Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

Alena brushed hair back from her cheek, and as she did, the Gulfstream banked slightly, and sunlight came flooding through the windows. Where it touched her head, the copper of her hair seemed to burn.

"So how bad is it?" I asked.

"No, that's not what they did."

"What do you mean?"

"It didn't make the media, Atticus. None of it. From the time we fled the safe house until just this morning, when we left Brighton Beach, there was never as much as a whisper that anyone had died in a gun battle in Cold Spring. There was never as much as a whisper that anything happened there at all."

"There must have been something. Some report."

"No. Nothing."

I removed my newly acquired glasses, rubbed my eyes with my other hand. The glasses had been waiting for me this morning, and while the prescription had been correct-or at least, close enough that my eyes had been able to compensate-their fit was bad, and they dug into the skin behind my ears. I folded them closed, set them on the shelf beside me.

"Natalie," I said. "There should have been at least something about Natalie."

"And I am saying to you that there wasn't, Atticus. There was nothing at all."

She stared at me, a little blurred in my sight, but her expression seemed almost entirely neutral, her sad brown eyes meeting my own. She was waiting for me to say it, to put the words to what she had already concluded, but I wasn't willing to, not quite yet. Not until I had at least made an effort at providing an alternate explanation.

My problem was, no alternate was offering itself for use.

"Dan did not need to sanitize the house," Alena said. "They would have done that for us."

"Whoever 'they' are."

"You know who 'they' are, Atticus, at least in the abstract, at least as much as I know it. There is only one possible explanation to satisfy every question, from who hired Oxford, to who tried to kill you, to who tried to kill me, to who did kill Natalie as a result."

"There could be others."

"With the ability to enforce media silence regarding what happened, to cover up the deaths of almost a dozen men? With the ability and the capital to assemble, finance, and deploy two coordinated strikes against both you and me with perhaps less than three, maybe even two hours of notice? There was no expectation that you would be arriving at the safe house, Atticus, remember that. The initial plan had been that you would deal with Oxford while I was taken to Cold Spring. You were never to join us there."

"Natalie called Dan from the road, told him that I was coming in with you two, that I'd need a car."

"The car that Illya acquired, yes. Which is probably when he informed his masters that you would be coming to the safe house. Masters who, in all likelihood, are responsible for Illya's disappearance. The team that ambushed you could have been an element of the larger team that assaulted the house; they could have been split off when it became apparent they needed a new contingency to deal with you, when they realized they needed to stage an ambush."

The tea bag in my cup was floating on the surface, on its side. I poked it back down with a finger.

"That's something that's been bothering me," I said. "Why didn't they just hit all of us at the house? Why did they think it was necessary to hit me separately?"

"They identified you as the greatest threat."

"Greater than you? I find that hard to believe."

"They knew I was wounded. They wanted to isolate you. That's why they forced you into an ambush, away from the safe house."

"Stupid on their part."

"Perhaps. They were having to adapt very quickly, remember. And their assessment of you was correct; you broke their ambush, and you killed all three of them without dying yourself. There are not many who could have survived that."

"If they'd kept the whole team together, hit us as soon as we'd arrived at the safe house-"

Alena moved her left hand, a slight gesture, side to side, impatiently. "Don't make assumptions, Atticus. We do not know if they were in position when we arrived. It is just as likely that they had to call for more men to set the ambush as it is that the three who attacked you were part of the larger unit."

I snagged on the word "unit." "You think they were military?"

"Not active duty, no."

"Civilian contractors."

"That would be my suspicion, yes. And we both know who civilian contractors contract with, Atticus." She ran a hand through her hair. "As I said, we both know who 'they' are."

I put my tea down, on the shelf, beside my glasses. I was tired and I was sore, and I hurt in body and heart. I let my head fall back against the cushion behind me, closed my eyes.

Natalie Trent was still resting on her bed of leaves.

"I love my country," I said softly. "But I fear my government."

Beside me, Alena said, "With good reason."

Then she reached across the aisle, and took hold of my hand, and held it until the government I feared was far, far behind us.

It took three years, two months, and twelve days for us to find where Illya Tyagachev was hiding.

Within three weeks of arriving in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, I was out of the woods and beginning to heal, and to heal fast. Maybe it was because I'd been in the best shape of my life when I'd been shot, better even than when I'd been twenty and full of juice and pounding the ground in the Army; maybe it was simply my bullheaded resolve that, between Alena and myself, at least one of us needed to be able to rely on their legs to do what they were told.

Whatever the reason, I bounced back quickly, and was able to move around, unassisted and with only minor discomfort, before the end of November. I wasn't doing handstands during yoga, and the ballet training was off the table, but if I had to, I could serve in a pinch. Vadim was still traveling with us, and he helped pick up my slack, further acting as our legman, gopher, and extra gun.

We spent New Year's Day that year at the Sonnenhof Clinic in Saanen-Gstaad, looking out at the snow-covered mountains of the Bernese Oberland. Alena had undergone her first surgery only two days prior, a combination exploration and cleanup where a team of orthopedic surgeons had gone into her leg to visualize the damage Oxford had done there. They'd removed the remaining bone debris and the last of the shot that had been missed by the first doctor who'd worked on her, back in Kingstown, St. Vincent.

The operation took just under three hours, and the doctor leading Alena's care, Frau Doktor Marika Akrman, told us afterwards that it had been "very productive."

"But there is, I am afraid, not so good news, as well," she said. Her English was precise, the accent very German. "What we feared due to the delay in your treatment has come to happen, and the anterior cruciate ligament will have to be replaced. In addition, the tendons that were severed have retracted. If you had come to us sooner, we might have been able to reextend and reattach them. Unfortunately, that is no longer possible."

Frau Doktor Akrman was in her fifties, with a girlish face and blond-white hair. When she frowned or smiled it made her look a lot younger. She was frowning when she added, "I am sorry to tell you that I do not think you will ever be able to dance as you once did."

Alena and I took the news stoically. That had been our story, that Alena had been teaching ballet in Moscow, a bystander making her way down the street caught in a cross fire between two rival gang factions. It wasn't the most creative lie, but it worked, because it wasn't much of a lie at all. I'd found the report of the actual gunfight through a Google search, and it was easy enough to put Alena on the scene as a woman named Sinovia Gariblinski, an innocent victim who had recently wed an American software designer more than willing to pay for his new bride's expensive surgeries.