She had been sleeping, Alena told me, when Mgelika Iashvili called to warn her that there were three men driving out to the house. It had been poor slumber, the way she described it, the kind where you're aware that you're sleeping badly, but not awake enough to do anything about it. It had taken four rings before she'd managed to pull herself to the phone, groggy and cotton-mouthed. The clock on my nightstand said it was seven minutes past six in the morning.
“I was certain it was you,” Alena told me as we sat together on the bed in her room at the Londonskaya. She was leaning back against my chest, warm and strong, my arms around her. I was having trouble letting her go. “Calling early again.”
“Good that it wasn't,” I said, thinking that a busy signal then would have cost her her life.
She'd been surprised to hear the chief's voice, enough so that it took her precious seconds to realize who was speaking.
“Do you hear me, Yeva?” Iashvili was telling her. “They're on their way to your home now, they will kill you if they find you there. You have to get out. You have to get out now.”
Groggy or not, that had been all it took.
Alena dropped the phone, not bothering to hang up, and rolled out of bed, reaching for the nightstand and the Walther P99 she kept there. It was her favorite pistol, at least for the time being, and the one she felt most innately comfortable with, and that was why she kept it close. She was on her feet and readying a round when Miata and the security system both went off at the same time. For Miata, that meant a frantic scrabbling at the bedroom door. For the security system, that meant a smoke detector-like shrieking that filled the house.
With the gun in her hand, she moved into the hall, stopping long enough at the linen cabinet to yank the power cords from each laptop and silence the alarm. The sound of it was loud enough to be heard outside, and now, working only from Iashvili's warning, she was desperate to maintain some element of surprise.
“They'd come early in the morning,” Alena said. “I had thought that meant they would try to breach, to take me in the house. If that was the case, I thought it best to remain inside and let them come to me. I thought my knowing the floor plan and them not knowing it, that would be an advantage.”
With the silence restored, she'd held in the hallway, putting one hand on Miata's back, to keep him beside her. She could feel the Doberman trembling anxiously, eager to move forward, but heard nothing from outside. She spared a moment to curse herself for disconnecting both computers from power, because in doing so, she'd cut off her own access to the external cameras, and had no way to visualize what was happening.
Then she heard the breaking glass and the rush of air being sucked into sudden flame, and she smelled the gasoline and the smoke. She realized she'd been wrong; they weren't coming inside.
They were going to burn her out.
The house had been constructed out of wood when first erected, and all our efforts to restore the place in the past years had been in keeping with that. It was summer in Kobuleti, and while sea damp could chill us to the bone during the winter, things had begun drying out since the late spring. The fire had everything it needed, and it took it all greedily. By the time Alena had realized what had happened, the temperature was already rocketing, and smoke was beginning to lead the flames inside.
Her mistake having been made, she moved immediately to correct it, releasing her hold on Miata and sprinting for the back door of the house as quickly as her weakened left leg would allow. It was a calculated risk; the fire had come so quickly upon the arrival of the car, Alena was gambling that no one had circled around the back yet. She cut through the living room, Miata at her heels, threw open the door, then held long enough to check her sight lines and assure herself she wouldn't be running into any bullets. She didn't see anything. Behind and above her, she could feel the flames, and the smoke was already making her eyes tear, her lungs labor and burn.
Again leading Miata, Alena started out, planning another sprint for the concealment of the treeline. She'd just begun out the door when she caught movement in her periphery, coming around the left side of the house, managed to arrest herself and veer off for the woodpile. A chatter of submachine-gun fire chased after her, and she slid as much as tumbled into cover, listening as bullets buried themselves in the logs and earth.
For a moment, then, she was certain she'd been trapped. The pile of wood had been stacked a meter away from the side of the house, perhaps even less, an attempt to give it shelter from inclement weather beneath the eaves. There was no immediate cover to either side, and, at her back, the house was rapidly becoming engulfed in flames, fire now racing up the walls, close enough that the heat had gone from uncomfortable to painful. Things had moved quickly enough she'd had no time to dress, still in the tank top and underpants she'd worn to bed, and she could feel her bare skin beginning to burn.
Another burst from the submachine gun chewed up the logs, and she heard shouting from the other side of the house, and then from the man gunning for her in response. They were speaking Russian, and the one who had her pinned down was shouting for one of his friends to come around the side, that he had her cornered. There was a percussive bang from the front side of the house, almost an explosion, and Alena realized that the Benz had been set alight, too, that one of the tires had burst from the heat.
She also realized that Miata wasn't with her, and when she looked, she could see the Doberman still holding in the back door, looking at her. She gave him a hand sign, ordering him to come to her, and the dog started to do as commanded and then, to her horror, broke off into a run, and she realized what he was doing and shouted at him to stop. She heard the submachine gun rattle off another burst as she spun out of the cover of the woodpile and fired two double-taps at the man trying to kill her. All four bullets hit, and the man collapsed.
Fast as she'd been, she hadn't been fast enough. She got to her feet, racing to where Miata lay in the open ground between the burning house and the treeline, where the dog had fallen halfway to target. The pool of blood spreading beneath him was enough to make her certain he was dead, but as she reached him, Miata managed to lift his head, tongue lolling, chest heaving, finding her.
Knowing it would get her killed, she stopped long enough to pick him up anyway, then ran for the trees beyond the man she'd just dropped.
“At least one of them was coming from the other direction,” Alena told me. “Coming to try and flank me, as his friend had told him to. I couldn't leave Miata lying there. I couldn't do it. What if he'd decided to finish him?”
I nodded my understanding, thinking but not saying that she'd been luckier than she'd ever had a right to be, something she already knew, anyway. I also didn't say that carrying eighty-seven pounds of Doberman in her arms while being shot at was possibly the most stupid, foolish, and noble thing she'd ever done in her life.
She and Miata were almost to the trees when the second man, the one who'd come around the right side of the house to flank her, opened fire at her exposed back. He, too, had come with a submachine gun, and the burst he laid down was long, which cost him accuracy. Two rounds scored, one creasing her right thigh an inch and a half below the hip, the other cutting a trough out of her upper arm, also on the right side, across the tricep. Between her perpetually weakened left leg and that, she went down, dog and mistress tumbling together through branches and brush. She scrambled herself behind the thickest tree she could find, pulling Miata after her by his paws. She had no idea how bad off Miata was, and wasn't even sure how wounded she was, herself, but she was seeing a lot of blood. More bullets cut through the woods, snapping branches and showering pine needles around them.
The house was engulfed entirely in flames now, and the roar of the fire was tremendous, creating its own breeze. She could hear glass shattering inside, but no more shouting, and she risked a low peek past a tree, trying to spot the new shooter. He'd retreated, backing off from the inferno he'd created with his friends, and Alena tried to capitalize on that, firing twice at him and missing both times.
I was staring at her, and Alena grew indignant.
“I'd been hit in the arm,” she reminded me. “I was doing the best I could.”
The man lay down a return burst to cover his retreat, but it was suppressing more than targeting, and only succeeded in hurting more trees.
For a second, then, Alena had a moment to consider her options, and not one of them was to her liking. She spared a moment to assure herself that her wounds were minor, or at least relatively so, then put her hands to Miata. The dog was not doing well, his breathing rapid and ragged, his eyes half-closed. She tried to stop the bleeding, but realized she had nothing to stop it with, and if she didn't do something soon, Miata would hemorrhage out. Taking him up again and making a run through the woods wouldn't work; even if she could make it through to the road on the far side, near the Lagidze house, the men remaining had a car, and they had automatic weapons. Trying to evade them now would only make sure she died winded and tired. And the Benz, she was now positive, was a total loss.
Which meant she had to take their vehicle, and that meant she had to take them.
She gave Miata a kiss on the muzzle, promising him she'd return, then made her way back to the treeline, dripping blood from the wounds on her arm and leg. The man she'd killed was only a meter or so away, but she passed him by without stopping, staying in the trees as she made for the right side of the house as fast as she dared, as fast as her weakened leg would allow, following the direction the last shooter had retreated. She took the corner wide, still in the woods, and saw no one.
Here, she decided that she needed to rely on speed more than stealth next, and to do that, she required open ground. She had just come out of the woods, preparing to make a run for the corner, when she heard a spasmodic crack and then, immediately, an even more tremendous bang as, inside the house, the major support beams gave way, one after another. The roof collapsed in a shower of sparks, splinters, and embers. Burning debris pelted her even as more heat blossomed, somehow more intense than before. She recoiled involuntarily, bringing her right arm up to shield her eyes.
When Alena brought it down again, she saw that the walls had collapsed along with the roof, and she was looking across the ruins and the flames at an angle, to the front of the house. Through the rippling air she could see two men, the one who'd fired at her last and another, each of them likewise reacting to the destruction of the building.
And they could see her.
She brought the Walther up, moving to her left as she did so, firing on the man nearest to her, the one she'd dogged around the side of the building. She shot him twice, adjusted while still in motion, and fired off another double-tap at the last man standing. Once again she missed, or thought she did, because he returned fire with a submachine gun of his own, and somehow managed to miss her completely.
Then he sagged to his knees, and pitched forward, and she realized that she had succeeded in hitting him after all.
Skirting the ruins of the burning house, she moved to each of the two men in turn, dumping an additional round into their heads. The car they'd arrived in was an Audi sedan, a new one, parked close to the mouth of the road, perhaps ten meters back, most likely to spare it from the fire they'd known they were going to start. She searched each of the men, finding no keys. She emptied each of their wallets of all the bills she could find, stuffing them down the front of her underpants, then ran back to the first man she'd dropped. He had the keys, and more cash, and she took both, as well as the denim jacket he wore and his belt, for good measure.
Miata was unconscious but breathing when she got back to him. With the jacket and the belt, she fashioned a pressure dressing as best as she could around the Doberman, then lifted him and carefully brought him to the Audi. She laid him across the backseat, then climbed behind the wheel and spun the car around, chewing dirt and gravel with the tires, leaving our still-burning home behind.
She headed north, pushing the Audi as fast as she dared given the road, covering the almost fifty kilometers to Poti in thirteen minutes. She couldn't stay in Kobuleti, she knew, and heading south to Batumi had instinctively seemed like a bad idea; I had left bodies in Batumi, and she was certain the men who had come to Kobuleti and what had happened there ten days earlier were connected. Batumi was out.
She needed a doctor or a vet, and she needed one fast, and that left Poti as the only option. So she raced along the coast road, swerving around the sparse early morning traffic and flooring it whenever there was opportunity, all the while talking to Miata, all the while telling him that she would take care of him, the way she had before.
For Alena, the situation had kindled a disturbing sense of déjà vu. Miata had become her dog in very similar circumstances, when she had taken money from one man who dealt and packaged large amounts of cocaine to kill another who did the exact same thing. The target in question had guarded his workplace with a variety of booby traps and dogs. The booby traps were one thing, but the dogs had posed a problem entirely of their own. Each had been treated in the same way, abused and beaten, their vocal cords severed. Dogs need their voices, and denying them it can drive them mad, which, of course, was just what the dealer in question had desired.
When Alena had come for his reckoning, she'd had to deal with the dogs first, and most of them she'd been forced to kill. After all had been said and done, only Miata was still alive, though wounded. Then, like now, she had loaded him into a car-a Mazda Miata-and rushed him to a doctor.
It was twenty minutes to seven in the morning when she arrived in Poti, and she lost another ten minutes driving the city's confusing streets, desperately trying to find someone to help her. The first two civilians she saw fled from her when she stopped, and it wasn't until after the second that she realized why, how she must've looked to them, stained with blood and smoke and sweat, in her underwear, the wheezing Doberman across the backseat of the car.
The third time she asked for help, she held out a fistful of the bills she'd taken off the dead men, and that helped overcome fear long enough for her to acquire directions to a veterinarian. By the time she actually reached the doctor's home-slash-office it was three minutes to seven, and Miata's breathing had gone from labored and rapid to shallow and dangerously slow.
She parked the car literally in front of the house, less than a meter from the door, leaning repeatedly and hard on the horn before getting out of the vehicle. The man who emerged from the house was bleary with sleep, silver-haired and stocky.
“My dog's been shot,” Alena told him, already opening the back door.
The doctor balked, not unreasonably, given what he was seeing. Alena lifted Miata out of the car, brushed past him, heading inside. There was an examination room just through the door to her left. The man followed her, watched as she lay Miata gingerly on the table.
“Help him,” she told the doctor. “Please.”
Then she went back outside to the car. She was gone less than thirty seconds, and when she came back, she saw that the vet had unfastened the belt around the makeshift bandage, had begun examining the wound. Then he noticed she'd returned and said, “It's not good. I don't know if I can save him.”
“You can.”
The vet saw the Walther that Alena had just retrieved from the Audi. Whether it was the sight of the gun, or her tone of voice, or both, or neither, the man hesitated for only a second before setting to work, quickly trying to save the Doberman's life.
“I didn't point it at him,” Alena hastened to clarify. “I never pointed the gun at him.”
I told her that given how she must've looked at the time, she damn well knew that showing the gun to him was more than enough. She shrugged, then continued.
For the first couple of minutes while the vet struggled to get Miata stabilized, Alena did nothing but stand there, watching. The adrenaline was dropping away like a wave retreating from the shore, uncovering all the aches and sores it had been concealing, the searing pain from the wounds on her arm and leg. She was afraid to sit down, afraid to leave the room to tend to her own needs, suspicious that the vet would capitalize on her absence.
After several minutes, the vet said, “I have to operate on your dog.”
“Go ahead.”
“I'll need you to help me.”
“Tell me.”
The man looked at her. She thought he was in his fifties, perhaps. The gun in her hand made her feel guilty, the lack of clothing made her feel ashamed.
“You have to get clean first,” the vet told her. “There's a bathroom in the back, and some clothes in my daughter's room. Wash up, then come back.”
She didn't move.
“Did you do this to him?” the vet asked, sharply.
“No.” The question confused her at first, and then she remembered the gun again. “No! He was trying to protect me.”
“Then you have no reason to fear me.” The vet indicated a roll of gauze on one of the nearby tables, a pile of bandages. “Take these, get clean. Hurry.”
She did as instructed, using the bathroom first to hastily wash herself off. The bleeding on her arm and leg resumed when she went to clean the wounds, and she bandaged herself as best as she was able. The daughter's room, she thought, hadn't seen use in quite some time, and the clothing she found there seemed to bear that out. She pulled on a pair of pants that were both too short and too wide for her, secured them in place with a beaded belt. She stuck the Walther in her waistband, at the front.
When she returned, the vet was still attending Miata, now delivering plasma to the dog through an IV he'd set up. He acknowledged Alena's return, then told her to come and stand beside him.
“Do what I tell you, when I tell you.”
With Alena assisting him, he began to operate.
As I was walking into a brothel in the desert outside Dubai, Alena was changing Miata's IV in Poti. While I was showing a frightened young woman Tiasa Lagidze's picture, she was holding a clamp while the vet pulled bullet fragments from Miata's liver. While I was checking out of the Marina, she was watching the vet stitch our dog closed once more.
“He'll live,” the vet told her. He pulled his bloodstained gloves from his hands and threw them into the trash beneath the sink. “But he'll be weeks, if not months, to recover from this. How old is he?”
“I don't know,” Alena told him. “Ten? Maybe older.”
“He's an old dog.”
She nodded, then said, “I have money. I will pay you.”
“If you like.”
Alena fumbled cash from where she'd moved it to the pockets of her borrowed pants. She hadn't taken time to count it, to really examine it at all. She guessed she was holding somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred euros. She gave him two hundred of them, and the vet took the money without comment.
“We have to go,” she told him.
“I would caution against moving him. You both can stay here awhile longer.”
The offer was a tempting one, Alena told me, an extremely tempting one. The vet clearly lived alone, and no one had come calling during the course of the operation, which led her to conclude that he didn't get much in the way of clients or visitors. Having trusted him this far, trusting him further would have been easy.
The problem was that she had no way of knowing who else might be hunting for her, if anyone else would be coming at all. Given how she'd departed Kobuleti, given that it had been the chief of police who had warned her, if there were more hunters on the trail, it wouldn't take them long to expand their search to Poti. The last thing she wanted was another fight. The second to last thing, at that moment, was to bring such a fight to the doorstep of the man who'd helped her.
“You're very kind,” Alena told the vet. “But we can't.”
He sighed, then turned to one of his cabinets and began assembling gauze and bandages, putting them into an empty cardboard box. When he was finished, he handed it to her, everything Alena needed to make replacement dressings for Miata's-and her own-wounds.
“Simple food for him for a while,” he said. “Lots of water. Watch for infection. He won't want to move about, which is good. You must let him rest.”
“I will. Thank you.”
The vet sighed again, looked at the dog sleeping on the table in front of them.
“I will help you carry him to your car.”
There was an overnight ferry from Poti to Sochi scheduled to leave at six that evening, and for extra you could get your own room. Alena bought a ticket for herself and then bribed the clerk to allow Miata on board. She bought herself a jacket, a backpack, and several bottles of water, and at five she carried Miata, still drugged and sleeping, to their tiny, run-down little cabin. She set him on the fold-down bed, changed his dressings, and waited for the ferry to depart. Six o'clock came and went, and then seven, and then eight, and just as Alena was beginning to think that this wasn't simply engine trouble but maybe something more, perhaps the occupying Russians flexing their muscles, the ferry went into motion, and they set sail across the Black Sea.
She lay down beside Miata, feeling his heart beating, listening to him breathing, and for the first time since the phone had rung that morning, she allowed herself to relax. That was when she remembered that she'd missed our check-in, and realizing that put the rest of her problems into sharp focus.
Of the money she'd taken off the dead men, two hundred and sixteen euros remained. She had no phone and no immediate access to one. She had no credit cards and no documentation. Of the cash she carried, she knew most of it would be required simply to bribe her way into Sochi.
In Sochi, she would find a phone. She would call Sargenti, and he would wire money, and she would find a place for her and Miata to hide.
Then she would call me.
And realizing there was nothing else she could do for the time being, she forced herself to fall asleep, one hand on the Walther she'd snuck on board in the crotch of her too short and too wide pants, the other on Miata's flank.