Patriot Acts (12 page)

He lifted his head, his look pleading, his eyes shining with tears. “I didn’t…they never told me—”

Alena handed the pistol to Vadim.

“—I don’t remember!” Illya screamed, and he tried again to push himself backwards, through the headboard and the wall, watching Vadim with alarm. When he ran out of room for his retreat, he started off the bed, instead, flopping to my right, and Dan lurched forward, grabbing hold of Illya by the upper arms, and gripping him tightly, forced him back into position. I half expected Dan to follow it up with a free shot, a punch to the gut or the side, but he didn’t. He just shoved Illya back into place on the bed and then resumed his seat.

Illya remained motionless for a second, staring at Vadim, now holding the pistol, then cried out and threw himself in the opposite direction he’d gone before, this time towards me. Unlike Dan, I didn’t move, just let him topple from the bed and onto the cold wood floor. He landed hard, no way to catch himself or, at least, no consideration in his fear to do so, and took the impact on his right shoulder. He sobbed, bound feet working, scrabbling against the wood floor, trying to drive himself into the corner, alternately pleading and whimpering.

I felt like I was going to be sick.

“Alena,” I said.

“Atticus?”

“Leave us alone for a couple of minutes.”

She put her hand back on my shoulder, resting lightly just for a moment, then turned and headed out without a word. Dan followed her, more slowly and much more reluctantly. Vadim started to follow, then turned back. He offered me the pistol.

“I don’t need it,” I told him.

Vadim’s brow creased, as if he wasn’t sure what to make of me, or at least, as if he wasn’t sure what I was up to. Then he shrugged, cast a last glance at Illya, and followed after the others, taking the Taurus with him.

I waited until Vadim had closed the door, then rose from where I’d been sitting. Illya had wedged himself into the corner, and his bladder had emptied, and the smell of urine was ripe and tragic. I put my hands on his shoulders, gently, but all the same he cringed when I did it, and I don’t blame him at all for that.

“Come on,” I said. “Let me help you up.”

I felt him shudder, exhaustion and surrender together, and he let me lift him back to the bed. I didn’t have anything for his wet underpants, but I put the blanket back around him all the same, trying to keep the chill away. He watched me with confusion and with fear.

Once he was propped up once more, I resumed my seat in the chair.

“Dan’s going to kill you,” I told him. “There’s nothing to be done for it. You’re going to die, and you don’t want to, but you and I already know that’s the way it’s going to be.”

“You…you could stop him.”

“I could,” I agreed. “I’m not going to stop him.”

The despair seemed to flood his entire body.

“No one is going to,” I said. “This is where it ends for you. This is where the choices you’ve made have brought you. Do you understand that?”

“It wasn’t my fault.” He said it softly. “They were government men, don’t you understand? What was I supposed to do?”

“You didn’t have to call them, Illya. No one had a gun at your head. They’d cut you loose. You could have waited until it was all said and done and vanished. But you did it for the money. Or you did it because Dan treated you badly. Or you did it because you thought when it was over you’d come out on top in Brighton Beach, or any other reason that only you can know. But you’re not going to convince me you’re a victim, here. It’s been three years, and you’re selling meth and you’re still trying to be a big-time Russian hood. So it doesn’t matter why you did it. It only matters
that
you did it.”

Illya closed his eyes, his upper teeth working on his lower lip. After several seconds, he nodded, slightly.

“Tell me about these men, the ones who paid you.”

“There was only one,” Illya said, after a second. “The others, the ones who took me, they were working for him. But there was only one in charge. Bowles. His name was Matt…Matthew Bowles.”

I nodded, just barely. Matthew Bowles had held the strings on Oxford. One of the middlemen, and it was logical that Bowles had been responsible for setting up what had happened in Cold Spring the same way he had set things up for Oxford, at least until Scott Fowler and I forced a stop to that. Bowles was a facilitator, a fixer, but he wasn’t the shot-caller. Natalie Trent had died because of what Bowles had put into motion, and he would taste his own blood for that, I would see to it.

But that wasn’t going to be enough.

“Did Bowles say who he worked for? What part of the government?”

“He didn’t…he didn’t say.” Illya shook his head. “I thought at first he was FBI, or maybe CIA, but it wasn’t that.”

“How do you know?”

“When he offered me the money, I told him…I told him it was a good offer, but he could offer me anything, why should I believe him? How could I know he would do what he said, that he even had the money to give me? And the man, he gave me his business card, it had his cell number on it and his name and all of that.”

“You’re a fool, Illya, but you’re not an idiot. We’ve been over that already. You can’t expect me to believe you did what you did on the strength of a business card anyone could have created.”

“No, no, not like that,” he said hastily. “You misunderstand, he gave me the card, but he showed me this ID, this pass. It was the real thing, it had to be. Hologram, microchip, picture, everything. It was real, Atticus. I knew he wasn’t lying.”

“What place?” I asked, and when he didn’t answer immediately, I repeated myself, turning the words harsh. “What place? Who’d he work for?”

Illya met my eyes, and even through his defeat and fear, I could read something else. A dawning realization, perhaps, that he and I weren’t so far apart in our circumstances as the moment might lead one to believe. There was almost humor in it, almost glee, but not quite.

“You’re fucked,” he said, softly. “You and Natasha and Dan and his shit of a kid, you’re all fucked now. You don’t even realize it.”

“Who did Bowles work for, Illya?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Realization was creeping into his voice, and with it, new strength. “It doesn’t matter what I say. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. You can’t win. You’re going to die. Just like me, you’re all going to die.”

I shot from my chair to where he lay on the bed, pushed the middle and index fingers of my right hand into the side of his trachea while holding his head back against the headboard with my other. I pressed down, and I pressed hard, because I was angry. Illya’s eyes bulged.

“Maybe,” I said. “But you’ll die first. Who did Bowles work for, Illya? Where was the ID from?”

He croaked, his lips pulling apart in a smile.

With a rasp, Illya said, “The White House, motherfucker.”

I held my fingers against his skin, didn’t move. Illya’s eyes seemed to fill with laughter as much as tears. For a long moment, I thought about finishing him then, about twisting his head around or crushing his trachea or using any of the other dozen ways that I knew to end his life.

“Dan!” I called out.

He was at the door within a breath. “Atticus?”

I released Illya.

“Make him pay,” I told Dan.

“We all do,” Dan told me.

PART
THREE

CHAPTER

ONE

The woman who took my passport application at the post
office in Whitefish, Montana, was in her mid-fifties, shaped like a dumpling, and chatty.

“Oh, travel,” she said. “Where you heading, then?”

“I’m thinking about visiting South America,” I lied. “Rio, maybe, someplace warm.”

She clucked, checking to see that my two headshots had been properly affixed. The photographs were new, taken that morning at a copy shop a couple blocks south of Whitefish Lake. I’d worn my glasses for the photos, and the young man working the camera had needed to remind me that I wasn’t supposed to smile.

“That’d be nice, someplace warm,” the dumpling said. “All this snow, can you believe it? The winters, they’re just getting colder. Global warming.”

“Global warming,” I agreed.

“Oh, you’re on Iron Horse Road,” she said, looking at the address I’d put on the application. “Bought one of the new places up by the lake?”

“It’s about a mile from the lake.”

“So you’re a resident, or is it just a vacation home?”

“Resident,” I said. “Just arrived.”

She stopped reviewing my application long enough to offer me a doughy hand to shake. “Well, then, welcome to Whitefish. I’m Laura.”

“Atticus,” I said.

Laura checked my application. “Atticus…Kodiak? Like the bear?”

“Like the bear.”

“Atticus Kodiak. Odd name, you don’t mind me saying.”

“I don’t mind you saying it at all, Laura,” I said.

She laughed, either pleased with my generous spirit or still wildly amused by my name, then moved my application to a tray beside her scale. “Well, everything looks just fine to me, Atticus. You should have a response in the next six to eight weeks.”

“Sooner, I hope,” I said, with a smile.

It was still snowing when I stepped back outside onto Baker Avenue, and I put my watch cap back atop my head and got my gloves back on my hands, then started walking north, in the direction of the lake. Snow, clean and white and wet, coated almost everything the eye could see. The temperature was below freezing, and there were a few people about, but no one paid me any attention. Whitefish billed itself as a resort community more than anything else, golfing, hunting, and fishing in the summer, skiing and sledding and skating in the winter, and a variety of festivals and events to fill in the gaps between. Resident population wasn’t more than 7,000, and while the income divide between those who visited and those who remained was dramatic, the cost of living wasn’t so high as to make it intolerable.

I walked in the cold and the snow, following Baker north over the short bridge that spanned where the Whitefish River flowed through town, then a couple blocks later crossed the railroad tracks on Viaduct. Whitefish had begun as a fur-trading town in the 1800s, and then the Great Northern Railway had come in the early 1900s, and fur turned to logging, and now, a hundred years later, logging had given way to leisure. All along the shores of the lake, resort homes were cropping up as fast as the hammers could raise them.

It took me most of an hour to get back to the house, partially because of the snow, but mostly because I was taking my time. If I was being watched or followed, I saw no signs of it, and I suspected that was because there was nobody watching or following me. It had been exactly a week since Alena and I had left the unpleasantness of Sunriver, Oregon, behind us. To our knowledge, Illya’s body hadn’t been found yet.

The way Dan and Vadim worked, I doubted it ever would.

Still, Alena and I had kept our movements discreet since then, doing our damnedest to stay beneath the radar. We were still hunted, and with the information Illya had given us, there was no question that the hunters had the power of the federal government at their disposal, at least in some part. That we’d been back in the U.S. for ten days without attracting attention could only mean that we’d managed a good job of it, that we’d kept any alarms regarding our whereabouts from being tripped.

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 Kobuleti, 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.