by Saul Herzog
He went out to the front of the bar and lit a cigar.
It was a perfect night, the air so still he could see tiny crystals of frozen vapor floating in it. It made the atmosphere shimmer in the moonlight.
He sat on the wooden bench by the door and watched the moon over the jagged silhouette of Dodge Summit. Between the town and the mountains were the icy waters of Lake Koocanusa, which straddled the Canadian border a few miles to the north.
He finished the cigar and looked at his watch again.
She was forty minutes late. He checked to see if she’d left any messages. There were none.
He went into the bar and said, “Did she call?”
Stodder shook his head.
“Did she say anything about where she was going?”
“She dropped off the champagne earlier. Said she needed to pick up a cake.”
“When was that?”
He looked at his watch. “Three hours, maybe.”
Lance tried giving her a call, but she didn’t pick up.
Stodder offered him another beer.
Lance shook his head. “How about some coffee?”
Stodder brought him over a cup. Lance sipped the coffee and, after fifteen minutes, tried calling her again. The phone rang a few times then forwarded to voicemail.
He hung up without leaving a message.
“Something ain’t right,” he said, getting up.
“You don’t want to go jumping to conclusions.”
“She’s had trouble before,” Lance said. “I took her from a mean son of a bitch in Beulah. He was mixed up in all sorts of things.”
“I heard what you did to that man,” Stodder said. “I don’t think he’d be in a hurry for more of that medicine.”
Lance shook his head. “Maybe I should have killed him.”
Stodder said nothing. People in the town sort of knew things about Lance, without really knowing what it was exactly that they knew.
What Stodder did know was that if Lance said he should have killed a man, it wasn’t just a turn of phrase.
Lance tried calling again, and again was forwarded to voicemail.
“Something’s definitely not right,” he said.
He went back outside and looked up and down the street. He didn’t know what to do and was about to go back inside when his phone started to ring.
His heart flooded with relief, but when he looked at the screen, he saw that it wasn’t Sam calling, it was the sheriff’s department in Libby.
“This is Lance Spector,” he said, his heart pounding.
“Lance, this is Mac at the sheriff’s office.”
“What is it, Mac?”
“I wanted to check in with you, see that you’re all right.”
“I’m all right, Mac. What is this about?”
“They found your truck, Lance, crashed in a ditch up by Stahl Peak.”
33
Lance went back inside the bar and said to Stodder, “I need to borrow your car.”
Stodder took one look at him and threw him the keys.
He drove out to Stahl Peak as if his life depended on it, careening around corners, sending snow and gravel flying. He didn’t slow down until he saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser ahead of him, then jammed on the brakes, skidding to a halt.
“What the hell was she doing out here?” he muttered as he got out of his car.
It was a place of startling natural beauty in the daytime, but in the darkness of night, the spindly pine trees seemed to close in on the road like the legs of spiders.
There was no way a young girl would have been out there alone by choice.
Lance’s truck had been coming down from further up the mountain and had clearly been going too fast. At the corner, it had skidded across both lanes and crashed into the ditch.
“Where is she?” Lance said to the deputy.
The deputy was over by the truck, shining a flashlight into the cab, and Lance recognized him. A young guy, pretty new to the force, his name was McCaffrey.
“Lance,” McCaffrey said.
“Where is she?” Lance said again.
“Who are you talking about, Lance?”
“Sam. The girl.”
“You weren’t driving?” McCaffrey said.
“Would I have driven it into a ditch?” Lance said.
“Who’s Sam?”
“She’s staying with me.”
“Female?”
“Female. About twenty. She had my truck today.”
McCaffrey’s tone turned more serious, and he said, “Is there any reason you can think of why she would have been driving up the side of a mountain?”
Lance shook his head.
McCaffrey looked at him a moment, uncertain what to do.
“Is she here?” Lance said. “Is Sam here?”
“No one’s here,” McCaffrey said.
“She wasn’t here when you got here?”
“No one was here when the truck was called in.”
“Then she’s missing,” Lance said.
McCaffrey nodded.
“Call it in,” Lance said.
McCaffrey picked up his radio. “This is McCaffrey out at Stahl Peak. I’ve got Lance Spector here, and he says he wasn’t driving the vehicle when it went in the ditch.”
There was a pause, then dispatch said, “Who was driving?”
McCaffrey looked at Lance then back at the truck. “Female. Twenty years old,” he said, then to Lance, “White?”
Lance nodded.
“White,” McCaffrey said.
“And she’s unaccounted for?”
“That’s correct,” McCaffrey said.
There was a pause, then the dispatch said, “All right, sheriff’s on his way.”
McCaffrey attached the radio to a clip on his vest.
Lance stepped toward the truck, and McCaffrey said, “Sir, I wouldn’t…”.
“Don’t sir me,” Lance said, looking into the truck.
As clear as day, right on the passenger seat, was a Russian Makarov pistol. On the steering wheel and on the seat leather was smudged blood.
“What does this look like to you?” Lance said.
“I’d say it looks like a crime scene.”
Lance nodded. “Give me that flashlight,” he said.
McCaffrey handed him the flashlight, and Lance did a quick search of the cab. There was a cake box on the ground in front of the passenger seat, and Lance opened it. Inside was an unharmed cake with white frosting and glazed strawberries on top.
He looked around the floor and saw something small and white, like a pebble. He picked it up and looked at it closely.
“What have you got there, Lance?”
“This,” Lance said, “is an earpiece.”
“An earpiece?”
Lance stepped away from the truck. His chest was thumping, and he was finding it difficult to breathe.
“Sam?” he called out into the forest.
He crossed the road and began shining the flashlight down the slopes of the mountain. He couldn’t see more than ten yards into the dense forest. He shone the light at the ground, looking for tracks or footprints.
There were none.
“Someone walked away from this truck,” Lance said, turning back toward McCaffrey. “And by the looks of things, they kept to the road.”
“I’d say that’s a fair assessment,” McCaffrey said.
“We’re looking for one man.”
“With a girl?”
“He’s not with the girl,” Lance said.
“Now, we don’t know that, Mr. Spector.”
“If he still had the girl, he’d have brought his gun with him,” Lance said.
Lance felt numb.
He knew what he was looking at.
He knew who used Makarov pistols and small white earpieces that looked like pebbles.
He knew what he was going to find.
He strode over to his car and got in.
“Mr. Spector,
where are you going?”
He fired up the engine and pulled into the road, continuing on up the mountain.
McCaffrey yelled, “What about my flashlight?” as Lance drove by.
Lance didn’t have far to go until he reached the clearing. It was a sort of lookout point where high schoolers brought their girlfriends to make out in summer.
He got out of the car and saw, near the center of the clearing, Sam’s white ski jacket.
Beyond it across the clearing, going down the slope into the forest, were two sets of footprints.
The prints told him everything, the smaller set, running, tripping, stumbling, and the larger set, following calmly, deliberately. He saw where Sam had slipped down a hill, he saw a bloodstain, he saw where she’d scrambled up the other side of a stream bank, and then, he saw something that stopped him in his tracks.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
He fell to his knees.
What he was looking at didn’t make any sense.
In fact, if God had created a world in which the scene before his eyes could take place, then the universe itself made no sense.
Sam hadn’t just been murdered.
She’d been mutilated.
It was as if she’d been ravaged by a pack of wolves, but even wolves wouldn’t have done the things that had been done to her. Her body was naked, laying on its back in the snow, stretched out spreadeagle as if someone had posed her.
Between her legs was a pool of blood.
All the strength went out of Lance’s body, and he let out a sound like a child’s whimper.
He stumbled up to the body and, about three feet from it, collapsed to his knees and stared, blankly, at Sam’s body.
This wasn’t the cold, methodical work of a professional assassin.
This was the work of a monster.
34
Tatyana Aleksandrova sat on the balcony of a cheap motel in Miami, Florida, and lit a cigarette. In her hand was a note, handwritten by the girl at the front desk in purple ink with a smiley face in place of a period.
Your uncle wants you to call.
She hadn’t answered the girl’s knock, and the girl had taped it to the door.
She turned it over and over, fidgeting like a schoolgirl with a love note, then held her lighter to it and lit it on fire. The wind took it, the flame lifting it upward as it floated away.
There was one problem with the message.
It didn’t specify which uncle.
Was it one of her scary uncles in Moscow who wanted to slit her throat, string her up by the ankles, and leave her to bleed out?
She supposed that was her answer.
If the Kremlin had found her, they wouldn’t have left a note.
She flicked her cigarette off the balcony and went inside.
Svetlana and Larissa were sitting on one of the beds watching Jerry Springer reruns.
“It’s good for her English,” Larissa said, looking up.
The motel accepted cash payment and overlooked an Interstate highway that seemed to get louder after the sun went down. None of them had gotten a good night’s sleep in a week.
Three women, two beds, one shower.
Tatyana had already made up her mind. If Roth made her an offer, she’d cut a deal. All she wanted was a guarantee of protection for her sister and Svetlana.
It seemed it was her fate to be a spy.
She’d done it for the GRU.
Now she would do it for the CIA.
She dialed Roth’s number from the motel room’s phone and waited.
“I wasn’t sure you’d call,” Roth said when he picked up.
“Uncle?” Tatyana said. “Is that how you see yourself?”
She made a sign for Larissa to turn down the TV, and she muted it.
Roth wasn’t like her bosses in Moscow. Those men took liberties. They pushed boundaries. They touched what they had no right to touch.
And now, they were all dead.
It wasn’t like that with Roth. There was never that feeling of quid pro quo that seemed to govern all relationships in Moscow. There were no insinuations.
No lewd looks.
No abuse of position.
“How did you find us?” she said.
“I’m the director of the CIA,” Roth said. “It wouldn’t say much about my abilities if I couldn’t.”
“I take it this isn’t a social call,” she said.
“No,” Roth said. “It’s not, I’m afraid.”
Tatyana lit a cigarette and prepared to negotiate. Larissa was her sister, or half-sister rather. Svetlana had risked her life to help them in Moscow. She didn’t think it would be too difficult to get them protection.
“Laurel’s back,” Roth said.
“That was fast.”
“She was always going to come back.”
“She’s not bothered that the president is trying to blame everything that happened on Lance?”
“Lance’s record has been wiped. He’s back in Montana.”
“Fresh starts all round,” Tatyana said.
“Quite,” Roth said, “and I was hoping to get the same for you.”
Tatyana said no. She’d learned long ago to keep her mouth shut in moments like this. The less she said, the better the deal she would get.
“You’ll be worried for your sister,” Roth continued.
Tatyana remained silent. He’d called her. She could afford to be coy.
“I don’t have to explain to you that there’s no such thing as complete safety,” Roth said. “Not for someone like your sister. Not after what she’s done.”
“I know that,” Tatyana said.
“Even with the protection of the US government, a Russian defector has to spend the rest of her life looking over her back.”
“I don’t need you to explain to me what the Russian government is capable of.”
“No,” Roth said, “I guess you don’t.”
Crossing the Kremlin always came with a price.
Vladimir Molotov allocated a disproportionate amount of attention to making sure that price was as high as possible. Entire divisions of the Russian intelligence apparatus had been built with the sole purpose of hunting down defectors and killing them. Sometimes, the murders were flagrant, specifically designed to attract the attention of the global media. Sometimes, they were quiet, behind the scenes, so no one, not even the police officers investigating the case, ever suspected the slightest trace of Russian involvement.
Everyone in the Russian intelligence community knew the risks. They knew what would happen if they switched sides.
That, after all, was the point.
“I want her in your top protection program, Roth. A complete new identity. Full US citizenship. A relocation budget. A cosmetics budget.”
She didn’t know if Larissa would be interested in cosmetic alterations. They could range from something as simple as voice and accent coaching to more dramatic surgical procedures that would completely alter the way she looked.
“I’ve been authorized by the president to give you whatever you ask for,” Roth said.
“That’s it,” Tatyana said. “Citizenship and protection. For both of them.”
“For both of them,” Roth said.
“You agree?”
“Yes, I do.”
“All right,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
35
A government car, black with black windows, came to the motel to pick up Tatyana. She said her goodbyes to Larissa and Svetlana, uncertain how long it would be before she saw them again, and got in the back seat.
“Good morning, ma’am,” the driver said, looking back at her over her shoulder. “We’re headed to Homestead Air Reserve Base today.”
“All right,” Tatyana said.
She looked out the window one last time at Larissa and Svetlana.”
From Homestead, she got on a military flight to Andrews Air Force Base just outside DC.
Laurel was waiting for
her at the hangar, looking quite out of place among the Air Force mechanics in a red wool coat and thousand-dollar Prada pumps.
“Wow,” Tatyana said, descending the steps. “It really must be urgent if they sent you down in person.”
Laurel smiled. “I just wanted to be the first to welcome you back.”
Laurel had an upgraded Cadillac Escalade waiting for them, and Tatyana was glad to get in. Coming from Miami, the cold was a shock.
“You look like you landed on your feet,” Tatyana said, indicating the vehicle, which was of the type reserved only for the most important government officials.
“I think we could say we both did,” Laurel said.
“As good as a couple of girls like us could expect,” Tatyana said.
The vehicle had a retractable divider between them and the driver to allow them to speak confidentially.
As they made their way through the traffic, Laurel opened her briefcase and showed Tatyana a crumpled newspaper.
“This is the reason Roth wanted you to come in,” she said.
Tatyana looked at the paper, a copy of Berliner Zeitung, and Laurel opened it to a page with a handwritten message.
Tell Roth that Tatyana Aleksandrova’s friend from Riga needs to talk.
“Where did this come from?” Tatyana said.
“It was passed to the embassy in Berlin.”
“By who?”
Laurel smiled. “That’s what we were hoping you’d be able to fill us in on.”
Tatyana thought. “Friend from Riga,” she said. “I was in Riga a lot. The Baltics are a high priority zone for the GRU.”
“That’s why Roth’s worried,” Laurel said.
Tatyana looked at her. “You don’t share that fear?”
“I think it’s a trap,” Laurel said. “Look at it. It’s the oldest trick in the book. How stupid do they think we are?”
“They know the reference to Riga is too big to ignore,” Tatyana said.
“Exactly.”
“And they’re right,” Tatyana said. “Laurel, we can’t ignore this. What if it’s real?”
“Is it real?”
“I don’t know,” Tatyana said.
“Do you have a friend in Riga?” Laurel said. “We can at least start with that much.”
