"Inside," I told him.
We went into the wreckage of the front room. The table had busted during the fight, as had one of the two chairs. I all but fell onto the couch, not feeling the room's warmth at all. Sean turned to close the door.
"Bad idea," I said.
"The heat's going out."
"She'll kill you."
He stopped, watched me as I held out my hands, still holding the pistol. I doubted I could actually get my finger to contract on the trigger if I needed to, and I suspect he doubted it, too. He put the key in the small lock on the Flexi-Cuffs and twisted.
"Take them off me."
When he dug his fingers between my skin and the plastic, I didn't feel it. He pulled the cuffs free, careful to draw them over the pistol without touching it, then threw them aside onto the floor. As soon as he'd finished, he unzipped his parka, then draped it around my shoulders.
"Thanks," I said.
"There are blankets in the bedroom. If I go and get them will she kill me?"
I shook my head.
He went to get the blankets, returning with three dark wool ones that smelled of mothballs and must. He was wrapping the second one around my legs, tucking its end beneath my feet, when Alena entered. He didn't hear her come inside, and the only reason I knew she was there was because I'd been watching the door.
She'd dressed for the work and the weather, winter camouflage in the form of overwhites. Her hair was hidden beneath a black watch cap, and that was barely visible beneath the drawn hood of her white parka. Grime and mud peppered her clothes, and the blood that soaked her right arm and spattered her right side was bright in contrast. The rifle across her back was a monster, a Winchester, the kind the locals used for hunting big buck, and in her hands she held one of the guns we'd taken from the Burien cache, a modified Ruger with an integrated suppressor.
She had the pistol pointed at the back of Sean's head before she'd finished crossing the threshold, and the look on her face made it clear that shooting him was not only what she intended to do, it was what she needed to do. If she was seeing me at all, I couldn't tell.
"No," I told her. "Friendly."
Alena didn't move and neither did Sean, and it was a struggle for each of them, because each of them wanted to. Yet neither did, Alena keeping the gun and her vision fixed on the back of Sean's head, and Sean, perfectly still with the last blanket in his hand.
"He's helping," I said to her. "You can close the door."
Sean brought his eyes up to mine, and that was the extent of his motion. His eyes were so brown they might as well have been black. He didn't seem afraid, but he wasn't happy.
"The door," I said again.
Without shifting her aim or looking away from Sean, Alena stepped back, extended her right foot, and used her boot to close the door.
"Who is he?" she asked in Georgian.
It took me a moment to parse the switch in languages. I was beginning to feel drowsy, another symptom of the hypothermia. "Sean. I shot him back in Cold Spring."
She thought about that. "We will have to kill him."
"I'm hoping we won't."
She thought about that, too. Then she lowered her aim, still with the gun in both hands, just no longer pointing it at Sean's head.
"Move away from him," she said to him, switching back to English.
With the caution reserved for handling poisonous snakes, Sean raised his hands and got up, stepping carefully away from me. He went to the side, avoiding the debris on the floor, giving Alena space. She watched him move, staring at him like he was a window and she wanted only the view beyond. For nearly thirty seconds more, none of us moved.
Then she came to my side at the couch, and looked down at me.
"I'm sorry I made you wait," she said.
"You're here now," I said. "I'm going to pass out, okay?"
I didn't hear her response, and when Alena woke me some time later, I found that I was still on the couch, but somehow I'd been dressed in dry clothes. The pain that surged in rising clamor throughout my extremities told me that I was going to recover.
"It will be dawn soon," she said, speaking in Georgian. "We must go."
I blinked the world back into focus, saw that Sean was seated on the chair, the Flexi-Cuffs now around his wrists. He was watching us impassively. As far as I could tell she hadn't actually harmed him, but there were ways she could have done it that I wouldn't have been able to see.
I sat up, and Alena pushed a mug of something hot into my hands. She'd stripped off the overwhites and cleaned off any of the blood that might have reached her skin. "Why'd you do that?"
She didn't bother looking at him. "To be safe."
"Well, I'm awake now," I said, switching to English. "Uncuff him."
Alena's lips compressed, the taste of my words unpleasant. She did it anyway, though, brusquely working the lock on the cuffs and then whipping them away from his wrists, then moving back to stand by me at the couch.
I sipped at the mug, discovered that it was warm water sweetened with sugar, nothing more, and nothing had ever tasted quite as good. I tried to drink it slowly, downing about half of it before attempting to move. The soreness and the stiffness that had settled into me made me wince.
"So, Sean," I said. "What do we do with you."
"You either kill me or let me go," he said. He glanced for a second to Alena before coming back to me. He was flexing his hands, working his fingers, and I wondered how tight Alena had fit the cuffs on him.
"Who does-did-Bowles work for?"
"I thought he was DoD, but the way you were talking to him I'm guessing I was wrong about that, that he's with the White House. I don't know, he never told us."
"That was the first you'd heard of a connection with the White House?"
"I'm with Gorman-North, Mr. Kodiak. I'm a contractor. I get the job, I do the job, I take my money, and I wait for the next job. It's mission-specific; I know you understand that."
"What was the mission?"
"To apprehend you. If possible, to apprehend the woman. To secure your cooperation in locating the woman if she couldn't be found."
"And then?"
"We were to drop you."
I admired the way he said it; he said it the same way he'd said everything else about the job so far, without opinion, merely reporting the facts.
"So Bowles was your contractor, that's what you're saying?" I asked him.
"I don't know if Bowles was the one paying Gorman-North for our services," Sean said. "But he's definitely the contact guy. This time and that thing in New York, he was management."
"Just your luck to be on both jobs?"
"It's a small community. You know that."
I took some more of my sugar water. "Getting smaller every day."
Sean looked at Alena again, clearly trying to compose his next words, then went back to me. "I don't know what you were into, or why they want you. I don't give a damn. It's not my job to give a damn. You cut me loose, I'll tell them what happened, that you overwhelmed us."
"So why should we let you do that?" Alena demanded.
"It'll come out either way. You're not going out there to dispose of the bodies, not in the snow and the daylight, at least. Whoever it is that wants you, they're going to know we blew the job, that you're still on the loose. You kill me or you let me go, that won't change."
"Unless this gets covered up. The way Cold Spring was covered up," I said.
Sean considered that. "Yeah, that's a possibility. Not sure how much it alters, though. They'll still know what happened."
I finished the sugar water, thinking that Sean was right. "What's your name, your full name?"
"Sean Baron."
"What were you before? Delta?"
He looked a little indignant. "Force Recon."
"Marine."
"Semper Fi."
I chose not to remark on the irony of that, used the arm of the couch to get to my feet. "We're leaving, Sean Baron. If you could give us a couple of hours before you call Gorman-North and tell them that the job's gone tango uniform, I'd appreciate it."