“But where will you be? You can’t go off alone in this country. You don’t even speak the language. You can’t operate without the Russian police and that means dealing through us. I want you to promise me that you won’t try to do anything like that.” The man, whose name was Owens, stopped talking and listened. There was nobody on the line.
He switched to an internal line. “We’re about to lose track of Fargo. He’s left the hotel. He’ll probably turn up near Nizhny Novgorod in a week or two. He left our cell phone and the kidnapper’s cell in his room. Send somebody to pick up both. Then send the kidnapper’s phone on a vacation to Rome, Paris, and Budapest. It’ll keep the poor guy’s wife alive for a while.”
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA
Sam is coming. Sam will come for me no matter what. He’s coming for me already. He will have found something to trace.
Remi lay in bed even though she suspected it was late morning. She had read somewhere that experimenters living in caves without sunlight or clocks would gradually lengthen their sleep cycles to a twenty-six hour day. She heard the quiet knock of the girl who would be bringing her breakfast. She was sensitive to Remi’s feelings. She knocked even though Remi was locked in and she had the key.
The girl’s name was Sasha—a boy’s name, usually, but maybe it was a nickname, or even a name that she’d assumed because she worked for a criminal and didn’t want to be identified. She was about eighteen, slim and blond, with pale green eyes. She had come in about five times now. Each time she entered, Remi would make sure to talk to her.
Remi said, “Good morning, Sasha. What a nice breakfast you’ve brought me. Thank you very much.”
Sasha put the food down on the small table and pulled out the chair for Remi as she always did. The girl never let on during the first few visits that she spoke English, but Remi had tested her. Remi had rattled on in English each visit as though the two were friends, and had planted ideas.
Once she had said she missed being outside and seeing the sun, and, most of all, she missed flowers like the ones that she had seen growing on the estate when she was brought here. The next visit Sasha put a bud vase on her tray with a small yellow rose in it. Remi had expressed great gratitude, and she repeated her thanks just as enthusiastically the next time a flower appeared. Remi liked the strong-brewed Russian tea Sasha brought in a glass with sugar in it. But the second time, she’d decided to sacrifice it. She had said, “It’s too strong for me. Would you like it?” and with a reassuring expression gave the tea to Sasha. Remi said that what she liked best was coffee sweetened with a little honey. The next day, Sasha brought the strong tea as usual and kept it as her own, but she also brought coffee and honey. Sasha sat on the bed with her tea and stayed with Remi while she ate.
Each breakfast included coffee and tea, each lunch had a flower. When Remi talked, she would ask Sasha questions about the world outside. When there was a particularly beautiful purple-and-white tulip, Remi asked where it grew, and Sasha used cups, napkin, plates, and silverware to make a little map of the estate. As she placed the pieces she called them “house . . . garden . . . road . . . stables . . . pasture . . . garage” in English.
With every visit, Remi kept trying to solidify the friendship and learn whatever she could about the house, the grounds, and its occupants. Sasha didn’t volunteer much information. Instead she listened to Remi, took a minute or two to ask herself whether the information could be dangerous, and then invariably devised some way to answer without saying anything that might get her in trouble.
Four days—twelve meals—passed this way. In the end, Remi knew—partly from observation the morning she’d arrived and partly from Sasha—the approximate layout of the house and grounds. She knew that there were twenty men on the estate who were not usually there and that they made Sasha’s work much harder since they required much more cooking, cleaning, laundry, and dishwashing. And they were the sort of men who gave Sasha the creeps.
What Sasha didn’t know was that Remi had slipped a fork up her sleeve the second day. Sasha would never have suspected that Remi had used a hole drilled in the steel bed frame to bend all the tines on the fork but one, that she had a husband who had taught her to pick a lock, and that she had broken one tine all the way off to use as a tension wrench.
During her sixth day of captivity, Remi unscrewed a small metal strut that strengthened the corner of the bathroom cabinet and tested its utility tapping on the pipes to make noise. That way, after using it, she could leave it where it belonged and never have it found if the room was searched.
She further endeared herself to Sasha by dividing her first dessert evenly and sharing it, all the while talking about what city they were near and which direction was Moscow in. When she was sure the house had gotten quiet for the night, she used her tine pick and tension wrench to line up the pins on the door lock’s tumbler and open it. She practiced again and again until she could do it easily and quickly. It occurred to her while she did that Sam would be amazed at how good she was at picking locks now that it mattered.
She slipped out and spent about five minutes exploring the quiet, dark hallway to find the back stairwell she had climbed to get here, looked out two different windows at the large estate and the big black river beyond, and found the room at the top of the stairway where she could hear two guards snoring. Then she had the feeling that she had ventured as much as she dared and went back to her room, relocked the door by poking the pins out of line, and slept.
On the seventh day she practiced the Morse code that Sam had insisted she learn for this kind of occasion despite her protests that no military organizations still taught it. She abbreviated her message to “Remi 4th floor” and began to tap it on the pipe that fed her sink. The taps had to be soft and at a low volume and continued for long periods so the regular occupants of the house got used to them and didn’t notice anymore. She and Sasha had a conversation in English about the mild, clear weather outside and the pretty view of the Volga from Sasha’s room. When the house was dark again, Remi picked the lock of her room and went out again into the dark hallway.
Remi had a light and agile fencer’s body, and her husband had taught her a few tricks about walking in a dark building. One was that boards tended to creak more near the center of a hall and that the way to walk silently was to move ahead a bit and then stop at the first creak and wait so that any listener would not associate it with the next creak that came, classifying the two as unrelated. Most noises made in this way would be thought of as having no human cause—just an old house standing up to a sudden wind or maybe a branch moving against the outer wall of the house.
Each day while Remi did her exercises to stay strong and limber, she reviewed all the tasks she had performed. She made certain that she had not neglected any of the preparations that Sam had made her practice in advance. During the long, happy times at the house on the Pacific at La Jolla, it had been hard to take all of the pieces of this drill seriously. Sam had kidded and cajoled her into learning the dull parts, but as she thought about them now, ticking them off in her mind, she realized that they had been helping her to stave off the terror that had been waiting to paralyze her. The drill had given her purpose and kept her occupied constructively from the very beginning of her captivity. Everything she did reminded her that she must not give up hope, but it also reminded her of Sam and made the tears threaten to come if she allowed them. Sam is coming, getting closer. I’ve got to be ready.