"You're kidding, right?" he asked.
I set my hands on the table, sighed, then said, "How about something to drink?" When I spoke, I could feel the dried blood at my mouth and lips crack.
He considered. "Water."
"That would be fine," I said.
Bowles half turned in his seat to the two on the couch, and the one who wasn't Sean got to his feet with a grunt. I watched him go, disappearing into the kitchen out of sight. There was murmured conversation, the words lost to the distance, but I was making out at least three voices.
So seven of them, then, including Bowles and his buddy Sean and the two on patrol. Maybe a couple more lurking someplace, but I doubted it; the cabin didn't look like it could hold many more people.
Still, seven, and if I was correct in assuming that Bowles had limited combat experience, that still left six of them who knew what they were about, and probably knew it quite well. If these were contractors-and Sean's presence all but confirmed that they were-they'd come with a pedigree, with years in the Army or Marines backing them up, maybe even some time with Special Forces. An awful lot for Alena to handle alone and in the cold and with a leg that, despite everything, still wasn't what it should be.
"So, where you been hiding?" Bowles asked me.
"Oh, you know," I said, turning my attention back to him. "Here and there."
"I'm guessing Eastern Europe. Maybe some time in Africa."
I shrugged.
He checked the laptop screen, clicking one of the keys a few times. "You have gotten around, though. Jakarta, Sao Paulo, Tokyo. Quito…huh. What were you doing in Ecuador, Atticus?"
"Someone's got to pick all those coffee beans."
Bowles smirked, nodded, tapped, and I wondered if he knew that, in fact, I'd never been to any of the four cities he'd just listed. If he did, this was gamesmanship, but to what end, I didn't know. If he didn't, I had no desire to correct him.
The one who wasn't Sean returned from the kitchen, setting a paper cup of water on the table by my hands. I took the cup in both hands, sipped at the water. It was so cold it hurt my teeth.
"Patriot," Bowles said for the third time, and I felt a flicker of annoyance. "You never answered my question. Are you a patriot, Atticus?"
"Probably not the way you or Sean, there, would define it."
On the couch, Sean's eyefuck dialed up to eleven.
"Don't you love your country?" Bowles asked.
I met his eyes with a look that, hopefully, told him just what I thought of people who asked that kind of question. It was a stupid question, it was a rhetorical question, it was the kind of question asked by people trying to establish their moral superiority. It was a question used to identify enemies, not to make friends. It was an all-or-nothing question, and there was never a right answer. It was a question that had nothing to do with place or history or current affairs or society. It was a question that asked only one thing: Are you with us or against us?-and us were always the people posing the question in the first place.
It was a question that, from the first time it had ever been uttered outside the Garden of Eden, was a justification to violence. Cain, I was sure, had asked Abel if he loved his country.
Bowles held the look, and his smile grew, and then he made a soft laugh and said, "Patriot," once more. Then he turned the laptop so I could see what he'd been looking at on its screen.
It was the Interpol file on Alena, except in it she was called Drama. The header dated the file from the winter of the last year, only four months earlier, identified the document as a law enforcement briefing-slash-update. According to the same header, it contained the latest intelligence for distribution on The Ten. It put "The Ten" in quotations.
With a gentle nudge, Bowles moved the laptop closer, so I could have access to the trackpad and keyboard. I scrolled down. There was a small file photograph, grainy and ill-focused. I'd seen the photo many times before, and it was now well out-of-date, almost five years old, taken when she'd been spotted in New York, trying to kill a man that I'd been trying to protect. I was only vaguely surprised that, since then, no one had managed to acquire a better one.
There were lines for her vitals: gender, height, weight, hair color, eye color. Country of origin. Aliases. Distinguishing marks. Characteristics. Methodology. Where the information was known, it had been filled in, which meant more lines about her had been left blank than had been completed, and much of what was there was incorrect. They'd gotten her gender right, that was about all.
I scanned the document, careful to limit the curiosity on my face to that alone and nothing else. There was a section on group affiliations, another on contacts, another for her known associates. Scant and theoretical biographical information followed, mostly surmising that she had been trained by the Soviets, specifically the GRU, prior to the end of the Cold War. Several pages were devoted to cataloguing her list of crimes, either those that had been definitively attributed to her, or those she was suspected of committing. The section ended with an analysis of the quality of this intelligence, and what could be reasonably concluded from it.
The list of aliases attributed to her numbered seventeen, and of them, I recognized only two. One of them was "Natasha." Nowhere was the name "Alena."
Under contacts was listed Danilov "Dan" Korckeva.
The list of murders was presented by date, from earliest attributed to most recent. It stretched back a little over ten years, and racked up thirty-three bodies. Seven of them had been killed in the last three years, which pretty much threw that section of the file into question. I'd been with her night and day for the last three years, and if she'd murdered anybody during that time, I'd like to think I would have noticed. Of the murders she was accused of committing prior to our association, only two of the crimes matched what she herself had told me, and, in the main, I was more inclined to believe her than anything Matthew Bowles put in front of me.
The analysis, at the end, concluded that Drama was still considered to be active, and had taken on a partner. There was a hyperlink embedded in the document, to a new entry on "Patriot."
"Oh, c'mon," Bowles said. "You know you want to."
The link jumped the file to a new page, with a new heading and a new photo. The photo was of me, excellent quality, though a little small, and, as with Alena's, nearly four years out-of-date. My entry followed the same format as hers, though this time many of the lines had been filled in, most of the time correctly. My distinguishing characteristics included the thin scar along my left cheek, and the fact that I required the use of corrective lenses.
According to the file, I'd done a lot of traveling in the last three years. I'd visited Sao Paulo and Jakarta and Tokyo and Glasgow. I'd been in Vienna and Stockholm and Brussels and Cairo. I'd apparently stopped briefly in Quito. According to the file, I'd never stayed long in any of the locations.
Just long enough each time to commit a murder, before moving on. "They call you Patriot because you're one of the only members of The Ten they've actually pulled a full bio on," Bowles told me. "Date of birth and education and, of course, your military service. The honorable discharge, that was the thing that did it. That's why they call you Patriot."
"I don't know that anyone is calling me anything," I said.
"Sure you do. You're on the list, Atticus. You're one of The Ten. Congratulations."
I stared at him, trying to find the angle. There was no reason to believe that the document was legitimate. It could have easily been manufactured by Bowles, or more likely, by someone working for Bowles. Just a tool to put me off balance, prepared solely to be used in this interrogation, to provide him with a psychological edge.