Patriot acts ak-6 Read online

  SEVEN

  Vadim found a bottle of champagne and three micro pizzas, pepperoni, in the galley when he went to look for lunch. He seemed genuinely surprised that Alena and I would decline to share such a feast with him, returning to his seat and his iPod with a rolling of the eyes that did more to convince me of his nineteen years than anything else had thus far.

  After a moment, Alena pulled herself to her feet and put on water for tea. I looked out the plane window and saw land beneath us, painted in white. Ice or snow. We were headed for Europe, I knew that, Eastern Europe almost certainly. I wasn't sure of the range of the Gulfstream V, but supposed we'd have to land to refuel at least once before reaching our final destination.

  Alena made two trips back from the galley, traveling slowly and carefully so as to keep from spilling the hot drinks. She brought mine first, then returned with hers, and took her same seat once again.

  "Black tea," she said, making a face. "No herbal, nothing without caffeine. I'm sorry."

  "We'll survive," I told her, thinking about how, once upon a time, I'd thought caffeine was a major food group all its own. Now it was no longer a part of the diet, neither mine nor hers, at the top of the list of verboten stimulants, in fact. Aside from being addictive as, say, nicotine, caffeine drains the adrenal gland. Considering how much Alena and I relied on adrenaline to do its job, that was something neither of us wanted.

  "How many days have I lost?" I asked.

  "Three and a half. Dan wanted to move you sooner, but I wouldn't let him. You lost a lot of blood. You almost died."

  "We could have made the trip sooner."

  "It was not in my mind to risk it. You nearly died, Atticus."

  I considered that, then said, "And you wanted to see how what happened in Cold Spring would play out. See what got reported in the media, maybe."

  Alena brushed hair back from her cheek, and as she did, the Gulfstream banked slightly, and sunlight came flooding through the windows. Where it touched her head, the copper of her hair seemed to burn.

  "So how bad is it?" I asked.

  "No, that's not what they did."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It didn't make the media, Atticus. None of it. From the time we fled the safe house until just this morning, when we left Brighton Beach, there was never as much as a whisper that anyone had died in a gun battle in Cold Spring. There was never as much as a whisper that anything happened there at all."

  "There must have been something. Some report."

  "No. Nothing."

  I removed my newly acquired glasses, rubbed my eyes with my other hand. The glasses had been waiting for me this morning, and while the prescription had been correct-or at least, close enough that my eyes had been able to compensate-their fit was bad, and they dug into the skin behind my ears. I folded them closed, set them on the shelf beside me.

  "Natalie," I said. "There should have been at least something about Natalie."

  "And I am saying to you that there wasn't, Atticus. There was nothing at all."

  She stared at me, a little blurred in my sight, but her expression seemed almost entirely neutral, her sad brown eyes meeting my own. She was waiting for me to say it, to put the words to what she had already concluded, but I wasn't willing to, not quite yet. Not until I had at least made an effort at providing an alternate explanation.

  My problem was, no alternate was offering itself for use.

  "Dan did not need to sanitize the house," Alena said. "They would have done that for us."

  "Whoever 'they' are."

  "You know who 'they' are, Atticus, at least in the abstract, at least as much as I know it. There is only one possible explanation to satisfy every question, from who hired Oxford, to who tried to kill you, to who tried to kill me, to who did kill Natalie as a result."

  "There could be others."

  "With the ability to enforce media silence regarding what happened, to cover up the deaths of almost a dozen men? With the ability and the capital to assemble, finance, and deploy two coordinated strikes against both you and me with perhaps less than three, maybe even two hours of notice? There was no expectation that you would be arriving at the safe house, Atticus, remember that. The initial plan had been that you would deal with Oxford while I was taken to Cold Spring. You were never to join us there."

  "Natalie called Dan from the road, told him that I was coming in with you two, that I'd need a car."

  "The car that Illya acquired, yes. Which is probably when he informed his masters that you would be coming to the safe house. Masters who, in all likelihood, are responsible for Illya's disappearance. The team that ambushed you could have been an element of the larger team that assaulted the house; they could have been split off when it became apparent they needed a new contingency to deal with you, when they realized they needed to stage an ambush."

  The tea bag in my cup was floating on the surface, on its side. I poked it back down with a finger.

  "That's something that's been bothering me," I said. "Why didn't they just hit all of us at the house? Why did they think it was necessary to hit me separately?"

  "They identified you as the greatest threat."

  "Greater than you? I find that hard to believe."

  "They knew I was wounded. They wanted to isolate you. That's why they forced you into an ambush, away from the safe house."

  "Stupid on their part."

  "Perhaps. They were having to adapt very quickly, remember. And their assessment of you was correct; you broke their ambush, and you killed all three of them without dying yourself. There are not many who could have survived that."

  "If they'd kept the whole team together, hit us as soon as we'd arrived at the safe house-"

  Alena moved her left hand, a slight gesture, side to side, impatiently. "Don't make assumptions, Atticus. We do not know if they were in position when we arrived. It is just as likely that they had to call for more men to set the ambush as it is that the three who attacked you were part of the larger unit."

  I snagged on the word "unit." "You think they were military?"

  "Not active duty, no."

  "Civilian contractors."

  "That would be my suspicion, yes. And we both know who civilian contractors contract with, Atticus." She ran a hand through her hair. "As I said, we both know who 'they' are."

  I put my tea down, on the shelf, beside my glasses. I was tired and I was sore, and I hurt in body and heart. I let my head fall back against the cushion behind me, closed my eyes.

  Natalie Trent was still resting on her bed of leaves.

  "I love my country," I said softly. "But I fear my government."

  Beside me, Alena said, "With good reason."

  Then she reached across the aisle, and took hold of my hand, and held it until the government I feared was far, far behind us.

  PART

  TWO

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  It took three years, two months, and twelve days for us to find where Illya Tyagachev was hiding.

  Within three weeks of arriving in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, I was out of the woods and beginning to heal, and to heal fast. Maybe it was because I'd been in the best shape of my life when I'd been shot, better even than when I'd been twenty and full of juice and pounding the ground in the Army; maybe it was simply my bullheaded resolve that, between Alena and myself, at least one of us needed to be able to rely on their legs to do what they were told.

  Whatever the reason, I bounced back quickly, and was able to move around, unassisted and with only minor discomfort, before the end of November. I wasn't doing handstands during yoga, and the ballet training was off the table, but if I had to, I could serve in a pinch. Vadim was still traveling with us, and he helped pick up my slack, further acting as our legman, gopher, and extra gun.

  We spent New Year's Day that year at the Sonnenhof Clinic in Saanen-Gstaad, looking out at the snow-covered mountains of the Bernese Oberland. Alena had undergone her first surgery o
nly two days prior, a combination exploration and cleanup where a team of orthopedic surgeons had gone into her leg to visualize the damage Oxford had done there. They'd removed the remaining bone debris and the last of the shot that had been missed by the first doctor who'd worked on her, back in Kingstown, St. Vincent.

  The operation took just under three hours, and the doctor leading Alena's care, Frau Doktor Marika Akrman, told us afterwards that it had been "very productive."

  "But there is, I am afraid, not so good news, as well," she said. Her English was precise, the accent very German. "What we feared due to the delay in your treatment has come to happen, and the anterior cruciate ligament will have to be replaced. In addition, the tendons that were severed have retracted. If you had come to us sooner, we might have been able to reextend and reattach them. Unfortunately, that is no longer possible."

  Frau Doktor Akrman was in her fifties, with a girlish face and blond-white hair. When she frowned or smiled it made her look a lot younger. She was frowning when she added, "I am sorry to tell you that I do not think you will ever be able to dance as you once did."

  Alena and I took the news stoically. That had been our story, that Alena had been teaching ballet in Moscow, a bystander making her way down the street caught in a cross fire between two rival gang factions. It wasn't the most creative lie, but it worked, because it wasn't much of a lie at all. I'd found the report of the actual gunfight through a Google search, and it was easy enough to put Alena on the scene as a woman named Sinovia Gariblinski, an innocent victim who had recently wed an American software designer more than willing to pay for his new bride's expensive surgeries.

  In fact, the money behind the surgeries-the money behind everything we did, how we traveled, how we lived, all of it-was Alena's and Alena's alone. Her "blood money," she called it, the wages she had been paid for the nine men and two women she had murdered as one of The Ten. There was a lot of it, hidden in trusts and accounts and investments around the globe, carefully folded into the safety of private banks. One of the first things Alena had done when we'd reached Eastern Europe was reach out for her attorney, arranging a meeting between him and the two of us in Warsaw. She'd liquidated some funds and redistributed others to new hiding places. After all, I'd been able to leverage Oxford through his money; she didn't want the same thing happening to us.

  "How much more of this will she have to go through?" I asked Dr. Akrman.

  The Frau Doktor inclined her head, accepting my concern for my spouse. "Another two procedures, I think. We will have to reattach the bones in the tibia and fibula, as discussed, and bolt them back into place. Then a final operation, to replace the anterior cruciate. Of course, you will need to look into appropriate physical therapy once you get her back home."

  "How long until I regain the use of the leg?" Alena asked.

  "If you dedicate yourself to the physical therapy, not long." Frau Doktor Akrman smiled a practiced smile, attempting to remove the sting from what she had to say next. "But without the tendons, the strength in your left leg will be severely diminished. Running and jumping will be difficult, and I would strongly advise against even attempting to try."

  Alena smiled, too, saying she understood, and Frau Doktor Akrman left, and as soon as she was out of the room and the door was closed, Alena pulled the pillow from behind her head and threw it across the room. The pillow hit the television in its open cabinet on the opposite wall, then fell to the floor. Alena cursed in Russian.

  "Don't swear," I told her. "You can't breathe properly if you swear."

  She turned the cursing at me, glaring, and I gave her a big grin in return. She tried to keep glaring at me for another second or two, but my grin won, and finally she had to look away, out the windows and at the glorious winter view, to keep her bad mood intact.

  "It's better than I hoped," I said.

  "No running?" Alena demanded. "No jumping? How is that better?"

  "You'll be able to walk without assistance, without the cane. You'll be able to swim."

  She grunted a sullen acceptance, and I left it at that. The last operation was performed that March, five months after we'd fled the States, and it was a shorter procedure than the second, and at the end of it Frau Doktor Akrman declared it a success. Alena was discharged from the clinic eight days later, and we made our way back to Georgia by roundabout route over the next three days. She was on crutches, and despite the Frau Doktor's optimism, we both knew it would be a while before she could move about reliably on her own.

  Vadim had located a new house for us outside the city of Batumi-the fifth we'd stayed in since fleeing the U.S.-down in the south along the Black Sea coast. It was easy to find places on the coast to rent or buy, and the Georgian economy being what it was, a little of Alena's money went a very long way. Most of the dachas the Party bigwigs once used were uninhabited or had been converted to summer rentals, and if we were willing to pay in cash-and we always were-almost anything we needed could be obtained in relatively short order, from vehicles to accommodations to weapons.

  The house was larger and more ostentatious than I would have chosen if I'd made the pick myself, with too much space for only three people and a dog. The last of the Georgian winter was still with us, and keeping the house warm was a nightmare. Vadim acknowledged all of these faults, but then justified the choice by telling us that there was an indoor pool, and that it was heated.

  I was growing very fond of Vadim.

  Alena and I made the first, stuttering attempts at resuming our respective training regimens. We swam a lot, slowly resumed our routine of morning yoga. Alena still couldn't incorporate ballet into her workout, but she took great glee in watching me attempt it, and never failed to find something wrong with the way I was moving, with a jete here, an entrechat quatre there. I didn't mind; I enjoyed my feeble attempts at dance, the way it focused my mind inward, honed my awareness of my own body.

  We brought up a physical therapist from Batumi three times a week to work with Alena. He worked with her in the pool, mostly, and with weights, sometimes, and after watching them together during the first half-dozen or so of their sessions, I left them alone. Vadim tailed him the first four times the therapist left the house, and his assessment was, and I agreed with him, that if this guy was going to try and kill any of us, it wouldn't be because he was working for someone who wanted him to do it.

  Twice since the year turned Dan had contacted us via e-mail sent from anonymous accounts. There had been no sign of Illya, and in February, Dan offered the theory that whoever he'd been working for had tied up that particular loose end with a hollow-point to the base of the skull. Alena was inclined to agree. I wasn't so certain.

  In early April, we received a third e-mail, and in it Dan asked if we could perhaps do without Vadim, that he had work for him back in Brooklyn.

  "He's missing him," Alena confided to me while watching my attempts at dance the following morning. "So he says he has work, because Dan doesn't want us to think he is weak."

  "He misses his son. How is that weak?"

  "He believes admitting such things makes one vulnerable. It can be exploited."

  I thought about what Natalie had said to me six months earlier in the kitchen of the house in Cold Spring, and what I'd said to her in return. Her words had seemed so saccharine and manipulative at the time, an attempt by her to convince me to stay, and I'd resented her like hell for making something that was already difficult all the harder.

  At night, when I closed my eyes, I still saw her on her autumnal bed. It didn't help things that the last words I'd exchanged with her had been bitter and spiteful ones.

  "It can," I said, and left it at that. At the end of April we moved to a smaller house outside the resort town of Ureki, and the next morning we sent Vadim back to his father. The boy was glad to go, though he tried to hide it. He missed New York, and he had friends there he wanted to see. I could almost remember what that was like.

  The following day the weather tur
ned unseasonably ugly, as if reminding us it was still winter, but Alena, Miata, and I went down to the shore for a walk anyway. We did some shopping for the house, bought some fresh-caught sea bass for dinner. In the grocery store, I saw Alena hovering over the selection of wines, and she caught me looking and then moved on to gather fruits and vegetables. Georgians, as a rule, loved to drink, and loved their wine, but Alena was not Georgian, she was Russian, born-she thought-in Magadan, and further, she never touched alcohol. Since I'd begun training with her, I didn't, either.

  We took our walk, getting cold and wet, trying to enjoy the empty beach and the quiet, but it wouldn't take. When we'd been in Bequia, both of us had known Oxford was coming, that it was only a matter of when, not if. That knowledge had followed us, cast its pall on the mood and the environment. Even at the best of times in Bequia, it had been impossible to truly relax.

  So it was here, some six and a half months since the attempts on our respective lives. It didn't matter that there'd been nothing, no threat, no signs of danger since that murderous night in Cold Spring. Our enemy remained, unnamed and unknown and potentially very powerful, and just because they hadn't found us yet didn't mean they had abandoned their search. As it had been with Oxford, we lived with the knowledge that we were hunted, and that the hunter might find us at any time.

  Yet we lived with something else now, too, something that we hadn't truly had in Bequia, even with Alena teaching me. We had been tested, after all, first by Oxford, then more cruelly by Cold Spring, and we had remained true to each other, had defended each other, had supported each other. For Alena, it must have been an extraordinary sensation, bewildering and perhaps even frightening. There had always been someone who had wanted to hurt her, or use her, or kill her, or there had been the promise of the same. That promise remained, but this time it was different.

  This time, she had someone with her that she could trust absolutely.

  With Vadim in the house, it had been easy to push any thoughts of intimacy aside as inappropriate, even if, as an excuse, it was a feeble one. Vadim didn't care what we did, and, being nineteen, probably imagined that we were doing far more together than we could've possibly done, anyway. With the addition of fabulous lingerie.