They reached the door into the yard, and Natalie had thrown it open, then stepped back into cover. Nothing happened, and she looked back to Alena and Dan, and they both nodded, and all of them, including Miata, started out into the creeping dawn.
When they were all five, maybe six feet outside, Dan's Nextel squawked inside his jacket, Vadim trying to raise him over the radio. Almost instantly, probably cued by the sound of the transmission, two of the three who had gone to flank came around the side of the house, on the right, bringing their MP5s to bear. Natalie turned, putting herself in front of Alena, half blocking her with her own body, as Dan stepped forward, each of them preparing to fire. It's likely, in that instant, all three of them thought they were going to die.
It was Miata who saved their lives, because before any of them had even realized the two shooters were coming around the corner, Miata had known. Either he'd caught their scent or he'd heard their movement, but for whatever reason, when the two with MP5s made the corner, Miata was already halfway to them, running hard.
The result was that the two shooters each had to switch targets, because neither of them knew which of them Miata was aiming for, and waiting to find out would have been too late. When you have eighty-seven pounds of furious Doberman bearing down on you, teeth bared and making not a sound as he charges, panic isn't just a reasonable response; it might well be the only response.
One of the two fired off a burst, but it was panicked, and his shots went low, passing beneath Miata as he leapt at him. The shooter screamed, dropped his gun, and fell, pretty much all at once. The second shooter, who had been pivoting out of Miata's way, now realized what he'd done and tried to self-correct. Before he had a chance, Alena and Dan opened up on him, each of them firing double-taps that scored hits in the face and neck.
In the cascade of their shots, then, came the other one, and the part of Alena's consciousness that tracks these things in the middle of gunfights thought it was Vadim's rifle, but thought also that the shot had come from the wrong direction. She turned, trying to locate the source, and that was when she saw that Natalie had gone down, and that was when she saw the last shooter, with his rifle, just inside the treeline, and she knew that the rifle was pointed at her.
(What must have happened, Alena said, was that the shooter on the rifle had lined up a head shot on her, and most likely had been about to take it, when she, Natalie, and Dan had reacted to the other two coming around the corner. Natalie's attempt to shield Alena from the two shooters and their MP5s had moved her into the sniper's path of fire, as well. Alena was adamant about this, and I was inclined to agree with her; if Natalie hadn't moved when she had, the way she had, the bullet that struck her would certainly have hit Alena, instead.)
Dan checked Alena with his shoulder, sending her onto the ground, practically falling on top of her, firing the TRP as he fell. With the range and the motion, if he had managed to hit anything, it would have been a miracle, and since people like us didn't rate miracles, he didn't hit anything at all. The shooter with the rifle fired again, missing, then readjusted and reacquired, readying to make his third shot. This time, he'd score a hit, whether on Alena or on Dan they didn't know, but they were on the ground, and the next bullet was going to kill one of them, certainly.
Then, from the tree house came the sound of shots, Vadim firing his last two rounds at the man who had killed Natalie Trent, doing to him what he had done to her.
CHAPTER
Vadim found a bottle of champagne and three micro pizzas, pepperoni, in the galley when he went to look for lunch. He seemed genuinely surprised that Alena and I would decline to share such a feast with him, returning to his seat and his iPod with a rolling of the eyes that did more to convince me of his nineteen years than anything else had thus far.
After a moment, Alena pulled herself to her feet and put on water for tea. I looked out the plane window and saw land beneath us, painted in white. Ice or snow. We were headed for Europe, I knew that, Eastern Europe almost certainly. I wasn't sure of the range of the Gulfstream V, but supposed we'd have to land to refuel at least once before reaching our final destination.
Alena made two trips back from the galley, traveling slowly and carefully so as to keep from spilling the hot drinks. She brought mine first, then returned with hers, and took her same seat once again.
"Black tea," she said, making a face. "No herbal, nothing without caffeine. I'm sorry."
"We'll survive," I told her, thinking about how, once upon a time, I'd thought caffeine was a major food group all its own. Now it was no longer a part of the diet, neither mine nor hers, at the top of the list of verboten stimulants, in fact. Aside from being addictive as, say, nicotine, caffeine drains the adrenal gland. Considering how much Alena and I relied on adrenaline to do its job, that was something neither of us wanted.
"How many days have I lost?" I asked.
"Three and a half. Dan wanted to move you sooner, but I wouldn't let him. You lost a lot of blood. You almost died."
"We could have made the trip sooner."
"It was not in my mind to risk it. You nearly died, Atticus."
I considered that, then said, "And you wanted to see how what happened in Cold Spring would play out. See what got reported in the media, maybe."
Alena brushed hair back from her cheek, and as she did, the Gulfstream banked slightly, and sunlight came flooding through the windows. Where it touched her head, the copper of her hair seemed to burn.
"So how bad is it?" I asked.
"No, that's not what they did."
"What do you mean?"
"It didn't make the media, Atticus. None of it. From the time we fled the safe house until just this morning, when we left Brighton Beach, there was never as much as a whisper that anyone had died in a gun battle in Cold Spring. There was never as much as a whisper that anything happened there at all."
"There must have been something. Some report."
"No. Nothing."
I removed my newly acquired glasses, rubbed my eyes with my other hand. The glasses had been waiting for me this morning, and while the prescription had been correct-or at least, close enough that my eyes had been able to compensate-their fit was bad, and they dug into the skin behind my ears. I folded them closed, set them on the shelf beside me.
"Natalie," I said. "There should have been at least something about Natalie."
"And I am saying to you that there wasn't, Atticus. There was nothing at all."
She stared at me, a little blurred in my sight, but her expression seemed almost entirely neutral, her sad brown eyes meeting my own. She was waiting for me to say it, to put the words to what she had already concluded, but I wasn't willing to, not quite yet. Not until I had at least made an effort at providing an alternate explanation.
My problem was, no alternate was offering itself for use.
"Dan did not need to sanitize the house," Alena said. "They would have done that for us."
"Whoever 'they' are."
"You know who 'they' are, Atticus, at least in the abstract, at least as much as I know it. There is only one possible explanation to satisfy every question, from who hired Oxford, to who tried to kill you, to who tried to kill me, to who did kill Natalie as a result."
"There could be others."
"With the ability to enforce media silence regarding what happened, to cover up the deaths of almost a dozen men? With the ability and the capital to assemble, finance, and deploy two coordinated strikes against both you and me with perhaps less than three, maybe even two hours of notice? There was no expectation that you would be arriving at the safe house, Atticus, remember that. The initial plan had been that you would deal with Oxford while I was taken to Cold Spring. You were never to join us there."