Considering that Nicolas Sargenti now took forty percent for his services-an increase from the thirty he'd earned when representing her alone-the fact that she was retired didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. And no wonder, then, that when she'd e-mailed him from Bozeman the day before yesterday with the sentence "Tuesday morning grove," he had dropped everything to meet us at the Grove Hotel in Boise this morning.
He hadn't traveled to us out of greed alone. He'd come because he had to. It was the nature of the relationship. He would come, because if he didn't, he believed either Alena or I would kill him. The only way out of his dealings with her and me was in death.
He certainly knew it as much as Alena or I did. That it didn't bother him in the least said volumes. It wasn't something he ever considered, I don't think; the idea of betraying her was absolutely alien to him, and probably had been so even before he had discerned exactly what she was doing to command such enormous fees. Sargenti was in his late sixties, now, retired from private practice. He had everything he could want, and more money than he could ever spend.
I found him fascinating, and had from the first time we'd met in Warsaw. From what Alena had told me, I'd expected someone in his forties, perhaps approaching fifty, but Sargenti was nearly twenty years older than that. His hair, worn flat on his scalp as if glued there, had gone entirely to gray where hair remained, and not much of it did, and his head itself was shaped almost exactly like an eggshell. He was an ugly man, genuinely so, as if genetics had conspired to intentionally mismatch his features to optimal effect. His eyes were hazel, muddy, widely spaced, and heavily lidded, and each seemed to protrude from its orbit enough that I thought they must surely brush against the inside of his spectacles. His nose managed to be both narrow, high, and flat at the same time, leading with the nostrils, and his mouth was small, as if to compensate for the real estate taken by everything above it. Pockmarks finished the ensemble, old scars from a childhood illness.
But where nature had failed him, money had come to the rescue. His winter suit was perfectly tailored, and he wore it well, from the silk tie to the braces to the fine leather shoes. The attache he always seemed to carry with him gleamed with the warmth that only superb leather has, and the Zenith watch on his wrist was never the same one twice, and always unpretentious in its elegance. There was nothing ostentatious in how he presented his wealth. He had it, he was comfortable with it, and that was all he wanted from it.
I understood greed, or thought I did, but Nicolas Sargenti gave me a whole new perspective on it. For him, this wasn't about acquiring wealth; it was about his right to have it in the first place, and to keep it. Perhaps it was entitlement, or a sense thereof, born from some psychological need or trauma. But whatever the reason, he was greedy because he wanted to be, and in that I also understood why, in him, Alena had made a perfect choice. She indulged his desire, satisfied it. She did so in a way that allowed Sargenti to feel everything he had was well earned.
Alena moved to the window, parting the privacy veil with her hand enough to look out, thinking. Sargenti waited, taking a sip from his cup of tea, then replacing the cup carefully on its saucer.
"The requests for my services," she said. "You do not respond to them, I assume?"
"I have seen no point in it," Sargenti admitted.
"But they've come, these requests, they've come through the established channels?"
"I am unaware of any other way to retain your services than those protocols we established to do so. Your anonymity-and Michael's, for that matter-is entirely intact. I have done nothing to compromise that, Elizavet, I assure you," he added. "For your sake as much as my own."
Alena let the curtain fall back. She smiled down at Sargenti, in his chair. "No, Nicolas. That is not my concern."
"I am relieved. I have always, as you know, treated my work for you with the utmost care."
I spoke up from where I was on the bed. "Do you know if it's been the same person or people trying to contact her?"
Sargenti cocked his head, perhaps trying to parse the question. "I'm not certain I understand your meaning, Michael."
"It's an insulated process, right? It starts the same way, say, uses the same initial point, but it's the cutouts that change, the steps necessary for the initial inquiry to reach you?"
"Ah, yes. Yes, though there are several possible points of initiation."
"And when you've received these, when you've checked, you've simply ignored them, right?"
"Disregarded, I would rather say."
"Disregarded, then. No response."
"Correct."
"But you're still receiving requests. So someone isn't getting the message, or is ignoring it."
Sargenti frowned. "Perhaps so. I had presumed that the requests were being made by different individuals, not by the same individual again and again. But it is possible."
"How many points of contact are there?" I asked. "How many starts to the chain?"
"Five," both Alena and Sargenti said, together.
I looked at her. "Is it likely they know more than one point of contact?"
She shook her head.
"So we're looking for multiple attempts stemming from the same point of contact."
"Possibly."
In his chair, Nicolas Sargenti closed his eyes, combing his memory. "A moment," he murmured.
Alena moved back to where I was on the bed, taking a seat beside me. Her right hand moved to find mine, simply to rest her fingers against my own. She looked tired, and she looked worried, and she looked guilty, and none were states I was used to seeing on her.
Our experience at the cabin in the Montana woods had, in its way, been far worse on her. While Bowles and the others had worked over my body, what Alena had done to secure my freedom had worked over her soul, fragile as it was. It had forced her to step backwards to what she once had been, and it made her doubt she could ever change.
Sitting on the side of the bed, not looking at me, afraid to even hold my hand, I knew what she was thinking. It didn't matter what changes the last three years had wrought upon her; she now believed it was only an illusion.
She was still an instrument of killing, still an empty thing, and she always would be. Bowles died, and I went for the pistol he dropped, my fingers too numb to manage the task easily. It took me too long to do it, I was too slow, and all I was thinking was that if Sean wanted to finish what Bowles had put into motion, I wasn't going to be able to stop him. I didn't know where he was, and that meant that Alena most likely didn't, either.
With the pistol in my swollen, useless hands, I fought myself to my feet, slipping in the snow. My teeth had stopped chattering, and I was beginning to feel warm again, and I still had enough wherewithal to recognize that was a very bad thing; it meant I was turning hypothermic, and that I wouldn't last for much longer in the cold.
Then I saw Sean, standing at the door to the cabin, and I brought the gun up much too slowly, but he didn't move, and I realized why. He'd disarmed, dropping his weapon, standing with his hands raised to either side. Between two of his fingers something sparkled.
"Just a job," Sean said. Slowly, he moved his hand, showing me what he was holding. "I've got the key for the cuffs. It's yours."
I lurched forward a couple of steps. "You speak Russian?"
The confusion lasted only an instant. "No."
In Russian, as loud as I could, I shouted for Alena not to shoot him, that we were going into the cabin, that I had to get warm. Sean flinched slightly at the abruptness of my voice, but that was it for movement until I reached him.