Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

"You're so sure?"

"He was a widower, Natalie's mother died from breast cancer when she was young. I can't remember Natalie ever mentioning Elliot so much as dating another woman. It was just the two of them. And now he's outlived his daughter, as well."

Alena stayed silent for several seconds, leaving me to my thoughts, which weren't particularly pretty at that moment. Then she said, "You should check."

I shook it off, nodded, and typed in the address for Billy Kork's LiveJournal.

"'February's wind, it blows so cold,'" I read, aloud. "'Is this my bones, as they grow old?'"

"In the name of God," Alena groaned, burying her face against my shoulder, "please stop."

I pointed at the screen. "You sure? The third stanza is all about his acne trouble."

"Check, damn you," she said.

I logged in as mountainclimber998, tapped in our password, then followed the appropriate link to reach the private messages.

#202

Alena and I stared at the monitor, neither of us speaking. At my feet, Miata stirred, repositioned his head to rest on my shoes.

"Tbilisi to Berlin-" I started to say.

"No," Alena disagreed. "We take the ferry from Poti to Sochi, to Russia. Sochi to Krasnodar, by plane. Krasnodar to Istanbul, by plane. From Istanbul to London, from London to target."

I pulled my eyes from the words on the monitor to look at her. Her expression had hardened, her mouth drawn to a tight line. She turned her head, met my gaze.

"To target," I echoed.

"To target," she confirmed.

The condominium was built on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a place called Swan Island, presumably because once upon a time, swans had held a great fondness for the place, or maybe because the land below, spilling into the wide swath of the Willamette River, had been owned by a man named Swan. I didn't know, and I didn't bother to find out, because I didn't care to. That wasn't why I'd come to Portland.

There were two buildings in the complex as you faced it, each block about four stories tall, and from the looks of things, I figured the condos were two stories each within. It gave the place height enough that anyone taking a leap from one of the upper balconies would be lucky to get away with a broken leg and nothing more. If someone were to take a header, the cement poisoning would be fatal.

It was seven in the morning, and it was raining cold and steady, and when I looked opposite, across the river, I could just make out the tree-covered mountains to the west through the veil of falling drops. I was sitting in a Nissan Pathfinder, with Danilov Korckeva behind the wheel and Alena seated directly behind me. According to my watch, we'd been on the ground in Portland for precisely twenty-seven minutes. Thirty hours earlier, we'd left Miata in the care of the Raminisshvillis and made our way to Frankfurt, instead of London, catching a direct flight on Lufthansa to, what I was informed by the signs at the airport, was the City of Roses. I hadn't seen any roses yet. Like learning about the origins of Swan Island, I didn't think I'd have the time.

Dan had arrived two days prior, on the Gulfstream. Vadim had made the trip with him. Together, the two had put Illya Tyagachev under immediate surveillance, each of them taking turns.

"You're positive it's him?" I asked. The words sounded strange to me, the English still alien on my tongue.

Dan nodded. "I made the ID myself, Atticus. Here, we go around the back, you can see the approaches. His place is on the second floor, second apartment from the south."

"Lives alone?"

"Far as we can tell, yes. Haven't taken a look at the apartment. Didn't want to do anything that might warn him. I don't want to lose him again."

"Probably wise," I told him.

Dan spun the wheel, and we turned up North Holman, now heading roughly east, but then he swung an almost immediate right, and we were heading south again, this time coming along the block at the rear of the condominiums. Houses were spaced evenly on both sides of the street as we approached, with shallow lawns running down to the sidewalk. The houses showed their age, beaten with weather and use. The nicest place in the immediate vicinity seemed to be the condos themselves.

We'd seen a black iron security fence at the front of the complex, with a call box and a gate. The fence enclosed a parking lot at the rear, with berths for each automobile built under the walkway for the second-floor condominiums, providing meager shelter from the rain for driver and vehicle. The fence was eight and a half, maybe nine feet high, with vertical bars, no crosspieces, to deter attempts to climb it. A motorized gate ran on a track, closed for the moment, where the cars could enter and exit, and perhaps six feet north from that was a smaller gate, for pedestrian traffic. There was no one in the lot as we went past, but most of the berths were full. I counted the spaces from the south side, saw that the fourth one was empty. Assuming each condo had a companion berth, and assuming the odd-numbered ones went with the apartments on the second floor, Illya Tyagachev was missing his car.

"Where is he now?" Alena asked from the backseat.

"Working, he drives a cab," Dan said. "Graveyard shift. I didn't want Vadim following him all night long, he might've made that. I told him to get rest, instead, so he's back at the hotel."

Alena hissed softly with displeasure.

"When does he get off work?" I asked.

"Another hour-he drives midnight to eight," Dan said, quickly, as if trying to assure us that his lack of surveillance didn't translate to a lack of information. "Heads home, crashes, gets up again around four in the afternoon, heads out again."

"To his other job," I said.

Dan had turned us away from the condos, had us on a main thoroughfare heading south, back towards the heart of the city. He shot me a glance, vaguely suspicious.

"You know about the other job?"

"He didn't pay for that place on a hack's salary," I said. "And if he did what he did to us for money, I'm sure it was spent long ago. There's another job, got to be. That's probably how you found him."

"There is another job," Dan confirmed. "He sells meth." "Russians," Dan told us. "Add in the others: Ukrainians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, all the rest. Over sixty thousand of them are here. That's why Illya came here. He didn't want to leave the U.S. of A., but he couldn't leave his people, either. He probably went to Seattle first, maybe San Francisco, we haven't been able to track all his movements yet. But he ended up here, maybe six, seven months ago."

Dan leaned his chair, threatening to topple backwards on the people eating their McDonald's burgers at the table behind him. We were in the food court of an indoor shopping mall. The court was on the third level, open in the middle with a view down to the ice rink below, where maybe two dozen boys and girls were wobbling about on skates. Music drifted up at us, distorted, the Vangelis theme from Chariots of Fire. Between that, the cavernous acoustics, and the ambient noise of shoppers and diners, there was little chance of being overheard.

"Anyway, he finds where the Russians are, you know how it is. Meets the people he needs to meet, gets himself a gig running meth from the labs outside of town to the sellers here in the town. Lot of meth here. They have a lot of the wide open spaces here in Oregon; you need that if you cook meth. Stuff stinks like shit in sunshine."

I nodded. When he said "Oregon," he said it "ore-ee-gone."

"You know the people he's working with?" I asked. "That how you found him?"

"One of them I know from the old days. He heard from a friend who heard from a friend who heard from a friend that I was looking for this guy, that it was personal for me. Illya, he changed his name, he calls himself Maks Dugachev now."