by Greg Rucka
“Dan…” he said, in Russian. His voice was hoarse, whether from fear or disuse, I didn’t know. “Oh God, Dan, please—”
“You don’t want to be talking to me,” Dan told him, switching to English and looking at the pistol he was holding in his right hand, as if noticing it for the first time. It was the same gun we’d taken from Illya when we’d made the snatch ten hours ago, a cheap Taurus semiauto. “You want to talk to him.”
Illya twisted his head back towards me, much the same way the Next Victim turns to look over her shoulder in horror films.
“Depending on what you say to him and how hard he has to work to get you to say it, then you’ll want to talk to me,” Dan told him. “So you better tell him what he wants to know, Illya. If you want anything from me at all, you better fucking well tell him what he wants to know.”
Illya swallowed, then nodded. “I…I didn’t know what they would do.”
I stared at him, doing my damnedest at keeping anything that I was thinking, anything that I was feeling, from my face. No fury, no sympathy, no hatred, nothing. Trying to let him supply all of those things, instead, to put on me what he feared and what he hoped.
“You don’t…you don’t believe me,” Illya said to me. His English was only mildly accented, as if he’d been working on perfecting it at the same time I’d been trying to master Russian and Georgian. “I know you don’t, I can tell you don’t. But I didn’t know, I swear.”
I looked at Dan. Dan sighed, then leaned across the bed towards me, handing over the Taurus as Illya eyed it with visible alarm. I took the pistol and nodded to Dan, and Dan got out of his chair and left the room. Illya didn’t know where to look, bouncing his eyes from the pistol to Dan to me, and it was obvious that the panic he was struggling to keep at bay was gaining ground, and quickly.
It gained more ground when I racked the slide on the Taurus. I didn’t point the gun at him; I didn’t need to. I pointed it at the floor.
“Oh God,” Illya said, switching to Russian. “Oh God oh my God please don’t kill me.”
Alena entered the room, moving around to stand behind me in my chair. Then Dan returned and took his seat once more, Vadim following him, picking a place at the foot of the bed. Illya struggled to sit up straighter in the bed, backing further against the headboard, as if hoping he could melt himself through the wood and the wall to freedom.
None of us said a word, all of us staring at him.
Illya began to tremble. Tears started filling his eyes, then began to spill down each cheek.
“I didn’t mean to, oh God, I didn’t mean to,” he said, and he was unable to look at any of us, so instead he studied his hands, the duct tape wrapped thick around his wrists. “They picked me up, I was at Millat’s, I was just doing some shopping and they grabbed me when I came outside, they said I had to go with them. I didn’t have a choice! They showed me—they showed me IDs, like that, not…not badges, but cards. They knew who I was, Dan! They knew who I was, everything, they said I was an illegal, that I was a criminal, that they were going to arrest me!”
He twisted in the bed, focusing on Dan. His hands came up, as if to implore him.
“I didn’t have a fucking choice, you understand, don’t you? You have to understand, I would never have betrayed you for anything, but they had me, they had me, they were going to put me away, send me back!”
Behind me, I felt Alena resting her hands on my shoulders. It was a subtle movement, but Illya was strung out on his fear and his adrenaline, and he caught it, twisting back in our direction, terrified.
“This is what they said, okay? This is what they said, what they wanted, they didn’t want me, they said they didn’t care about me, they wanted my help, that’s what they wanted. They just wanted to know where the two of you were, that was all. They just wanted me to tell them where you were, when you would be there, then they wanted me to go away. They gave me money, they told me fifty thousand dollars if I did this.
“I tried to tell them I didn’t know what they were talking about, I tried to tell them they had made a mistake, but they knew! You understand? They knew about you and about her, that she was somewhere around New York, that you two were together, working together, that Dan was helping. They said that was all they wanted, only the two of you, they said Kodiak and Drama, that’s what they called Natasha, they said that was it, just the two of you, that was all I had to do, just tell them where you would be, where and when you would be there. If I did that, they said that would be all, they would take care of it. I swear to God I didn’t know they wanted to kill you!”
He stopped speaking abruptly, clamping his mouth closed, breathing noisily through his nose. He was still shaking, and I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he clenched his teeth.
I looked pointedly at the pistol in my hand, then back at Illya. He was lying, at least about the last part. Maybe whoever had grabbed him had never said, yes, we want Kodiak and the woman, Drama, dead, but he had been brought in by Dan as one of the bodyguards for Alena, and that should have been more than enough to explain the stakes. It was justification, that’s all it was, lies to absolve himself from his guilt.
“I’m telling you the truth!” Illya cried. “They never told me what they wanted to do! They never told me!”
I pointed the Taurus at the headboard by his right shoulder and put a round into it. Wood splintered and popped, and the report in the bedroom was explosive. Illya screamed.
“Stop lying to me,” I said, softly. “You’re smart enough to have stayed hidden for three years. You’re smart enough to know better than to lie to me.”
“I’m not—”
“I was never supposed to go to the house in Cold Spring, Illya,” I said. “You had to have contacted them and told them I was going to be there as soon as you found out, probably when Dan sent you to find me a car. So what did you think they were going to do to me when they told you to tap the tank? What did you think it meant when they told you to leave your post at the door, to run as soon as you saw them?”
“I didn’t, I didn’t think—”
I handed the pistol to Alena, who took it and fired a second round, this into the headboard on the opposite side of Illya from where I’d put my shot. He screamed again, cringing.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” I said. “You sold us out for fifty fucking thousand dollars.”
Illya had tucked his chin to his chest, raising his bound arms to cover his face. He was sobbing.
“I want a name,” I told him. “And I want it now.”
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.
