Sammie, entering behind me, hefted the canvas bag she had looped over her shoulder.
Rarig and Corbin-Teich were sitting at a table in the corner, their hands free. Willy, I noticed with no surprise, had only graduated from coat hangers to his own handcuffs, his muscular right wrist still attached to his chair.
“Where’s Gail?” I asked.
Padzhev gave me a distracted look, reaching for Sammie’s bag. “She’s fine.”
I stepped in front of him and slapped his arms down. Anatoly immediately grabbed me from behind and shoved a gun in my ear. I kept looking at Padzhev. “Where is she?”
The muscles in his face quivered briefly as he fought for self-control. He then muttered something fast and harsh to Anatoly, who steered me outside, down the walkway, and into the abutting room. Gail was sitting up on one of the beds, no longer bound or gagged, but looking like hell. A guard was lounging in a seat by the window.
Anatoly said, “You have two minutes,” and shoved me toward the bed, taking up a station by the door.
I sat next to her and took one of her hands in mine. “How’re you holding up?”
She smiled wanly. “If I knew you’d be this much trouble when we met, I don’t think I would’ve made the effort.”
That cut deeper than she’d intended. I looked at the floor, thinking how right she was.
She touched my cheek. “Joke, kiddo-I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I wish the hell I could.”
“What’s going on, anyway?”
“It’s boiling down to an old-fashioned shoot-out between two rival Russian gangs. I’m just hoping we all get out of it alive.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You, me, Willy, and Sam, plus some guy from Middlebury and John Rarig. They might have more hostages than they got soldiers by now.”
She watched my face for a long moment, and then asked, “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”
“It could be. I’ve been told so many lies by now I’m the last one to know what’s what. But I think the top guy here-Georgi Padzhev-is fighting to stay alive, pure and simple. He’s far from his base, cut off and outnumbered, and so desperate for help he’s got us working for him.”
Her face registered surprise. “How?”
“He’s holding you over my head. Sammie and I just got him a fancy bugging system he’s hoping will tell him when the opposition’s too close. I don’t know what the hell good it’ll do.”
Anatoly pushed himself away from the doorframe and tapped his wristwatch.
I kissed Gail and stood up. “I love you. I’ll do what I can.”
She nodded and smiled encouragingly. “I know.”
Back in the first room, Padzhev had spread his new toys on one of the beds. Rarig and Corbin-Teich were standing at its foot, looking like two spectators at a game of solitaire.
“This is quite excellent, Lieutenant,” he said as I entered.
“Sammie fill you in?”
“Yes, she did. I hope we can rely on your two operatives in Brattleboro.”
“You can send somebody down there to shoot one of them as insurance, if you want.”
He looked away from the computer and the small pile of wafer-thin transmitters and fixed me with a stare. “I will if you think it necessary, just as I will shoot your girlfriend in the head if you step out of line.”
I stared back, feeling my face flush. It was time for me to do everything possible to avoid such confrontations-to be amenable, affable, and helpful. To fade into the woodwork until I saw an opportunity to act.
“I appreciate that,” I finally said and jutted my chin toward the electronic pile on the bed. “How do you plan to use this stuff?”
His study of me lasted a few seconds longer, before he stepped away and resumed his nervous pacing. “From what I understand, the best advantage it gives us is if we occupy a stationary position.”
“That’s true,” Sammie agreed. “If we were getting the information in real time, it might not be, but since it’s going to be e-mailed to us, that’ll slow everything down. Our staying put means that much less data to be crunched down and forwarded.”
Padzhev paused by the bed and picked up one of the transmitters again, turning it over in his hand. “So we are the fort and they are the attacking army-a fort before which they will abandon their vehicles and render all this utterly useless.” He tossed it back, barely hiding his disgust.
“That was plan A,” I suggested, “when we thought we were dealing with much clunkier transmitters. What we need is to find a way to plant the bugs on the people, not their cars.”
He gave me a sour look. “If we could do that, Lieutenant, we could also kill them, which happens to be the whole point of this exercise.”
“We have to figure out a way they’ll pick up the bugs themselves,” Sammie said, stimulated, I thought, by Padzhev’s worsening mood, which was beginning to concern me, too. “Like the Trojan horse.”
He lifted his face, intrigued. I felt we’d become courtiers to his fickle king, finding any way possible to prop up his spirits-and extend our own lives.
“How?” he asked, reasonably enough. “What would they want of ours?”
“Weapons,” I answered.
There was dead silence in the room. “The one thing you both have in common, as you pointed out,” I continued, “is you want to kill each other. If you leave behind a cache of arms-like they’d been abandoned in a panic-they’ll probably be picked up and distributed.”
He frowned. “And used against us.”
“A few extra aren’t going to make much difference. We only have eight bugs. We could plant them in eight gun butts.”
“Screw up the sights,” Rarig suggested.
Padzhev shook his head. “They would check for something like that. The Lieutenant is quite right-they must be of obvious value.”
He buried his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the bathroom door, taking us in like a challenging teacher. “So now we are in need of a fort with walls a mile thick-someplace we can control, where we know the terrain, and into which our opponents will have to penetrate on foot, allowing us to intercept them by eavesdropping on their positions.”
“Someplace high and lonely?” Corbin-Teich asked softly.
Rarig looked at him meaningfully. It struck me then that Corbin-Teich had been almost mute since being bundled in here with the rest of us, overwhelmed and perhaps quite frightened by all the fireworks. Or so I’d thought.
Padzhev watched him carefully. “You know of such a place?”
“With only one narrow road, eight miles long,” Lew admitted, sounding like he was reaching far back in time.
Rarig seemed to have made the same decision I had, about buying time with cooperation. “You have a map?” he asked. “I know where he’s talking about.”
Padzhev didn’t move, but one of his men immediately produced a road map of the state, spreading it open at the foot of the bed. Rarig leaned over it, slowly extending his finger and tapping it in the middle of Vermont’s so-called Northeast Kingdom, a remote, sparsely populated, harsh, and beautiful area, famous for its desolate, forested land and the independence of its inhabitants.
“There’s a mountaintop here that might suit your needs,” he said. “It worked for us forty years ago.”
I suddenly remembered what he’d told me earlier of how and why Lew had come to know Vermont. “That the old radar site you were talking about? Where he was held under wraps for two years?”
Lew smiled wistfully. “It was well known for good hunting.”
The irony of that was lost on no one.
Rarig’s mountain was as empty and unmolested as he and Corbin-Teich had foretold, but their description had missed the hostile vastness of the place. As we drove in a caravan up miles of narrow, broken, blacktopped road, the edges of which disappeared into the bordering vegetation like liquid, I began feeling we’d left one world for another. Vermont is famous for its trees and mountains, but mostly as a backdrop to a rural domesticity that has stamped the state for well over a hundred years.