Neither Vadim nor Dan had said anything about there being another occupant in the condo. While their surveillance had been quick, I doubted it had been sloppy. So either this was a new arrival-someone who was sleeping here today-or it was someone who had been here but who hadn't gone out. Someone who Dan's friend Semyon either didn't know about, or had neglected to tell Dan about.
There was a faint scent in the air, and it was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it. Almost floral, but not quite.
The sleeper's breathing had become regular, steady and calm.
I stood up slowly, turned out from the cover of the wall, and stepped silently to the foot of the bed.
The sleeper was a woman, blond, maybe in her mid-to-late twenties. Almost all of her was buried beneath the bedclothes but for her head and her right arm. She was wearing flannel pajamas.
There was a red light glowing from something positioned on the nightstand nearest her side of the bed. It took me a half-second to realize what it was, and as soon as I did, I placed the scent I'd caught earlier, and that was all it took.
I left the room, entering a short hallway. Carpet continued to cover the floor, making silence easy to preserve. On my right, a flight of stairs ran past me down to the main floor of the condo. A folding door was set in the wall just past the head of the stairs, off the landing, open, and inside was a washer-dryer stack, both of them too small to be of much use. Another door, this one standard, was ahead of me, barely ajar, presumably the room I'd been unable to see into when I'd first climbed onto the roof. I knew what was inside it, now. I didn't need to see, but I wanted to.
Maybe I was hoping I would be wrong about what I'd find.
I wasn't.
The baby was asleep in her crib, butt in the air, blanket piled beside her. Stuffed animals surrounded her on all sides, Kermit the Frog and Elmo and a fluffy bunny rabbit and two Winnie the Poohs, and one creature with one eye and no nose and a goofy grin. The odor of disposable diapers and scented wipes was heavy. She was breathing easy, the sound of an infant deep asleep, with one cheek mashed against the mattress, her mouth open. She didn't look happy and she didn't look sad; she just looked like a baby girl, finally letting her mother have a good night's sleep.
I made my way downstairs, and left using the front door, without making a sound.
CHAPTER
"You're sure it's his?" Alena asked me.
"I haven't the first fucking clue if it's his or not," I told her. "It's been three years, the baby can't be more than three months old, the math works. If it is his, and if he has been traveling around the way Dan suspects, then he must have hooked up with Mom someplace else, moved her and the baby here after he got settled. But it doesn't matter. The point is he's caring for the mother and the kid, so either it's his or he's taking responsibility for it."
We were seated outside of a Peet's Coffee perhaps a stone's throw from each of our hotels. Morning traffic was just beginning to trickle past us, heading west on a one-way street. The rain, for the moment, had stopped, and the sky was just beginning to lighten, hinting at daylight behind its gray mask. It was surprisingly warm, maybe in the low fifties. Looking past Alena, into the coffee shop, the baristas looked like ghosts as they moved at their counter, hidden behind the sheen of condensation that had formed on the windows.
I waited for Alena to say something more, and she didn't, and her expression didn't change. I wondered if she was seeing the same problem here that I was. She had a paper cup of herbal tea in her hand. They'd given her two bags for it, and their strings dangled over the side with their tags, and she was flicking them with her index finger lightly, but that was it.
"Fuck this," Dan growled, keeping his voice low. "Have you forgotten why we want this cumwhore? Have you forgotten what he did to us?"
I turned my head enough to meet his eyes, and hoped my expression gave him all the answer he needed. Then I checked my watch, and said, "I've got sixteen minutes past six. He gets off work in just under two hours. We've got maybe fifteen minutes to come up with a plan that gets us what we want without involving the woman or the kid."
"Fuck this!" Dan repeated, louder. "We go back there, we do what we were going to do!"
"It's not an option."
"He brought this on himself! He should never have taken a woman, brought her into this! It's his own fucking fault!"
Off the reflection on the window I saw Alena raise her head, focusing on Dan, and her expression still hadn't changed. In Russian, she said, "But it's not hers, nor the child's."
"What the hell is the matter with you?" he shot back at her, also in Russian. "Where the fuck's your head, Natasha?"
"The child and the mother stay out of it," she said icily.
In the past, the tone, the finality, would have been enough to shut Dan down completely. In the past, he would have pulled a face, then stopped it before it could take hold, either his fear or his respect for Alena getting the better of him. Not this time.
He shot me a glare that was full of naked hostility and accusation, then leaned across the table, moving his head closer to Alena.
"You're not thinking," Dan said in Russian. He said it calmly, as if trying to explain a mistake to a promising but stubborn student. "Your man here has goatfucked this, Natasha. Illya won't be in that apartment five minutes before he realizes someone was there, and as soon as he realizes that, he's going to run again. What happens if he takes the woman and the baby with him? We just give him a free pass for murdering Natalie?"
She didn't respond. Her index finger kept flicking the tags on their strings.
Dan shot me another glance, and I looked past him, watching the traffic on the street. If he was suspicious that maybe I understood what was being said, I couldn't blame him. He didn't know everywhere we'd lived for the past three years, only that we had started in Georgia, not that we'd ended there. But he'd have been a fool if he hadn't already considered the possibility that I'd learned more than just yoga, ballet, and some new hand-to-hand moves while we'd been away.
He frowned, clearly struggling with what he wanted to say next. He leaned further forward towards Alena, his hands resting palm up on the table, trying to appeal to her.
"You know what we have to do," Dan said gently, still speaking in Russian. "You know the best way to do it, and you know the tactics involved in something like this, the kind of pressure you're going to need to bring. Refusing to do this is weakness, it's the kind of thing that leads to mistakes that get you killed. You want information from Illya, the best way to get that will be to have the woman and the baby in the same room with him."
Her only answer was the quiet assault her finger was continuing against the tea tags. Dan waited to see if she would say anything, and he waited what seemed like a long time, maybe thirty seconds, but she didn't.
Abruptly, he straightened up in his chair, the frustration spilling from his voice into his posture and motion. "What the fuck is the matter with you? Natasha, seriously, and I say this with all the respect that is due to you, but you are seriously fucked up. I've known you, what, twenty years? Your man, here, he's got you twisted around, you don't know if you're going or coming anymore. I know you taught him, I know he's yours. But what he's taught you, he's changed you and it's not for the better."
Her index finger froze, and I felt as much as saw the subtle shift of her weight, the tensing of the muscles in her lower body, all the signatures of an upcoming attack. Dan saw it, too, or sensed it, maybe, and it didn't matter that we were on a public street at a quarter past six in the morning; it was in his eyes, the fear that he'd crossed one line too many, and that however much she might have been changed, she hadn't been changed enough to keep from killing him then and there.