David Morrell - The Spy Who Came for Christmas

He changed the subject.

“ You’re dressed like you were going to a party.”

“ The parents of a boy Cole goes to school with invited us to their house.” Meredith sounded weighed down by thoughts of what might have been.

“ Will you be missed?” Kagan asked quickly. “Will they wonder what happened to you? If they can’t reach you on the phone, maybe they’ll become concerned enough to-”

“ Before Ted smashed the phones, he called them and claimed Cole was sick.”

“ Ah.” Kagan’s tone went flat. “Ted’s a clever man.”

“ Yes. A clever man.” Meredith took a deep breath and looked down at the baby. “I’d forgotten what it feels like to have something this helpless in my arms. That’s right, little fellow. Keep sipping. I bet you’re thirsty. Don’t worry. We’ve got plenty, and it’s all for you.”

“ Not quite,” Kagan said. Dehydrated from bleeding, he was terribly aware of his own thirst. He reached into the first aid kit, opened a container of Tylenol, and shoved four tablets into his dry mouth. Crouching to prevent his silhouette from showing at the window, he went back to the stove, tested the saucepan’s handle to make sure he wouldn’t burn himself, and poured some of the mixture into a glass he found next to the sink.

He took two deep swallows and got the pills down. He tasted the salt and the sugar. Instantly, his stomach cramped, aggravating the nausea produced by his wound. He waited, then took another swallow, feeling his mouth absorb the warm fluid.

“ See anything, Cole?”

“ It really looks like he went away,” the boy said from the living room.

“ Keep watching anyhow. It never hurts to be cautious. Spies can’t take anything for granted.”

“ I keep changing the channel on the radio you gave me, but I don’t hear anything. Maybe I’m not doing it right.”

“ If you play video games, I’m sure you can work that receiver.” The microphone in Kagan’s pants pocket was too far from his mouth to transmit his voice if Andrei happened to be listening on the frequency the team had first used. “Those men won’t talk unless they need to. There’s only a slight chance that you’ll turn to the frequency they’re using at the moment they happen to be talking. But we’ve got to try everything. You’re doing fine.”

Kagan switched off the night-light, noting that Meredith trusted him enough now that she didn’t object. Concealed by the deeper shadows, he opened the curtains a couple of inches.

Through the falling snow, he was able to see the upright poles of the coyote fence. He watched for movement in the shadows beyond it.

“ Meredith, describe the layout of the house.”

Andrei crawled hurriedly through the snow along the bottom of the fence. His breathing quickened as the heat of the renewed hunt dissipated the cold on his cheeks. When he was far enough down the lane that he felt safe to stand, he did so and peered up at a utility pole.

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.”