Natalie Trent drove, speeding us away from Allendale and the body of the man I had been unable to kill.
She drove fast at first, trying to put quick distance between ourselves and the place where Oxford's body now lay, but once we left the Franklin Turnpike for US 202, she slowed to the speed limit. From inside her coat, she pulled her cell phone, pressed the same button on it twice without ever looking away from the road, and then moved it to her ear.
"About thirty minutes," Natalie told the phone, softly. "I've got both of them with me-yes, both of them. He's going to need a car."
She listened for a moment to the reply, murmured a confirmation, then ended the call and dropped the phone back into her pocket. She checked her mirrors, left then right then rear view, and when she did that, she met the reflection of my gaze. She tried a thin smile, and it looked as tired as I felt.
"Dan says he'll have a car waiting for you," Natalie said, paused, then added: "You're still going through with it?"
"I'm wanted for murder," I said. I didn't say that the murder I was wanted for was probably the wrong one, the death of an FBI agent named Scott Fowler. I didn't say it because I didn't need to. Scott Fowler had been a friend to both Natalie and me, a dear friend of many years, in fact. Had been, right until the moment he'd shuddered out his final breath while I tried to save him from the knife that Oxford had buried to its handle in Scott's chest.
That was Oxford's revenge, the way he had worked. He'd killed Scott because he could, and because he knew it would hurt me, and he had been right. He'd killed Scott Fowler because Scott Fowler had been unlucky enough to call himself my friend.
That he hadn't, for instance, killed Natalie Trent, or any of those other people who had the audacity to call me their friend, to care for me, wasn't for lack of trying. It was because we'd barely managed to deny him the opportunity.
Natalie frowned, putting lines to her beautiful face, then shifted her attention back to the road and said nothing more. Beside me in the backseat, Alena shifted, turning her head to watch as a New Jersey State Police car raced by, lights and sirens running, heading in the opposite direction. At Alena's feet, and mine, lying flat and forlorn, Miata pricked up his ears, raised his muzzle, then lowered it again, more concerned with the tension inside the car than anything that might be happening outside of it. He was a big dog, a Doberman, strong and loyal and silent as the grave. The first two were in return for the love Alena had given him; the last was because the man Alena had taken Miata from had cut the dog's larynx, to keep him silent.
Alena watched the police car disappear into the darkness behind us, then turned back and glanced at me, then quickly away again when she saw I was watching her. With the back of her left hand, she wiped at her eyes, deliberately erasing the last of her tears. If they embarrassed her, I couldn't tell. I imagined they did. The last time Alena Cizkova had cried, she'd been locked inside a Soviet prison cell with men three and four times her age. She had been eight at the time.
One shot would have been enough to kill Oxford, and God knew she could have put the shot where she wanted it to go. But Alena had used three instead, and the first two had been revenge, pure and simple. Until very recently, I'd been living with her and Miata at their home on the island of Bequia. Alena had brought me there to protect her life, and I'd succeeded, but with qualifications. Another woman, entirely innocent, had died at Oxford's hands. Then he'd taken the use of Alena's left leg with a blast from a Neostad shotgun that discharged while he and I had grappled. The shot had found Alena, turned the muscle and bone beneath her left knee to ground chuck. Since then, there'd been no opportunity and no time to seek truly appropriate medical attention, and now Alena Cizkova-sometimes called Drama-who had once commanded millions of dollars for her ability to visit death upon anyone for a price, needed a brace and a cane to walk.
So Alena had returned Oxford's favor. I wondered if Oxford had realized what was happening before the last round found home. If he'd understood who it was who was shooting him. Time dilates in moments like that, and he was smart, and more, he was quick. He'd probably understood. It was probably the last conscious thought he'd had.
Alena had exacted an assassin's revenge. Just fast enough to limit Oxford's ability to strike back, just slow enough to let him realize what she was doing to him, and why.
The three shots though, regardless of their significance, had been a mistake. One shot, maybe that would have been ignored by a slumbering resident jerked suddenly awake. One shot, he or she could have believed it was just their imagination. But three, in quick succession? No doubt someone had called the cops.
It was the first mistake I'd known Alena to make, and it was significant as much for its singularity as for the reasons I suspected that lay behind it. It wasn't an error of planning, nor an oversight. Nor was it an error in judgment. She had made it deliberately, because she wanted to. She had wanted to punish Oxford, and not just because of what he'd stolen from her body.
She had wanted to punish him for what he'd done to me.
She and Natalie should have been halfway to the safe house in Cold Spring by the time I put Oxford in my sights. Somehow, Alena had convinced Natalie to turn around, to double back, and that must have been quite the trick, because I knew Natalie. She and I had been friends for nearly a decade, colleagues for just as long, and even business partners for a couple of years. We'd fought each other, loved each other, and carried each other through very dark days. We'd seen each other in glory and despair, with warts and without. I knew just how damn stubborn she could be, and how seriously she took her job. There was only one thing that would have convinced Natalie to risk the safety of her principle.
The safety of a friend.
They had done it for me.
That was why Alena couldn't look at me right now.
And that was why, as soon as we reached the safe house in Cold Spring, as soon as I made certain that Alena would be protected, I was going to leave.
We crossed the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge and the water was black beneath us, and the sky still heavy with stars. It took another seventeen minutes to reach Cold Spring, and another ten after that to locate the safe house off Deer Hollow Road, where the street tapered out into the surrounding woods. We were maybe half a mile south of the Cold Spring reservoir, perhaps a mile east of Lake Surprise, and there were no other houses on the street. The safe house itself was a small two-story structure, old, pushed back from the road and surrounded by trees. All of its lights appeared to be off. The only things noteworthy about it at all were the three vehicles parked nearby, a Mercedes-Benz SLK 230 Kompressor on the driveway beside a Ford minivan, both of which I recognized as belonging to the security detail, and then a twenty-year-old Honda Civic. Even in the relative darkness of the night, I could see the Civic showing its age.
Natalie swept the Audi into a slow turn, then reversed into the driveway, killing the engine. I got out first, Miata following on my heels. Natalie emerged next, immediately moving around to Alena's side to give her a hand out. It was late October, predawn in the Lower Hudson River Valley, and the air had a bite to it, cold and a little moist, rich with the smell of autumn.
The front door to the house opened, and Danilov Korckeva stepped out, a serious-looking pistol in his right hand, held against his thigh. He made for us briskly, looking past me, up the street, checking the approach. Then he glanced over to where Natalie was helping Alena out of the vehicle, and the anxiety on his face flickered for a moment as he gave her a smile, then faded altogether for an instant when Natalie returned it. Then Dan put his attention on me, and however sweet he was on Natalie Trent, I didn't rate, because the anxiety was back, and now he was scowling. Past him, in the darkened doorway, I could just make out one of the security detail, another of the Russians standing post, night-vision goggles waiting on his forehead and a Remington shotgun close at hand.
"What happened?" Dan demanded when he reached me, hissing the question. "You were going to cap the fucker and do the vanishing act. What happened?"
I moved around to the back of the car as Natalie used her free hand to pop it open with her remote. She had Alena out of the car now, supporting her with one arm as Alena got her cane beneath her. I lifted the trunk, took hold of the submachine gun I'd failed to kill Oxford with, and the HK PDW.
"What the fuck happened?" Dan asked a third time, more insistently, his voice lower.
Alena said something in Russian, softly, and it didn't sound hostile, but whatever it was, Dan reacted as if she'd put a knife to his throat. He stood six four, which put him almost five inches taller than both Alena and myself, and he had at least fifty pounds on me, probably as much as double that on her, and most all of it from bone and muscle, not from fat. I didn't know his age, but it had to be somewhere in the early forties, which gave him ten years on each of us. With his shaved head and his black goatee, he vibed Satan-as-bully, and looking at him you got the impression that he'd just as soon break your neck as get drunk on vodka with you. He'd been Russian spesnaz, essentially their equivalent of the Special Forces, and he these days was hooked in tight with the organized crime running out of Brighton Beach. He called Alena "Natasha" or "Tasha," for short, presumably because it was the name she'd used when they had first encountered each other. How he knew Alena I didn't know and I'd never asked, but however he knew her, one thing was clear.
She scared the living shit out of him.
When I met his eyes as I handed him the PDW and said, "Get rid of this," the look he gave me said that now I did, too.
"Can it wait until morning?" he asked. "I'll have to pull a guard off the house otherwise."
"Morning's fine."
"It'll go in the Hudson."
I went back into the trunk, hooked the strap on the go-bag, and pulled it onto my shoulder. It was a small nylon duffel, nothing fancy. Inside were two pairs of underpants, one clean shirt, a toothbrush, a set of fresh socks, and what was left of the half million dollars I'd held back from Oxford's money. By my guess, there was about three hundred thousand left, but I wasn't sure, because I hadn't counted.
I pointed to the Civic, asked Dan, "That's for me?"
He looked vaguely embarrassed. "The best I could do so quick, Atticus."
"As long as it gets me to Newark, I'm happy," I told him.
He looked relieved, but not by much, then turned to follow Natalie and Alena as they made their way into the house. I went to the Civic, found the driver's door unlocked; when I opened it, the dome light stayed off. I appreciated that, and I appreciated that Dan had taken the time to disable it. Then again, from the shape of the car, it was just as possible that the bulb had died.
I tossed the go-bag onto the passenger seat, pulled the keys from where they were waiting in the ignition, and dropped them in my pocket. I closed the door again, took a moment for another look around, another listen to the surroundings. The sky was still dark as pitch, and the only sounds I heard were from the woods, rustling dead leaves and shifting branches, and then, from somewhere above me, the sound of something solid knocking on wood. A tree house was just visible in the branches, perhaps twenty-five feet from where I was standing, maybe fifteen feet or so from the ground. There was a figure moving inside, and he raised a hand to me, and I raised one back. Another of Dan's Russians, this one on overwatch. Whoever was up there was probably very cold and very bored, but again I appreciated the precaution.
Miata nudged my left hand with his muzzle. He'd hung back to wait for me, and I reached down and gave him a scratch behind the ears. He looked up, fixing me with those soulful dog eyes, and I swear it was as if he knew what was going to happen next. Dogs' eyes are like that. Sometimes you can see exactly what they're feeling; sometimes, you see exactly what you're feeling yourself.
"Yeah," I told him. "Stop wasting time, right?"
By way of answer, Miata turned and headed up the path to the house.
I followed the dog. Natalie and Dan were in the kitchen, which seemed to be the only room with its lights on, and that was fine with me because there was no way to see into the kitchen from the outside. Looking from the exterior, the house would appear dark, and that was how both I and Natalie wanted it.
"Who's in the tree house?" I asked, taking off my jacket.
Dan's expression was one of both disappointment and surprise. "You saw him?"
"Not soon enough."
That mollified him, and he grinned. "That's Vadim up there. He's my boy."
Natalie arched an eyebrow. "You've got a son?"
"Nineteen," Dan said, then added, "He has promise."
I hung my jacket on the back of the nearest chair, fighting off a wave of sudden exhaustion while listening as Natalie and Dan continued discussing the security arrangements for the safe house. Oxford's death diminished the threat against Alena, but none of us was willing to say it was gone, not yet. Three hours before Oxford had planted his dagger in Scott Fowler's heart, Scott and I had met with two men at a Holiday Inn off Times Square. Two men who, we'd assumed, had been holding the end of Oxford's leash. One had been a big stack of jovial threat who had done most of the talking, but the other had been a quieter and more thoughtful piece of menace named Matthew Bowles.
Bowles and his partner hadn't been the instigators, though; they were middlemen, the ones responsible for tasking Oxford, for directing him at some other's request to clean up the mess that Alena and I had become. But Oxford had become a liability to them. In the end, Scott and I had persuaded Bowles and his partner to cut their losses. We'd watched Bowles make a four-second telephone call that terminated Oxford's contract, firing the assassin with all the ceremony and care of ordering take-out.
Oxford hadn't liked that. He'd liked that I'd stolen most of the money he'd made from two decades of killing people even less.
That was when he'd begun murdering anyone who'd ever had the misfortune of calling themselves my friend.
He'd killed Scott in Madison Square Park while I was close enough to see it and too far away to stop it. Scott had died in my arms while Oxford had fled, unnoticed and unmolested. The irony of that-if there was an irony to be found-was that I was now wanted for Scott's murder, for the murder of a federal agent.
There were ways out from beneath the charge, of course. Most obviously, I could just turn myself in to the authorities and confess the whole story of everything that had transpired. It could probably work. Until I'd disappeared to Bequia with Alena, I'd had a good reputation in the New York security community; I'd had some respect and even a modicum of brief fame. With a strong lawyer and a little good faith, the truth behind Scott's death would be revealed. At the least, I could be exonerated for the murder of my friend.
But that would require Alena's corroboration, and as Alena was known in certain law enforcement and intelligence circles as Drama, and as Drama was wanted in connection with something in the neighborhood of two dozen murders-for-hire, the odds of her corroboration being seen as credible were pretty damn low. If she walked into the Federal Building in lower Manhattan, the only way she'd walk out again would be in full restraints, with a phalanx of guards, on her way to arraignment.
If she walked out at all.
Someone had hired Oxford to kill her, after all, and that someone was most likely connected with the government. Just because Oxford was currently bloating with swamp water in the Allendale Nature Preserve didn't mean another attempt on Alena's life wouldn't be made.
Even now, we didn't know who had bought the hit. We didn't have the first idea.
I had given Alena my word that I would protect her. I had sacrificed friends and future because I believed her when she told me that she was a killer no more. I had promised her that she would be safe. The best way I could keep that promise was to button her up someplace safe and secure, and that someplace was this house in Cold Spring. Natalie would run the security, and Dan would provide the muscle and the firepower. Nothing fancy, just a safe place that could be secured and controlled for a week, maybe two at the outside. Long enough to be sure that the threat to Alena was gone, that Oxford was the end of it. Long enough for me to disappear someplace far, far away. It didn't matter where.
Just someplace where the people I loved didn't die because of the things I'd done, or the man I'd become. Miata padded off into the darkness, in search of Alena, and I listened with half an ear to Natalie and Dan, standing around the kitchen table, discussing the security he'd put in place. Vadim up in the tree house had been a last-minute addition, it seemed, placed up there while Illya-the guard on the front door-had been dispatched to find me a car. While they talked I found myself a nearly clean glass and filled it with water, drinking it down. I was still wearing my Kevlar, and while it was a light vest, about as thin and comfortable as these kind of things ever managed to be, I was warm in it.
I thought about taking it off, leaving it behind, but I could just imagine what Alena would say if she saw me remove it. She'd call me a fool, and ask me if I wanted to die, and if I answered that things, for the moment, seemed to be safe, she would have snorted that near-contemptuous snort of hers and left it at that.
Natalie had given me a pistol before my meeting with Oxford, and that I did remove, setting it on the table. If I was going to be catching a plane anytime soon, it'd be best to go light. The vest could be ditched easily enough at the airport, if needed; the gun would be harder to dispose of, and since I didn't know where she'd acquired it, I didn't want to risk it being traced back to her. Better to leave the problem for Dan and Natalie to solve.
"There are three," Dan was telling her, indicating a rough drawing he'd made on a piece of paper that rested on the table. The drawing was a map of the house and the immediate area, and it looked quickly done, but more than serviceable. "Not counting Vadim on overwatch. He's got a rifle up there, and night-vision."
"And hopefully a blanket," I said.
"You've got coms?" Natalie asked Dan.
Dan reached into the outside pocket of his jacket, held up a Nextel mobile phone. Natalie nodded slightly, and he dropped the phone back where he'd found it.
"What about the other three?"
"Illya's on the door, you saw him as you came in. We loaded his shotgun with the Brenneke rounds, better for dealing with vehicles if a vehicle should come. Yasha is covering the back door, and Tamryn is sleeping upstairs, in the room next to Tasha's."
"So six altogether, counting you and me."
"You think more?"
"No, six should be plenty, at least for tonight."
They both looked at me.
"Dandy," I told them.
Dan considered my lack of enthusiasm, then said, "I'll go check on Tasha, make sure she's comfortable."
He left the room, shutting the door behind him.
Natalie and I stared at each other. After a couple of seconds of silence, I said, "I'm not sure it's safe to leave the two of you alone. I'm thinking I'll come back to find a gaggle of little red-haired Russian thugs-to-be shaking down the nearest kindergarten."
"He's Georgian, not Russian."
"He's also got a nineteen-year-old son behind a rifle in a tree house outside. Talk about a motivated family."
Natalie grinned, but then it froze. She shook her head slightly. She didn't want to banter, she didn't want the jokes. I didn't blame her. There was a lot of history between us, history that stretched back to a time and a place where we had been very different people. Her father, Elliot Trent, and his company, Sentinel Guards, was the be-all and end-all of security firms in Manhattan. She'd left his company to form a new one with me. She'd turned her back on her father and his Secret Service connections and his five hundred employees and the corporate accounts, and instead thrown her lot in with me when we hadn't stood a chance in hell of surviving.
It was the way she was, always looking to pursue a challenge, maybe because it would have been so very easy for her to live a life with no challenges in it at all. She was beautiful, she was smart, and Elliot Trent was a wealthy man. He hadn't even wanted her to join Sentinel, and when she'd gone into business with me, he'd all but disowned her. As far as Elliot Trent was concerned, I was a danger not just to myself and others, but to the profession as well. If anyone had told him that my profession seemed to have changed recently, he would have taken it as proof confirming all of his worst suspicions.
"You don't have to go," Natalie said, finally. "You can stay."
"I'm not going to take the risk."
"You think maybe, just maybe, you're being paranoid?"
I nodded. "But that doesn't mean I'm wrong."
"Oxford's dead."
"But not whoever the hell it was who hired him in the first place. That threat is still out there, and I want it bearing down on me, not on her and not on you."
Her brow furrowed as she considered her possible counterarguments, and then she sighed sadly. "Any messages?"
I thought about it, then shook my head. My association with Alena had already cost me all of my friends but Natalie; what relationships remained wouldn't survive what would happen next. I'd disappeared once without a trace. Doing it again was going to be one time too many.
"You're sure?" Natalie asked.
"There's nothing I can say."
"Not even to her?" She indicated the floor above us with her head.
"There's nothing I can say."
"Maybe you should think of something. It was her idea to go back for you, Atticus, not mine."
I shook my head again, hoping Natalie would take that as my request to let the matter drop. I wasn't surprised when she didn't.
"She's in love with you, you know that, right? That's why she made me turn around, why we came back."
"It doesn't matter."
"Of course it matters, Atticus." She looked at me with honest incredulity. "It's the only thing that matters."
"Don't be a fucking idiot."
"What?"
"Give me a goddamn break, Nat," I said. "You don't really believe that. It's all that matters? It doesn't matter at all. Not at all, not one bit. Not to Oxford or Bowles or any of that lot, and sure as hell not to Scott. What matters is survival. That's all that fucking matters."
"Don't tell me what I do or don't believe." Her look reflected my sudden anger, turned it back on me, and it crept into her voice even though I knew she was fighting to keep it out. "Survival isn't just drawing another breath. It has to be more than that."
"Then I'm right," I said. "You are a fucking idiot."
She shook her head, hard, as if trying to knock the words I'd said free with the motion, and I know she would've said something more in response, but the door from the hallway opened again, and Dan returned.
"She's fine," Dan said. "Cranky, that's how I know."
"She's not the only one," Natalie said, looking at me. The anger she'd been reflecting was gone, replaced by confusion, and it made me feel guilty, but I wasn't about to explain.
Dan reached around his back, beneath the same thin black leather jacket he seemed to always wear no matter what the weather, and came out with a pistol. He held it out, offering me the butt end.
"Just in case," he said. "It's clean. You can dump it with the car."
It was a Glock 34, simple and straightforward and infinitely anonymous. The magazine was fully loaded, seventeen rounds. I tucked the pistol into my pants at the small of my back.
"We'll take good care of her for you," he told me.
"I know you will."
"She wants to see you before you go."
"Then I should see her," I said, and turned to head upstairs.
"Atticus," Natalie called after me. "Idiot or not, I'm right. It's the only thing that matters." They'd put her in a small room on the second floor, beside the bedroom where Tamryn was sleeping. The lights were off, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, Miata with his head in her lap, petting him.
When she saw me, she said, "Why do they keep putting me on the second floor when I can barely climb the stairs alone?"
"Because it's easier to fall down than to climb up?" I suggested.
She snorted, then pushed Miata gently away and got to her feet, using the headboard as a support. Her cane was leaning against the wall nearby, but she didn't go for it, instead making her way slowly to where I was standing just inside the door. The progress looked painful, and when she reached me she put out her hands, resting them, palms flat, against my chest, and I thought she would give me her weight, but she didn't. There was enough light to see her face, just barely, but not enough to read what was painted there when she looked at me. I couldn't feel her hands through the vest, but I imagined that they were warm.
"I have to go, Alena," I said.
"I don't know how to do this, Atticus," she said, and the frustration in her voice sounded more pained than angry. "I have never had to do this. I have never had to say good-bye to someone I did not want to see go."
I didn't say anything.
She moved her left hand, raised it as if to rest it against my cheek, but then dropped it back to my chest, as if afraid that the touch would burn her. Even in the darkness, I could see her scowling.
"I want to kiss you," Alena said, suddenly. "May I do that?"
"You can do that," I told her.
She moved her hands up my chest once again, this time lighter, splaying her fingers, as if reading me in Braille. When they reached my shoulders, she began to lean in, then balked, pulling back. She tilted her head to her right, tried a second approach, pulled back once again. Her head tilted to the left, and that seemed to make her feel more confident, and she held my shoulders more firmly, and this time I knew she would go through with it.
I met her mouth with my own, felt her lips tentative against mine, and there was only a light brushing of skin, dry and softer than I had thought her capable of being. Then she did it again, this time with certainty. Her fingers moved to my neck, then into my hair, and she pulled herself into me. I put my arms around her, tasting her and holding her, and she made a sound into my mouth, almost mournful.
Then she let me go, reaching out for the dresser with one hand, using it to support herself as she made her way back to the bed. She sat slowly, in exactly the same place she had before.
"Good-bye, Atticus," Alena said.
I left her sitting there.