, then moving back to stand by me at the couch.

  I sipped at the mug, discovered that it was warm water sweetened with sugar, nothing more, and nothing had ever tasted quite as good. I tried to drink it slowly, downing about half of it before attempting to move. The soreness and the stiffness that had settled into me made me wince.

  "So, Sean," I said. "What do we do with you."

  "You either kill me or let me go," he said. He glanced for a second to Alena before coming back to me. He was flexing his hands, working his fingers, and I wondered how tight Alena had fit the cuffs on him.

  "Who does-did-Bowles work for?"

  "I thought he was DoD, but the way you were talking to him I'm guessing I was wrong about that, that he's with the White House. I don't know, he never told us."

  "That was the first you'd heard of a connection with the White House?"

  "I'm with Gorman-North, Mr. Kodiak. I'm a contractor. I get the job, I do the job, I take my money, and I wait for the next job. It's mission-specific; I know you understand that."

  "What was the mission?"

  "To apprehend you. If possible, to apprehend the woman. To secure your cooperation in locating the woman if she couldn't be found."

  "And then?"

  "We were to drop you."

  I admired the way he said it; he said it the same way he'd said everything else about the job so far, without opinion, merely reporting the facts.

  "So Bowles was your contractor, that's what you're saying?" I asked him.

  "I don't know if Bowles was the one paying Gorman-North for our services," Sean said. "But he's definitely the contact guy. This time and that thing in New York, he was management."

  "Just your luck to be on both jobs?"

  "It's a small community. You know that."

  I took some more of my sugar water. "Getting smaller every day."

  Sean looked at Alena again, clearly trying to compose his next words, then went back to me. "I don't know what you were into, or why they want you. I don't give a damn. It's not my job to give a damn. You cut me loose, I'll tell them what happened, that you overwhelmed us."

  "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 attache 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. T
here 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."