"Who did Bowles work for, Illya?"
"It doesn't matter." Realization was creeping into his voice, and with it, new strength. "It doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what you do to me. You can't win. You're going to die. Just like me, you're all going to die."
I shot from my chair to where he lay on the bed, pushed the middle and index fingers of my right hand into the side of his trachea while holding his head back against the headboard with my other. I pressed down, and I pressed hard, because I was angry. Illya's eyes bulged.
"Maybe," I said. "But you'll die first. Who did Bowles work for, Illya? Where was the ID from?"
He croaked, his lips pulling apart in a smile.
With a rasp, Illya said, "The White House, motherfucker."
I held my fingers against his skin, didn't move. Illya's eyes seemed to fill with laughter as much as tears. For a long moment, I thought about finishing him then, about twisting his head around or crushing his trachea or using any of the other dozen ways that I knew to end his life.
"Dan!" I called out.
He was at the door within a breath. "Atticus?"
I released Illya.
"Make him pay," I told Dan.
"We all do," Dan told me.
PART
CHAPTER
The woman who took my passport application at the post office in Whitefish, Montana, was in her mid-fifties, shaped like a dumpling, and chatty.
"Oh, travel," she said. "Where you heading, then?"
"I'm thinking about visiting South America," I lied. "Rio, maybe, someplace warm."
She clucked, checking to see that my two headshots had been properly affixed. The photographs were new, taken that morning at a copy shop a couple blocks south of Whitefish Lake. I'd worn my glasses for the photos, and the young man working the camera had needed to remind me that I wasn't supposed to smile.
"That'd be nice, someplace warm," the dumpling said. "All this snow, can you believe it? The winters, they're just getting colder. Global warming."
"Global warming," I agreed.
"Oh, you're on Iron Horse Road," she said, looking at the address I'd put on the application. "Bought one of the new places up by the lake?"
"It's about a mile from the lake."
"So you're a resident, or is it just a vacation home?"
"Resident," I said. "Just arrived."
She stopped reviewing my application long enough to offer me a doughy hand to shake. "Well, then, welcome to Whitefish. I'm Laura."
"Atticus," I said.
Laura checked my application. "Atticus…Kodiak? Like the bear?"
"Like the bear."
"Atticus Kodiak. Odd name, you don't mind me saying."
"I don't mind you saying it at all, Laura," I said.
She laughed, either pleased with my generous spirit or still wildly amused by my name, then moved my application to a tray beside her scale. "Well, everything looks just fine to me, Atticus. You should have a response in the next six to eight weeks."
"Sooner, I hope," I said, with a smile. It was still snowing when I stepped back outside onto Baker Avenue, and I put my watch cap back atop my head and got my gloves back on my hands, then started walking north, in the direction of the lake. Snow, clean and white and wet, coated almost everything the eye could see. The temperature was below freezing, and there were a few people about, but no one paid me any attention. Whitefish billed itself as a resort community more than anything else, golfing, hunting, and fishing in the summer, skiing and sledding and skating in the winter, and a variety of festivals and events to fill in the gaps between. Resident population wasn't more than 7,000, and while the income divide between those who visited and those who remained was dramatic, the cost of living wasn't so high as to make it intolerable.
I walked in the cold and the snow, following Baker north over the short bridge that spanned where the Whitefish River flowed through town, then a couple blocks later crossed the railroad tracks on Viaduct. Whitefish had begun as a fur-trading town in the 1800s, and then the Great Northern Railway had come in the early 1900s, and fur turned to logging, and now, a hundred years later, logging had given way to leisure. All along the shores of the lake, resort homes were cropping up as fast as the hammers could raise them.
It took me most of an hour to get back to the house, partially because of the snow, but mostly because I was taking my time. If I was being watched or followed, I saw no signs of it, and I suspected that was because there was nobody watching or following me. It had been exactly a week since Alena and I had left the unpleasantness of Sunriver, Oregon, behind us. To our knowledge, Illya's body hadn't been found yet.
The way Dan and Vadim worked, I doubted it ever would.
Still, Alena and I had kept our movements discreet since then, doing our damnedest to stay beneath the radar. We were still hunted, and with the information Illya had given us, there was no question that the hunters had the power of the federal government at their disposal, at least in some part. That we'd been back in the U.S. for ten days without attracting attention could only mean that we'd managed a good job of it, that we'd kept any alarms regarding our whereabouts from being tripped.
Not anymore. Not after my passport application-submitted in my real name, and with the photographs to prove it-reached the State Department. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that my name had been flagged, that I was on a watch-list someplace. Whoever it was giving Matthew Bowles his orders would learn of it, and he or she or they would learn that I had listed an address on Iron Horse Road in Whitefish, Montana, as my place of residence.
There would be a response; there would have to be. Whoever wanted us dead didn't have a choice.
The same way that, because of what had happened in Cold Spring, I didn't have one, either. "It's done?" Alena asked as I moved past her into the faux flagstone entryway of the house. She had a pistol in her hand, practically an afterthought, and by the time I'd turned back from shutting and locking the door, she'd made it disappear. I removed my hat, knocked snow from my shoulders and stamped it off my boots. Spatter caught her bare feet, and she hissed at me, dancing back onto the safer warmth of the carpet.
"Signed, sealed, and delivered," I told her. "You should put some shoes on, you might need to move fast."
"It will be the end of the day before your application is sent to the offices in Bozeman, and tomorrow morning-at the earliest-before it's processed." She headed away from me, towards the kitchen, adding over her shoulder, "We have time."
I removed my coat, and the sweatshirt I was wearing beneath it, and hung both from the row of pegs on the wall. When I'd told Laura the Dumpling that I was a resident I'd been lying, inasmuch as the house was a rental. It was, like many of the homes in the vicinity of Whitefish Lake, a recent construction, not more than five years old, and everything in it and about it still felt new, from the spring in the carpet to the smell in the bedrooms. Architecturally, it was of that same open-plan, high-ceilinged family that seemed to be the modern equivalent of posh-log-cabin, and in an odd way, it reminded me of Alena's home in Bequia before I'd burnt it to the ground.
Alena was at the counter in the kitchen when I caught up, the kettle on the gas stove spewing forth a column of steam. On the table was a MacBook, the Web browser open. We'd bought the laptop at the Apple Store in Seattle after clearing the cache in Burien, just south of the city. Alena had established the Burien cache years earlier, along with dozens of others around the world, when she'd worked as one of The Ten. Most were in Western Europe or the United States, since those were the places she'd most often visited in pursuit of her targets, and each was designed to be used once and never again, and each held the same things: weapons, cash, alternate identities. The Burien cache had contained sixty-three thousand in American dollars, two sets of false identities, including driver's licenses (one for the state of Washington, one for the state of Idaho), companion credit cards (Visa and American Express), and passports, four pistols (all of them semiautos), ammunition for the same, and two sets of clothes. Everything had been tailored for Alena's use, which meant the IDs and clothes were useless to me, since I suffered the obvious gender disadvantage.