Fisher sat up and blinked hard. They were outside another mining entrance. It appeared that she’d dragged them out with the help of several ruddy-faced young men who where standing behind her, counting U.S. banknotes—tens and twenties. There were no security men, no bosses, just this small group and the Snow Maiden, and they, too, were all hidden from view by a line of parked bulldozers to their immediate left. His pistol, crossbow, trifocals, and OPSAT were gone. He wasn’t sure about his karambit, but he wasn’t reaching back for it. Not yet.
“What’s your name?” she asked, her English heavily accented but discernable.
Fisher averted his gaze and muttered, “Grim, if you can hear me, we might be needing a little help.”
Suddenly, the Snow Maiden hunkered down and ripped the SVT patch from his throat. “What’s your name?”
“My name’s Sam,” he said in Russian.
She switched to Russian. “Who was the man you were chasing?”
“My daddy.”
“Answer me!”
Fisher widened his eyes. “You want to find Kasperov, right?”
“You know where he is?”
“That guy we were chasing . . . did he get away?”
She nodded.
“Then there’s no time. We need to go!”
She snorted. “We need to go? I don’t think so.” She pressed the suppressor against his forehead. “Where is Kasperov?”
Fisher narrowed his gaze. “I know who you are, Snegurochka. I’ve heard all about you.”
“Then you know this conversation will not end well.”
“Not for you.”
She leaned in closer and brought a hand up to his chin. “You look tired. You look . . . broken. You’ve been doing this too long.”
“Or not long enough.”
“Where is Kasperov? You tell me now, otherwise I’ll cut you slow, the way I cut Nadia’s friend.” In her other hand she now gripped his karambit. Well that answered the question regarding his knife.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“You mean besides my new friends here?” She gestured back to the miners.
“Yeah.”
“If you know all about me, then you know I brought an army.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I have comrades posted throughout the entire city, with another twenty people back in Juliaca. Not only will we capture Kasperov, but I’ll be bringing you two back with me. Three prizes in one day. And, of course, I’ll be interrogating you myself.” She ran the tip of the karambit across Fisher’s cheek, not deep enough to cut him but with a promise that she would.
“That sounds like a date. Can we go now?”
“You really are in a hurry.”
“We need to go.”
“How many bodyguards does he have?”
Fisher cursed. “Look, we’ve got no time. He’s on the run right now.”
Briggs sat up now, glanced back to the miners, and spoke rapidly in Spanish: “She’s a Russian spy. We’ll double what she gave you. Think about it.”
“Show me the money,” said one of the miners.
Briggs grimaced and said, “I got five hundred bucks in my pocket. He’s got even more.”
“They’re lying,” cried the Snow Maiden.
“I promise we have the money,” said Briggs.
“Hey,” Fisher cried, regaining the Snow Maiden’s attention. He steeled his voice. “Coming after us was your first mistake.”
“Oh, really?”
“Letting us live was your second.”
She chuckled under her breath.
“Trying to hold two weapons on me at once? Well, that was your third.”
As he was speaking, Fisher was already visualizing his maneuver the way great athletes visualized their victories before even competing.
His arms came up in the sweeping, poetic movements of an Olympic swimmer, seizing the Snow Maiden’s pistol with one hand and forcing it away from his head while he grabbed the wrist of her knife hand and drove it back. That must’ve been the arm where she’d been shot, as her struggle was much weaker on that side.
Briggs needed no cue, no orders. He was already rushing behind the Snow Maiden to put her in one of their now well-practiced blood chokes.
Her reflexes took over, her hand involuntarily flexing, and she fired a round into the air while Briggs applied more pressure.
To Fisher’s surprise, one of the miners, the tallest, rushed over and dug fingers into the Snow Maiden’s grip, prying free the karambit, which tumbled to the slush-covered ground. Seeing this, Fisher placed both of his hands on her pistol and began wrestling it free. He managed to squeeze his fingers up, above hers, and pressed the magazine release button. The magazine tumbled from the handle. She still clutched the gun, but now she only had one round in the chamber.
With a guttural hiss, the Snow Maiden reached up and tried to claw Briggs’s face, even as Fisher tore the pistol from her grip, the force nearly knocking him onto his rump.
The Snow Maiden slipped her legs behind Briggs’s ankles and suddenly tripped him back, onto the ground, the impact breaking his hold on her.
Even as Fisher brought the pistol around, the Snow Maiden was rolling backward, launching herself into a reverse somersault and landing on her boots.
She gasped, her face and neck flushed, a weird grin splitting her lips. “Pull the trigger,” she urged him. “And don’t worry, the round won’t explode in the chamber.”
Fisher glanced at the pistol and the red LED light just beneath the hammer. Damn, it was electronically keyed only to her.
“Maybe the knife?” she suggested, glancing toward the blade half covered in mud.
Fisher looked to the miners. “Double what she paid you,” he said in Spanish.
The tall one nodded.
And at once, Fisher, Briggs, and all four miners surrounded and pounced on the Snow Maiden.
It took two miners to hold down each of her wrists, with Briggs fighting to maintain his grip on her ankles while Fisher produced several sets of zipper cuffs from his parka’s inner pocket and quickly bound her wrists and ankles. She fought against them as if they were priests trying to perform an exorcism, screaming and cursing in Russian.
“Charlie says the chopper’s five minutes out,” said Briggs. “Gotta be for Kasperov.”
“I need a car,” Fisher told the tallest miner in Spanish.
“I have one,” the man said in English.
“And our gear? Pistols, a crossbow? Some night-vision goggles and big watches?”
“She put them in a bag over there.”
“I need them back.”
“Okay. You’re Americans, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“CIA?”
Fisher shook his head. “Your English is good. Can we get moving?”
“Sorry. Come with me.”
Fisher turned back and hollered, “Briggs, search her! See if she’s got our phones.”
“Already did, here!” He tossed Fisher his smartphone. “Weird thing is, she only had our phones. Nothing else. No way to contact her people.”
Fisher shrugged. “Okay, get her down to the helipad. I’ll meet you there.”
He took off running after the miner.
24
AFTER collecting their gear, Fisher followed the man down along a steep dirt path to a narrow service road lacing its way up the mountain. A broken string of cars was parked along the embankment, some owned by the workers, others by the supervisors and machine operators, the miner explained. He was lucky enough to afford a small four-cylinder sedan because before coming up to La Rinconada he’d been an attorney in Arequipa, but his practice had suffered greatly after a corruption scandal involving one of his partners. Fisher couldn’t believe that a man with his education would resort to the crapshoot of the mines, but he assured Fisher that many of the workers had once been professionals in the cities before they’d fallen on hard times. The temptation of quick money was too great to resist.
He said his name was Hector and admitted that he’d heard a rumor about the rich Russian who’d returned to the city. They said he was beginning work on his humanitarian project. They hadn’t seen him yet, but they had followed his bodyguards, wondering if any of them would be robbed. Hector did not know where Kasperov was, but he did know the swiftest route to the helipad located just outside the city, lying on a small plateau.