He stopped speaking abruptly, clamping his mouth closed, breathing noisily through his nose. He was still shaking, and I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he clenched his teeth.
I looked pointedly at the pistol in my hand, then back at Illya. He was lying, at least about the last part. Maybe whoever had grabbed him had never said, yes, we want Kodiak and the woman, Drama, dead, but he had been brought in by Dan as one of the bodyguards for Alena, and that should have been more than enough to explain the stakes. It was justification, that's all it was, lies to absolve himself from his guilt.
"I'm telling you the truth!" Illya cried. "They never told me what they wanted to do! They never told me!"
I pointed the Taurus at the headboard by his right shoulder and put a round into it. Wood splintered and popped, and the report in the bedroom was explosive. Illya screamed.
"Stop lying to me," I said, softly. "You're smart enough to have stayed hidden for three years. You're smart enough to know better than to lie to me."
"I'm not-"
"I was never supposed to go to the house in Cold Spring, Illya," I said. "You had to have contacted them and told them I was going to be there as soon as you found out, probably when Dan sent you to find me a car. So what did you think they were going to do to me when they told you to tap the tank? What did you think it meant when they told you to leave your post at the door, to run as soon as you saw them?"
"I didn't, I didn't think-"
I handed the pistol to Alena, who took it and fired a second round, this into the headboard on the opposite side of Illya from where I'd put my shot. He screamed again, cringing.
"Fifty thousand dollars," I said. "You sold us out for fifty fucking thousand dollars."
Illya had tucked his chin to his chest, raising his bound arms to cover his face. He was sobbing.
"I want a name," I told him. "And I want it now."
He lifted his head, his look pleading, his eyes shining with tears. "I didn't…they never told me-"
Alena handed the pistol to Vadim.
"-I don't remember!" Illya screamed, and he tried again to push himself backwards, through the headboard and the wall, watching Vadim with alarm. When he ran out of room for his retreat, he started off the bed, instead, flopping to my right, and Dan lurched forward, grabbing hold of Illya by the upper arms, and gripping him tightly, forced him back into position. I half expected Dan to follow it up with a free shot, a punch to the gut or the side, but he didn't. He just shoved Illya back into place on the bed and then resumed his seat.
Illya remained motionless for a second, staring at Vadim, now holding the pistol, then cried out and threw himself in the opposite direction he'd gone before, this time towards me. Unlike Dan, I didn't move, just let him topple from the bed and onto the cold wood floor. He landed hard, no way to catch himself or, at least, no consideration in his fear to do so, and took the impact on his right shoulder. He sobbed, bound feet working, scrabbling against the wood floor, trying to drive himself into the corner, alternately pleading and whimpering.
I felt like I was going to be sick.
"Alena," I said.
"Atticus?"
"Leave us alone for a couple of minutes."
She put her hand back on my shoulder, resting lightly just for a moment, then turned and headed out without a word. Dan followed her, more slowly and much more reluctantly. Vadim started to follow, then turned back. He offered me the pistol.
"I don't need it," I told him.
Vadim's brow creased, as if he wasn't sure what to make of me, or at least, as if he wasn't sure what I was up to. Then he shrugged, cast a last glance at Illya, and followed after the others, taking the Taurus with him.
I waited until Vadim had closed the door, then rose from where I'd been sitting. Illya had wedged himself into the corner, and his bladder had emptied, and the smell of urine was ripe and tragic. I put my hands on his shoulders, gently, but all the same he cringed when I did it, and I don't blame him at all for that.
"Come on," I said. "Let me help you up."
I felt him shudder, exhaustion and surrender together, and he let me lift him back to the bed. I didn't have anything for his wet underpants, but I put the blanket back around him all the same, trying to keep the chill away. He watched me with confusion and with fear.
Once he was propped up once more, I resumed my seat in the chair.
"Dan's going to kill you," I told him. "There's nothing to be done for it. You're going to die, and you don't want to, but you and I already know that's the way it's going to be."
"You…you could stop him."
"I could," I agreed. "I'm not going to stop him."
The despair seemed to flood his entire body.
"No one is going to," I said. "This is where it ends for you. This is where the choices you've made have brought you. Do you understand that?"
"It wasn't my fault." He said it softly. "They were government men, don't you understand? What was I supposed to do?"
"You didn't have to call them, Illya. No one had a gun at your head. They'd cut you loose. You could have waited until it was all said and done and vanished. But you did it for the money. Or you did it because Dan treated you badly. Or you did it because you thought when it was over you'd come out on top in Brighton Beach, or any other reason that only you can know. But you're not going to convince me you're a victim, here. It's been three years, and you're selling meth and you're still trying to be a big-time Russian hood. So it doesn't matter why you did it. It only matters that you did it."
Illya closed his eyes, his upper teeth working on his lower lip. After several seconds, he nodded, slightly.
"Tell me about these men, the ones who paid you."
"There was only one," Illya said, after a second. "The others, the ones who took me, they were working for him. But there was only one in charge. Bowles. His name was Matt…Matthew Bowles."
I nodded, just barely. Matthew Bowles had held the strings on Oxford. One of the middlemen, and it was logical that Bowles had been responsible for setting up what had happened in Cold Spring the same way he had set things up for Oxford, at least until Scott Fowler and I forced a stop to that. Bowles was a facilitator, a fixer, but he wasn't the shot-caller. Natalie Trent had died because of what Bowles had put into motion, and he would taste his own blood for that, I would see to it.
But that wasn't going to be enough.
"Did Bowles say who he worked for? What part of the government?"
"He didn't…he didn't say." Illya shook his head. "I thought at first he was FBI, or maybe CIA, but it wasn't that."
"How do you know?"
"When he offered me the money, I told him…I told him it was a good offer, but he could offer me anything, why should I believe him? How could I know he would do what he said, that he even had the money to give me? And the man, he gave me his business card, it had his cell number on it and his name and all of that."
"You're a fool, Illya, but you're not an idiot. We've been over that already. You can't expect me to believe you did what you did on the strength of a business card anyone could have created."
"No, no, not like that," he said hastily. "You misunderstand, he gave me the card, but he showed me this ID, this pass. It was the real thing, it had to be. Hologram, microchip, picture, everything. It was real, Atticus. I knew he wasn't lying."
"What place?" I asked, and when he didn't answer immediately, I repeated myself, turning the words harsh. "What place? Who'd he work for?"
Illya met my eyes, and even through his defeat and fear, I could read something else. A dawning realization, perhaps, that he and I weren't so far apart in our circumstances as the moment might lead one to believe. There was almost humor in it, almost glee, but not quite.
"You're fucked," he said, softly. "You and Natasha and Dan and his shit of a kid, you're all fucked now. You don't even realize it."