There were two buildings in the complex as you faced it, each block about four stories tall, and from the looks of things, I figured the condos were two stories each within. It gave the place height enough that anyone taking a leap from one of the upper balconies would be lucky to get away with a broken leg and nothing more. If someone were to take a header, the cement poisoning would be fatal.
It was seven in the morning, and it was raining cold and steady, and when I looked opposite, across the river, I could just make out the tree-covered mountains to the west through the veil of falling drops. I was sitting in a Nissan Pathfinder, with Danilov Korckeva behind the wheel and Alena seated directly behind me. According to my watch, we'd been on the ground in Portland for precisely twenty-seven minutes. Thirty hours earlier, we'd left Miata in the care of the Raminisshvillis and made our way to Frankfurt, instead of London, catching a direct flight on Lufthansa to, what I was informed by the signs at the airport, was the City of Roses. I hadn't seen any roses yet. Like learning about the origins of Swan Island, I didn't think I'd have the time.
Dan had arrived two days prior, on the Gulfstream. Vadim had made the trip with him. Together, the two had put Illya Tyagachev under immediate surveillance, each of them taking turns.
"You're positive it's him?" I asked. The words sounded strange to me, the English still alien on my tongue.
Dan nodded. "I made the ID myself, Atticus. Here, we go around the back, you can see the approaches. His place is on the second floor, second apartment from the south."
"Lives alone?"
"Far as we can tell, yes. Haven't taken a look at the apartment. Didn't want to do anything that might warn him. I don't want to lose him again."
"Probably wise," I told him.
Dan spun the wheel, and we turned up North Holman, now heading roughly east, but then he swung an almost immediate right, and we were heading south again, this time coming along the block at the rear of the condominiums. Houses were spaced evenly on both sides of the street as we approached, with shallow lawns running down to the sidewalk. The houses showed their age, beaten with weather and use. The nicest place in the immediate vicinity seemed to be the condos themselves.
We'd seen a black iron security fence at the front of the complex, with a call box and a gate. The fence enclosed a parking lot at the rear, with berths for each automobile built under the walkway for the second-floor condominiums, providing meager shelter from the rain for driver and vehicle. The fence was eight and a half, maybe nine feet high, with vertical bars, no crosspieces, to deter attempts to climb it. A motorized gate ran on a track, closed for the moment, where the cars could enter and exit, and perhaps six feet north from that was a smaller gate, for pedestrian traffic. There was no one in the lot as we went past, but most of the berths were full. I counted the spaces from the south side, saw that the fourth one was empty. Assuming each condo had a companion berth, and assuming the odd-numbered ones went with the apartments on the second floor, Illya Tyagachev was missing his car.
"Where is he now?" Alena asked from the backseat.
"Working, he drives a cab," Dan said. "Graveyard shift. I didn't want Vadim following him all night long, he might've made that. I told him to get rest, instead, so he's back at the hotel."
Alena hissed softly with displeasure.
"When does he get off work?" I asked.
"Another hour-he drives midnight to eight," Dan said, quickly, as if trying to assure us that his lack of surveillance didn't translate to a lack of information. "Heads home, crashes, gets up again around four in the afternoon, heads out again."
"To his other job," I said.
Dan had turned us away from the condos, had us on a main thoroughfare heading south, back towards the heart of the city. He shot me a glance, vaguely suspicious.
"You know about the other job?"
"He didn't pay for that place on a hack's salary," I said. "And if he did what he did to us for money, I'm sure it was spent long ago. There's another job, got to be. That's probably how you found him."
"There is another job," Dan confirmed. "He sells meth." "Russians," Dan told us. "Add in the others: Ukrainians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, all the rest. Over sixty thousand of them are here. That's why Illya came here. He didn't want to leave the U.S. of A., but he couldn't leave his people, either. He probably went to Seattle first, maybe San Francisco, we haven't been able to track all his movements yet. But he ended up here, maybe six, seven months ago."
Dan leaned his chair, threatening to topple backwards on the people eating their McDonald's burgers at the table behind him. We were in the food court of an indoor shopping mall. The court was on the third level, open in the middle with a view down to the ice rink below, where maybe two dozen boys and girls were wobbling about on skates. Music drifted up at us, distorted, the Vangelis theme from Chariots of Fire. Between that, the cavernous acoustics, and the ambient noise of shoppers and diners, there was little chance of being overheard.
"Anyway, he finds where the Russians are, you know how it is. Meets the people he needs to meet, gets himself a gig running meth from the labs outside of town to the sellers here in the town. Lot of meth here. They have a lot of the wide open spaces here in Oregon; you need that if you cook meth. Stuff stinks like shit in sunshine."
I nodded. When he said "Oregon," he said it "ore-ee-gone."
"You know the people he's working with?" I asked. "That how you found him?"
"One of them I know from the old days. He heard from a friend who heard from a friend who heard from a friend that I was looking for this guy, that it was personal for me. Illya, he changed his name, he calls himself Maks Dugachev now."
"And you're certain it's him?" I asked again.
Dan sat forward, bringing his chair down with a slam, getting angry. "I told you, I checked for myself, I made visual confirmation. This is personal for me."
"And the people, your friend's friend's friend, you trust this guy?"
"I told you, I trust him."
"How do you know him?"
"It doesn't matter! I know him, he won't fuck with me, he understands the personal, okay?"
"It matters to me," I insisted. "It matters if he tips 'Maks' that we're on to him."
Dan shot me a look, then spoke to Alena in Russian, asking why the hell he should put up with my bullshit. She'd been sitting with her chair turned away from us, chin on the railing, gazing down at the skaters. Without looking back, she told him that he had to put up with my bullshit because my bullshit was her bullshit, and if he didn't like hearing it from me, he could hear it from her instead, and that the questions would be the same, but her patience for the answers would be much shorter.
She sounded only vaguely annoyed when she said it, and she never raised her voice, and Dan looked from her back to me, sighing.
"His name's Semyon, okay? Semyon Pagaev. We were outside the White House together when the hard-liners tried to take Yeltsin in 1993. This man, I trust him with my life."
It took me a moment before I remembered that the White House he was referring to was the White House of Russia, where the Supreme Soviet had been housed. Now it held the Russian cabinet, if my memory was serving me right.
"This satisfy you? Are you happy now?" Dan demanded.
"Almost. How'd Semyon make Maks for Illya?" I asked.
Beside me, still looking down at the skaters, Alena snorted softly, grinning, and muttered, "Say that ten times fast."
The joke caught Dan off guard, and he'd started to answer me, then did a double take, looking at Alena strangely. Then he said, "One of Semyon's boys-"