by Greg Rucka
The strain of the hold was eating at my fingers and shoulders, I could feel the fatigue already building in my hands. If I didn't move soon, I'd lose the strength to move altogether.
I brought my legs together, again using my hips and abdomen to swing my legs back, away from the building. My grip started to go immediately, and I snapped my lower body forward as hard as I could before it went entirely, hoping the move had been enough to carry me onto the balcony. I arched my back and brought my arms down and in, trying to keep from smashing myself on the railing.
I landed between the railing and the glass-topped patio table, my shoes splashing down in a puddle of runoff, pulling my torso back into line as soon as I felt something solid beneath my feet. I got my hands out in front of me in time to keep from toppling forward, ending ultimately in a crouch, and for a moment I stayed exactly like that, catching my breath and hearing the rainfall beat a companion rhythm to my pulse. My fingers, all the way into my palms, throbbed, and I opened and closed my hands several times, trying to get the blood flowing properly through them once more.
On the street behind me I heard a car approaching, turned my head to see the lights coming along Willamette Boulevard, from the north. There was enough diffused illumination that I could make out the shape of a light bar at the top, a spot mounted on the driver's side, above the mirror. The police car continued past, without slowing. If it didn't turn off, it would pass the Pathfinder at the overlook.
Suddenly I was imagining a scenario with Alena and Dan and a dead police officer, and I didn't like that at all, and for an instant I thought about calling them, warning them, but the call wouldn't come in time anyway. It was an overreaction; they were keeping watch, certainly, and there were a dozen lies they could give the cop that would be a better solution than violence.
I put it out of my mind, pivoted in place, turning to face the door onto the balcony. It was narrower than the standard size, just as tall, its center clear glass. Looking through it I could make out a dresser, a small television resting atop it. Pulling my sleeve down over my hand, I reached out and slowly tried to turn the knob. There was no resistance, and it rotated almost a full one-eighty before stopping. When I pushed forward there was a slight squeak, the rubber seal at its base scraping the bottom of the door frame, but no real resistance. It opened easily, as I suspected it would.
This high up, this impossible to reach, why bother to lock the balcony door?
I slipped inside quickly, feeling carpet beneath my feet, still thick enough or new enough that it sank to receive my steps. Without light, I couldn't tell if I was leaving just damp impressions or something more as footprints. Hopefully, it wouldn't matter; I didn't see Illya entering his home in the same fashion I had done. I closed the door behind me, as quietly as I'd opened it.
Then I heard a rustle, a movement of bedclothes, and atop it the sound of a sleeper's breathing, broken for a moment.
The door to the balcony hadn't opened into the view of the whole room, rather just this end of it, and I had a corner to my right. I put myself against it, peering out. There was a bed, a queen, and there was someone in it, a shape just visible in the shadows, comforter and blankets heaped upon it. I drew breath slowly, waiting and listening.
There was another slight rustle from the bed, and I saw a hand appear for a moment, pulling the comforter back down. The breathing relaxed, resumed the rhythm of sleep. It had been the opening of the door that had done it, the shift in the air, just enough of the outside cold coming in to disturb the sleeper. That had been all.
There'd been no sign of Illya or his cab anywhere around the building that I'd seen, and I'd made a point of looking before climbing the fence. While Vadim didn't have Illya under surveillance at the moment, there was no reason to think that he'd come home and gone to bed. Which meant this was someone else under those covers, someone we hadn't anticipated.
Neither Vadim nor Dan had said anything about there being another occupant in the condo. While their surveillance had been quick, I doubted it had been sloppy. So either this was a new arrival-someone who was sleeping here today-or it was someone who had been here but who hadn't gone out. Someone who Dan's friend Semyon either didn't know about, or had neglected to tell Dan about.
There was a faint scent in the air, and it was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it. Almost floral, but not quite.
The sleeper's breathing had become regular, steady and calm.
I stood up slowly, turned out from the cover of the wall, and stepped silently to the foot of the bed.
The sleeper was a woman, blond, maybe in her mid-to-late twenties. Almost all of her was buried beneath the bedclothes but for her head and her right arm. She was wearing flannel pajamas.
There was a red light glowing from something positioned on the nightstand nearest her side of the bed. It took me a half-second to realize what it was, and as soon as I did, I placed the scent I'd caught earlier, and that was all it took.
I left the room, entering a short hallway. Carpet continued to cover the floor, making silence easy to preserve. On my right, a flight of stairs ran past me down to the main floor of the condo. A folding door was set in the wall just past the head of the stairs, off the landing, open, and inside was a washer-dryer stack, both of them too small to be of much use. Another door, this one standard, was ahead of me, barely ajar, presumably the room I'd been unable to see into when I'd first climbed onto the roof. I knew what was inside it, now. I didn't need to see, but I wanted to.
Maybe I was hoping I would be wrong about what I'd find.
I wasn't.
The baby was asleep in her crib, butt in the air, blanket piled beside her. Stuffed animals surrounded her on all sides, Kermit the Frog and Elmo and a fluffy bunny rabbit and two Winnie the Poohs, and one creature with one eye and no nose and a goofy grin. The odor of disposable diapers and scented wipes was heavy. She was breathing easy, the sound of an infant deep asleep, with one cheek mashed against the mattress, her mouth open. She didn't look happy and she didn't look sad; she just looked like a baby girl, finally letting her mother have a good night's sleep.
I made my way downstairs, and left using the front door, without making a sound.
CHAPTER
FOUR
"You're sure it's his?" Alena asked me.
"I haven't the first fucking clue if it's his or not," I told her. "It's been three years, the baby can't be more than three months old, the math works. If it is his, and if he has been traveling around the way Dan suspects, then he must have hooked up with Mom someplace else, moved her and the baby here after he got settled. But it doesn't matter. The point is he's caring for the mother and the kid, so either it's his or he's taking responsibility for it."
We were seated outside of a Peet's Coffee perhaps a stone's throw from each of our hotels. Morning traffic was just beginning to trickle past us, heading west on a one-way street. The rain, for the moment, had stopped, and the sky was just beginning to lighten, hinting at daylight behind its gray mask. It was surprisingly warm, maybe in the low fifties. Looking past Alena, into the coffee shop, the baristas looked like ghosts as they moved at their counter, hidden behind the sheen of condensation that had formed on the windows.
I waited for Alena to say something more, and she didn't, and her expression didn't change. I wondered if she was seeing the same problem here that I was. She had a paper cup of herbal tea in her hand. They'd given her two bags for it, and their strings dangled over the side with their tags, and she was flicking them with her index finger lightly, but that was it.
"Fuck this," Dan growled, keeping his voice low. "Have you forgotten why we want this cumwhore? Have you forgotten what he did to us?"
I turned my head enough to meet his eyes, and hoped my expression gave him all the answer he needed. Then I checked my watch, and said, "I've got sixteen minutes past six. He gets off work in just under two hours. We've got maybe fifteen minutes to come up with a plan that gets us what we want without invol
ving the woman or the kid."
"Fuck this!" Dan repeated, louder. "We go back there, we do what we were going to do!"
"It's not an option."
"He brought this on himself! He should never have taken a woman, brought her into this! It's his own fucking fault!"
Off the reflection on the window I saw Alena raise her head, focusing on Dan, and her expression still hadn't changed. In Russian, she said, "But it's not hers, nor the child's."
"What the hell is the matter with you?" he shot back at her, also in Russian. "Where the fuck's your head, Natasha?"
"The child and the mother stay out of it," she said icily.
In the past, the tone, the finality, would have been enough to shut Dan down completely. In the past, he would have pulled a face, then stopped it before it could take hold, either his fear or his respect for Alena getting the better of him. Not this time.
He shot me a glare that was full of naked hostility and accusation, then leaned across the table, moving his head closer to Alena.
"You're not thinking," Dan said in Russian. He said it calmly, as if trying to explain a mistake to a promising but stubborn student. "Your man here has goatfucked this, Natasha. Illya won't be in that apartment five minutes before he realizes someone was there, and as soon as he realizes that, he's going to run again. What happens if he takes the woman and the baby with him? We just give him a free pass for murdering Natalie?"
She didn't respond. Her index finger kept flicking the tags on their strings.
Dan shot me another glance, and I looked past him, watching the traffic on the street. If he was suspicious that maybe I understood what was being said, I couldn't blame him. He didn't know everywhere we'd lived for the past three years, only that we had started in Georgia, not that we'd ended there. But he'd have been a fool if he hadn't already considered the possibility that I'd learned more than just yoga, ballet, and some new hand-to-hand moves while we'd been away.
He frowned, clearly struggling with what he wanted to say next. He leaned further forward towards Alena, his hands resting palm up on the table, trying to appeal to her.
"You know what we have to do," Dan said gently, still speaking in Russian. "You know the best way to do it, and you know the tactics involved in something like this, the kind of pressure you're going to need to bring. Refusing to do this is weakness, it's the kind of thing that leads to mistakes that get you killed. You want information from Illya, the best way to get that will be to have the woman and the baby in the same room with him."
Her only answer was the quiet assault her finger was continuing against the tea tags. Dan waited to see if she would say anything, and he waited what seemed like a long time, maybe thirty seconds, but she didn't.
Abruptly, he straightened up in his chair, the frustration spilling from his voice into his posture and motion. "What the fuck is the matter with you? Natasha, seriously, and I say this with all the respect that is due to you, but you are seriously fucked up. I've known you, what, twenty years? Your man, here, he's got you twisted around, you don't know if you're going or coming anymore. I know you taught him, I know he's yours. But what he's taught you, he's changed you and it's not for the better."
Her index finger froze, and I felt as much as saw the subtle shift of her weight, the tensing of the muscles in her lower body, all the signatures of an upcoming attack. Dan saw it, too, or sensed it, maybe, and it didn't matter that we were on a public street at a quarter past six in the morning; it was in his eyes, the fear that he'd crossed one line too many, and that however much she might have been changed, she hadn't been changed enough to keep from killing him then and there.
"He has changed me," she told him. She said it quietly, but it had all the force of the physical attack he'd feared, each word precise and delivered with deliberation. "And I have changed him. And if one of us is the worse for it, it is not me. Do you know why you have always feared me, Danilov? Even twenty years ago, when you first saw me? Have you ever wondered why?"
Dan hesitated, as if uncertain that she wanted an answer, or perhaps afraid of giving the wrong one. "I didn't fear you, I respected you, you were a gifted girl, taught by the best, you were capable of-"
"You did, and you do," she cut in, softly. "You never saw a girl. You saw an empty thing. You saw a tool that could do everything you had been trained to do, but could do it better than you could ever dream of doing yourself. You saw a weapon, but you did not ever see a person. And that, Danilov, is what terrified you.
"The empty thing would agree with you, and think that using the woman and the child to put pressure on the target was logical and efficient. The empty thing would murder them afterwards, calling the act necessary and prudent. The empty thing wouldn't care.
"I am not that thing anymore. I would die before I became it again."
She paused, perhaps to collect herself, perhaps to let what she'd said take hold with Dan. It was the most I'd ever heard her say about herself, as the person she'd been before we'd met, the person the Soviets had designed her to be with their calculated abuse and refined instruction. From the expression on Dan's face, it was the most he'd ever heard her say on the subject, as well.
It couldn't have been lost on him just who, sitting at this table on a February dawn, she thought was an empty thing, and who she thought was not.
"Illya is the target," Alena concluded. "Not the woman. Not the child."
Dan swallowed, looked from her to me, then back to her.
"Then what do we do?" He was speaking Russian, just as she had been. "We can't let him go, Alena! What he did must be answered!"
I cleared my throat, and both of them looked at me.
"What kind of car is Illya driving?" I asked Dan.
His opinion of me was uncensored in his expression. "The fuck?"
"What kind of car? New? Old?"
"New, brand new. Ford Mustang, a black one. Vadim wants one, too. Why the fuck does it matter what car he's driving?"
"Air bags," Alena said.
"Vadim's got his own vehicle," I said. "Another rental?"
"Yeah, we rented on the same ID, same credit cards."
"We're going to need another two cars, then," I said. "Older ones. And a roll or two of duct tape, and something to keep Illya down, a good sleeping pill will do it, something like Ambien."
Dan looked at me as if he couldn't decide to be incredulous, outraged, or both.
"We can't let him go home," I explained. "And we can't let him get away."
"His car," Alena told Dan. "We'll take him at his car."
CHAPTER
FIVE
The irony of springing an automotive ambush on Illya didn't hit me until I hit him, or more precisely, until the moment I smashed the front end of my stolen 1978 Lincoln Town Car into the back of his probably-not-stolen and brand-spanking-new black-and-silver Ford Mustang. The cars connected with the unique bang that only comes from automobile accidents, the almost-hollow sound of metal and fiberglass cracking together, the sudden tinkling of glass and plastic hitting asphalt.
It was a good hit, not too fast, eleven miles an hour. Enough to rattle the bones, to snap me against my seat belt and send me back hard into the driver's seat, and, more importantly, to send the Mustang forward. The new Mustangs have crap visibility out their rear, the window too small and set too high on the tail, and I couldn't see Illya behind the wheel, but I heard the second collision as his front end met the back of Vadim's Cadillac. The Caddie, like the Town Car, was stolen, though a couple years younger, maybe an '82 or '83.
I lost a second getting the seat belt off, which isn't a long time in the concrete, but in the abstract was more than adequate for me to think about how slowly I was moving, and how badly this could turn out if I didn't speed things up. We were on a public street, and while the daylight wasn't broad due to the heavy cloud cover, it might as well have been. There was no place to hide, and certainly the sound of the crash would pull people from their beds or their breakfast tables,
send them running to their windows to see what was happening on the street outside.
Then I was out of the car, the tire iron I'd found in the trunk in my hand, and running forward to the Mustang. Vadim was out of the Caddie, heading around its nose to come along the other side of the car, to the passenger side. I heard, then saw, the Pathfinder as it hopped up on the curb to my left, drawing even with the Mustang. Through the side window, I could see Illya still dazed, only now beginning to shake off the effects of three collisions in quick succession. While the first two-the Town Car and the Caddie-might have rattled his cage, it was the third, when his air bag had deployed, that had been the most crucial. For air bags to work, they have to work fast, and they have to be able to counter the force of the collision in their own right. Take one to the chest in a low-speed crash, and you'll feel it.
Illya was feeling it right now.
I reached his door and tried the handle, and wasn't at all surprised that it was locked. Inside, Illya was looking around, realizing what had happened and the trouble he was in. Opposite me, at the front passenger's door, Vadim was working with a tire iron of his own. We hit the windows almost simultaneously, and the glass shattered in concert, raining onto the wet street and into the car. In his seat, Illya started shouting at us, gabbling fear and outrage as he leaned forward, trying to reach with his right hand to the small of his back. I spun the tire iron around, jabbed the straight end hard through the now missing window and into his side, connecting with him just below the armpit.
