David Morrell - The Spy Who Came for Christmas

“ Right. An iPod.” The boy examined the equipment and nodded. “I can do that.” He mustered his courage and limped into the living room.

Throughout their conversation, Kagan sensed that Meredith was watching him.

Then the baby squirmed, and she removed the diaper.

“ A boy,” she murmured. “He doesn’t look more than four or five weeks old.”

“ Five weeks. Good guess,” Kagan said. “If he’d waited a little longer, he’d have been a Christmas present.”

Meredith dropped the diaper in a trash can under the sink.

“ I forgot how tiny a baby is. Look. He has a birthmark on his left heel. It sort of reminds me of a rose.”

“ The child of peace.”

“ What?”

Kagan realized he’d said too much. “Isn’t that what babies mean this time of year? Like the Christmas carol says, ‘Peace on Earth, goodwill to men.’ It’s sexist, I suppose, but the sentiment still works.”

Again Meredith studied him. Then she returned her attention to the baby.

“ He isn’t Anglo.”

“ Anglo?” Kagan asked.

“ What the locals call ‘white.’ But he doesn’t look Hispanic or Native American, either. His skin is like cinnamon. He looks-”

“ Middle Eastern.” Kagan stood and wavered. Managing to steady himself, he went to the kitchen sink and peered cautiously past the curtain on the window.

“ I don’t have any safety pins big enough to close this dish towel and make it work as a diaper,” Meredith said.

Wincing, Kagan eased off his parka, freeing himself of the weight of the gun in his right pocket. When Meredith had opened the coat and taken out the baby, she hadn’t pushed the flaps to each side and thus hadn’t felt what was there. He set the parka on the kitchen table, taking care to cushion the impact of the gun against the wood and avoid a sound that might attract questions.

“ Do you have any duct tape?” he asked.

“ Duct tape? Yes, that would work instead of safety pins. But what made you think of that?”

“ Duct tape has all kinds of uses. Where is it?”

“ The bottom drawer, to the left of the sink. We had a leak under the drain.”

Kagan opened the drawer and pulled out the roll of duct tape. He tore off two pieces and pressed them where Meredith held the folded dish towel around the baby’s hips. Then he tore off several more strips-longer ones-and stuck them to the edge of the counter.

“ For now, I won’t need those,” Meredith told him.

“ They’re for something else,” Kagan said.

He turned his back, then unbuttoned his shirt and gently pulled it free. He didn’t want Meredith to be alarmed by the Russian prison tattoos on his chest.

Despite the sweat that slicked his skin, he shivered. In the glow from the night-light, he managed to confirm that the bullet had passed through the flesh of his upper left arm. The wound was swollen, but as far as he could tell, neither bone nor the artery had been hit.

Well, that’s the good news about the bad news, he thought.

He braced himself for what he needed to do. You can manage this, he told himself, fighting the pain.

Behind him, Meredith evidently got a look at the injury to his arm. “What happened to you?”

Kagan didn’t answer.

“ Is…? My God, is that a bullet wound? Were you shot?”

When I rescued the baby.”

Repressing his dizziness, Kagan leaned over the sink and soaped the wound. “Do you have a first-aid kit?” He tried not to grimace when he rinsed blood away with warm water.

Meredith’s mind seemed paralyzed. “A first-aid kit?” She was so overwhelmed that she appeared to have trouble understanding the concept. “First-aid…? The next drawer up.”

Kagan pulled it from the drawer and opened it, pleased to find antibiotic cream. While he gingerly rubbed it over his wound, he looked through a crack in the curtains above the sink. The snow kept falling. He stared past the two trees toward the coyote fence and the lane. No one was in sight.

Maybe we’ll get lucky, he thought.

Sure we will.

He noticed a dry cloth next to the sink. Biting his lip, he pressed it to his wound and used the strips of duct tape to stick it to his skin. Sweat beaded his face while he wrapped several layers of tape tightly around his arm, making a pressure bandage. He waited, hoping that he wouldn’t see any blood leak out.

The baby whimpered. When Kagan looked over his shoulder, he saw it trying to suck one of its fists.

“ What are we going to feed him?” Meredith said.

“ Do you have any milk?”

“ Babies aren’t supposed to be fed regular milk.”

“ The World Health Organization has an emergency recipe for diluting it with water and adding sugar.”

“ We don’t have any milk. Cole can’t digest it. We had rice milk, but we used the last of it earlier.”

“ Then put a half teaspoon of salt into a quart of water.”

“ Salt?”

“ Add a half teaspoon of baking soda and three tablespoons of sugar.”

“ Are you making this up?”

“ It’s something the Mayo Clinic developed.”

Kagan shoved a finger into the bullet hole in his shirt. He tugged at the hole, ripping the sleeve open to make room for the added bulk of the pressure bandage. As he put on the shirt, he told Meredith, “Warm the water until the salt, baking soda, and sugar dissolve.”

“ World Health Organization? Mayo Clinic? Since when do spies know about feeding babies?”

“ I once escorted a medical team in Somalia.”

That was close enough to the truth to be believable, Kagan decided. The country had actually been Afghanistan, and he hadn’t been an escort. Instead, his assignment had been to pretend to be part of the medical team while he tried to get information from Afghan villagers about the location of terrorist training camps. Knowing how to save a baby’s life could buy a lot of cooperation.

“ The babies were starving,” Kagan explained. “The doctors told me what to do. It felt good to be able to help.”

Reinforcing Kagan’s point, Meredith held the baby against her chest.

“ The mixture isn’t a substitute for food. All it’ll do is give him electrolytes and keep him from dehydrating,” Kagan went on. “He needs twelve ounces in the next twelve hours. But after that, he’s got to have formula.”

Twelve hours, Kagan thought. If we’re not out of danger by then, it won’t matter if the baby gets fed or not.

“ Someone’s coming,” Cole said from the living room.

Wary of the shadows on either side, Andrei followed the tracks.

The falling snow had accumulated until it was above the ankles of his boots. The footprints ahead were rapidly becoming faint impressions.

Two sets veered toward a house on the right. Farther on, two other sets angled toward a house on the left. The pairs of prints were next to each other and showed no sign of scuffling. But Andrei suspected that if Pyotyr had used his gun to force someone to take him into a house, he would probably have done so with the gun pointed toward the person’s back. In that case, one set of prints would be in front of the other. Also, the prints in front would be unevenly spaced, evidence that the person in front was being shoved.

As Andrei kept walking, faint light reflecting off the snow now revealed only one remaining set of fresh tracks. He noted that they paralleled some almost-filled prints that came in Andrei’s direction, apparently from a house farther down the lane.

Do these fresh prints belong to you, Pyotyr? he hoped. Have I almost caught you?

Or maybe you’re leading me into a trap.

Andrei slowed, scanning the snowy haze before him. The cold made his cheeks numb, but that only took his mind back again. While in the Russian army, he had once marched twenty-four hours in a blizzard. In that period, he hadn’t been able to drink or eat anything, the weather having frozen his water and rations. We do this to make you tougher, his officers had told him.