Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

She didn't respond. Her index finger kept flicking the tags on their strings.

Dan shot me another glance, and I looked past him, watching the traffic on the street. If he was suspicious that maybe I understood what was being said, I couldn't blame him. He didn't know everywhere we'd lived for the past three years, only that we had started in Georgia, not that we'd ended there. But he'd have been a fool if he hadn't already considered the possibility that I'd learned more than just yoga, ballet, and some new hand-to-hand moves while we'd been away.

He frowned, clearly struggling with what he wanted to say next. He leaned further forward towards Alena, his hands resting palm up on the table, trying to appeal to her.

"You know what we have to do," Dan said gently, still speaking in Russian. "You know the best way to do it, and you know the tactics involved in something like this, the kind of pressure you're going to need to bring. Refusing to do this is weakness, it's the kind of thing that leads to mistakes that get you killed. You want information from Illya, the best way to get that will be to have the woman and the baby in the same room with him."

Her only answer was the quiet assault her finger was continuing against the tea tags. Dan waited to see if she would say anything, and he waited what seemed like a long time, maybe thirty seconds, but she didn't.

Abruptly, he straightened up in his chair, the frustration spilling from his voice into his posture and motion. "What the fuck is the matter with you? Natasha, seriously, and I say this with all the respect that is due to you, but you are seriously fucked up. I've known you, what, twenty years? Your man, here, he's got you twisted around, you don't know if you're going or coming anymore. I know you taught him, I know he's yours. But what he's taught you, he's changed you and it's not for the better."

Her index finger froze, and I felt as much as saw the subtle shift of her weight, the tensing of the muscles in her lower body, all the signatures of an upcoming attack. Dan saw it, too, or sensed it, maybe, and it didn't matter that we were on a public street at a quarter past six in the morning; it was in his eyes, the fear that he'd crossed one line too many, and that however much she might have been changed, she hadn't been changed enough to keep from killing him then and there.

"He has changed me," she told him. She said it quietly, but it had all the force of the physical attack he'd feared, each word precise and delivered with deliberation. "And I have changed him. And if one of us is the worse for it, it is not me. Do you know why you have always feared me, Danilov? Even twenty years ago, when you first saw me? Have you ever wondered why?"

Dan hesitated, as if uncertain that she wanted an answer, or perhaps afraid of giving the wrong one. "I didn't fear you, I respected you, you were a gifted girl, taught by the best, you were capable of-"

"You did, and you do," she cut in, softly. "You never saw a girl. You saw an empty thing. You saw a tool that could do everything you had been trained to do, but could do it better than you could ever dream of doing yourself. You saw a weapon, but you did not ever see a person. And that, Danilov, is what terrified you.

"The empty thing would agree with you, and think that using the woman and the child to put pressure on the target was logical and efficient. The empty thing would murder them afterwards, calling the act necessary and prudent. The empty thing wouldn't care.

"I am not that thing anymore. I would die before I became it again."

She paused, perhaps to collect herself, perhaps to let what she'd said take hold with Dan. It was the most I'd ever heard her say about herself, as the person she'd been before we'd met, the person the Soviets had designed her to be with their calculated abuse and refined instruction. From the expression on Dan's face, it was the most he'd ever heard her say on the subject, as well.

It couldn't have been lost on him just who, sitting at this table on a February dawn, she thought was an empty thing, and who she thought was not.

"Illya is the target," Alena concluded. "Not the woman. Not the child."

Dan swallowed, looked from her to me, then back to her.

"Then what do we do?" He was speaking Russian, just as she had been. "We can't let him go, Alena! What he did must be answered!"

I cleared my throat, and both of them looked at me.

"What kind of car is Illya driving?" I asked Dan.

His opinion of me was uncensored in his expression. "The fuck?"

"What kind of car? New? Old?"

"New, brand new. Ford Mustang, a black one. Vadim wants one, too. Why the fuck does it matter what car he's driving?"

"Air bags," Alena said.

"Vadim's got his own vehicle," I said. "Another rental?"

"Yeah, we rented on the same ID, same credit cards."

"We're going to need another two cars, then," I said. "Older ones. And a roll or two of duct tape, and something to keep Illya down, a good sleeping pill will do it, something like Ambien."

Dan looked at me as if he couldn't decide to be incredulous, outraged, or both.

"We can't let him go home," I explained. "And we can't let him get away."

"His car," Alena told Dan. "We'll take him at his car."

The irony of springing an automotive ambush on Illya didn't hit me until I hit him, or more precisely, until the moment I smashed the front end of my stolen 1978 Lincoln Town Car into the back of his probably-not-stolen and brand-spanking-new black-and-silver Ford Mustang. The cars connected with the unique bang that only comes from automobile accidents, the almost-hollow sound of metal and fiberglass cracking together, the sudden tinkling of glass and plastic hitting asphalt.

It was a good hit, not too fast, eleven miles an hour. Enough to rattle the bones, to snap me against my seat belt and send me back hard into the driver's seat, and, more importantly, to send the Mustang forward. The new Mustangs have crap visibility out their rear, the window too small and set too high on the tail, and I couldn't see Illya behind the wheel, but I heard the second collision as his front end met the back of Vadim's Cadillac. The Caddie, like the Town Car, was stolen, though a couple years younger, maybe an '82 or '83.

I lost a second getting the seat belt off, which isn't a long time in the concrete, but in the abstract was more than adequate for me to think about how slowly I was moving, and how badly this could turn out if I didn't speed things up. We were on a public street, and while the daylight wasn't broad due to the heavy cloud cover, it might as well have been. There was no place to hide, and certainly the sound of the crash would pull people from their beds or their breakfast tables, send them running to their windows to see what was happening on the street outside.

Then I was out of the car, the tire iron I'd found in the trunk in my hand, and running forward to the Mustang. Vadim was out of the Caddie, heading around its nose to come along the other side of the car, to the passenger side. I heard, then saw, the Pathfinder as it hopped up on the curb to my left, drawing even with the Mustang. Through the side window, I could see Illya still dazed, only now beginning to shake off the effects of three collisions in quick succession. While the first two-the Town Car and the Caddie-might have rattled his cage, it was the third, when his air bag had deployed, that had been the most crucial. For air bags to work, they have to work fast, and they have to be able to counter the force of the collision in their own right. Take one to the chest in a low-speed crash, and you'll feel it.

Illya was feeling it right now.

I reached his door and tried the handle, and wasn't at all surprised that it was locked. Inside, Illya was looking around, realizing what had happened and the trouble he was in. Opposite me, at the front passenger's door, Vadim was working with a tire iron of his own. We hit the windows almost simultaneously, and the glass shattered in concert, raining onto the wet street and into the car. In his seat, Illya started shouting at us, gabbling fear and outrage as he leaned forward, trying to reach with his right hand to the small of his back. I spun the tire iron around, jabbed the straight end hard through the now missing window and into his side, connecting with him just below the armpit.