“Ah. Foreigners.”
The widow filled their glasses again. “There’s no point asking me where they were from because I don’t know. Jasha was always secretive. Why, just last month he left on a trip for four days without telling me a thing. If I hadn’t found the receipt from that Beirut restaurant in his pocket when I was washing his trousers, I’d never have known where he’d been.”
October’s hand jerked, nearly spilling her vodka. “He went to Lebanon?”
“He goes there a couple of times a year.” The widow paused, then corrected herself. “Used to go.”
“Do you still have the receipt?”
“For the restaurant? No. Why?”
“Do you remember the name?”
“No.” She polished off another vodka and sniffed. “Poor Jasha. The militia keeps refusing to release his body to me. Can you imagine? They haven’t let any of the families see the bodies.”
Jax thought about the condition of the bodies he’d seen in those big glossy militia photographs, and figured that was probably a good thing.
Anna Baklanov dabbed the pad of one finger at the corner of each eye. “It’s so hard on Jasha’s poor old mother, losing the two of them.”
“The two of them?”
She nodded. “Jasha’s nephew was on the Yalena with him, you know. Jasha’d been like a father to the boy, ever since his brother died. And now Stefan’s dead, too.”
“I’m so sorry,” said October. “I had no idea.”
Lurching to her feet, the widow reached for a snapshot in a cheap brass frame that rested with a collection of others atop a nearby piano. “This was taken last year,” she said, holding it out.
“But he’s so young,” said October, holding the picture in both hands.
Peering over her shoulder, Jax found himself staring at a skinny, dark-haired boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen. The picture was taken on a rocky beach on a cold, overcast day, the sea a sullen gray in the background. But the boy was rosy-cheeked and laughing, with one arm thrown affectionately around the shoulders of the big shaggy mutt panting happily beside him.
“Nice dog,” said Jax.
Anna Baklanov sniffed. “Stefan’s father got him for Stefan when the boy was just a little thing. Broke the poor boy’s heart when the dog died, not more’n a month after this picture was taken.”
She took the photograph back and stared at it soulfully before carefully returning it to its place on the piano. “He could sing like an angel, you know. Sang in the church choir from the time he was small. Jasha used to say it made him weak, like his father. But then, Jasha had no use for the church. Russia might not be Communist anymore, but Jasha was a member of the Party until the day he died.”
Jax lifted his vodka in a silent toast. To Jasha Baklanov. Smuggler. Thief. Proud Party member. He had the glass halfway to his lips when a thought occurred to him. “How old was the boy?” he asked in his fractured Russian.
He obviously got it wrong because Anna Baklanov’s bleary eyes squinted into a frown. “Excuse me?”
October repeated the question for him.
Anna Baklanov blew a stream of blue smoke out her nostrils. “Just sixteen.”
They wavered back to the car in a haze of vodka fumes.
“What are you doing with a press card?” said October.
Jax frowned at two big Kawasakis parked at the end of the lane. “It comes in handy sometimes.”
She was silent for a moment. “Funny, I never thought about it, before.”
“About what?”
“How much spies lie.”
He gave a sharp laugh. “Don’t like it, do you? See, there are some advantages to letting me do the talking.”
“When you know the language.”
“When I know the language,” he agreed, his attention drawn again to the men at the end of the block. Both riders had the visors on their helmets down. He could hear the motorcycles’ powerful roar as they revved their engines impatiently.
She said, “It’s sad about the boy.”
“Baklanov’s nephew? Maybe more curious than sad.” Jax opened the door for her. “I looked at the photographs of every man killed on that salvage ship. I could be wrong, but I didn’t see anyone who looked like young Stefan. In fact, I’d say none of those men was under twenty-five.”
Closing her door, he went to slip behind the wheel, aware of the Kawasakis pulling away from the curb. He thrust the key in the ignition and listened to the old Lada grind painfully over and over again without catching.
“Shit,” he whispered under his breath.
“What’s the matter?”
He threw a quick glance in the rearview mirror. “See those two motorcycles behind us? I think we’re in trouble.”
26
The Lada coughed. Caught.
Jax threw the old car into gear and stepped on the gas as the motorcyclists came up behind them. October skewed around in her seat to watch them out the back window. The Kawasakis were nearly identical, one dark blue, the other black.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What are they doing?”
“At the moment, they’re just following us. It’s when we get out of town we’ll need to worry.”
She cast a quick glance around at the dwindling houses. “This is a very small town.”
“I’d noticed.”
Leaving the last straggling houses behind, they cut through wild dunes of soaring sand that disappeared beneath a thickly planted pine grove. But beyond the trees the sandy dunes reemerged, untamed and windblown. Deserted.
“Shit,” said Jax as the leather-jacketed men gunned their engines, roaring right up on his ass. He already had the accelerator floored.
“Why are they getting so close?” she shouted over the whine of the engines.
He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as the bumps and dips on the pavement bounced the old car wildly from side to side. “Because this road’s so bad, they’re going to need to get close to get a good shot at us.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw one of the riders reach beneath his coat. He jerked the steering wheel violently to the left and yelled, “Get down!”
The rear windshield shattered in a rain of glass.
Tires squealing, he spun the wheel to the right again, careening back and forth across the centerline to keep the motorcyclists from getting a steady shot. He heard a ping, then another as bullets buried into the Lada’s metal frame.
“Sonofabitch,” he swore. “Brace yourself!”
He stood on the brakes. The Lada’s backend broke loose, sending the heavy car into a sideways skid that filled the air with the screech of tires and the stench of burning rubber.
Too close to stop, the thug on the blue motorcycle jerked to the right, laying down a line of black rubber as he shot off the side of the road to crash head-on into a massive pine tree. They heard a whooshing explosion, and rider and bike disappeared in a ball of fire.
The black biker’s reactions were a split second slower. Hitting his brakes, he slammed into the Lada’s left rear fender with a tearing shriek of metal and a jarring thump that reverberated through the heavy old car. And then he was airborne, a black leather blur that sailed over the Lada’s trunk to land in a sprawling skid that carried him far down the old blacktopped road and ripped off his helmet. When he finally slid to a halt, he didn’t move.
“Oh, my God,” whispered October.
Jax was out of the car almost before it stopped. The air was thick with the black smoke from the burning bike down the road. A sickly sweet stench of charred flesh mingled with the smell of the pines and the briny breeze blowing in off the sea.
Crouching down, he stared into the second cyclist’s wide, unseeing eyes. He glanced up and down the narrow deserted road and pushed to his feet. Walking back to the Lada, he straightened the rear fender enough to be sure the wheel would turn. Then he got back in the car, threw it into gear, and hit the gas.