Two wires led from it toward the house. In the faint reflection off the snow, he strained his eyes and saw that one of them was attached to an insulator on the pole-that was for electricity. The other wire was either for telephone service or for cable television. Then he remembered the satellite dish he’d seen on the roof and decided that the remaining wire must be for the phone.
In adequate conditions, his marksmanship was exceptional. But now it took him four shots before a bullet connected with the thick wire at the pole and blew it apart. Because of the falling snow, the sound suppressor on his gun was even more muffled than usual, and the sound of hitting the wire wasn’t enough to attract attention.
Immediately, he removed the partly empty magazine, slid it into a pants pocket, and shoved a full fifteen-round magazine into the pistol. Only then did he speak to the microphone, his voice an urgent whisper.
“ I found him.”
Through the earbud under his cap, he heard an abrupt exhale.
“ Thank God,” the Pakhan’s taut voice said.
Andrei thought it ironic that his leader, who had also been raised in the atheistic Soviet Union, would use that expression.
“ Our clients are here now,” the Pakhan said. “I’ve never seen anyone so furious. How soon can you deliver the package?”
“ I don’t know,” Andrei answered.
“ What?”
“ Pyotyr took cover in a house. I need to figure how to get to him.”
“ Don’t let him escape again,” the Pakhan’s voice warned.
“ Not this time. He’s ours.”
“ I don’t give a govno about him! Deal with him quickly! The package! Just get me the package!”
It troubled Andrei that the Pakhan felt so threatened. Normally, he was content to provide barely adequate service. If clients complained, he ordered someone like Andrei to set fire to their homes. People who needed to employ the Odessa Mafia were desperate to begin with. The Pakhan’s attitude was that they ought to be grateful for any help they received.
But these clients were another matter.
The three million dollars they’d paid for a week’s work-at a resort city, no less-had been too tempting for the Pakhan to resist. At the time, he’d called it easy pickings.
“ They made all the arrangements. They bribed the necessary people. They learned the target’s schedule, exactly when and where the job can be done. It should have been easy for them. But they can’t carry out the actual mission. They need us because we can blend with the Santa Fe crowd, while they’d be spotted right away. So I charged those damned Arabs as much as possible.”
Accustomed to causing fear rather than being the subject of it, the Pakhan now understood the penalty for going into business with clients who were even more ruthless than he was.
Andrei stepped off the lane toward a fir tree that provided a hidden vantage point from which he could watch the house.
“ Did the rest of you hear?” he murmured to his microphone.
“ Yes.” Yakov’s voice came through the earbud. “Where are you?”
“ Follow the lane I took.”
A few minutes later, when he saw two heavyset men hurrying through the falling snow, Andrei said to the microphone, “I’m to your right. By a fir tree.”
The men paused, looking in his direction.
“ There you are,” Mikhail murmured. “Good. We wouldn’t want to shoot you by mistake.” Grinning at the joke, he and Yakov took cover behind the tree and assessed the house.
“ How many people are inside?” Yakov’s question could barely be heard.
“ No way to tell,” Andrei replied softly. “Someone walked off and made footprints earlier, but those are Pyotyr’s footprints that go through the gate toward the house.”
“ How do you know?”
“ Blood on the gate.”
“ Ah.”
“ There’s light-probably from a television-in the room on the far right.” Andrei pointed. “Maybe there’s someone in the house, someone who isn’t aware that Pyotyr snuck in. Or maybe the house is empty, and Pyotyr turned on the television to make it seem the place is occupied.”
“ A lot of maybes,” Mikhail said. “He lost his cell phone. But if he’s in there, he’ll use the land line to call the police.”
“ I shot the telephone wire,” Andrei told him.
“ He could have phoned before you did that. Or maybe there’s a cell phone in the house.”
“ Then why haven’t the police arrived? Why don’t we hear sirens?”
Yakov shrugged. “It’s Christmas Eve on Canyon Road. The crowd would make it difficult for police cars to reach here.”
“ But we can’t just leave or rush the house because we think the police might be coming,” Andrei insisted. “If we screw up, we’d better run and keep running. We’d never be able to stop-because we know our clients and the Pakhan will never stop hunting us.”
And my family, Andrei thought. If the Pakhan can’t find me, he’ll go after my wife and daughters.
“ Then what do you suggest?” Mikhail wanted to know.
“ We’ll approach the house from three sides,” Andrei decided. “Pyotyr can’t defend it from every angle. At least two of us are bound to get in.”
“ Those are pretty good odds, as long as I’m not the one who gets shot,” Yakov said.
“ Pyotyr’s wounded and weak from blood loss,” Andrei countered. “His aim will be affected. There’s a high probability that all of us will get out of this alive.”
“‘ High probability’ doesn’t fill me with confidence. Whoever goes in from the front takes the greatest risk. How do we decide who-”
“ The two of you sound like old women. I’ll take the front,” Andrei said irritably.
They stared at him.
“ Pyotyr knows I’m the one he has the most reason to fear. I’ll show myself in front of the house. He’ll be distracted. That gives the two of you a better chance to get inside from different directions. If we synchronize the attack precisely-”
“ We have company,” Yakov warned.
Andrei pivoted toward the lane. At first, he worried that police were arriving. But the figure he saw was alone, plodding through the snow: a man wearing a buttoned pale-gray coat and a hat with built-in earflaps. He walked with his head so low that he looked weary.
The holiday blues? Andrei wondered. Or maybe he’s just protecting his face from the snow.
A further thought occurred to him.
Maybe this is a policeman putting on some kind of act. If so, he won’t be alone. He’ll be setting up a trap.
Andrei thought of the Pakhan, of the clients, of Pyotyr.
Of his wife and daughters.
The man trudged closer, angling toward the opposite side of the lane, toward the gate.
I’ll take the risk, Andrei decided.
“ We’re going to Santa Fe for a baby?”
“ Yes, Pyotyr. For the child of peace.”
“ I don’t understand.”
“ Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you watch the news on television?”
“ The news? Bah. Everything they tell us here is propaganda, the same as it was back in Russia.”
“ Then you’ve never heard of Ahmed Hassan?”
“ Is that the child’s name?”
“ The father’s. He’s an obstetrician.”
“ Andrei, my English isn’t…”
“ Hassan delivers babies. He’s a surgeon who once specialized in treating Palestinians who were shot in gunfights with Israelis.
Over the years, he operated on two thousand combat patients. ‘But nothing got better,’ he said. So he changed his specialty and became a baby doctor. Thousands of children are in the world because of him, far more than all the gunshot patients he treated. As he tells his followers, he chose life instead of death, hope instead of hate.”
“ His followers? You make Hassan sound like some kind of religious leader.”
“ In a way, he is. Although he doesn’t have any religious authority, his speeches are so impassioned that a great many people are inspired by his sheer presence. He speaks like a prophet and attracts more disciples every day. They believe he has a vision. He preaches that war between Palestinians and Israelis will destroy the region and the rest of the world with it. Many-those who are tired of the decades of killing and destruction-agree with him.