Colonel Letvinov, their commander, greeted Ruslan with a bear hug, like an old friend. (Turns out he is an old friend. That big old red-bearded pirate has been keeping secrets from us — now we have serious doubts about who he was really working for all this time.)
Anyway, we’ve been transported to a Siberian border town whose main feature is a restored wooden fort, once a fur-trading post, and that’s where we’re barracked, the three of us, a heavy-timbered suite with a stinky bear rug. Atun is here too, so protective, he sleeps just outside the door. I’ll tell you about him and Ivy on the phone, it’s unbelievable. He proposed! They’re engaged! (She didn’t mull long over it.) After overthrowing the Ultimate Cockroach he’s going to fetch Ivy to be his Canadian princess and they will live happily ever after.
Right now I’m at the window looking down at some of our Revolutionary Front irregulars behind the palisade walls. They’re getting basic training from a Russian drill major who spends most of his time shouting and stamping his feet with exasperation. It would be comical if we weren’t afraid Russia has plans to use them somehow. As sacrificial lambs, maybe, to foment a terrible, full-scale civil war.
When we warned Atun he should not trust the Russians, he shrugged. “They are generous. Every fighter will have a Kalashnikov.” That’s what’s making us nervous, talk like that.
Our fort is on a rise five hundred metres from a village on the Bhashyistan side that’s even smaller than Canora, but a lot scarier. There are a couple of customs buildings at the border, which has a swing gate but no fence unless you count a few useless strands of barbed wire. But you can’t say it’s undefended. Brown-uniformed soldiers have been pulling in since dawn, in trucks or on foot, looking bedraggled when you see them through Atun’s binocs. There have to be a thousand of them over there. I don’t know much about military strategy, but it doesn’t make much sense for them to be digging trenches in the desert.
Beyond the border, in the distance, are some deserted oil derricks, and farther away, clinging to the horizon, is a commercial centre called Ozbeg. Atun says it’s a strategic target, they’re going to liberate it first.
Above, I see three unbroken contrails in the still afternoon sky. Russian MiGs.
My nightmares have stopped, Hank. Now I only dream of you and the girls. Love to all, and Mom, and all our friends.
XOXO, Jill
33
On Sunday, Arthur sought to entertain his melancholy client at the Ohrid festival’s closing events, but they were hounded everywhere by a tagalong team of reporters. The Russian, Vlad Mishin, was not one of them — he’d last been seen smiling and waving at them as he lined up for a rock concert.
“Maybe he has given up trying to get his Russian-language exclusive,” Abzal said. “We owe the Russians nothing. We were their colony, and instead of granting us freedom they turned us over to their trained goons.”
It was always “we” when he talked of his home — he was losing his Canadianness. He hadn’t stopped lamenting about Bhashyistan, about his years of felt inadequacy, but at least he’d quit making veiled threats to disappear. Mostly, he was morose, tense, and silent.
Tired of insisting to the press, however pleasantly, on their right to remain silent, they finally retreated to the refuge of the RCMP’s villa and its guarded gate. The press corps followed, but by afternoon’s end had dwindled to a hard core shivering by the road in the cold, crisp evening air. Abzal carried on down to the basement fitness room, to try burning off his surplus of nervous energy.
McIlhargey and Djon were again at the chessboard — they’d been at it for three hours, off and on. It would be their last game; Djon planned to leave for Albania that evening. He’d already cleared out his room — accommodation was tight, and the two inspectors were soon due back from Tirana.
With them, hopefully, would be Ray DiPalma, sole medical casualty of Operation Erzhan. Arthur had talked to him the night before — he felt well enough to leave his care facility, but hadn’t sounded enthusiastic. In fact, the news of Abzal’s emergence in Macedonia seemed almost to have added to his melancholia. “Congratulations, Arthur,” he’d said in a dry and weary monotone. “You pulled it off in spite of me.” He was either off his boutique mood elevator or it was working in reverse. Like cocaine, Arthur suspected, it rewarded with extreme highs and punished with brutal lows.
“Offering draw,” said Djon. He’d been defeated only once, a courtesy loss.
“Not yet, comrade.”
McIlhargey rose to the summons of Sergeant Chow in the sunroom, now dimly lit by a desk lamp and a pair of glowing computer screens. The printer was humming, pages rolling from it. Chow said, “It’s a wrap,” and announced that Ottawa was sending an executive jet tomorrow to fetch everyone home.
McIlhargey sat, read through the printouts, handed Arthur a report from the Montreal RCMP.
The stilted, over-precise law enforcement jargon, when reduced to common English, disclosed that after twenty-four hours of surveillance and intercepted phone calls, Sully Clugg and Rod Klein had been arrested at the Montreal airport, carrying false passports and last-minute tickets to Mexico. The FBI had been asked to trace a call Clugg had made to an unlisted number in Dallas in which he’d warned, in poorly coded language, of a “blowback,” spy jargon for alarming news.
Arthur assumed Clugg and Klein hadn’t opened their mouths except to demand counsel. Law enforcers, traditionally contemptuous of criminal lawyers, tended to run to them with more haste than the average evildoer. So it would be difficult to identify other conspirators — the driver of the kidnap car, Anglo-Atlantic’s operatives — or to trace secret bank accounts. Harder to nail these mercenaries for the ten murders on Colonel By Drive. But the kidnapping case seemed solid, especially with the panicky attempt to flee to refuge in Mexico.
Arthur expressed these thoughts to McIlhargey, who seemed torn between continuing this conversation or resuming his chess game.
“Let me ask you, Counsellor, how would you defend them?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Don’t play high and mighty, you’ve acted for the worst scum on the West Coast. Let’s say these turkeys had retained you — what would you advise them?”
The answer seemed easy. “Any competent lawyer would pleabargain for a minimum sentence, tendering their clients as Crown witnesses on their agreement to implicate Anglo-Atlantic. Clugg seems enough of a sociopath to roll over on friends and allies, especially if tens of millions are sitting in a numbered account in Freeport or the Caymans.”
McIlhargey’s grunt seemed to express admiration, but it might have been scepticism. A wrap, Chow had said. Yet much seemed unresolved, the entire backwash from the assassinations of November 26: the farcical mini-war with Bhashyistan, the perils facing the Canadians trapped there, the tumult in that country, Anglo-Atlantic’s oil grab, the Russian bear at the border.
Arthur would let the politicians sort that out. He couldn’t do everything.
“Again I offer draw,” said Djon.
McIlhargey mulled over the end game, frowning, but then rose and took his hand. “Accepted. Next time we meet, I’ll want revenge. Get out of here.” His punch on the arm was intended as jocular, but must have smarted — Djon was rubbing it as he went upstairs for his bag. McIlhargey muttered, “I had a winner going.”