I woke up twice before the flight.
The first time, I was lying on my back on something cold and hard, and I could smell garlic and onions and frying meat. When I opened my eyes, I saw two large colanders and a stockpot and what looked like a twelve-inch skillet hanging above me from various hooks. Between a tarnished copper saucier and a pasta steamer hung a bag of Ringer's solution, and the line from the bag seemed to be running down and into my arm. Dan and Vadim were on one side of me, and there was a woman I'd never seen before on the other, and her nose looked like someone had trapped it in a vise and forgotten to ever release it. Dan still had powder burns on his face, but the blood spatter was gone.
There were voices all around me, some very soft, all of them speaking Russian, and the woman with the fascinating nose was wearing surgical gloves, and the gloves were stained with blood. It took me a moment to recognize that it was likely my blood that stained them, that she was probably working on me as I watched, and that explained the extraordinary amount of pain I was feeling.
"Please tell me I'm not getting surgery in a kitchen," I said.
Dan and Vadim and the woman all looked down at me in surprise.
Then the woman looked at Dan and began shrieking at him, clearly berating him, and Dan shouted back at her, and Vadim reached for something out of my sight. I felt a needle breaking through my skin, felt something warm and heavy filling my veins, and I fell gratefully back into darkness. The second time I awoke, I was in a bed, in a room, in the dark. Light filtered in from the street through windows somewhere behind me, but it was weak, street lighting, and I thought it must be late in the night. The sound of music thumped up through the floor and then through the bed from someplace beneath me, a bass line more felt than heard, and behind that, barely audible, I could make out the susurration of traffic running along streets that sounded slicked and puddled with rain.
The bed was a big one, maybe a king, and I was beneath the covers, and my clothes were gone. Alena lay beside me, sleeping above the sheets, and she had her clothes on, but had removed her boots. A pistol rested on the nightstand nearest her, along with a cell phone, and I tried reading the time on its display, but couldn't focus my eyes, couldn't manage to make things stop looking so blurry. It took me another few seconds to realize that was because someone had removed my contact lenses.
I wondered where I was going to get a new set of glasses.
Paws came scratching across the hardwood floor, Miata making his way to me, and I felt his breath against the back of my hand. I raised my arm and stroked his neck for a few seconds, and then he pulled away, and I listened to the sound of him settling once more on the floor nearby. I shifted experimentally in the bed, trying to reposition myself, and the pain that erupted from my right side, from my gut down through my knee, made me gasp, and filled my eyes with water.
Beside me, Alena made a noise in her sleep, perhaps responding to me, but more likely experiencing, once again, the nightmares that were her youth.
The pain lasted for several seconds before it drifted away reluctantly, and it must have been a minute or more before I was willing to try moving again. This time, I limited myself to moving only my right leg, and the pain returned as intense and hateful as before. Maybe because I'd known it was coming, I managed to remain silent.
The hurt retreated, taking its time to do it. When I finally closed my eyes again, I saw Natalie's body, lying in the leaves.
I stared at her until sleep took me back where I belonged. The plane was a Gulfstream V, and it was waiting on a piece-of-shit runway in Montauk, on the ass-end of Long Island, and I didn't get a good look at it from the outside, because Dan and Vadim had to carry me on a stretcher into the plane. Once inside, I had a great view of the ceiling, which was painted a robin's egg blue. It seemed an oddly cheerful choice, and I supposed whoever designed these kinds of things had gone with the color to conjure a greater sense of flying free in the wild blue yonder.
The pilot stood at the door of the cockpit as I was loaded inside, a long stick of a man with a two-day growth of gray and black beard on his face, wearing a suit with a wide array of wrinkles. Our eyes met as I was carried past him, and the boredom he showed me was so absolute I wondered if he wasn't loaded up with painkillers the same way I was.
They carried me almost the whole length of the plane, then settled me on a leather-covered bench near the galley. As soon as I was down and safe, Vadim slipped past his father, heading back the way he came. Dan looked down at me with a frown for a moment, then sighed and sat down on the bench opposite me.
"I want to sit up," I told him.
"Atticus," Dan said. "You really don't."
I rolled my head to the side to look at him. He looked tired, and I imagined he hadn't grabbed much sleep since everything had gone to hell at the safe house, however long ago that had been. I didn't know. My sense of where I stood in the passage of time had been almost entirely destroyed. It wasn't the first time I'd experienced the sensation, and each time it happened to me, I liked it less and less.
"Help me sit up," I told him.
Dan sighed heavily, but moved to assist me. If he did it because he was still afraid of me, I couldn't imagine why. The condition I was in, I couldn't have convincingly threatened a wet paper towel.
It took effort, and more help than I had hoped I would need, but together we got me propped into a nearly upright position, with my back to the galley wall, and a view of the length of the plane. I swore a couple of times while we did it.
"Don't swear," Alena said, limping down the aisle, Miata following at her heels. She had a duffel bag, gray canvas, over her shoulder, and it must have made moving with the cane difficult, but she gave no sign of it. "You can't breathe properly if you're swearing, and why the hell is he sitting up?"
The last was directed at Dan, and for a moment, I thought he would actually throw up his hands in exasperation. "He tells me he wants to sit!"
Alena dropped the duffel onto one of the leather-covered seats, then dropped herself into the one across from it, facing me. She scowled. Miata continued past us, snuffling his way into the galley.
"The bullet creased the iliac crest on your right side as it exited. The bone needs time and rest to heal. If you insist on moving, you will prolong recovery, and potentially do greater damage. Bad enough that I'm half lame; now you're trying to cripple yourself, as well?"
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," I said.
Vadim returned, carrying a bag of his own, this one smaller than Alena's duffel, black, with a silver Nike swoosh on its side. He gave me a grin, then bent to stow his luggage in one of the lacquered wood cabinets acting as a divider between portions of the cabin. The plane wasn't terribly large, but a lot of effort had gone into the main cabin design, and there was plenty of space. Slight tears marred the leather upholstery around me, and I could see faint scratches on the lacquer in places, and it struck me that the Gulfstream probably got a lot of use.
Finished, Vadim closed the cabinet once more, then dropped into a seat of his own, pulling an iPod from one of his jacket pockets. From where he stood at the cockpit door, the pilot called out to us, asking if we were ready to go. That surprised me, not because he seemed to actually care, but because he sounded American, and not Russian.
"They're ready," Dan said, and he got to his feet. He switched into Russian, asking Alena something, and while I was starting to pick up words here and there, I couldn't really understand it. But I heard the name "Illya," and that was enough.
"You know where he is?" I asked.
They both looked at me, Dan with vague hostility, Alena with curiosity.
"Not yet," Dan admitted. "But we'll find him. We'll find him, and we'll take care of him. I'll take care of him."
"But you don't know where he is."
"I said that I will find him."
"And you think he doesn't know that? There's no way Illya's still in New York, Dan. He got out, and he got help to do it, most likely. You're going to have to cast a very wide net before you find him again."
Dan clenched his teeth, showing me one of his thick fingers. The anger was an anger I understood, the anger of betrayal, and I didn't take it personally that he was consequently directing it at me.
"But I will find him, Atticus." It was a growl, half threat, half oath. "I will find him, and when I do, I will pay him back for what he did. He sold us out, he got two of my boys killed and your Natalie, he goes down for that. For that, he pays."
"He pays for that," I agreed. "But not until after I've had a chance to talk to him."
"The fuck-"
Alena interrupted. "It will take you a while to find him, I think, Dan. Atticus is correct."
"This kind of thing, it has to be answered quickly!"
"Not until after I talk to him," I said, and I said it deliberately, and I said it softly, and I said it as clearly as I could. In his seat, about to put his ear buds into place, Vadim stopped what he was doing, turning around to look at first me, then his father.
"Tasha, tell this guy-"
"Find him," I told Dan. "Watch him. Track him. Mark him. But don't touch him, Dan. And don't let him make you. Once you have him, you let us know."
"I have to take care of this!"
"You will. But I'm going to need him first."
I moved my eyes from Dan to Alena, and I saw she was with me, that she understood what I wanted, and why, and more, why it was important.
She spoke quietly, in Russian, and Dan made a face like he was having trouble controlling his temper, and then he actually did throw his hands in the air. When they came down again, he pointed his finger at me a second time.
"I don't do this for you," he said. "And I don't do this for Tasha, you understand? I do this for Natalie, because I liked her, and she liked you. But because I do this for Natalie, Illya is mine, you understand? His life is now mine, no one else's. No one kills that walking fuckhole but me, understand?"
"I understand."
Dan grunted, turned away, slapping Vadim on the shoulder. The younger man got to his feet, and the two of them exchanged a rough hug. Vadim had drawn the short straw on the height gene, because he only reached Dan's shoulder, which put him at, perhaps, chin height on me and Alena. But he had his father's body type, the same strength of chin and jaw. When the two of them embraced, it was clear that the blood running between them was thick.
Dan released the young man, this time slapping him lightly on the cheek, then made his way to the front of the aircraft. He stopped at the door, looked back at us.
"I will see you when I see you."
"You didn't even see us here," Alena responded.
Dan turned to the pilot, still waiting at the cockpit door. "How many passengers you carrying?"
"One," the pilot said. "Some kid I'm taking back to the home country."
"That's right. One."
Dan looked back at us, then at his son, a final time. Then he went out the door, disappearing down the stairs.
"Buckle up," the pilot told us. Seven minutes after takeoff, the pilot came over the intercom.
"International waters," he said.
I shifted carefully on my bench, looked over to where Alena had taken a position opposite me, her legs stretched out in front of her, as if she was imitating my posture. Her head was turned to the window, resting her forehead against the glass. Miata lay curled in the aisle between us.
Without looking at me, Alena asked, "Are you ready to talk about what happened?"
"If you're asking do I feel up to it, yes, I think so."
"Then tell me what happened."
I told her what happened, as best as I could remember. Everything from the moment I'd left the safe house in the Civic to my broken memories upon returning. I ended with her and Vadim taking me to see Natalie where she lay in the yard.
She never stopped looking out the window as I relayed it to her, and her questions were few. She was curious about the AR-15, because she said that had been an anomaly in the weapons load-out. The MP5s were, strictly speaking, MP5SDs, and apparently, all but two of the people who'd been trying to kill us had carried them.
"Tasked from the same source," Alena murmured, more to herself than to me. "Each group, tasked from the same source for their op."
"Your turn," I said. "What happened at the house?"
She drew a deep breath through her nose, exhaling it strong enough that it formed a mist on her window. Then she swung her legs off the bench, turning so she could sit facing me.
"Natalie was trying to protect me," Alena said. "Remember that, Atticus."
Then she told me what happened at the safe house.