by Tanya Chris
“Head back to the hut,” he told Joe. “But don’t go inside without me. I’m serious about this.”
Joe scowled at him, still recalcitrant but obeying at least. He grabbed the pole with the red tape, gave Lars an angry glare, and stalked away.
“Sorry about that,” he told Lars when he could hear that Joe had put some distance between them.
“What the fuck? What did I ever do to either of you?”
“You took the wrong pole. Joe’s a little over-protective of his property.”
“Shit, a pole’s a pole, but if it’s that important to him, he can have it. Take them both.”
Lars threw the other pole at him. Pyotr winced instinctively as the pole clattered against his chest, but he didn’t retaliate. He figured Lars had a reason to be pissed off.
“You can go on to Muir,” he told him. “We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us.”
Lars spent about thirty seconds looking like he might be up for some bi-directional bothering, then he turned without a word and started trudging in the direction he’d been heading before Joe had tackled him.
He forced himself to wait until Lars had put a good bit of distance between them before backing slowly towards the hut. When he was pretty sure Lars wouldn’t try to sneak up on him and exact revenge, he turned and found that Joe hadn’t gone all the way back to the hut like he’d been ordered to. Of course he hadn’t. He was standing right there, a few hundred yards away.
He sighed to himself. Fine. Joe could cover his retreat. He closed the distance between them, his legs aching from the struggle to wade through slush, but there was no time to rest his legs or catch his breath. They had a problem, and they were going to need a plan. And Joe was going to need to learn how to take fucking orders.
Chapter 19
Tanner
Tanner shut the door behind Pyotr to close out the circling wind and drifted over to the window. He watched until the three figures struggled out of sight—Pyotr trailing at the back, a someone who must be Green Tea no more than a speck on the horizon, and Joe moving fast between them.
He had no idea what’d just happened, but it couldn’t be good. Something in Pyotr’s plan had gone wrong and now both his lovers were out in the snow chasing a Russian spy to try to fix a problem he’d created and then slept through.
After a few minutes, it became clear that no one was coming back. The three figures had disappeared one after another over the horizon towards the late afternoon sun. He walked back into the great room and nearly jumped out of his skin to see a woman sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs by the stove.
Right. Two people, Joe had said, and there he was in a pair of boxers and no shirt. He gave her a rueful glance of apology and slipped past her into Joe’s room. His clothes were on the ground, half-buried under the stuff Joe had tossed out of his closet. As he dressed, he noticed the food sitting on the nightstand. The stew was congealed, cold and sticky-looking, but he picked up the tuna fish sandwich and gave it a whiff.
Good enough, he decided. He was actually hungry and the first half of the sandwich went down in a few bites while he rooted around and came up with his socks.
Pyotr had told him to stay in Joe’s room, but that was when they’d been expecting Green Tea to arrive. With Joe and Pyotr out chasing a stranger, he could safely assume that Green Tea had both arrived and departed. The hut was empty now except for that woman and she’d already seen him. There was no point staying locked up, so he carried the second half of his sandwich out into the great room.
“Sorry,” he said to the woman, who he now realized was in her underwear too, at least from the waist down. “I didn’t realize anyone was here.”
“Me either. I thought they all ran off just now. Where did you come from?”
“I wasn’t feeling well, so I was lying down in, um, there.” He gestured weakly towards Joe’s door, no good explanation for why he should be in the caretaker’s bedroom occurring to him. Well, fuck. He could be in there to have sex with the guy. No law against that.
“I meant, when did you get to the hut? They told me it was closed. I was trying to get here myself and then Lars came from Flume this morning and that other guy was trapped here by the storm.”
“Me too. Like Pyotr. I got trapped up here and I’m just trying to get down now, but I haven’t been feeling well, like I said, and the weather and everything.”
“Pyotr,” she repeated. “I think he introduced himself to me as Pete.”
Oh, right. Pyotr had said something about not using his Russian name for spy work but that had been back when his head had been befogged by heroin. He’d forgotten. It probably didn’t matter now, did it? If Pyotr and Joe were off chasing down Green Tea, Pyotr’s cover was blown anyway
“Right, Peter,” he agreed, trying to make it sound like that was what he’d said the first time.
“Peter didn’t mention that anyone else had been trapped up here with him.”
“Oh, well, it’s not like we were trapped together or something. I mean, I was here and he was here, and I’ve been sick, so …”
In fact, he felt sick again now. He shouldn’t have wolfed that sandwich down so fast. And tuna salad? Ugh. It might come right back up. Joe claimed mayonnaise didn’t have to be refrigerated, but his stomach was insisting otherwise, and worrying about his two lovers out there potentially getting shot wasn’t helping at all.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Tanner. What’s yours?”
“Holly. Don’t you want to sit down?” She pointed at the chair next to her and he went over and sat down. His stomach was telling him to go back to Joe’s room and lie down, but his mind was too anxious to even sit, never mind sleep.
“So, that was a lot of commotion.” Holly flipped her hair over her shoulder and smiled at him warmly. “What was that all about?”
“Um, I don’t know that other guy.”
“Lars?”
“Lars, yeah. I guess he’s kind of a bad guy?”
“Really?” Holly’s eyes widened and she leaned in towards him and rested a hand on the arm of his chair, nearly touching him. “What did Lars do?”
“I don’t know,” he lied, “but Pyotr, Peter—” he repeated, slurring it the second time to get closer to the American pronunciation “—he’s a really good guy, so if Peter’s chasing him, I guess that’s why I said that.”
He might not know as much about spying as Pyotr, but he knew more than Holly, which felt powerful. For the last two days, he’d been the weak man in every situation.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “If Lars comes back here or something, I’m still here.”
“You think you could fight him? He was a pretty big guy. Maybe you know karate or something?”
He hadn’t actually gotten a look at Lars, not beyond seeing his heavily-dressed figure from a distance, and he definitely didn’t have any ninja protective skills. Or a gun.
“I don’t think he’ll probably come back,” he hedged. “Not unless Peter brings him back.”
“So tell me who Peter is again?”
“Um.” He had that sick feeling in his stomach again. The tuna, or the way Holly was assessing him like he was a specimen, or maybe just the awareness that he shouldn’t be talking to her about any of this. He should’ve stayed in Joe’s room with his mouth shut like Pyotr had told him.
Holly stood up. Her hand reached behind her back and when it came forward, there was a gun in it. It was a small gun, much smaller than Pyotr’s, but a gun was a gun when it was only a few feet from your head.
“Who’s Pyotr?”
And the way she said Pyotr—not like it was six syllables, the way it felt on his own tongue, but the same way it rolled off Pyotr’s—told him who she was.
“CIA?” she asked.
He looked away, trying to avoid seeing the gun, as if he could imagine it away. He should definitely not tell the Russian spy that Pyotr was CIA, but Pyotr wasn’t there and t
he gun was very close to his head.
“All right,” she said after a moment. “I guess that’s an answer. Who’s Joe?”
“He’s just the caretaker,” he said quickly. “He’s not anyone.” It was bad enough he’d implicated Pyotr, but it was Pyotr’s job to face Russian spies. Joe didn’t deserve to die because Tanner was an addict and a traitor and an idiot.
“He sure charged out of here fast enough for someone who’s not involved,” Holly observed. “Who’s Lars?”
“We thought he was you.”
“So you and Pyotr set up a sting to catch me, but he ends up chasing after some random trekker because of course the spy is a big-ass man, not the little blond girl, right? You see how sexism hurts us all, baby cakes?”
She laughed at the joke, but he didn’t find it particularly funny. He had no idea why Joe and Pyotr had charged off after Lars. From where he was sitting, it was pretty obvious who the Russian spy was now.
“I don’t have to ask who you are,” Holly said. “Because you’re Tan2mount2treeZn, aren’t you, Tanner? Nice try on selling me out.”
He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. Was he really about to argue with a Russian spy that he hadn’t intentionally set her up? If he’d been a halfway decent person, he’d never have made a bargain to sell those plans in the first place, and the only reason he hadn’t sold them was because Pyotr had turned up to buy them instead of Holly.
If it hadn’t been for the snowstorm, for his dwindling supply and the extra time in close contact with Joe and Pyotr, if he’d met Holly up here as scheduled, those plans would be long sold. He’d be on his way back to San Diego now. High. With the money he needed to pay off his dealers.
To his shame, that sounded pretty damned appealing.
“Where are the plans?”
He shook his head.
“Right now, I’m asking questions,” she said. “But this phase of the operation only lasts so long. Then the shooting starts.”
“You’ll kill me anyway.” He doubted Russian spies left witnesses behind.
“Probably,” she agreed, “but it’s like in the movies. I can do it quick or slow, though given that your two little friends might be back at any moment, I can’t take all day with it. So here’s my proposition. Give me the plans and I’ll slip out of here before they get back.”
Before I have to kill them too. That was what she was implying.
“I hate having to kill people,” she complained with a pout. “It really messes with my head, you know?” She dropped the pout with a laugh. “Just kidding. Really, I don’t mind killing people. A couple extra doesn’t mean shit to me, so it’s up to you. Give me the plans now or we wait for your boyfriend to come back and I take him out too.”
He wondered which one of them Holly thought was his boyfriend, but there was no point letting her know that he cared about both of them. That would just give her double the ammunition. He didn’t want to get shot, to die like this, but he definitely didn’t want either Joe or Pyotr to die for him.
“They’re in one of my trekking poles.”
“Let’s go get them.” She waved the gun at him to indicate that he should stand up and then pointed through the doorway towards the foyer. The last time he’d seen his poles they’d been leaning against the dining room table, but a quick glance over his shoulder told him they weren’t there anymore, so he went into the foyer the way she was pointing.
“These aren’t mine though,” he said, after surveying the stack of poles near the door. There were four pairs there now. He had no idea which poles belonged to who, but none of them had red tape wrapped around the handle.
“Where are yours?”
He shook his head. How should he know? He’d been asleep. They weren’t by the drying rack or in the staging area where a single, small pack sat slumped against the wall.
“I left them in the other room. The one with the plans in it was marked. Lars must have taken it.” It explained what all the commotion had been about. Lars had walked off with the plans.
“Fuck,” Holly said, apparently coming to the same conclusion. She looked at him with a frown of concentration. “You better hope they come back with them.”
He shrugged. She was already going to kill all three of them. What worse could she do? Better if Lars did get away with the plans. At least they wouldn’t end up in Russian hands. At least the damage he’d done would be somewhat contained. It would end here, a trio of dead bodies littering the hut where he’d almost found a second chance at happiness.
That was all over now. He wouldn’t be going to DC to live with Pyotr, Joe would never join them there, and this place of tranquil beauty would be permanently stained with their blood.
Holly waved him back into the great room. She rotated one of the chairs so that it faced the doorway and pushed him down into it.
“Now what?” he asked. Against the back of his head, he felt the cold, hard press of the gun’s barrel.
“Now we wait.”
Chapter 20
Pyotr
Balanced precariously on Joe’s shoulders like a fucking circus acrobat, Pyotr reached for the lip of the window sash. Beneath him, Joe shifted and Pyotr hissed under his breath, expecting to tumble down onto the snow like he had the first two times they’d tried this, but this time the hand he flung out found its mark. His fingers curled over the edge of the sill. For a moment, he hung by no more than those fingertips and then Joe steadied under his feet and he was able to suck in a quiet lungful of breath.
Joe had only cracked the window a few inches to air out the dorm, so he used the hand that wasn’t holding on for dear life to inch the pane higher until he could worm his way through it in a graceless slither. He braced his hands on the floor and slid cautiously into the room, careful not to make an audible thump no matter how fast his head was telling him he needed to move.
He righted himself, then took a minute to unlace his boots and pull them off, the better to muffle his footfalls. From his pack next to the bunk he hadn’t slept in last night, he took out his phone and powered it on. After logging in, he disabled the security feature entirely, then went over to the window and made sure he had Joe’s eye before dropping the phone down to him.
Joe pocketed the phone and tossed up the marked ski pole. Pyotr made an OK sign at him and then, suppressing a grin, blew him a kiss. He watched until Joe turned the corner to the back of the hut where he could circle around to the trail to the landing zone without crossing the front windows.
He had the option of waiting until reinforcements arrived, of trusting that Holly wouldn’t do anything to harm Tanner until she had the plans in hand, but he didn’t trust Holly and he didn’t trust the agency either, not when it came to keeping Tanner safe. Their objectives would be capturing the FSB agent and securing the payload. No one at the CIA would care if a turncoat happened to lose his life in the fallout. Tanner’s life was only a priority to him.
Gun in hand, he crept to the open doorway and spun through it, not surprised to find the hallway empty. If he were Holly, he’d either be in the foyer, staking out the front door, or in the great room where she could keep an eye on the door to the kitchen as well, depending on whether or not she’d realized there was a back door leading out of there.
He couldn’t hope that she hadn’t figured out what was going on, not with the way Joe had been shouting out their business as he ran back and forth in his panic over the poles, not considering she’d now seen Tanner. He was dealing with an alert FSB agent. She’d be sharp, he had no doubt, and not shy about using deadly force. But she’d want those plans, and Tanner didn’t have them, so she was going to have to deal with him.
He stepped down one stair at a time, careful not to let them creak as he shifted his weight, until he couldn’t go any further without being visible to the foyer, then he dropped into a crouch and shifted and pivoted at the same moment so that he’d see her as fast as she saw him.
A quick scan of the foyer show
ed him it was empty aside from a fan of trekking poles across the floor. So she knew that much too.
One more step down brought him to a point where he could see the bottom half of Tanner’s body through the doorway to the great room. He was seated in one of the chairs by the stove wearing the striped socks he’d had on that morning and a pair of sweat pants.
He dropped into a crouch and crept along the wall, more and more of Tanner coming into view, until he was able to see that Tanner had his eyes closed and a gun pressed to the back of his head.
“You might as well come out,” Holly’s voice said. “Save us all a few more minutes of you skulking around like I haven’t known you were here since you came through the window. As if I didn’t know the window was open. I was in the dormitory earlier. You think I didn’t pay attention? Men.”
Her voice was scathing and he felt like he deserved it, not so much for getting caught sneaking into the hut but for the whole debacle.
“Come on then,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of time to screw around, and this guy is expendable.”
“All right,” he agreed. “Easy, OK?”
She snorted. “I’m cold as ice, baby. Show me what you’ve got.”
He stepped out from the doorway, his gun trained on the spot where her head would be even before he could see it. She stood behind Tanner, a small handgun in her hand, the barrel pressed tightly against the back of his head and her other hand on his forehead, keeping him pinned against it. Tanner’s eyes were open now, but he couldn’t look at them. His aim remained squarely on the spot between Holly’s eyes.
“You think you can shoot me before I shoot him?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then put your gun down on the floor and step back from it.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I can shoot you and you can shoot him. I come out of that just fine.”
