"I don't know what you want me to tell you, Elizavet," Nicolas Sargenti said. "Even if you had done work for Gorman-North, there would be no way to prove it. The entire nature of the transaction, from its beginning to its end, is perfect in its anonymity. That is how you have always desired it, for both of our sakes, I must add."
Alena growled from the back of her throat, and spun away from where the attorney sat in the reading chair by the window of our hotel room. "It would have been American, an American job."
"A job on American soil?" Sargenti asked. When he spoke, his accent was more Italian than French. "Or a job bought by an American?"
"The latter, it would be the latter."
"The same problem. Impossible to say." Nicolas Sargenti released a pained sigh, looking to where I was lying on the bed, back against the headboard. "Michael, what is this about, please?"
"We're having some trouble," I told him, and indicated the bruises that covered my torso. They were glorious in their color, and while Alena had massaged most of the swelling down, their array of green, yellow, red, and blue remained spectacular, and covered me in strips and splashes from my shoulders on down, disappearing beneath the waistband of my pants.
The damage could have been much worse, and as it was, it was relatively minor. I was stiff and I was sore, but the frostbite hadn't taken, and my fingers and toes had feeling and motion. Given another day or three of rest, I'd be back to fighting speed, so to speak.
Nicolas Sargenti managed a courtesy chuckle. "Dare I ask what has placed you in such an ignoble position?"
"I fell," I told him. "In the snow."
Alena filled a glass with orange juice from the glass pitcher on the room service cart, left over from our yogurt-and-muesli breakfast. The cart also held a pot of tea and some rapidly fading fresh fruit.
"All right," she said to Sargenti, handing me the glass and a handful of ibuprofen. "You are still checking inquiries?"
"Not as frequently as I once did." Sargenti adjusted his glasses and refocused his attention on her, his voice as mild and soft as ever. "But I do check them, yes. I add that you did tell me that you were retired, Elizavet, so if this has been a shortcoming on my part, I think you will understand. For the last several years I have not thought it necessary to stay atop them as I once did." An almost hopeful gleam came to his eye. "Though I still field requests for your services. Would you be reconsidering your decision?"
"No, I am not. I am retired. I intend to stay that way."
Sargenti nodded slightly, letting his eyes go about the room again, taking it in. He didn't speak, but he didn't need to. If she wanted to maintain that she was retired, that was fine with him. She still required his services, as I now did, and he still took a hefty annual stipend to provide what we needed.
This was the third time I'd met Nicolas Sargenti in person. The first time had come some two and half years earlier, in Warsaw, at the Radisson Hotel off Grzybowska Street and Jana Pawla II Avenue, near the business center of the city. It had served as both Alena's annual meeting with her attorney, as well as my introduction to him. At that point, Alena had explained that I was now her partner, and she was hopeful Sargenti would be willing to provide for me the same services he provided for her, for an increased percentage, of course. He had been willing; his only question had been whether or not she was still retired, and if so, did that mean that I would be taking on the clients she now declined. He had seemed entirely ambivalent when I'd explained that, no, I was not, at the present, looking for work.
The second meeting had been almost thirteen months prior to today's, in Moscow, at the Rossiya Hotel, near the Kremlin. The Rossiya had closed its doors the following month, though I doubted our business there had played any part in that. Sargenti had supplied Alena and me with a new battery of identities, and then gone over the books with her. He had noted that her expenses were outstripping her earnings, but had then assured her that her investments were still performing quite well, and that there was more than enough money left in the account. Her investments, I learned, were primarily in real estate owned around the world. At the Moscow meeting, she had directed him to sell two of her properties, one of them in Hong Kong, the other in California. Together, the two sales had netted over thirty million dollars.
Considering that Nicolas Sargenti now took forty percent for his services-an increase from the thirty he'd earned when representing her alone-the fact that she was retired didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. And no wonder, then, that when she'd e-mailed him from Bozeman the day before yesterday with the sentence "Tuesday morning grove," he had dropped everything to meet us at the Grove Hotel in Boise this morning.
He hadn't traveled to us out of greed alone. He'd come because he had to. It was the nature of the relationship. He would come, because if he didn't, he believed either Alena or I would kill him. The only way out of his dealings with her and me was in death.
He certainly knew it as much as Alena or I did. That it didn't bother him in the least said volumes. It wasn't something he ever considered, I don't think; the idea of betraying her was absolutely alien to him, and probably had been so even before he had discerned exactly what she was doing to command such enormous fees. Sargenti was in his late sixties, now, retired from private practice. He had everything he could want, and more money than he could ever spend.
I found him fascinating, and had from the first time we'd met in Warsaw. From what Alena had told me, I'd expected someone in his forties, perhaps approaching fifty, but Sargenti was nearly twenty years older than that. His hair, worn flat on his scalp as if glued there, had gone entirely to gray where hair remained, and not much of it did, and his head itself was shaped almost exactly like an eggshell. He was an ugly man, genuinely so, as if genetics had conspired to intentionally mismatch his features to optimal effect. His eyes were hazel, muddy, widely spaced, and heavily lidded, and each seemed to protrude from its orbit enough that I thought they must surely brush against the inside of his spectacles. His nose managed to be both narrow, high, and flat at the same time, leading with the nostrils, and his mouth was small, as if to compensate for the real estate taken by everything above it. Pockmarks finished the ensemble, old scars from a childhood illness.
But where nature had failed him, money had come to the rescue. His winter suit was perfectly tailored, and he wore it well, from the silk tie to the braces to the fine leather shoes. The attache he always seemed to carry with him gleamed with the warmth that only superb leather has, and the Zenith watch on his wrist was never the same one twice, and always unpretentious in its elegance. There was nothing ostentatious in how he presented his wealth. He had it, he was comfortable with it, and that was all he wanted from it.
I understood greed, or thought I did, but Nicolas Sargenti gave me a whole new perspective on it. For him, this wasn't about acquiring wealth; it was about his right to have it in the first place, and to keep it. Perhaps it was entitlement, or a sense thereof, born from some psychological need or trauma. But whatever the reason, he was greedy because he wanted to be, and in that I also understood why, in him, Alena had made a perfect choice. She indulged his desire, satisfied it. She did so in a way that allowed Sargenti to feel everything he had was well earned.
Alena moved to the window, parting the privacy veil with her hand enough to look out, thinking. Sargenti waited, taking a sip from his cup of tea, then replacing the cup carefully on its saucer.
"The requests for my services," she said. "You do not respond to them, I assume?"
"I have seen no point in it," Sargenti admitted.
"But they've come, these requests, they've come through the established channels?"
"I am unaware of any other way to retain your services than those protocols we established to do so. Your anonymity-and Michael's, for that matter-is entirely intact. I have done nothing to compromise that, Elizavet, I assure you," he added. "For your sake as much as my own."
Alena let the curtain fall back. She smiled down at Sargenti, in his chair. "No, Nicolas. That is not my concern."
"I am relieved. I have always, as you know, treated my work for you with the utmost care."
I spoke up from where I was on the bed. "Do you know if it's been the same person or people trying to contact her?"
Sargenti cocked his head, perhaps trying to parse the question. "I'm not certain I understand your meaning, Michael."
"It's an insulated process, right? It starts the same way, say, uses the same initial point, but it's the cutouts that change, the steps necessary for the initial inquiry to reach you?"
"Ah, yes. Yes, though there are several possible points of initiation."
"And when you've received these, when you've checked, you've simply ignored them, right?"
"Disregarded, I would rather say."
"Disregarded, then. No response."
"Correct."
"But you're still receiving requests. So someone isn't getting the message, or is ignoring it."
Sargenti frowned. "Perhaps so. I had presumed that the requests were being made by different individuals, not by the same individual again and again. But it is possible."
"How many points of contact are there?" I asked. "How many starts to the chain?"
"Five," both Alena and Sargenti said, together.
I looked at her. "Is it likely they know more than one point of contact?"
She shook her head.
"So we're looking for multiple attempts stemming from the same point of contact."
"Possibly."
In his chair, Nicolas Sargenti closed his eyes, combing his memory. "A moment," he murmured.
Alena moved back to where I was on the bed, taking a seat beside me. Her right hand moved to find mine, simply to rest her fingers against my own. She looked tired, and she looked worried, and she looked guilty, and none were states I was used to seeing on her.
Our experience at the cabin in the Montana woods had, in its way, been far worse on her. While Bowles and the others had worked over my body, what Alena had done to secure my freedom had worked over her soul, fragile as it was. It had forced her to step backwards to what she once had been, and it made her doubt she could ever change.
Sitting on the side of the bed, not looking at me, afraid to even hold my hand, I knew what she was thinking. It didn't matter what changes the last three years had wrought upon her; she now believed it was only an illusion.
She was still an instrument of killing, still an empty thing, and she always would be. Bowles died, and I went for the pistol he dropped, my fingers too numb to manage the task easily. It took me too long to do it, I was too slow, and all I was thinking was that if Sean wanted to finish what Bowles had put into motion, I wasn't going to be able to stop him. I didn't know where he was, and that meant that Alena most likely didn't, either.
With the pistol in my swollen, useless hands, I fought myself to my feet, slipping in the snow. My teeth had stopped chattering, and I was beginning to feel warm again, and I still had enough wherewithal to recognize that was a very bad thing; it meant I was turning hypothermic, and that I wouldn't last for much longer in the cold.
Then I saw Sean, standing at the door to the cabin, and I brought the gun up much too slowly, but he didn't move, and I realized why. He'd disarmed, dropping his weapon, standing with his hands raised to either side. Between two of his fingers something sparkled.
"Just a job," Sean said. Slowly, he moved his hand, showing me what he was holding. "I've got the key for the cuffs. It's yours."
I lurched forward a couple of steps. "You speak Russian?"
The confusion lasted only an instant. "No."
In Russian, as loud as I could, I shouted for Alena not to shoot him, that we were going into the cabin, that I had to get warm. Sean flinched slightly at the abruptness of my voice, but that was it for movement until I reached him.
"Inside," I told him.
We went into the wreckage of the front room. The table had busted during the fight, as had one of the two chairs. I all but fell onto the couch, not feeling the room's warmth at all. Sean turned to close the door.
"Bad idea," I said.
"The heat's going out."
"She'll kill you."
He stopped, watched me as I held out my hands, still holding the pistol. I doubted I could actually get my finger to contract on the trigger if I needed to, and I suspect he doubted it, too. He put the key in the small lock on the Flexi-Cuffs and twisted.
"Take them off me."
When he dug his fingers between my skin and the plastic, I didn't feel it. He pulled the cuffs free, careful to draw them over the pistol without touching it, then threw them aside onto the floor. As soon as he'd finished, he unzipped his parka, then draped it around my shoulders.
"Thanks," I said.
"There are blankets in the bedroom. If I go and get them will she kill me?"
I shook my head.
He went to get the blankets, returning with three dark wool ones that smelled of mothballs and must. He was wrapping the second one around my legs, tucking its end beneath my feet, when Alena entered. He didn't hear her come inside, and the only reason I knew she was there was because I'd been watching the door.
She'd dressed for the work and the weather, winter camouflage in the form of overwhites. Her hair was hidden beneath a black watch cap, and that was barely visible beneath the drawn hood of her white parka. Grime and mud peppered her clothes, and the blood that soaked her right arm and spattered her right side was bright in contrast. The rifle across her back was a monster, a Winchester, the kind the locals used for hunting big buck, and in her hands she held one of the guns we'd taken from the Burien cache, a modified Ruger with an integrated suppressor.
She had the pistol pointed at the back of Sean's head before she'd finished crossing the threshold, and the look on her face made it clear that shooting him was not only what she intended to do, it was what she needed to do. If she was seeing me at all, I couldn't tell.
"No," I told her. "Friendly."
Alena didn't move and neither did Sean, and it was a struggle for each of them, because each of them wanted to. Yet neither did, Alena keeping the gun and her vision fixed on the back of Sean's head, and Sean, perfectly still with the last blanket in his hand.
"He's helping," I said to her. "You can close the door."
Sean brought his eyes up to mine, and that was the extent of his motion. His eyes were so brown they might as well have been black. He didn't seem afraid, but he wasn't happy.
"The door," I said again.
Without shifting her aim or looking away from Sean, Alena stepped back, extended her right foot, and used her boot to close the door.
"Who is he?" she asked in Georgian.
It took me a moment to parse the switch in languages. I was beginning to feel drowsy, another symptom of the hypothermia. "Sean. I shot him back in Cold Spring."
She thought about that. "We will have to kill him."
"I'm hoping we won't."
She thought about that, too. Then she lowered her aim, still with the gun in both hands, just no longer pointing it at Sean's head.
"Move away from him," she said to him, switching back to English.
With the caution reserved for handling poisonous snakes, Sean raised his hands and got up, stepping carefully away from me. He went to the side, avoiding the debris on the floor, giving Alena space. She watched him move, staring at him like he was a window and she wanted only the view beyond. For nearly thirty seconds more, none of us moved.
Then she came to my side at the couch, and looked down at me.
"I'm sorry I made you wait," she said.
"You're here now," I said. "I'm going to pass out, okay?"
I didn't hear her response, and when Alena woke me some time later, I found that I was still on the couch, but somehow I'd been dressed in dry clothes. The pain that surged in rising clamor throughout my extremities told me that I was going to recover.
"It will be dawn soon," she said, speaking in Georgian. "We must go."
I blinked the world back into focus, saw that Sean was seated on the chair, the Flexi-Cuffs now around his wrists. He was watching us impassively. As far as I could tell she hadn't actually harmed him, but there were ways she could have done it that I wouldn't have been able to see.
I sat up, and Alena pushed a mug of something hot into my hands. She'd stripped off the overwhites and cleaned off any of the blood that might have reached her skin. "Why'd you do that?"
She didn't bother looking at him. "To be safe."
"Well, I'm awake now," I said, switching to English. "Uncuff him."
Alena's lips compressed, the taste of my words unpleasant. She did it anyway, though, brusquely working the lock on the cuffs and then whipping them away from his wrists, then moving back to stand by me at the couch.
I sipped at the mug, discovered that it was warm water sweetened with sugar, nothing more, and nothing had ever tasted quite as good. I tried to drink it slowly, downing about half of it before attempting to move. The soreness and the stiffness that had settled into me made me wince.
"So, Sean," I said. "What do we do with you."
"You either kill me or let me go," he said. He glanced for a second to Alena before coming back to me. He was flexing his hands, working his fingers, and I wondered how tight Alena had fit the cuffs on him.
"Who does-did-Bowles work for?"
"I thought he was DoD, but the way you were talking to him I'm guessing I was wrong about that, that he's with the White House. I don't know, he never told us."
"That was the first you'd heard of a connection with the White House?"
"I'm with Gorman-North, Mr. Kodiak. I'm a contractor. I get the job, I do the job, I take my money, and I wait for the next job. It's mission-specific; I know you understand that."
"What was the mission?"
"To apprehend you. If possible, to apprehend the woman. To secure your cooperation in locating the woman if she couldn't be found."
"And then?"
"We were to drop you."
I admired the way he said it; he said it the same way he'd said everything else about the job so far, without opinion, merely reporting the facts.
"So Bowles was your contractor, that's what you're saying?" I asked him.
"I don't know if Bowles was the one paying Gorman-North for our services," Sean said. "But he's definitely the contact guy. This time and that thing in New York, he was management."
"Just your luck to be on both jobs?"
"It's a small community. You know that."
I took some more of my sugar water. "Getting smaller every day."
Sean looked at Alena again, clearly trying to compose his next words, then went back to me. "I don't know what you were into, or why they want you. I don't give a damn. It's not my job to give a damn. You cut me loose, I'll tell them what happened, that you overwhelmed us."
"So why should we let you do that?" Alena demanded.
"It'll come out either way. You're not going out there to dispose of the bodies, not in the snow and the daylight, at least. Whoever it is that wants you, they're going to know we blew the job, that you're still on the loose. You kill me or you let me go, that won't change."
"Unless this gets covered up. The way Cold Spring was covered up," I said.
Sean considered that. "Yeah, that's a possibility. Not sure how much it alters, though. They'll still know what happened."
I finished the sugar water, thinking that Sean was right. "What's your name, your full name?"
"Sean Baron."
"What were you before? Delta?"
He looked a little indignant. "Force Recon."
"Marine."
"Semper Fi."
I chose not to remark on the irony of that, used the arm of the couch to get to my feet. "We're leaving, Sean Baron. If you could give us a couple of hours before you call Gorman-North and tell them that the job's gone tango uniform, I'd appreciate it."
His surprise was minor, and quickly concealed. "I can hold off on it until this evening, say that's how long it took me to get clear."
"You won't take it the wrong way if I say I hope never to see you again," I told him.
"Honest to God," Sean Baron said, "I have it my way, I wouldn't have seen you in the first place." In his chair in our room at the Grove Hotel, Nicolas Sargenti opened his eyes.
"The man in Cape Fear," he told us. "He has passed on a message for Mr. Collins four times in the last two and a half years."
"You're certain?" Alena asked.
"Of course."
"The man in Cape Fear?" I asked.
"Nicolas can explain," Alena said, dropping back into her thoughts.
"The man in Cape Fear is named Louis Woodburn," the lawyer told me. "He sells yachts. For the last decade or so, he has received, every Christmas, an annual gift in the form of a porcelain doll of the kind that is popular in France. Upon breaking apart the doll, he has discovered ten thousand dollars for him to spend as he might choose, and a telephone number. The number changes each year, of course. Currently, it is for a private voice mail box run by a singles-matching service in London.
"In return for this annual gift, Louis Woodburn takes a message should anyone ever call his business, asking to speak to Mr. Jacob Collins. Mr. Collins is the name of a schoolmate of Mr. Woodburn's, one he has not had any contact with since he was twelve years old. The caller asks if Mr. Woodburn knows where Mr. Collins might be reached. Mr. Woodburn explains that he has not had any dealings with Mr. Collins since they were in school together, but should he run into him, he can take a name and a number to pass along. Whatever name and number he takes is then forwarded to the voice mail box to be collected by me."
"At which point you do what?"
Sargenti checked on Alena, who gave no indication that she was even hearing us. Taking that as permission, he continued. "Were Elizavet still seeking new clients, I would then call the number that had been left. In every case it is another cutout, and I would leave a message in turn, with a name and a number to be contacted at, and a time. Assuming that I was then contacted as described, Elizavet would direct me to arrange a personal meeting, at the time and place of her choosing. The client would then be collected at the stated time and place, and taken to a location not unlike this one, for a personal interview to be conducted by me. In some cases, Elizavet would attend, though her presence would be concealed or otherwise obfuscated."
I nodded my understanding. If each of the five initial contacts led to procedures as convoluted and insulated as this, there was almost no chance of the communication being traced back to either Sargenti or Alena until they were certain it was legitimate. Whichever of them established the initial contact point certainly had done so under an assumed name, so even should that be discovered, it would lead only to a dead end.
Much like where we were now.
Alena abruptly rose, saying, "Thank you for coming, Nicolas. You have the paper?"
Sargenti straightened in his seat, and if he was bothered by the abruptness with which she was terminating the meeting, he did not, like everything else, reveal it. He took his attache from where it stood beside the chair, moving it onto his lap, then worked the combination on each latch with deliberation before snapping them open. From inside the case he produced a slate-gray mailer, slightly smaller than the standard American business size, bulging with its contents. He offered it to Alena, then closed his case and got to his feet and reached for his overcoat.
"Do you wish me to look into Mr. Collins?" he asked us.
"No," she told him, then added, "You're flying back tonight?"
"I spend tonight in Montreal. I should be home the day after tomorrow."
"We need reservations for a hotel in Wilmington, North Carolina." Alena gestured with the mailer, then tossed it to me on the bed. "In one of these names, please."
"For how long?"
"Three weeks."
"You shall have it before I leave for Montreal," he assured her, then leaned forward and gave Alena a kiss on each cheek, which she returned. He nodded good-bye to me, then went with her to the door. I listened for the sound of the locks falling back into place, then dumped out the contents of the mailer beside me on the bed. There were four identities, two for each of us, and in each set we were husband and wife, and it was the full battery, from driver's licenses to credit and library cards. One set said we were Canadian, from Toronto; the other identified us as Americans, from St. Louis. Passports for each identity had been provided.
Alena returned, stopping at the room service cart to pour herself the last of the orange juice.
"Wilmington?"
"I do not know what else to do, Atticus." She turned to me, draining the glass and setting it back on the cart. Frustration was evident in her voice. "It is a very long shot that the person or persons who has been trying to reach Mr. Collins is the same person or persons who is trying to kill us. But I do not know what else to do."
"Gorman-North uses the Mr. Collins contact?" I asked her.
"I do not believe I have ever done any work for Gorman-North. Of course, I could be mistaken in that. I believe the two jobs I did for the CIA before my retirement came through the Collins contact. Given the relationship between the government and its civilian contractors, the people who move between those two sectors, it is reasonable to believe that someone at Gorman-North knows of it. But that is incidental, perhaps."
"Because it doesn't go back to the White House?"
"It presumes that Gorman-North is the connection with the White House, yes, and we have no evidence of that."
"No reason to think there isn't."
"But no reason to think that there is, either."
"So we go to Cape Fear, and we watch Mr. Woodburn, and we hope that whoever has been trying to reach you through him pays him a call?"
"Or is watching him already, and we can make the surveillance, double back on it."
"And then try to get out of whoever might be watching him what we hoped we'd get from Bowles."
She looked almost stricken. "I didn't have a choice, Atticus."
"I'm not blaming you."
"He was going to kill you, I had to-"
"I'm not blaming you, Alena."
Her mouth closed tightly, and I saw her hands ball into fists. Her expression contracted, filling with her anger and her frustration and her fears.
"Come here," I said.
She shook her head, almost childlike.
I thought for a moment, then said, "You're not who you were. Don't think that you are."
The anger in her voice matched the anger in her eyes, still directed more at herself than anyone or anything else. "You can't say that. You don't know. You can't say that."
"If it had been you," I said. "If it had been you in the snow, half naked and taking that beating, if it had been your head that Bowles was pointing the gun at, I would have done the same thing."
She shook her head, refusing me, saying, "No, no, I cut him, Atticus, do you hear me? I needed to announce myself, I needed to draw them away from you. The two men on patrol-I killed the first one, but the second, I kept him alive so I could cut him, so I could make him scream, so they would know that I was there. I cut him so it would hurt, so they could all hear."
Her voice trailed off. She wasn't looking at me, perhaps she felt she couldn't, and maybe if I was someone else, she'd have been right in that.
I brought myself forward on the bed, wincing as I swung my legs onto the floor. She refused to look at me still, even when I put my hands on her shoulders, brought her around to face me. There were things I could say, things I could offer to try to make her feel better about what she had done, what she once was, what she was afraid she always would be. I could have told her that her guilt was the thing that declared she had changed, that her self-loathing at this moment was the mark of her relearned humanity, that what she had told Dan in Portland had been true, that what she once was wouldn't have batted an eye.
There were a lot of things I could have said to try and help her through it, to try to make her feel better, but I didn't say any of them. I just took her in my arms and I held her, and she let me do it.
I certainly didn't tell her that what she'd told me didn't change anything I'd said.
Had the positions been reversed, I would have done exactly the same thing.
Including cutting strips off a man to make him scream.