Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

In fact, the money behind the surgeries-the money behind everything we did, how we traveled, how we lived, all of it-was Alena's and Alena's alone. Her "blood money," she called it, the wages she had been paid for the nine men and two women she had murdered as one of The Ten. There was a lot of it, hidden in trusts and accounts and investments around the globe, carefully folded into the safety of private banks. One of the first things Alena had done when we'd reached Eastern Europe was reach out for her attorney, arranging a meeting between him and the two of us in Warsaw. She'd liquidated some funds and redistributed others to new hiding places. After all, I'd been able to leverage Oxford through his money; she didn't want the same thing happening to us.

"How much more of this will she have to go through?" I asked Dr. Akrman.

The Frau Doktor inclined her head, accepting my concern for my spouse. "Another two procedures, I think. We will have to reattach the bones in the tibia and fibula, as discussed, and bolt them back into place. Then a final operation, to replace the anterior cruciate. Of course, you will need to look into appropriate physical therapy once you get her back home."

"How long until I regain the use of the leg?" Alena asked.

"If you dedicate yourself to the physical therapy, not long." Frau Doktor Akrman smiled a practiced smile, attempting to remove the sting from what she had to say next. "But without the tendons, the strength in your left leg will be severely diminished. Running and jumping will be difficult, and I would strongly advise against even attempting to try."

Alena smiled, too, saying she understood, and Frau Doktor Akrman left, and as soon as she was out of the room and the door was closed, Alena pulled the pillow from behind her head and threw it across the room. The pillow hit the television in its open cabinet on the opposite wall, then fell to the floor. Alena cursed in Russian.

"Don't swear," I told her. "You can't breathe properly if you swear."

She turned the cursing at me, glaring, and I gave her a big grin in return. She tried to keep glaring at me for another second or two, but my grin won, and finally she had to look away, out the windows and at the glorious winter view, to keep her bad mood intact.

"It's better than I hoped," I said.

"No running?" Alena demanded. "No jumping? How is that better?"

"You'll be able to walk without assistance, without the cane. You'll be able to swim."

She grunted a sullen acceptance, and I left it at that. The last operation was performed that March, five months after we'd fled the States, and it was a shorter procedure than the second, and at the end of it Frau Doktor Akrman declared it a success. Alena was discharged from the clinic eight days later, and we made our way back to Georgia by roundabout route over the next three days. She was on crutches, and despite the Frau Doktor's optimism, we both knew it would be a while before she could move about reliably on her own.

Vadim had located a new house for us outside the city of Batumi-the fifth we'd stayed in since fleeing the U.S.-down in the south along the Black Sea coast. It was easy to find places on the coast to rent or buy, and the Georgian economy being what it was, a little of Alena's money went a very long way. Most of the dachas the Party bigwigs once used were uninhabited or had been converted to summer rentals, and if we were willing to pay in cash-and we always were-almost anything we needed could be obtained in relatively short order, from vehicles to accommodations to weapons.

The house was larger and more ostentatious than I would have chosen if I'd made the pick myself, with too much space for only three people and a dog. The last of the Georgian winter was still with us, and keeping the house warm was a nightmare. Vadim acknowledged all of these faults, but then justified the choice by telling us that there was an indoor pool, and that it was heated.

I was growing very fond of Vadim.

Alena and I made the first, stuttering attempts at resuming our respective training regimens. We swam a lot, slowly resumed our routine of morning yoga. Alena still couldn't incorporate ballet into her workout, but she took great glee in watching me attempt it, and never failed to find something wrong with the way I was moving, with a jete here, an entrechat quatre there. I didn't mind; I enjoyed my feeble attempts at dance, the way it focused my mind inward, honed my awareness of my own body.

We brought up a physical therapist from Batumi three times a week to work with Alena. He worked with her in the pool, mostly, and with weights, sometimes, and after watching them together during the first half-dozen or so of their sessions, I left them alone. Vadim tailed him the first four times the therapist left the house, and his assessment was, and I agreed with him, that if this guy was going to try and kill any of us, it wouldn't be because he was working for someone who wanted him to do it.

Twice since the year turned Dan had contacted us via e-mail sent from anonymous accounts. There had been no sign of Illya, and in February, Dan offered the theory that whoever he'd been working for had tied up that particular loose end with a hollow-point to the base of the skull. Alena was inclined to agree. I wasn't so certain.

In early April, we received a third e-mail, and in it Dan asked if we could perhaps do without Vadim, that he had work for him back in Brooklyn.

"He's missing him," Alena confided to me while watching my attempts at dance the following morning. "So he says he has work, because Dan doesn't want us to think he is weak."

"He misses his son. How is that weak?"

"He believes admitting such things makes one vulnerable. It can be exploited."

I thought about what Natalie had said to me six months earlier in the kitchen of the house in Cold Spring, and what I'd said to her in return. Her words had seemed so saccharine and manipulative at the time, an attempt by her to convince me to stay, and I'd resented her like hell for making something that was already difficult all the harder.

At night, when I closed my eyes, I still saw her on her autumnal bed. It didn't help things that the last words I'd exchanged with her had been bitter and spiteful ones.

"It can," I said, and left it at that. At the end of April we moved to a smaller house outside the resort town of Ureki, and the next morning we sent Vadim back to his father. The boy was glad to go, though he tried to hide it. He missed New York, and he had friends there he wanted to see. I could almost remember what that was like.

The following day the weather turned unseasonably ugly, as if reminding us it was still winter, but Alena, Miata, and I went down to the shore for a walk anyway. We did some shopping for the house, bought some fresh-caught sea bass for dinner. In the grocery store, I saw Alena hovering over the selection of wines, and she caught me looking and then moved on to gather fruits and vegetables. Georgians, as a rule, loved to drink, and loved their wine, but Alena was not Georgian, she was Russian, born-she thought-in Magadan, and further, she never touched alcohol. Since I'd begun training with her, I didn't, either.

We took our walk, getting cold and wet, trying to enjoy the empty beach and the quiet, but it wouldn't take. When we'd been in Bequia, both of us had known Oxford was coming, that it was only a matter of when, not if. That knowledge had followed us, cast its pall on the mood and the environment. Even at the best of times in Bequia, it had been impossible to truly relax.

So it was here, some six and a half months since the attempts on our respective lives. It didn't matter that there'd been nothing, no threat, no signs of danger since that murderous night in Cold Spring. Our enemy remained, unnamed and unknown and potentially very powerful, and just because they hadn't found us yet didn't mean they had abandoned their search. As it had been with Oxford, we lived with the knowledge that we were hunted, and that the hunter might find us at any time.