by Greg Rucka
“Who’s in the tree house?” I asked, taking off my jacket.
Dan’s expression was one of both disappointment and surprise. “You saw him?”
“Not soon enough.”
That mollified him, and he grinned. “That’s Vadim up there. He’s my boy.”
Natalie arched an eyebrow. “You’ve got a son?”
“Nineteen,” Dan said, then added, “He has promise.”
I hung my jacket on the back of the nearest chair, fighting off a wave of sudden exhaustion while listening as Natalie and Dan continued discussing the security arrangements for the safe house. Oxford’s death diminished the threat against Alena, but none of us was willing to say it was gone, not yet. Three hours before Oxford had planted his dagger in Scott Fowler’s heart, Scott and I had met with two men at a Holiday Inn off Times Square. Two men who, we’d assumed, had been holding the end of Oxford’s leash. One had been a big stack of jovial threat who had done most of the talking, but the other had been a quieter and more thoughtful piece of menace named Matthew Bowles.
Bowles and his partner hadn’t been the instigators, though; they were middlemen, the ones responsible for tasking Oxford, for directing him at some other’s request to clean up the mess that Alena and I had become. But Oxford had become a liability to them. In the end, Scott and I had persuaded Bowles and his partner to cut their losses. We’d watched Bowles make a four-second telephone call that terminated Oxford’s contract, firing the assassin with all the ceremony and care of ordering take-out.
Oxford hadn’t liked that. He’d liked that I’d stolen most of the money he’d made from two decades of killing people even less.
That was when he’d begun murdering anyone who’d ever had the misfortune of calling themselves my friend.
He’d killed Scott in Madison Square Park while I was close enough to see it and too far away to stop it. Scott had died in my arms while Oxford had fled, unnoticed and unmolested. The irony of that—if there was an irony to be found—was that I was now wanted for Scott’s murder, for the murder of a federal agent.
There were ways out from beneath the charge, of course. Most obviously, I could just turn myself in to the authorities and confess the whole story of everything that had transpired. It could probably work. Until I’d disappeared to Bequia with Alena, I’d had a good reputation in the New York security community; I’d had some respect and even a modicum of brief fame. With a strong lawyer and a little good faith, the truth behind Scott’s death would be revealed. At the least, I could be exonerated for the murder of my friend.
But that would require Alena’s corroboration, and as Alena was known in certain law enforcement and intelligence circles as Drama, and as Drama was wanted in connection with something in the neighborhood of two dozen murders-for-hire, the odds of her corroboration being seen as credible were pretty damn low. If she walked into the Federal Building in lower Manhattan, the only way she’d walk out again would be in full restraints, with a phalanx of guards, on her way to arraignment.
If she walked out at all.
Someone had hired Oxford to kill her, after all, and that someone was most likely connected with the government. Just because Oxford was currently bloating with swamp water in the Allendale Nature Preserve didn’t mean another attempt on Alena’s life wouldn’t be made.
Even now, we didn’t know who had bought the hit. We didn’t have the first idea.
I had given Alena my word that I would protect her. I had sacrificed friends and future because I believed her when she told me that she was a killer no more. I had promised her that she would be safe. The best way I could keep that promise was to button her up someplace safe and secure, and that someplace was this house in Cold Spring. Natalie would run the security, and Dan would provide the muscle and the firepower. Nothing fancy, just a safe place that could be secured and controlled for a week, maybe two at the outside. Long enough to be sure that the threat to Alena was gone, that Oxford was the end of it. Long enough for me to disappear someplace far, far away. It didn’t matter where.
Just someplace where the people I loved didn’t die because of the things I’d done, or the man I’d become.
Miata padded off into the darkness, in search of Alena, and I listened with half an ear to Natalie and Dan, standing around the kitchen table, discussing the security he’d put in place. Vadim up in the tree house had been a last-minute addition, it seemed, placed up there while Illya—the guard on the front door—had been dispatched to find me a car. While they talked I found myself a nearly clean glass and filled it with water, drinking it down. I was still wearing my Kevlar, and while it was a light vest, about as thin and comfortable as these kind of things ever managed to be, I was warm in it.
I thought about taking it off, leaving it behind, but I could just imagine what Alena would say if she saw me remove it. She’d call me a fool, and ask me if I wanted to die, and if I answered that things, for the moment, seemed to be safe, she would have snorted that near-contemptuous snort of hers and left it at that.
Natalie had given me a pistol before my meeting with Oxford, and that I did remove, setting it on the table. If I was going to be catching a plane anytime soon, it’d be best to go light. The vest could be ditched easily enough at the airport, if needed; the gun would be harder to dispose of, and since I didn’t know where she’d acquired it, I didn’t want to risk it being traced back to her. Better to leave the problem for Dan and Natalie to solve.
“There are three,” Dan was telling her, indicating a rough drawing he’d made on a piece of paper that rested on the table. The drawing was a map of the house and the immediate area, and it looked quickly done, but more than serviceable. “Not counting Vadim on overwatch. He’s got a rifle up there, and night-vision.”
“And hopefully a blanket,” I said.
“You’ve got coms?” Natalie asked Dan.
Dan reached into the outside pocket of his jacket, held up a Nextel mobile phone. Natalie nodded slightly, and he dropped the phone back where he’d found it.
“What about the other three?”
“Illya’s on the door, you saw him as you came in. We loaded his shotgun with the Brenneke rounds, better for dealing with vehicles if a vehicle should come. Yasha is covering the back door, and Tamryn is sleeping upstairs, in the room next to Tasha’s.”
“So six altogether, counting you and me.”
“You think more?”
“No, six should be plenty, at least for tonight.”
They both looked at me.
“Dandy,” I told them.
Dan considered my lack of enthusiasm, then said, “I’ll go check on Tasha, make sure she’s comfortable.”
He left the room, shutting the door behind him.
Natalie and I stared at each other. After a couple of seconds of silence, I said, “I’m not sure it’s safe to leave the two of you alone. I’m thinking I’ll come back to find a gaggle of little red-haired Russian thugs-to-be shaking down the nearest kindergarten.”
“He’s Georgian, not Russian.”
“He’s also got a nineteen-year-old son behind a rifle in a tree house outside. Talk about a motivated family.”
Natalie grinned, but then it froze. She shook her head slightly. She didn’t want to banter, she didn’t want the jokes. I didn’t blame her. There was a lot of history between us, history that stretched back to a time and a place where we had been very different people. Her father, Elliot Trent, and his company, Sentinel Guards, was the be-all and end-all of security firms in Manhattan. She’d left his company to form a new one with me. She’d turned her back on her father and his Secret Service connections and his five hundred employees and the corporate accounts, and instead thrown her lot in with me when we hadn’t stood a chance in hell of surviving.
It was the way she was, always looking to pursue a challenge, maybe because it would have been so very easy for her to live a life with no challenges in it at all. She was beautiful, she was smart, and Elliot Trent w
as a wealthy man. He hadn’t even wanted her to join Sentinel, and when she’d gone into business with me, he’d all but disowned her. As far as Elliot Trent was concerned, I was a danger not just to myself and others, but to the profession as well. If anyone had told him that my profession seemed to have changed recently, he would have taken it as proof confirming all of his worst suspicions.
“You don’t have to go,” Natalie said, finally. “You can stay.”
“I’m not going to take the risk.”
“You think maybe, just maybe, you’re being paranoid?”
I nodded. “But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Oxford’s dead.”
“But not whoever the hell it was who hired him in the first place. That threat is still out there, and I want it bearing down on me, not on her and not on you.”
Her brow furrowed as she considered her possible counterarguments, and then she sighed sadly. “Any messages?”
I thought about it, then shook my head. My association with Alena had already cost me all of my friends but Natalie; what relationships remained wouldn’t survive what would happen next. I’d disappeared once without a trace. Doing it again was going to be one time too many.
“You’re sure?” Natalie asked.
“There’s nothing I can say.”
“Not even to her?” She indicated the floor above us with her head.
“There’s nothing I can say.”
“Maybe you should think of something. It was her idea to go back for you, Atticus, not mine.”
I shook my head again, hoping Natalie would take that as my request to let the matter drop. I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t.
“She’s in love with you, you know that, right? That’s why she made me turn around, why we came back.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters, Atticus.” She looked at me with honest incredulity. “It’s the only thing that matters.”
“Don’t be a fucking idiot.”
“What?”
“Give me a goddamn break, Nat,” I said. “You don’t really believe that. It’s all that matters? It doesn’t matter at all. Not at all, not one bit. Not to Oxford or Bowles or any of that lot, and sure as hell not to Scott. What matters is survival. That’s all that fucking matters.”
“Don’t tell me what I do or don’t believe.” Her look reflected my sudden anger, turned it back on me, and it crept into her voice even though I knew she was fighting to keep it out. “Survival isn’t just drawing another breath. It has to be more than that.”
“Then I’m right,” I said. “You are a fucking idiot.”
She shook her head, hard, as if trying to knock the words I’d said free with the motion, and I know she would’ve said something more in response, but the door from the hallway opened again, and Dan returned.
“She’s fine,” Dan said. “Cranky, that’s how I know.”
“She’s not the only one,” Natalie said, looking at me. The anger she’d been reflecting was gone, replaced by confusion, and it made me feel guilty, but I wasn’t about to explain.
Dan reached around his back, beneath the same thin black leather jacket he seemed to always wear no matter what the weather, and came out with a pistol. He held it out, offering me the butt end.
“Just in case,” he said. “It’s clean. You can dump it with the car.”
It was a Glock 34, simple and straightforward and infinitely anonymous. The magazine was fully loaded, seventeen rounds. I tucked the pistol into my pants at the small of my back.
“We’ll take good care of her for you,” he told me.
“I know you will.”
“She wants to see you before you go.”
“Then I should see her,” I said, and turned to head upstairs.
“Atticus,” Natalie called after me. “Idiot or not, I’m right. It’s the only thing that matters.”
They’d put her in a small room on the second floor, beside the bedroom where Tamryn was sleeping. The lights were off, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, Miata with his head in her lap, petting him.
When she saw me, she said, “Why do they keep putting me on the second floor when I can barely climb the stairs alone?”
“Because it’s easier to fall down than to climb up?” I suggested.
She snorted, then pushed Miata gently away and got to her feet, using the headboard as a support. Her cane was leaning against the wall nearby, but she didn’t go for it, instead making her way slowly to where I was standing just inside the door. The progress looked painful, and when she reached me she put out her hands, resting them, palms flat, against my chest, and I thought she would give me her weight, but she didn’t. There was enough light to see her face, just barely, but not enough to read what was painted there when she looked at me. I couldn’t feel her hands through the vest, but I imagined that they were warm.
“I have to go, Alena,” I said.
“I don’t know how to do this, Atticus,” she said, and the frustration in her voice sounded more pained than angry. “I have never had to do this. I have never had to say good-bye to someone I did not want to see go.”
I didn’t say anything.
She moved her left hand, raised it as if to rest it against my cheek, but then dropped it back to my chest, as if afraid that the touch would burn her. Even in the darkness, I could see her scowling.
“I want to kiss you,” Alena said, suddenly. “May I do that?”
“You can do that,” I told her.
She moved her hands up my chest once again, this time lighter, splaying her fingers, as if reading me in Braille. When they reached my shoulders, she began to lean in, then balked, pulling back. She tilted her head to her right, tried a second approach, pulled back once again. Her head tilted to the left, and that seemed to make her feel more confident, and she held my shoulders more firmly, and this time I knew she would go through with it.
I met her mouth with my own, felt her lips tentative against mine, and there was only a light brushing of skin, dry and softer than I had thought her capable of being. Then she did it again, this time with certainty. Her fingers moved to my neck, then into my hair, and she pulled herself into me. I put my arms around her, tasting her and holding her, and she made a sound into my mouth, almost mournful.
Then she let me go, reaching out for the dresser with one hand, using it to support herself as she made her way back to the bed. She sat slowly, in exactly the same place she had before.
“Good-bye, Atticus,” Alena said.
I left her sitting there.
CHAPTER
TWO
It turned out I was right; they were coming after me.
I’d just thought they’d give me more time before they did it.
Three minutes out from the safe house, following Foreman Road, the reserve light for the gas tank lit up on the Civic’s console. There was no tone, no warning buzzer, but there didn’t need to be. It was a hard light to miss.
My first thought was that, in his haste to acquire a car, Illya had forgotten to check how much gas was in the tank. Then I thought that there was no way in hell that Dan would have permitted that kind of mistake, no way in hell he would have supplied me with an escape vehicle that wouldn’t be able to manage my escape.
So maybe it was a fault in the console someplace, a short in the warning light or a skewed sensor in the tank.
I was willing to believe that, until I saw the headlights in the rearview mirror.
They were distant, maybe a hundred feet back, but riding high enough to throw reflected glare into the Civic. As I watched, the lights came closer, then held steady. Maybe fifty feet off. A good covering distance. Not so far away as to lose the target; not so close as to risk unnecessary exposure if the target did something unexpected, hit the brakes, for instance, or threw a U-turn.
I told myself that it didn’t mean anything, that it was a public damn road, and that other vehicles would thus be using it. I told mysel
f that, yes, while it was half past four in the morning and only assassins and their students and the people who protected them would be awake and up and about in the sleepy little Putnam County town of Cold Spring, that was no reason to become alarmed.
The Glock was on the seat beside me, wedged beneath the go-bag, and I reached over for it, moved it into my lap. The Civic was an automatic, and I took both hands off the wheel long enough to rack the slide, to make the pistol ready. Then I slid the barrel beneath my right thigh, on the outside, so my weight would keep it from bouncing around should I do anything to anger the Laws of Physics, but so I could grab it in a hurry if the need arose.
I had a very strong feeling that the need would arise very shortly.
The lights behind me were steady, still keeping their distance. The sky was playing in shades of black and blue, and I couldn’t tell the make of the vehicle. From the height of the headlights, I guessed it was a pickup of some sort, or maybe an SUV.
That damn reserve light was still on, still warning me that I was low on fuel.
I felt my pulse begin to race.
If the tank had been tapped, punctured, or drained just enough to get me going but not enough to get me where I wanted to go, there was no telling what else had been done to the vehicle. No telling if a bug had been planted, if an explosive had been placed. That the car hadn’t blown up when I’d started it was small consolation; it’s easy enough to rig a charge in two phases, to prime when the engine starts, to detonate when it stops.
I didn’t much like thinking that, because it meant that when the car died, I would, too.
There was a turn coming up, onto County Route 10, and I made the right, and when I did the lights behind me seemed to move closer, just a bit, as if whoever was handling the vehicle behind me wanted to keep me in sight.
We’d passed a Citgo station on the way to the safe house, in the direction I was currently heading. It couldn’t be more than half a mile from where I was now. I’d noted it because there’d been nothing else around, just the pumps and a garage and a lot and the encroaching woods.
