"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 involving 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."