Then, finally, I was able to get it under control.
"What's so fucking funny?" she asked.
I managed to stop laughing long enough to gesture vaguely at the house, her, and the dog with my hammer, and to say, "Bonnie and Clyde play house."
It took her a few seconds, staring first at me as if trying to determine if I truly had lost my mind or not, then finally looking at those things I'd indicated. She frowned at Miata. She frowned at the house, with its missing windows and half-finished floors. Then she looked down at herself, at the handful of nails in one hand and the hammer in the other, and the penny dropped, and she, too, started laughing.
Laughing at our domestic fucking bliss, and the irony of it all.
Twice a week we'd check for a message from Dan.
We would go to one of the Internet cafes in town, get a cup of tea and surf the Web and check up on the news of the world. While we were at it, we'd check the LiveJournal of a man named Billy Kork. Billy Kork was sixteen, lived in Newark, and posted every few days or so about all the kinds of things you'd expect a sixteen-year-old from Newark to post about. He posted about music, and school, and movies, and television, and girls. He posted a lot about girls. Sometimes, he shared his poetry. His poetry was very, very bad.
When we saw that another of the very, very bad poems had been posted, we'd log in with the user name and password Alena had chosen, and access the private-message portion of the blog. Once there, we'd find a message from Dan, forwarded to us by Billy Kork. If a response was required, we would post one, and thus carry on an albeit truncated and stilted conversation.
It was a good system, simple, and difficult to crack. To have intercepted the communication would have required the intercepting party to know, first, that Billy Kork was Vadim; second, that "mountainclimber998" was Alena and myself; and third, at least one of the account passwords. The odds of discovering the first were very, very low, but within the realm of possibility. The odds of discovering the second were even lower, because the only way to learn that we were mountainclimber998 would've been from either Dan or Vadim. Learning the third, especially the password for mountainclimber998, was impossible.
Which is not to say that it was a foolproof system, because it wasn't. On our end, if someone knew what they were doing and hit the computer after we'd finished with it, they could have recovered enough information to know what was going on, despite the fact that I made a point of clearing the browser's cache after each session. On their end, it was possible that someone could bring a federal warrant to bear on LiveJournal and its servers, forcing them to open the accounts, and thus gain access to our communication that way. But if the federal government knew enough to know that it was Dan and Vadim communicating with us, then surely they would know a lot more, and the Men in the Black Balaclavas would have come calling.
As that had not yet happened, we could reasonably assume we were safe.
In the beginning, the messages had been status reports. They mostly apprised us of Dan's search for Illya, and the frustration he was having in locating the man who had betrayed us. Sometimes he'd give us an update on what was happening in New York, what was going on with the few people I'd asked him to keep tabs on. But these days, the very, very bad poems, and thus Dan's messages, were fewer and further between. Even the blog itself was beginning to suffer from a lack of attention, with Billy offering his opinion less and less often as Vadim himself lost interest in the facade. I couldn't blame him; he'd kept Billy Kork alive for over two years. That's a long time to tell the same joke.
Still, twice a week, we found ourselves an Internet cafe, and we checked Billy Kork's blog. Two months after our third New Year together, on a rainy and cold Monday morning, the message came.
I'd settled at the computer in the little cafe, a place called Khval Dghes, which translated to "Tomorrow Today," Miata flopping at my feet. He was getting old, and both Alena and I suspected arthritis was beginning to affect his joints; on the days when it rained, days like today, he was slower, though as attentive as ever. Alena was at the counter, ordering our tea and chatting with Rezo's wife, Irema.
We'd been around long enough that we were known in Kobuleti, that we were locals, and we were reasonably sociable as a result. Better that the community know us and like us, better that we be good neighbors than bad; that way, should anyone come calling asking questions, we stood a chance of hearing about it. Being antisocial would have only drawn unwanted attention, and the wrong kind of speculation. As it was, we were the nice-but-strange couple renovating that house outside of town. It was assumed that we were married, that we had American money, and if they wondered why we'd chosen to live in Kobuleti, their imaginations were happy to supply plenty of theories. With Alena's limp and the silent Doberman, they would have talked about us anyway.
I surfed for a few minutes, checking the news, then running the same searches I always did, plugging in the names that still mattered to me to see if the people they belonged to showed up on the Web. I found a few articles and stories, skimmed them. A girl I had known and cared for apparently had sold her first novel for a six-figure advance. I was mildly surprised to find a story about an ex-girlfriend dating a reasonably famous computer guru. When I typed in "Natalie Trent" I got multiple hits, but none of them for the one I cared about. As far as I knew, there'd never been so much as an obituary for her.
On an impulse, I did a search for "Elliot Trent" and got much the same result. Alena joined me as I tried it again, this time adding "Sentinel Guards," and that came back with a surprise. She moved her chair closer beside me, leaning in and resting her chin on my shoulder, reading as I did.
"He sold it," she said. "He sold his company, Sentinel Guards."
"Yeah."
"'Citing declining health.'"
"It's a better excuse than a broken heart," I said. "His health's fine. It's his will that's broken."
"You're so sure?"
"He was a widower, Natalie's mother died from breast cancer when she was young. I can't remember Natalie ever mentioning Elliot so much as dating another woman. It was just the two of them. And now he's outlived his daughter, as well."
Alena stayed silent for several seconds, leaving me to my thoughts, which weren't particularly pretty at that moment. Then she said, "You should check."
I shook it off, nodded, and typed in the address for Billy Kork's LiveJournal.
"'February's wind, it blows so cold,'" I read, aloud. "'Is this my bones, as they grow old?'"
"In the name of God," Alena groaned, burying her face against my shoulder, "please stop."
I pointed at the screen. "You sure? The third stanza is all about his acne trouble."
"Check, damn you," she said.
I logged in as mountainclimber998, tapped in our password, then followed the appropriate link to reach the private messages.
2330 NORTH WILLAMETTE BLVD.
#202
Alena and I stared at the monitor, neither of us speaking. At my feet, Miata stirred, repositioned his head to rest on my shoes.
"Tbilisi to Berlin-" I started to say.
"No," Alena disagreed. "We take the ferry from Poti to Sochi, to Russia. Sochi to Krasnodar, by plane. Krasnodar to Istanbul, by plane. From Istanbul to London, from London to target."
I pulled my eyes from the words on the monitor to look at her. Her expression had hardened, her mouth drawn to a tight line. She turned her head, met my gaze.
"To target," I echoed.
"To target," she confirmed.
CHAPTER
The condominium was built on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a place called Swan Island, presumably because once upon a time, swans had held a great fondness for the place, or maybe because the land below, spilling into the wide swath of the Willamette River, had been owned by a man named Swan. I didn't know, and I didn't bother to find out, because I didn't care to. That wasn't why I'd come to Portland.