Seattle had been our last real stop before Whitefish, an overnight that had followed our leaving Vadim and Dan in Sunriver. Given what Illya had told us, taking airplanes seemed an unnecessary risk.
Alena turned off the flame beneath the kettle. She used a dish towel decorated with leaping fish to take the handle, then proceeded to fill the two mugs she'd prepared. When she'd finished, I indicated the laptop with my head. "No joy?"
She glanced to the computer, her expression flickering sour. "Nothing. No one I recognize, no one I recollect."
I took my mug and sniffed at the liquid within. The tea she'd made had a citrus, floral scent, and for the first time in a long while, I wished I was drinking coffee, instead.
"Not to insult your vanity, but it is possible that whoever wants us dead is someone I've offended, and not you," I said.
"I find that unlikely." She was watching my examination of the tea. "You are not, and were not, ever counted as one of The Ten. If it is someone in the White House, someone in the current administration, who pursues us, then the odds are far greater that it is someone I have had dealings with, either directly or indirectly. Someone I did a job for. That is the only plausible explanation for this vendetta."
I used two fingers to pluck the tea bag from the mug, dropped it into the sink. The splash it made on impact was the color of ketchup. "Vendetta makes it sound like it's personal."
Alena shook her head, opened her mouth, then closed it, looking at me with the mug still in my hand. I sighed and took a sip, and was profoundly relieved to find the tea tasted nothing like ketchup. If it tasted like oranges and hibiscus, however, I couldn't tell.
"That was not my intent. Only that the strike in Cold Spring indicated a certain…zealotry, perhaps."
"Assuming you're correct, that this goes back to work you did as one of The Ten, work you did for the CIA or the Pentagon, we're talking about a job you did four years ago, at least."
"It would be six, I think."
"You think?"
"The contracts are always initiated through cutouts, Atticus, you know that."
"Yeah, but you vet the source on each job, that's just common sense."
She nodded her agreement, almost absently. "But it is possible I missed something. That the person, the people, I was working for in one or more instances were not the people I thought they were. Mistakes happen. Governments subcontract the work. It is possible that someone discovered the contact procedures for me, the ones used by your government, and employed that method for their own ends."
"There's our answer," I said.
She nodded slightly. "I did consider that. That someone in the White House is someone I did a job for might be motive enough. Before he died, Agent Fowler, you, and I had a long conversation about what I did and who I did it for. If he reported that information back to his superiors, if he was, perhaps, not as discreet as he should have been, it is possible that whoever our adversary is took alarm, saw that potentially his or her relationship with me was in danger of being exposed. Wishing to protect himself or herself, they have taken steps to silence both of us."
"Don't say that," I said.
"What?"
"It's not Scott's fault," I said. "Don't blame the dead man."
"I'm not insulting the memory of your friend," Alena said, carefully. "Simply stating a fact, however unpleasant it may be to hear. What matters is not how the information reached our adversary in the White House; what matters is that once it did, he or she deemed us a threat that needed to be addressed, immediately and completely."
"Which means we're being hunted for something you know that you don't know you know."
"Yes."
"Maybe you should try to remember."
"I have been."
"Maybe you should try harder."
Alena took another sip of her tea, then set the mug down and moved the two steps required to stand in front of me. She put her hands on my forearms, her expression serious, meeting my eyes.
"There are other ways to do this, Atticus," she said, gently. "We can leave here right now, and the passport application will have done no more harm than has been done already with the death of Illya. We can withdraw, try to find another way."
"No," I said. "We really can't."
"It is a big planet. There are many places to hide."
"I don't want to hide anymore."
Her grip on my arms tightened slightly, almost imperceptibly. "And what if they do not wish to question you? What if we are mistaken, and their desire to find me is not more powerful than their desire to silence you?"
"Then you'll keep me alive," I said.
The fear was easy to miss, just a flash in her eyes, hinting at her doubt and the pain that it brought. It wasn't much at all. In Kobuleti, when I'd angered her or annoyed her or delighted her, she'd been willing to show it, though it was still something she was learning to allow herself. Since our return to the U.S., that had begun to fade. The professional emerging to subsume the personal.
Except the problem here, the problem for both of us, was that they were the same. Nothing was personal, and everything was. Every move we made had to be as professionals, and yet the motives behind them were anything but. We could have argued that what we were doing was for self-defense and survival, nothing more, and maybe for Alena, that would even have been true. But it wasn't for me, and we both understood that; it was about the future as much as the past, about the home we had made for ourselves in Kobuleti as much as about what had happened three years earlier in Cold Spring on a New England autumn's dawn.
"It has to be answered," I told her. "And if the way to find out who needs to answer is by bringing them to me, then that's what I'll do."
Her hands moved up my arms, then stopped, fell away, and I could read the conflict in each movement, the struggle she was having. Then she stepped past me, leaving the kitchen to disappear further into the house.
"I have to pack," Alena said. We made love that night, and it was all need, cathartic and hungry, and when we were finished we clung to each other as we had during our passion. The night was utterly silent, the quiet of the snow broken only by the hiss of the forced air trying vainly to keep the chill from the house.
Her lips against my cheek, Alena said, "They will hurt you."
"I know."
"I will come as soon as I can."
"I know."
"I will come for you."
I kissed her.
"I know," I told her. She was gone in the morning. I made the surveillance four days later. Two days after that, as the last of the sunlight slid away from Big Mountain to the north and the valley was turning to darkness, there was a knock at the door. I'd built a fire in the fireplace, half to stave off the chill, half to stave off the apprehension and loneliness I was feeling. I'd been reading a book of Kurt Vonnegut essays that I'd bought in town, and they had done nothing to improve my mood.
Then the knock at the door, three quick raps, no doorbell to follow, and I knew it was time. I marked the book and set it on the coffee table beside one of the guns from the Burien cache, a Walther that was resting there. For a moment, I considered taking the weapon up, carrying it with me, but then I thought that the last thing I really wanted to do was give them another reason to shoot first and ask questions later.
If they were knocking on the front door, it meant that there was a team already in position at the back. I hadn't heard any glass breaking, hadn't felt a shift in the air inside the house in answer to a sudden draught. So no penetration, not yet, which meant they were covering the perimeter; they'd wait to enter until they were certain I wasn't going to try to bolt in their direction.