The Spy Who Came for Christmas

by David Morrell

  Immediately, he removed the partly empty magazine, slid it into a pants pocket, and shoved a full fifteen-round magazine into the pistol. Only then did he speak to the microphone, his voice an urgent whisper.

  “I found him.”

  Through the earbud under his cap, he heard an abrupt exhale.

  “Thank God,” the Pakhan’s taut voice said.

  Andrei thought it ironic that his leader, who had also been raised in the atheistic Soviet Union, would use that expression.

  “Our clients are here now,” the Pakhan said. “I’ve never seen anyone so furious. How soon can you deliver the package?”

  “I don’t know,” Andrei answered.

  “What?”

  “Pyotyr took cover in a house. I need to figure how to get to him.”

  “Don’t let him escape again,” the Pakhan’s voice warned.

  “Not this time. He’s ours.”

  “I don’t give a govno about him! Deal with him quickly! The package! Just get me the package!”

  It troubled Andrei that the Pakhan felt so threatened. Normally, he was content to provide barely adequate service. If clients complained, he ordered someone like Andrei to set fire to their homes. People who needed to employ the Odessa Mafia were desperate to begin with. The Pakhan’s attitude was that they ought to be grateful for any help they received.

  But these clients were another matter.

  The three million dollars they’d paid for a week’s work—at a resort city, no less—had been too tempting for the Pakhan to resist. At the time, he’d called it easy pickings.

  “They made all the arrangements. They bribed the necessary people. They learned the target’s schedule, exactly when and where the job can be done. It should have been easy for them. But they can’t carry out the actual mission. They need us because we can blend with the Santa Fe crowd, while they’d be spotted right away. So I charged those damned Arabs as much as possible.”

  Accustomed to causing fear rather than being the subject of it, the Pakhan now understood the penalty for going into business with clients who were even more ruthless than he was.

  Andrei stepped off the lane toward a fir tree that provided a hidden vantage point from which he could watch the house.

  “Did the rest of you hear?” he murmured to his microphone.

  “Yes.” Yakov’s voice came through the earbud. “Where are you?”

  “Follow the lane I took.”

  A few minutes later, when he saw two heavyset men hurrying through the falling snow, Andrei said to the microphone, “I’m to your right. By a fir tree.”

  The men paused, looking in his direction.

  “There you are,” Mikhail murmured. “Good. We wouldn’t want to shoot you by mistake.” Grinning at the joke, he and Yakov took cover behind the tree and assessed the house.

  “How many people are inside?” Yakov’s question could barely be heard.

  “No way to tell,” Andrei replied softly. “Someone walked off and made footprints earlier, but those are Pyotyr’s footprints that go through the gate toward the house.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Blood on the gate.”

  “Ah.”

  “There’s light—probably from a television—in the room on the far right.” Andrei pointed. “Maybe there’s someone in the house, someone who isn’t aware that Pyotyr snuck in. Or maybe the house is empty, and Pyotyr turned on the television to make it seem the place is occupied.”

  “A lot of maybes,” Mikhail said. “He lost his cell phone. But if he’s in there, he’ll use the land line to call the police.”

  “I shot the telephone wire,” Andrei told him.

  “He could have phoned before you did that. Or maybe there’s a cell phone in the house.”

  “Then why haven’t the police arrived? Why don’t we hear sirens?”

  Yakov shrugged. “It’s Christmas Eve on Canyon Road. The crowd would make it difficult for police cars to reach here.”

  “But we can’t just leave or rush the house because we think the police might be coming,” Andrei insisted. “If we screw up, we’d better run and keep running. We’d never be able to stop—because we know our clients and the Pakhan will never stop hunting us.”

  And my family, Andrei thought. If the Pakhan can’t find me, he’ll go after my wife and daughters.

  “Then what do you suggest?” Mikhail wanted to know.

  “We’ll approach the house from three sides,” Andrei decided. “Pyotyr can’t defend it from every angle. At least two of us are bound to get in.”

  “Those are pretty good odds, as long as I’m not the one who gets shot,” Yakov said.

  “Pyotyr’s wounded and weak from blood loss,” Andrei countered. “His aim will be affected. There’s a high probability that all of us will get out of this alive.”

  “‘High probability’ doesn’t fill me with confidence. Whoever goes in from the front takes the greatest risk. How do we decide who—”

  “The two of you sound like old women. I’ll take the front,” Andrei said irritably.

  They stared at him.

  “Pyotyr knows I’m the one he has the most reason to fear. I’ll show myself in front of the house. He’ll be distracted. That gives the two of you a better chance to get inside from different directions. If we synchronize the attack precisely—”

  “We have company,” Yakov warned.

  Andrei pivoted toward the lane. At first, he worried that police were arriving. But the figure he saw was alone, plodding through the snow: a man wearing a buttoned pale-gray coat and a hat with built-in earflaps. He walked with his head so low that he looked weary.

  The holiday blues? Andrei wondered. Or maybe he’s just protecting his face from the snow.

  A further thought occurred to him.

  Maybe this is a policeman putting on some kind of act. If so, he won’t be alone. He’ll be setting up a trap.

  Andrei thought of the Pakhan, of the clients, of Pyotyr.

  Of his wife and daughters.

  The man trudged closer, angling toward the opposite side of the lane, toward the gate.

  I’ll take the risk, Andrei decided.

  * * * * *

  “WE’RE GOING to Santa Fe for a baby?”

  “Yes, Pyotyr. For the child of peace.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you watch the news on television?”

  “The news? Bah. Everything they tell us here is propaganda, the same as it was back in Russia.”

  “Then you’ve never heard of Ahmed Hassan?”

  “Is that the child’s name?”

  “The father’s. He’s an obstetrician.”

  “Andrei, my English isn’t . . .”

  “Hassan delivers babies. He’s a surgeon who once specialized in treating Palestinians who were shot in gunfights with Israelis.

  Over the years, he operated on two thousand combat patients. ‘But nothing got better,’ he said. So he changed his specialty and became a baby doctor. Thousands of children are in the world because of him, far more than all the gunshot patients he treated. As he tells his followers, he chose life instead of death, hope instead of hate.”

  “His followers? You make Hassan sound like some kind of religious leader.”

  “In a way, he is. Although he doesn’t have any religious authority, his speeches are so impassioned that a great many people are inspired by his sheer presence. He speaks like a prophet and attracts more disciples every day. They believe he has a vision. He preaches that war between Palestinians and Israelis will destroy the region and the rest of the world with it. Many—those who are tired of the decades of killing and destruction—agree with him.

  “‘The children,’ Hassan reminds them. ‘Think of our children. If we truly love them, if we treasure them as much as we claim to, we’ll give them a future and create a lasting peace.’”

  “Peace. You used that word to describe the baby.” />
  “Yes, Pyotyr. The child of peace. Hassan’s child. His enemies are paying us three million dollars to steal it for them.”

  * * * * *

  “THE LAYOUT of the house?” Meredith sounded troubled.

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  In the shadowy kitchen, Kagan saw her outline sit tensely straighter as she held the tiny glass to the baby’s lips.

  “No special reason,” he answered. “Just a standard precaution. A way to fill the time.”

  “Precaution?”

  “So I can anticipate.”

  “Anticipate what? You heard Cole. The man’s gone.”

  “Probably. The thing is, it’s always a good idea to have a backup plan.”

  In the meager light, Kagan couldn’t see Meredith’s eyes, but he was certain that she studied him nervously. The silhouette of her head nodded toward a dark archway next to a recessed side-by-side refrigerator-freezer at the back of the kitchen.

  “The furnace and laundry room are through that arch,” she said. “There’s also a small bathroom, just a toilet and sink.”

  “Any windows back there?”

  “No.”

  Kagan was grateful for that small blessing. “What about the rest of the house? Cole said his room is in front.”

  “Yes. In front there’s the living room, a bathroom, and then Cole’s room.”

  “What about in back?”

  “Ted’s office is behind the living room. The master bedroom is next to that.”

  “Across from Cole’s room?”

  “Yes. At the end of a hallway that divides that part of the house.

  “How many outside doors do you have?”

  Kagan noticed that Meredith’s voice wavered as the logic behind his questions became impossible to ignore.

  “Three. The front door, the side door here in the kitchen, and one through Ted’s office. It leads to a back garden.”

  “What about an outside entrance to the basement?”

  “There isn’t a basement. Most Santa Fe houses are built on slabs.”

  Another thing not to worry about, Kagan thought. “Attic?”

  “Not with the flat roof.”

  “The door in Ted’s office, is it wood or sliding glass?”

  “Wood.”

  At least they can’t break through easily, Kagan thought. “Is it locked?”

  “Yes. I checked it when I thought we were leaving the house to go to the party. Then I checked it again after Ted . . .left.”

  “What about the other doors?” Kagan went over and examined the one in the kitchen, confirming that it was secured.

  “After Ted lost his temper, believe me, all the doors are locked.”

  Kagan took another wary look out the kitchen window.

  “He wasn’t always like this,” Meredith said.

  “How so?” Kagan encouraged her to keep talking in the hope that it would distract her.

  “He knows he has a drinking problem. When we moved here from Los Angeles, he was determined to make a new start. In fact, that’s why we came here. Last spring, he visited Santa Fe for a business conference. The night he returned, all he could talk about were the mountains and the light and how the air’s so clean you can see forever. He kept saying the state’s called the ‘Land of Enchantment.’ I understood. We definitely needed some magic.”

  “So you moved here?” Kagan prompted her.

  “Two months later, in June, we were living in this house. On the Fourth of July, I remember, there was a pancake breakfast on the Plaza, thousands of people enjoying themselves. We sat under the trees and watched musicians playing bluegrass songs on the bandstand. People were dancing, having a wonderful time. Ted looked at me with a big smile and said, ‘It’s Independence Day, I promise.’

  “Twice a week, he went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. We spent a lot of time as a family. We hiked in the ski basin. We drove across the valley to Los Alamos to see where they invented the atomic bomb. We explored the cliff ruins in Bandolier Canyon. Spanish Market, Indian Market, Fiesta. It was the best summer of my life.

  “In September, Ted had some business pressures that stopped him from spending time with us. I didn’t complain. The bills need to be paid. I did my part and got a job at one of the museums. At Thanksgiving, he brought home a bottle of wine. I must have looked upset because he said, ‘Hey, it’s not even red wine. It’s white . It’s nothing. I’ve been working seven days a week. What’s a turkey dinner without a little white wine?’”

  “And now, a month later...” Kagan said, letting his voice trail off.

  “New location. Same old problems. I guess there’s no such thing as a fresh start.” After an awkward pause, Meredith changed the topic. “The baby’s asleep.” She set the glass on the kitchen table and carried the child through the dark archway next to the refrigerator-freezer.

  Kagan heard her groping around back there and wondered what she was doing. Something scraped on the floor. Meredith’s shadow reappeared. He saw her backing into the kitchen, dragging a wicker hamper.

  “This was in the laundry room. I put towels inside it,” she said. “It’s almost as good as a crib.” She set the baby in the hamper and covered him with one of the towels.

  “In the laundry room, is there space in a corner behind the washer and dryer?” Kagan asked. “With room enough for you

  to crouch?”

  “Yes.” Meredith sounded puzzled.

  “If something happens, take the baby and hide there. The metal on the appliances might protect you.”

  “Protect me from . . . ?”

  Kagan turned toward the archway to the living room.

  “Cole, are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Protect me from bullets?” Meredith asked.

  “It’s a bad idea for everyone to stay together,” Kagan said. “That makes you all one target. Cole, if something happens, is there a place where you can hide?”

  The boy was silent while he thought about it.

  “There’s a big television cabinet in here. I think I can squeeze into the space behind it.” His voice was unsteady.

  “If you’re forced to do that, lie on the floor. You need to visualize what I want you to do. If you see it in your mind, if you rehearse it in your imagination and understand what you need to do, you won’t be confused when the time comes. If something happens—”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Good.”

  “I was scared when my dad hit my mom, but now . . .”

  “Yes? Now?”

  “I feel numb.”

  * * * * *

  FROM HIS VANTAGE point behind the fir tree, Andrei watched the man plod through the falling snow. His shoulders were hunched. His head was down.

  Within moments, the man was close enough for Andrei to conclude that his first impression had been correct—he looked weary, as if the weight of the world were on him. He glanced up only once, just enough to get his bearings and angle left toward the fence and the gate.

  “Sir.”

  Andrei stepped from the shadows and intercepted the man before the two of them could be seen from the house. “I’m a police officer.”

  “Police?” The man looked startled. He was thin, about six feet tall. His hands were crammed into his coat pockets. The faint light reflecting off the snow made it difficult for Andrei to gauge the man’s age any closer than mid-thirties. He had a mustache, an oval face, and a haggard expression. His breath smelled of whiskey, but not strongly. Any drinking he’d done had been a couple of hours earlier.

  “What are the police doing here?” The man came out of his gloomy mood, straightening with concern.

  “Do you live in that residence?” Andrei pointed.

  “Yes, but—”

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Brody. Ted Brody. What’s this all about? What’s going on?”

  “There’s been an incident in the neighborhood.”

  “Inciden
t?”

  “Do you know how many people are in your house, Mr. Brody?”

  “My wife and son. Why do you . . . My God, has something happened to them?”

  “Mr. Brody, please just answer my questions. How old is your son?”

  “Twelve, but—”

  “Describe the house for me. Draw a diagram in the snow.”

  “Diagram? I don’t understand.”

  “The rooms. The windows. The outside doors. That’s very important. Show me the location of every outside door.”

  “Jesus, are you telling me someone broke in?” Brody pushed past, heading for the gate.

  Andrei clamped a strong hand on his shoulder and tugged him back down the lane.

  “Stop that.... I need to...” Brody struggled. “That hurts. Get your hand off me.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Andrei warned. “You don’t want to let him know we’re out here.”

  “Him?”

  Andrei hauled Brody farther back. “Don’t raise your voice. We were chasing a fugitive. He entered your house before we could stop him.”

  “Then I need to get in there. I need to—”

  Andrei stepped in front of him and grabbed both his shoulders. He spoke forcefully but at a low register, his face close to Brody’s.

  “Pay attention, Mr. Brody. If you go inside, you’ll only give the fugitive another hostage. Don’t put your family at greater risk.”

  “But—”

  Andrei cut him off. “The best thing you can do is help us. Do you have a cell phone? If not, I’ll lend you mine.”

  “Cell phone? Why?”

  “There’s a chance the fugitive doesn’t know we followed him. I want you to call your wife and try to learn what’s happening in there, what room she and your son are in, any details that might help the SWAT team when it gets here.” Even though Andrei knew the phone line wasn’t working, he needed to find out if there was a cell phone in the house.