Patriot Acts (10 page)

I made my way downstairs, and left using the front door, without making a sound.

CHAPTER

FOUR

“You’re sure it’s his?” Alena asked me.

“I haven’t the first fucking clue if it’s his or not,” I told her. “It’s been three years, the baby can’t be more than three months old, the math works. If it
is
his, and if he has been traveling around the way Dan suspects, then he must have hooked up with Mom someplace else, moved her and the baby here after he got settled. But it doesn’t matter. The point is he’s caring for the mother and the kid, so either it’s his or he’s taking responsibility for it.”

We were seated outside of a Peet’s Coffee perhaps a stone’s throw from each of our hotels. Morning traffic was just beginning to trickle past us, heading west on a one-way street. The rain, for the moment, had stopped, and the sky was just beginning to lighten, hinting at daylight behind its gray mask. It was surprisingly warm, maybe in the low fifties. Looking past Alena, into the coffee shop, the baristas looked like ghosts as they moved at their counter, hidden behind the sheen of condensation that had formed on the windows.

I waited for Alena to say something more, and she didn’t, and her expression didn’t change. I wondered if she was seeing the same problem here that I was. She had a paper cup of herbal tea in her hand. They’d given her two bags for it, and their strings dangled over the side with their tags, and she was flicking them with her index finger lightly, but that was it.

“Fuck this,” Dan growled, keeping his voice low. “Have you forgotten why we want this cumwhore? Have you forgotten what he did to us?”

I turned my head enough to meet his eyes, and hoped my expression gave him all the answer he needed. Then I checked my watch, and said, “I’ve got sixteen minutes past six. He gets off work in just under two hours. We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes to come up with a plan that gets us what we want without involving the woman or the kid.”

“Fuck this!” Dan repeated, louder. “We go back there, we do what we were going to do!”

“It’s not an option.”

“He brought this on himself! He should never have taken a woman, brought her into this! It’s his own fucking fault!”

Off the reflection on the window I saw Alena raise her head, focusing on Dan, and her expression still hadn’t changed. In Russian, she said, “But it’s not hers, nor the child’s.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” he shot back at her, also in Russian. “Where the fuck’s your head, Natasha?”

“The child and the mother stay out of it,” she said icily.

In the past, the tone, the finality, would have been enough to shut Dan down completely. In the past, he would have pulled a face, then stopped it before it could take hold, either his fear or his respect for Alena getting the better of him. Not this time.

He shot me a glare that was full of naked hostility and accusation, then leaned across the table, moving his head closer to Alena.

“You’re not thinking,” Dan said in Russian. He said it calmly, as if trying to explain a mistake to a promising but stubborn student. “Your man here has goatfucked this, Natasha. Illya won’t be in that apartment five minutes before he realizes someone was there, and as soon as he realizes that, he’s going to run again. What happens if he takes the woman and the baby with him? We just give him a free pass for murdering Natalie?”

She didn’t respond. Her index finger kept flicking the tags on their strings.

Dan shot me another glance, and I looked past him, watching the traffic on the street. If he was suspicious that maybe I understood what was being said, I couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know everywhere we’d lived for the past three years, only that we had started in Georgia, not that we’d ended there. But he’d have been a fool if he hadn’t already considered the possibility that I’d learned more than just yoga, ballet, and some new hand-to-hand moves while we’d been away.

He frowned, clearly struggling with what he wanted to say next. He leaned further forward towards Alena, his hands resting palm up on the table, trying to appeal to her.

“You know what we have to do,” Dan said gently, still speaking in Russian. “You know the best way to do it, and you know the tactics involved in something like this, the kind of pressure you’re going to need to bring. Refusing to do this is weakness, it’s the kind of thing that leads to mistakes that get you killed. You want information from Illya, the best way to get that will be to have the woman and the baby in the same room with him.”

Her only answer was the quiet assault her finger was continuing against the tea tags. Dan waited to see if she would say anything, and he waited what seemed like a long time, maybe thirty seconds, but she didn’t.

Abruptly, he straightened up in his chair, the frustration spilling from his voice into his posture and motion. “What the fuck is the matter with you? Natasha, seriously, and I say this with all the respect that is due to you, but you are seriously fucked up. I’ve known you, what, twenty years? Your man, here, he’s got you twisted around, you don’t know if you’re going or coming anymore. I know you taught him, I know he’s yours. But what he’s taught you, he’s changed you and it’s not for the better.”

Her index finger froze, and I felt as much as saw the subtle shift of her weight, the tensing of the muscles in her lower body, all the signatures of an upcoming attack. Dan saw it, too, or sensed it, maybe, and it didn’t matter that we were on a public street at a quarter past six in the morning; it was in his eyes, the fear that he’d crossed one line too many, and that however much she might have been changed, she hadn’t been changed enough to keep from killing him then and there.

“He has changed me,” she told him. She said it quietly, but it had all the force of the physical attack he’d feared, each word precise and delivered with deliberation. “And I have changed him. And if one of us is the worse for it, it is not me. Do you know why you have always feared me, Danilov? Even twenty years ago, when you first saw me? Have you ever wondered why?”

Dan hesitated, as if uncertain that she wanted an answer, or perhaps afraid of giving the wrong one. “I didn’t fear you, I respected you, you were a gifted girl, taught by the best, you were capable of—”

“You did, and you do,” she cut in, softly. “You never saw a girl. You saw an empty thing. You saw a tool that could do everything you had been trained to do, but could do it better than you could ever dream of doing yourself. You saw a weapon, but you did not ever see a person. And that, Danilov, is what terrified you.

“The empty thing would agree with you, and think that using the woman and the child to put pressure on the target was logical and efficient. The empty thing would murder them afterwards, calling the act necessary and prudent. The empty thing wouldn’t care.

“I am not that thing anymore. I would die before I became it again.”

She paused, perhaps to collect herself, perhaps to let what she’d said take hold with Dan. It was the most I’d ever heard her say about herself, as the person she’d been before we’d met, the person the Soviets had designed her to be with their calculated abuse and refined instruction. From the expression on Dan’s face, it was the most he’d ever heard her say on the subject, as well.

It couldn’t have been lost on him just who, sitting at this table on a February dawn, she thought was an empty thing, and who she thought was not.

“Illya is the target,” Alena concluded. “Not the woman. Not the child.”

Dan swallowed, looked from her to me, then back to her.

“Then what do we do?” He was speaking Russian, just as she had been. “We can’t let him go, Alena! What he did must be answered!”

I cleared my throat, and both of them looked at me.

“What kind of car is Illya driving?” I asked Dan.

His opinion of me was uncensored in his expression. “The fuck?”

“What kind of car? New? Old?”

“New, brand new. Ford Mustang, a black one. Vadim wants one, too. Why the fuck does it matter what car he’s driving?”

“Air bags,” Alena said.

“Vadim’s got his own vehicle,” I said. “Another rental?”

“Yeah, we rented on the same ID, same credit cards.”

“We’re going to need another two cars, then,” I said. “Older ones. And a roll or two of duct tape, and something to keep Illya down, a good sleeping pill will do it, something like Ambien.”

Dan looked at me as if he couldn’t decide to be incredulous, outraged, or both.

“We can’t let him go home,” I explained. “And we can’t let him get away.”

“His car,” Alena told Dan. “We’ll take him at his car.”

CHAPTER

FIVE

The irony of springing an automotive ambush on Illya
didn’t hit me until I hit him, or more precisely, until the moment I smashed the front end of my stolen 1978 Lincoln Town Car into the back of his probably-not-stolen and brand-spanking-new black-and-silver Ford Mustang. The cars connected with the unique bang that only comes from automobile accidents, the almost-hollow sound of metal and fiberglass cracking together, the sudden tinkling of glass and plastic hitting asphalt.

It was a good hit, not too fast, eleven miles an hour. Enough to rattle the bones, to snap me against my seat belt and send me back hard into the driver’s seat, and, more importantly, to send the Mustang forward. The new Mustangs have crap visibility out their rear, the window too small and set too high on the tail, and I couldn’t see Illya behind the wheel, but I heard the second collision as his front end met the back of Vadim’s Cadillac. The Caddie, like the Town Car, was stolen, though a couple years younger, maybe an ’82 or ’83.

I lost a second getting the seat belt off, which isn’t a long time in the concrete, but in the abstract was more than adequate for me to think about how slowly I was moving, and how badly this could turn out if I didn’t speed things up. We were on a public street, and while the daylight wasn’t broad due to the heavy cloud cover, it might as well have been. There was no place to hide, and certainly the sound of the crash would pull people from their beds or their breakfast tables, send them running to their windows to see what was happening on the street outside.

Then I was out of the car, the tire iron I’d found in the trunk in my hand, and running forward to the Mustang. Vadim was out of the Caddie, heading around its nose to come along the other side of the car, to the passenger side. I heard, then saw, the Pathfinder as it hopped up on the curb to my left, drawing even with the Mustang. Through the side window, I could see Illya still dazed, only now beginning to shake off the effects of three collisions in quick succession. While the first two—the Town Car and the Caddie—might have rattled his cage, it was the third, when his air bag had deployed, that had been the most crucial. For air bags to work, they have to work fast, and they have to be able to counter the force of the collision in their own right. Take one to the chest in a low-speed crash, and you’ll feel it.

Illya was feeling it right now.

I reached his door and tried the handle, and wasn’t at all surprised that it was locked. Inside, Illya was looking around, realizing what had happened and the trouble he was in. Opposite me, at the front passenger’s door, Vadim was working with a tire iron of his own. We hit the windows almost simultaneously, and the glass shattered in concert, raining onto the wet street and into the car. In his seat, Illya started shouting at us, gabbling fear and outrage as he leaned forward, trying to reach with his right hand to the small of his back. I spun the tire iron around, jabbed the straight end hard through the now missing window and into his side, connecting with him just below the armpit.

Illya screamed in pain, jerking away from me and towards Vadim, who had the passenger’s door open already. Seeing Vadim reaching in for him, Illya made another attempt to get at his gun, and I jabbed him with the tire iron a second time, just as hard, hitting him in the small of the back, above where he was wearing the weapon. Illya cried out again, lying down further across the seats, and Vadim grabbed hold of him by the back of his shirt and yanked.

Dan joined his son, and together the two of them pulled Illya free from the Mustang. Once they had him, they didn’t let go, dragging him flailing to the door Dan had left open on the Pathfinder. I did a quick spin around in place, checking the street, catching Alena seated behind the Pathfinder’s wheel as I did so. The traffic around us was light, not yet bloated with the morning commute, and only now really beginning to come to a stop. I didn’t see any police, and I didn’t see anyone who seemed to have witnessed the entirety of what we were doing, or at least, no one who had borne witness and therefore looked like they wanted to get involved.

“Let’s go!” Dan shouted to me.

Tire iron still in hand, I came around the back of the Mustang, jumped onto the hood of the Town Car where the two vehicles had tried to become one, and came down again beside the Pathfinder. Inside, Vadim was holding Illya in a headlock while Dan forced him to swallow two of the Ambien we’d scored. I moved around to the front of the car, climbed in beside Alena, and we were moving before I had the door closed.

In the backseat, Illya emitted a muffled sob, finally succumbing to Dan’s pressure.

“Ochen preyatna, cyka,”
I told him.

We caught Route 26 out of Portland, heading east, and by the time we’d hit Gresham, Illya was fast asleep, despite his best efforts. Given the dose, he’d stay down for at least the next eight hours, which would be enough to cover our transport time. As soon as he was out, Dan gave him a thorough search, coming up with a spring-action knife in addition to the pistol he’d been carrying at the small of his back. He had a couple hundred dollars in mixed bills, maybe his wages for the night’s work, tucked into his pockets, as well.

We drove without speaking for most of the next hour, Alena at the wheel, myself beside her, Dan and Vadim in the back. The sky started to clear as we began climbing towards Mount Hood, and there was snow throughout the Cascade Range, and the trees were very green and very lush and very beautiful, and it reminded me of the little I’d seen of northern Georgia, where the Caucasus came down from the border with Russia. We stopped at a gas station in Welches to fill the tank, and Vadim and I took the opportunity to go inside to gather some supplies. He grabbed a six-pack of Budweiser and two bags of spicy Cheetos, and I made him put the Budweiser back.

“We do
not
want to be stopped for an open container in the car,” I told him.

Vadim pulled a face that said that I absolutely needed to lighten up, then replaced the beer and got himself six cans of Red Bull instead. I went with two bottles of clearly-from-concentrate orange juice, and another two of water, and looked for something that wasn’t purely high-fructose corn syrup. Failing that, I decided I wasn’t hungry. I also grabbed a road atlas of Oregon.

Back in the car, now with Dan at the wheel and Alena seated beside him, and Vadim and I flanking the sleeping Illya at the back, we broke out the map and took a look at our options. Thus far, we’d done pretty well relying on our improvisational skills, but what we needed to do next would require seclusion and security. We had Illya; now we needed a place to button him up and do what needed to be done next.

“What are you thinking?” Dan asked. He asked it in Russian, maybe to see if I could keep up. “Take him out to the middle of the high desert, maybe?”

“It’s the winter season,” I said. “We want someplace quiet and discreet, and the further from Portland and the police the better.”

“You think a vacation rental?” Alena asked.

“It worked for us in Georgia. We find a place that’s not being used right now, maybe one that looks like it’s only occupied during the summer. A fishing cabin, rather than skiing, say.”

“So near a river,” Vadim said. “Someplace near a river.”

I checked the map. “Along the Deschutes would work. If we had access to a computer we could just do a quick search for vacation rentals, plug in the communities we like the looks of, see what’s available, and see what’s
not
being used at the moment.”

“Hold on.” Vadim handed me the can of Red Bull he’d been working on, then dug around in his pockets until he came out with one of the new Palm Treos, began fiddling with it. “Ah, it’s going slow as shit, the coverage’s no good out here. Hang on.”

I looked to Dan, said, “Maybe we should keep moving while he does this.”

Dan started the Pathfinder again, pulling us back onto the road. Vadim stayed bent over his Treo, occasionally muttering about how long it was taking for the pages to load.

“Okay,” he said, after almost two minutes. “I’ve got a page here, it’s got towns in Central Oregon with vacation rentals. Lots of towns. Bend, Eagle Crest, Sunriver—”

“Sunriver,” I told him, checking the map.

There was another pause, this one perhaps half as long as the first, accompanied by more of his muttering about crappy connection speeds. “Got it. Lots of places.
Lots
of places, man, let me check availability, here…goddammit this is slow…yeah, okay, looks like about a dozen places we could use.”

“Note the addresses,” I told him. “We’ll eyeball them when we get there, pick the one we like.”

“This is amateur hour,” Dan said, mostly to himself. “We should have had a location lined up before we grabbed him.”

“We also should have known there was a woman and a child,” I told him.

Dan didn’t say anything else until we reached Sunriver.