Buried Secrets

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

– ÉMILE ZOLA

80.

Just before six in the morning, the FedEx cargo flight landed in Boston.

I desperately needed sleep.

If I was to have any hope of locating Alexa Marcus, I needed a little rest. Just a few hours of downtime so I could think clearly again. I was at the point where I could be mainlining caffeine and it still wouldn’t keep me awake.

My phone rang as I was parking the Defender.

It was Tolya Vasilenko. “The picture you just sent me,” he said. “I am very sorry for you. This is a particularly bad egg.”

“Tell me.”

“You remember this terrible murder of the family in Connecticut I told you about?” He was still pronouncing it wrong.

“He was the one who survived? The one who escaped?”

“So I am told.”

“Name?”

“We still haven’t discussed a price.”

“How much do you want?” I said wearily.

“It’s not money I want. It’s… let’s call it a swap of intelligence.”

He told me his demand, and I agreed to it without a moment’s hesitation.

Then he said: “Dragomir Vladimirovich Zhukov.”

I mulled over the name, tried to connect it to the snapshot that Navrozov’s security chief, Eugene, had e-mailed me: the hard-looking man with the shaven head and the fierce expression. Dragomir, I mentally rehearsed. Dragomir Zhukov. A hard-sounding name.

“An unusual name for a Russian,” I said.

“Uncommon. His mother’s a Serb.”

“What else do you have on him?”

“Besides the fact that he is a sociopath and a monster and an extremely clever man? There is maybe more you need to know?”

“Specifics about his background. His childhood, his family.”

“You have decided to become a psychoanalyst in your spare time?”

“It’s how I work. The more I know about a target’s personal life, the more effective I can be.”

“Unfortunately we have very little, Nicholas, apart from the arrest files and his military records and a few interviews with family members and witnesses.”

“Witnesses?”

“You don’t think this home invasion in Connecticut was his first murder, do you? When he served in Chechnya with the Russian ground forces, he was disciplined for excess zeal.”

“What kind of ‘zeal’?”

“He took part in a zachistka-a ‘cleansing operation’-in Grozny, and did certain things that even his commanders couldn’t bring themselves to talk about, and these are not sensitive souls. Acts of torture. I know of only a few things. He captured three Chechen brothers and dismembered them so thoroughly that nothing remained but a pile of bones and gristle.”

“Is that why he was sent to prison?”

“No, no. He was jailed for a crime he committed after he returned from the war.”

“Another murder, I assume.”

“Well, no, not exactly. He was sentenced to five years for theft of property. He’d gotten work on one of the oil pipeline projects in Tomsk, operating excavation equipment, and apparently he ‘borrowed’ one of the excavators for his own personal use.”

“Like getting Al Capone for not paying taxes.”

“That was all they could get him on. The Tomsk regional police were unable to definitively connect him to something far worse that they were sure he did. The reason he borrowed the excavation equipment. For more than a year the police investigated the disappearance of a family, a husband and wife and their teenage son who vanished overnight. They questioned Zhukov extensively but got nothing. They had nothing more than unfounded rumors that Zhukov had been hired by a fellow prison inmate to do a hit.”

“A hit on a family?”

“The man owned several auto dealerships in Tomsk. He had been warned that if he didn’t sell his dealerships to a friend of Zhukov’s, his entire family would suffer. It seems these threats were not hollow.”

“So the family’s bodies were never found.”

“They were found. A year after their disappearance. And purely by coincidence. An abandoned parcel of land outside the city was being developed for a housing project, and when they dug the foundation, three bodies were unearthed. A middle-aged couple and their teenage son. The police forensic examiners found large quantities of dirt in their lungs. They were buried alive.”

“Which was why Zhukov borrowed the excavation equipment.”

“So it seems. But the case could never be proven in the courts. You see, he is very, very good. He covered his tracks expertly. I can see why Roman Navrozov hired him. But if you are looking for a psychohistory, Nicholas, you might be interested to know that when Zhukov was a boy his father died in a coal-mining accident.”

“Also buried alive?”

“Maybe ‘drowned’ is more accurate. The father worked in an underground mine, and when some of the miners accidentally dug into an abandoned shaft that was filled with water, the tunnels were flooded. Thirty-seven miners drowned.”

“How old was Zhukov?”

“Nine or ten. You can imagine how traumatic this must have been for the families. Especially for the young children who were left fatherless.”

“I don’t see a connection between some childhood trauma and-”

“His mother, Dusya, told our interviewer years ago that her son’s chief complaint at the time was that he never saw it happen. She says that was when she first realized that Dragomir wasn’t like the other little boys.”

Suddenly I didn’t feel sleepy. “He’s not doing this for the money, is he?”

“I’m sure the money will come in handy for his escape and buying new identities and such. But no, I imagine he took this job because it offered him a rare opportunity. I’m just guessing, of course.”

“Opportunity?”

“To watch someone drown before his eyes.”

81.

Alexa sang as loud as she could: songs she liked to dance to, songs she loved listening to. Or just scraps of songs, when she couldn’t remember the rest.

Anything to keep her mind off where she was.

Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” She tried to remember the French lyrics near the end of the song. Something about revenge. That distracted her briefly. Then “Poker Face.” She sang so loud she was almost yelling. But that one was too easy. She imagined being Lady Gaga herself and wearing a skintight outfit made entirely of duct tape.

Black Eyed Peas next. “Imma Be” worked for a little while. She moved on to Ludacris: lots of lyrics there to try to remember. Too many. She tried MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” for a while but that was too hard and she soon gave up.

When she stopped, bored with it and discouraged, her throat hurting, she remembered where she was, and she began to shudder uncontrollably again. It felt like something was raking her nerve endings. She felt chills deep down, her entire body cringing. The way the mere thought of rubbing Styrofoam against cardboard set her teeth on edge.

But the physiological reaction was nothing compared to the deep horror that came over her now, the cold black cloud of fear, as it had done over and over again throughout this nightmare. That realization that there really was something worse than death, and this was it.

She screamed, long and loud, and it became a hopeless sob. She felt her tears scald her cheeks.

She screamed, clawed at the lining of her coffin. Her fingertips hit a hard square object mounted on the lid, and she knew it had to be the video camera.

She could feel the tiny lens and she put her thumb on it.

Held it there for a while.

Now he couldn’t see her.

She had the power to blind the Owl.

She held her thumb over the lens until her hand began to tremble.

Then the Owl’s voice bleated through the speakers and she jumped. “If you are playing a joke, Alexa, this is not a very good idea.”

She didn’t reply. Why should she? She didn’t have to answer him.

Then she thought of something so monumental that her heart began racing from excitement instead of terror.

She could rip the damned camera off its mounting.

She could blind the Owl forever.

Without his camera, he had no power over her!

Grabbing the camera’s casing, she tugged, wiggling it back and forth like a loose tooth to dislodge it from its mounting.

This was genius. The videocam was the key to his whole plot. This was how he made his demands, using her, coaching her, having her recite his bizarre demands over video so Dad would totally freak out.

So she’d get rid of it.

Cut off his access to her, his surveillance. Cripple his scheme, where he couldn’t do anything about it.

Without the video, the Owl’s plan couldn’t work. No camera, no ransom.

Tear down the camera, he’d get desperate. He’d have to improvise.

He’d have to dig her up.

He’d have to fix his damned camera, because that was the key to the whole thing.

Why the hell had it taken her so long to figure this out?

She felt a little warm pulse of pleasure. Her father, who probably did love her after all but totally didn’t respect her, would be proud of her now, wouldn’t he? He’d be amazed at her cleverness, her resourcefulness. He’d say, “My Lexie, you got the saichel, you got the head of a Marcus.”

She gripped the little metal box so hard her whole arm shook. She tugged at it, twisted it, and finally she felt something start to give way.

A tiny piece of something dropped onto her face. She felt it with her left hand. A little metal screw. Must be part of the mounting.

She was doing it. She was ripping out the Owl’s eyes.

She smiled to herself, crazy with triumph, felt the camera thing began to wobble ever so slightly.

A sudden blare: “Another bad idea.”

She didn’t reply.

Of course he didn’t want her to rip the damned thing down. Of course he didn’t want that.

“You know, Alexa, I am your only means of communication with the world,” the voice said. Not angry, but patient.

She gritted her teeth and kept twisting, hand shaking with exertion, the sharp metal corners cutting into her palm.

“If you disable the camera,” the Owl said, “you will be cut off from the rest of the world, you know.”

She stopped twisting for a moment.

“They will think you have died,” the voice said. “Why else would the video stream stop, yes?”

Her hand was frozen in a grip just above her face. A few more minutes of this and she’d be able to snap off the other screws or posts or whatever it was that kept the camera stuck to the lid of the…

“Maybe your father will cry. Maybe he feels relief. But at least he knows this is over. There’s nothing he can do. He never wanted to give us what we ask anyway, and now he thinks, I don’t need to do this. What is the point, yes? His daughter is dead.”

She said, in a guttural animal growl, “He’ll know you failed.”

“He will give up. Believe me. Or don’t believe me. I don’t care.”

The muscles in her forearm and wrist were aching. She had to lower her hand.

“Yes,” said the Owl. “You prefer to get out of this box, isn’t that right?”

She began to sob.

“Yes,” he said again. “This camera is your only hope of getting out of there alive.”

82.

As badly as I needed sleep, I needed to talk to Diana Madigan even more, to tell her what I’d found out.

Six in the morning. She was an early riser. Odds were she was awake and having coffee and reading e-mail or whatever FBI agents do before they go to work in the morning, those who aren’t married and don’t have kids.

So instead of going straight home, I drove a few minutes out of my way, looped around to the South End, down Columbus Avenue and a left up Pembroke Street.

Her apartment lights were on.

“HOW ABOUT coffee?” she said warily.

“I think I’m past the point of no return,” I said. “Any more caffeine’s just going to put me into a coma.”

“Ice water, then?”

I nodded. I sat on her couch, and she sat on the chair next to it. Exactly where we’d sat last time. She was wearing a white T-shirt and sweatpants and was barefoot.

She went to her little kitchen and filled one of her funky handblown drinking glasses with ice water. She handed it to me and sat down again.

Then I told her as much of what I’d just learned as I could. It wasn’t exactly a coherent presentation. My brain was much too fried. But I managed to set out the basic facts. “Now I’ve got Dorothy checking on every place in New Hampshire that rents excavation equipment, but she’s not going to find anything until nine or ten when the places open.”

“Okay,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ve looked at the case files on that Connecticut home invasion.”

“Already? But how did you know…?”

She smiled ruefully. “Nico, you need sleep. Badly. You told me about that last night.”

I shook my head, embarrassed.

“The husband survived. I wanted to see whether he might recall anything more about the attackers. But… well, he’s not going to be talking to anyone. Zhukov left him seriously brain damaged.”

I nodded.

“No latent prints were found at the scene. Neither Zhukov nor his associate. I was hoping that the locals might have submitted any unidentified fingerprints to the unsolved latent file at IAFIS. Maybe those same prints turned up somewhere else… But nothing.”

“And that’s it?” I stood up. I was exhausted and cranky and desperate to do something. I started pacing around her living room.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s the FBI’s budget again? Like almost ten billion dollars, right? And every single law-enforcement officer in the country on tap. More databases than you know what to do with. And you still haven’t found a damned thing more than me and Dorothy.”

“Oh, and what have you found? Last I heard, that girl is still in the ground.”

I turned away, headed toward the door. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”

“No,” she said, “you need sleep. You’re just about at the breaking point. There’s not a damned thing you can do right now until one of our leads comes in. Or one of your leads. Or until the business day starts. So go to sleep, Nick.”

“After.”

She came in close, put a hand on my shoulder. “If you don’t give your brain and your body a rest, you’re going to start screwing up, and then what?”

I whirled around. “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I don’t screw up.”

“Now I know you’re sleep deprived,” she said with a laugh.

And before I knew it, my lips were on hers.

Her mouth was warm and tasted of mint. I held her face in my hands and stroked her hair. Her eyes were closed. Her smooth hands slid underneath my shirt and pressed flat against my chest, her fingernails lightly raking my chest hair. Then I was caressing her breasts and kissing her throat, and I heard the clink of her fingers at my belt.

“Diana,” I said.

She silenced me with her mouth on mine, and her legs wrapped tightly around my waist.

“I KNOW we can’t go back to the way things were,” she said.

“I wasn’t thinking this was a do-over.”

She smiled, but her eyes were wet. She reached for me, and I held her for a long time. It felt wonderful. Almost enough.

My phone rang, and I glanced at it. Marshall Marcus.

“Nick,” he whispered, “I just got a message.”

A beep indicated a call coming in on the other line. Dorothy.

“Message from whom?”

“Them. I have until the end of the day and then they’ll-”

“Hold on.” I clicked on Dorothy’s call.

“Nick, Marcus just got an e-mail from the kidnappers.”

“I know, he’s on the other line, he was just telling me.”

“It’s not good,” she said.

I felt my mouth go dry.

“Are you near your computer?”

I hesitated. “I’m near a computer.”

“I’m going to send you an e-mail right now.”

I signaled to Diana, who brought her laptop over, and I signed on to my e-mail. Meanwhile, I clicked back to the other line. “Hold on, Marshall, I’m just opening it right now.”

“How can you do that?”

I didn’t reply. I was too busy reading the text on another anonymous e-mail.

The rules are all change now

Now demand is very simple for you to save your daughter

Five hundred 500 $ US mil must be wired into account listed below by close of business 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today

This is not open of negotiation

This is final offer.

If $$$ received satisfactory by 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today your daughter Alexa will be released. You will be notified of her public place location and can pick her up then.

No further negotiation possible.

If $$$ not received by 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today you will get one last opportunity to watch your daughter Alexa on internet

You will watch when coffin is flood with water.

You will watch your daughter drown before your eyes

You will watch last minutes of your daughters life

Then followed the name and address of a bank in Belize, bank codes, and an account number.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Nicky,” Marshall Marcus said, his voice high, quavering. “Dear God in heaven, please, Nick, help.”

“That’s all we’re doing,” I said. “Round the clock.”

“Five hundred million dollars? I don’t have that kind of money anymore, thanks to those bastards, and they damned well know it.”

“Where’s Belinda?”

“Belinda? She’s right here beside me. Like always. Why?”

“Let me get off the phone,” I said. “Maybe there’s a way to pull this off.”

“How?”

But I just hung up.

I leaned over and gave Diana a kiss.

“Call me as soon as you know anything,” she said.

83.

I arrived at the office with a Box o’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts and a dozen assorted donuts.

Half an hour later, after repeated calls to Belize City, I was on the phone with the Honorable Oliver Lindo, minister of national security in Belize.

“Nick!” he said. “Have you been trying to call me? I’m so sorry. I was at the gym. I have a personal trainer now. Someday I may even look like you, my man.”

“And how’s Peter?”

“Did you know he’s in his second year at Oxford, Nick?”

“I had no idea. Congratulations. Have you remarried, by any chance?”

He chuckled. “We have a saying here: Why buy the cow if the milk is free?”

“I may have heard that before,” I said.

No need to get explicit with Oliver Lindo. When I was working at Stoddard Associates in D.C., I’d helped him out with a sticky problem involving a boat, a rum factory, one of his ex-wives, and a lot of angry Cubans. Later he asked me to extricate his son, who was then at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, from a situation involving gangbangers in Trenton.

“Do you happen to know anyone at the Belize Bank and Trust Limited?”

“It is a shady bank, my friend. If you are thinking about hiding money, well, I can recommend-actually, this is not a conversation we should be having on the mobile phone.”

“If I ever have enough money to hide away somewhere, you’ll be the first person I’ll call,” I said. “But I’m calling about something else. I need a favor.”

“Anything you want, Nick. You know that.”

84.

“You want to explain to me how this is going to work?” Dorothy said.

“Just before the bank in Belize closes, Dragomir Zhukov is going to get a confirmation that five hundred million dollars has been deposited into his account,” I said.

She took a long sip of coffee from a mug that said JESUS SAVES-I SPEND. “And your friend in Belize can get this done?”

“He’ll pay a visit to the bank’s president himself. I’m guessing that this bank might not want to be complicit in the abduction of a teenage girl. Or maybe he has other means of persuasion. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

“But it’s all a trick, right? The bank is going to confirm a deposit that was never made?”

“Of course.”

“But what’s the point? If this Zhukov guy has gone rogue, he doesn’t answer to anyone. It doesn’t make any difference whether he gets the money or not, he’s never going to let Alexa go.”

“Not if he thinks he doesn’t have to. That’s why the timing is crucial. There’s going to be a last-minute complication. Some screwup in the number of his bank account that requires him to make a call.”

“And you’ll be on the other end of that call.”

I shrugged. “I’m going to let him know that he gets the five hundred million only after he releases Alexa.”

She looked at her computer, looked at me. Looked down at the floor and then back up at me. “Nick, you’re delusional. You have no leverage. None. He’ll just refuse, he’ll say it’s my way or the highway, and then he’ll kill her.”

“You’re probably right.”

“So what am I missing here?”

“He’ll want to keep her alive until five o’clock. So he can show that she’s still alive. He’ll want to keep his options open.”

“Okay, but then at five, whether he gets the money or not, whether there’s a last-minute hitch or not, he’ll kill her anyway.”

“I agree.”

“So what’s the point, Nick?”

“To give me until five o’clock today to find Alexa,” I said. “Now I want you to go back to your idea about locating him based on the schedule of plane flights, the interruptions in the satellite signal.”

“What’s to go back to? That’s a dead end. Didn’t you tell me the FBI didn’t find any matches in the FAA database?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you think they’re wrong?”

“Not at all. I think they searched all flights in the FAA database. But I don’t think they searched all flights.”

“You don’t? Why not?”

“Because the one thing I know is the U.S. military. And I know that they don’t like to share information on military flights with pencil-neck civilian geeks in the federal government.”

“Military flights?”

“There are military air bases in Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire. They each keep their own flight logs.”

“Online?”

“Never.”

“Then how do we get to them?”

I picked up the phone and handed it to her. “The old-fashioned way,” I said.

85.

Dorothy assigned Jillian to pull up a list of all companies in New Hampshire that rented or leased construction equipment.

There were almost nine hundred.

Even after narrowing it down to just “earth-moving equipment” and “heavy construction equipment,” we had close to a hundred. It was just about hopeless. We’d have to get extremely lucky.

Meanwhile Dorothy spent two hours on the phone with military air bases and Air National Guard air traffic controllers. I had to get on a few times and throw around names of generals in the Pentagon who probably didn’t remember me. But when she walked into my office with a wide grin on her face, I knew she had something for me.

“What’s a KC-135?” she asked.

“Ah. The Stratotanker. Made by Boeing. Mostly aerial refueling tankers, though some of them have been reconfigured as airborne command posts. Let’s hear it.”

“We got a hit. Each one of those interruptions in the video signal coincides exactly with a KC-135 flight out of the Pease Air National Guard Base.”

“Meaning what? They’re in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”

“No, no,” she said. “Not that simple. The kidnap site could be anywhere from about five miles to forty miles away.”

“You can’t narrow it down? Like by triangulating or something? Don’t you digital forensic techs always triangulate stuff?”

“Not enough data points to do that. All I have is three cutouts on the video, about ten seconds after three KC-135s take off.”

“You’ve got plenty,” I said. “You know the direction the planes took off toward, right?”

“True.”

“You probably know the speed the planes generally take off at, right?”

“Maybe.”

“You should be able to get within ten miles, I’d say. Do I have to do all your work for you?”

I tried to head off the Look with what I thought was a disarming smile. But it didn’t work. I got the Look anyway.

Then my BlackBerry rang. I glanced at it, saw it was Diana.

“Hey,” I said. “You got the photo I sent.”

“More than that, Nick,” she said. “I think we found him.”

86.

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“Nick?”

“You found Zhukov?”

Diana’s voice was taut, louder than normal. “We got a hit on his phone.”

“New Hampshire?”

“Right. Just west of Nashua.”

“He must have switched it on.”

“Listen, I have to go. We’re deploying up north.”

“Where?”

“A forward staging area in a parking lot a couple of miles away from the target site.”

“You’re deploying with the SWAT team?”

“They’re calling in all assets, operational or not. They want me at a surveillance point outside the SWAT perimeter.”

“Give me the exact location.”

“You can’t be there. You know that. It’s a Bureau operation. You’re a civilian.”

I inhaled slowly. “Diana, listen. I don’t want her to die in the middle of some big noisy SWAT team operation. I want her alive.”

“So do they, Nick. Their number-one priority is always victim recovery.”

“I’m not talking about intention. I’m talking about technique.”

“Our SWAT guys are as good as you get.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

I closed my eyes, tried to focus. “What’s the location?”

“A house on a country road. It looks deserted, from the satellite imagery.”

“Is there land?”

“It’s a farmhouse.”

“Secluded?”

“What’s your point, Nick?”

“Is it just him, hiding out there? Or is that where he has Alexa buried? It makes all the difference in how you approach him.”

“We don’t know if she’s there or not.”

“As soon as he hears the snap of a twig, or he sees guys in ghillie suits coming through the woods, he’s not going to wait to be shot. He’s going to kill her. He’s already threatened to flood the grave, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s set up to do it remotely. As simple as pulling a lever on an irrigation system in the house. And no matter how fast you guys can dig, you’re not going to save her in time.”

“That doesn’t make sense. She’s his bargaining chip. He wants her alive. If he floods the grave and kills her, he has no leverage.”

“Diana, this guy doesn’t operate by normal rules. To assume he does would be a dangerous miscalculation. He wants to flood the grave or shut off her air supply and he wants to watch it on his computer screen. He wants to watch her gasping and struggling and trying to scream. He wants to watch her die.”

“Then why the ransom demand?”

“He figures he’ll collect a load of money and kill her anyway. Tell your squad commander he wants me there on scene. Tell him I’m the only one who knows anything about Dragomir Zhukov.”

87.

As I drove north on 93, it started to rain, first a few ominous drops from a steel sky, then a full-fledged torrential downpour. It came down with the sort of force that almost always tells you it’s going to be short-lived, that it can’t possibly last.

But this one kept going. Out of nowhere, the wind began to gust, driving the rain nearly sideways. My windshield wipers were flipping at maximum speed but I could still barely see the road. The other cars began to skid, then slowed to a crawl, and a few pulled over to wait it out.

Normally I enjoy dramatic weather, but not then. It seemed to echo the strange, unaccustomed feeling of anxiety that had come over me.

My instinct told me that this was not going to end well.

SO I blasted music. Few tunes pump me up like the twangy guitar licks and huge, booming, diesel-fueled rockabilly sound of Bill Kirchen, the Titan of the Telecaster, the guy who did “Hot Rod Lincoln” years ago. I played “Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods” and then his live version of “Too Much Fun.” By the time I reached the New Hampshire border, I was feeling like my old self.

Then I had to hit MUTE to answer the phone.

It was Diana, with directions to the SWAT staging area. “We’re mustering at a parking lot two miles from the house,” she said. “You’re going to join me on the perimeter surveillance team. But that means staying outside the hard perimeter.”

The highway had gotten narrower, down to a two-lane road with steel guardrails on either side. I passed a BRAKE FOR MOOSE sign.

“Works for me. Are we going to be in a vehicle or on foot?”

“In one of their SUVs, thank God. I’d hate to be standing around in weather like this. Is it raining where you are?”

“Pouring. I’m maybe thirty miles away, no more.”

“Drive safe, Nico.”

88.

Forty-five minutes later I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a black Suburban. It had been specially modified for the SWAT team with roof rails and side rungs, though it wasn’t armored. We were outside the crisis area. We weren’t supposed to get hit.

Diana was behind the wheel. Under her FBI sweatshirt she was wearing a level III trauma vest, a concealable ballistic garment fitted with a trauma plate.

Rain sheeted down. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth like a metronome at top speed.

We were parked at the end of the woods, just off a narrow winding asphalt road, stationed at what the SWAT team called “phase line yellow,” the last cover-and-conceal position before the action started. Phase line green was the imaginary line around the house. Phase line green meant game on.

Supposedly we were part of the perimeter team, at the point of egress, but in truth we were nothing more than observers. My role was limited and quite clear: If they were able to take the Russian alive, and if he resisted cooperation, I was to be put on the radio to communicate directly with him. Not in person, on the radio.

Surrounding us were various American-made SUVs-Ford Explorers and Blazers and Suburbans, also fitted with roof rails and side rungs. SWAT operators hung off the side, wearing two-piece olive drab suits with armor that was supposed to withstand a rifle round, ceramic trauma plates inside. They wore ballistic helmets and eye protection and FBI signage everywhere. They carried M4 carbine rifles equipped with red-dot optical sights. In their side holsters they had pistols, to be used only if their machine guns jammed. Snipers in ghillie suits were secreted in the woods, in the shadows cast by the trees, within range of the house.

For a long while we sat in silence, listening to the exchange on the dash-mounted radio.

We waited. Everyone out there seemed to be waiting for a signal. The air was charged with tension.

I said, “If he shows his face-”

“The snipers will take him out. Deadly force has been pre-authorized.”

“Is that FBI protocol?”

“Only in circumstances where we believe the target has the means and the probable intention to kill his victim, yeah, killing him is considered legally justified.”

“And if he doesn’t show his face?”

“They’ll attempt a silent breach of the house from two points and go into hostage-rescue mode.”

After sitting in silence a while longer, Diana said, “You want to be up there, don’t you? Admit it.”

I didn’t reply. I was still mulling things over. Something seemed somehow off about the whole situation.

She looked at me. I said, “Can I borrow your binoculars?” I hadn’t grabbed mine from the Land Rover. I didn’t think I’d need them.

She handed me a pair of army-green Steiners, standard SWAT-team issue, full-size, a PROPERTY OF FBI SWAT sticker on one side. I dialed in the focus until the house came into view: a small, neat, white-painted clapboard house with dark green shutters. It wasn’t a farmhouse at all but a house in the woods. The land surrounding it was surprisingly small, given the size of the property. The grass was overgrown and wild, probably waist-high, as if no one had been looking after it for a year or more.

It was dark. No car or truck in the driveway that I could see.

Then I handed the binoculars back to her. “I don’t think we’re in the right place,” I said.

“How so? It’s his phone number that came up, no question about it.”

“Look at the egress. Only one way in or out, and we’re sitting at it. The woods in back of his house are overgrown, choked with underbrush and vine. He can’t walk for two minutes through that without getting stuck in thorn bushes.”

“You saw all that?”

“Good binoculars.”

“Good eyes.”

“He’s trapped. This isn’t the sort of property he’d ever pick.”

“Maybe he didn’t pick it. Maybe Navrozov’s people chose it for him. It’s been abandoned for a year and a half.”

“I don’t think he’d ever let someone else make that kind of decision for him. He doesn’t like to rely on anyone.”

“That’s your assessment, based on a thirdhand evaluation in some old KGB file.”

I ignored that. “Did anyone check the utility bills on this place?”

“It’s been empty for eighteen months.”

“I don’t see any generators, do you? So how the hell does he get on the Internet?”

She shook her head slowly, considering.

“Or a satellite dish,” I said.

She continued to shake her head.

“Also, it’s sloppy,” I said.

“What’s sloppy?”

“Using his mobile phone. He shouldn’t be using it again.”

“He doesn’t know we have his phone number.”

“This guy never underestimates anyone. That’s why he’s still alive.”

I took out my cell phone and hit the speed-dial for Dorothy.

“Where are you, Heller?”

“New Hampshire.”

“Right. Where?”

“In the middle of what’s beginning to feel a lot like a diversion,” I said. “West of Nashua.”

“Nashua? That’s… something like forty miles south of the flight path area.”

“Can you send me the GPS coordinates?” I said.

“Done.”

“How large an area are you vectoring in on? I wonder if we can narrow down the possibilities. Look at terrain and available properties and-”

“I may have one more data point.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I’ve been combing NCIC for anything coming out of New Hampshire, and I came across a possible homicide.”

The National Crime Information Center was the computerized database of crimes maintained by the FBI and used by every police force and other law-enforcement agency in the country.

“How is that connected?”

“The code on the report was 908. A premeditated homicide of a police officer by means of a weapon.”

“And?”

“So a rookie police officer was found in his car at the bottom of a ravine in New Hampshire. At first it looked like he drove off the road. But the local police chief strongly suspects homicide.”

“Why?”

“Because of the victim’s injuries. According to the county coroner, they’re nothing like what you’d expect to see in a car accident. For one thing, all the internal organs in his chest cavity were destroyed. Like someone detonated a depth charge down there.”

My pulse started to race. “Where was this?”

“Within the flight path radius. Town of Pine Ridge, New Hampshire. Forty miles away, like I said.”

89.

“We’re in the wrong place,” I said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“His phone’s probably in there. But he’s not. This is a diversion, maybe even a setup.”

“How so?”

“He knows Navrozov is trying to shut him down. Maybe he wants to lure Navrozov’s guys to the wrong site to conceal his true whereabouts.” I took the handset from the dash-mounted radio, pressed the communicator button, and said, “Break-Zulu One, this is Victor Eight.”

“Nick, what are you doing?” Diana said.

“We need to stand down,” I said to her. “And head north.”

The SWAT team leader’s voice came over the speaker, crisp and loud: “Go ahead, Victor Eight.”

“Zulu One, I have some new intel I need to pass to you. What’s your location for a meet?”

Diana stared, aghast.

A pause. “Say again, Victor Eight?”

“Zulu One, I have urgent intel I need to pass on. Request a meet ASAP. How copy?”

“That’s a negative, Victor Eight,” the voice came back.

But I wasn’t going to give up. “Zulu One, urgently request meeting.”

The team leader’s voice came back immediately: “Received, Victor Eight, and that’s a negative. Get off the radio. Out.”

I shrugged, replaced the handset on the hook.

“Wow, Nick,” Diana said. “Just… wow.”

“What?”

“We’re about to launch an assault.”

“Which means that the FBI’s best people are tied up forty miles away while our guy finishes the job. Come on, let’s go.”

“I can’t just leave the scene, you know that. You don’t leave your position without permission.”

“They don’t need you here. You’re a spectator. This is a waste of your time and your talents.”

She looked agonized, wracked with indecision.

“Come on,” I said, opening the Suburban’s door.

“Heller!”

“Sorry,” I said, getting out.

“Nick, wait.”

I turned back.

“Don’t do it, Nick. Not by yourself.”

For a moment I looked at her: those amazing green eyes, the crazy hair. I felt something inside me tighten. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Don’t, Nick.”

I gently pushed the door closed.

90.

The walk back to the parking lot where I’d left my car, a mile away, was arduous and slow, along narrow country roads and then a heavily trafficked highway. The rain had become a downpour of biblical proportions. By the time I reached the Defender, my clothes were soaked through, even despite the rain slicker.

Then I cranked the heat all the way up and headed north toward Pine Ridge. Dusk rapidly turned into night, and still the rain didn’t let up.

Three hundred and twenty days a year the Land Rover was an overpowered beast, a curiosity, an M1 Abrams tank in the city streets. That night, the driving treacherous, it was king of the road. I passed countless beached cars, washed up along the side of the road, their drivers waiting out the storm.

About fifteen minutes after I’d set out, Diana called.

“They found a body.”

“Any ID?” I asked.

“Yes. The name is Kirill Chuzhoi. In the U.S. on a green card, residing in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Born in Moscow. He’s on the payroll of Roman Navrozov’s holding company, RosInvest.”

“And in his pocket you found a knockoff Nokia cell phone,” I said.

“Right. Probably Zhukov’s.”

“No, more likely his own phone, with Zhukov’s SIM card inside.”

“Huh?”

“He knew if he put his SIM card in the other guy’s phone, his phone number would pop up in your search and you’d think you finally found him. And he was right.”

“I don’t get it. Why not just swap phones?”

“Look, the guy’s smart. He didn’t want to take the chance that Chuzhoi’s phone had some sort of tracking software encoded in it. Now, can you send me a photo of the body?”

“Hold on,” she said. A minute or so later she got back on. “You should have it now.”

I put the call on hold, looked at my e-mail, and found the picture.

The bogus legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate. The one who’d killed the drug dealer at the FBI office in Boston. Roman Navrozov had probably sent him to make sure Mauricio Perreira didn’t give up any information that might tie him to Alexa’s abduction.

When I got back on the call, I told Diana, “Send this picture to Gordon Snyder, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because it ties Navrozov to the murder at FBI headquarters.”

“Got it. Will do.”

“Where are you now?” I said.

“Headed back to the staging area. You?”

“Twenty-two miles away. But the driving is really slow. Can you get the team redeployed up here?”

“Where?”

I read off the GPS coordinates.

“Is that the exact location where you think he is?”

“No. That’s the center of the town of Pine Ridge. Which covers thirty-five square miles.”

“What makes you so sure you have the right place?”

“I’m not sure. Dorothy’s cross-checking property records against Google Earth satellite views.”

“Looking for what?”

“Land that’s big enough and private enough. Multiple points of egress. Unoccupied, abandoned, foreclosed, whatever. Absentee owner goes to the top of the list.”

“What about utility bills?”

“We don’t have your resources. We’re sort of running blind here. So try to get SWAT up here as soon as possible.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “See you up there.”

“I hope so.”

A minute or so after I hung up, I had an idea. I reached Dorothy on her cell. “Can you get me the home number of the chief of police in Pine Ridge?” I said.

91.

“Oh, believe me,” the police chief’s wife said, “you’re not interrupting dinner. Walter’s out there sandbagging, and I don’t know when to expect him home. They’re all out there, the part-timers and every volunteer they can rustle up. It’s a mess. The river’s swollen and there’s mudslides just all over the place. Can I help you with anything?”

“Think he can use one more volunteer?” I said.

“Head out there.”

“What’s his cell phone?”

Chief Walter Nowitzki answered on the first ring.

“Chief,” I said, “I’m sorry to bother you during such a difficult time, but I’m calling about one of your officers-”

“That’s gonna have to wait,” he said. “I’m up to my neck in alligators here.”

“It’s about Jason Kent. He was on your force, reported as a homicide?”

“Who’s this?” he said sharply.

“FBI,” I said. “CJIS.”

He knew the jargon. Any cop would. CJIS was the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which maintained the central NCIC database of all reported crimes.

“How can I help you?”

“You reported this as a 908, a premeditated homicide on a police officer, and I was following up on that.”

“All right, I-you know, this is probably not the best time to talk, we’ve got some real bad flooding up here in New Hampshire and we’ve got people stuck in their cars and the river’s swelling its banks, and-”

“Understood,” I replied. “But this is a matter of some urgency. We’ve got a homicide in Massachusetts that seems to fit some of the basic parameters of the one you reported, so if you could answer just a couple of real quick questions…”

“Let me get into my vehicle so’s I can hear you. Can’t even hear myself think out here.”

I could hear him fumbling with the phone, then the door slam.

“Tell me what you wanna know,” he said.

“Do you have any suspects?”

“Suspects? No, sir. I’m sure it was someone from out of town.”

“Was he investigating a crime or anything of that sort before he was killed?”

“We don’t get a lot of crime in these parts. Mostly speeders, but they’re usually not from around here. He made some routine rounds, checked up on a noise complaint, but…”

“Did he make a traffic stop near where he was killed?”

“Not so far’s I know. That was my theory, but he didn’t call anything in.”

“No run-ins with anyone?”

“Not that he mentioned.”

“Any theory at all what might have happened to him?”

“No, sir. I wish I did. That kid-they didn’t make ’em any better than that one-” He seemed to swallow his words, and he went quiet for a moment.

“I’m very sorry.”

“If that kid met Satan himself he’d offer him the shirt off his back. Only bad thing I can say about him is he probably wasn’t cut out to be a cop. That’s on me. I shouldn’t never have hired him.”

“The day he was killed, what were his duties?”

“The usual. I mean, I asked him to look into a sort of, well, I call ’em nuisance calls. We got a fella called Dupuis who’s sort of a fussy sort, you know? Kept calling to complain about one of his neighbors, and I asked Jason to go check it out. And I’ll bet you Jason didn’t even-”

“What sort of complaint?”

“Oh, I dunno, Dupuis said he thought the guy down the road stole his dog, like anyone would want that mangy mutt, and he said the guy mighta been doing work without a permit.”

I was about to steer him into another line of questioning when I had a thought. “What kind of work?”

“Construction maybe? All I know is, there hasn’t been no one living on the Alderson farm for years, not since Ray Alderson’s wife died and he moved down to Delray Beach. I figured maybe Ray had a caretaker getting the place ready to sell, because they had your, whatcha call it, earth-moving equipment delivered a week or so back.”

I’d stopped listening. I was less than ten miles away. The rain was drumming the roof of the car and the hood, though it seemed finally to be letting up. The visibility wasn’t great. Ten miles in weather like this could take twenty minutes.

Then a couple of words jumped out at me.

Caretaker.

Moved down to Delray Beach.

That meant the owner didn’t live there.

“This caretaker,” I said. “Has he been there a while?”

“Well, of course, I’d have no way of knowing that. I’ve never met the fella. Foreigner, maybe, but they all are these days, right? Can’t get an American to do manual labor worth a damn. Far as I know he just showed up one day, but we keep to ourselves up here, try to stay out of other people’s business for the most part.”

“Do you have a street address?”

“We don’t really go by numbers so much around here. Ray’s farm is a nice piece of land, more than two hundred acres, but the main house is a wreck, you know? Doesn’t show well, which is why-”

“Where is it?” I cut in sharply.

“It’s on Goddard just past Hubbard Farm Road. You thinking the caretaker had something to do with this?”

“No,” I said quickly.

The last thing I wanted was for the local police chief to show up and start asking questions.

“Because I would be more than happy to take a run over there. Take the four-by-four-that’s a summer road, and it’s surely a swamp by now.”

“No hurry,” I said. “Next couple of days would be fine.”

“You wanna talk to the owner, I can probably rustle up Ray’s number down in Florida, give me a couple minutes.”

“Don’t bother. I know you’ve got your hands full. This is for the database. Routine data entry. It’s what I spend my life doing.”

“Well, it’s important work,” the police chief said kindly. “Somebody’s got to do it. I’m just glad it’s someone who speaks the language.”

I thanked him and I hung up before he could ask anything else.

“Dorothy,” I said fifteen seconds later. “I need directions.”

92.

By the time I drove into Pine Ridge, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The main highway looked recently built. Its asphalt surface was as smooth as glass, the road crowned, the drainage good. I passed Pine Ridge Quality Auto, which was nothing more than a glorified gas station, and then the Pine Ridge Memorial School, a modern brick structure built in the architectural style best described as Modern High School Ugly. Then a post office. At the first major intersection was a gas station on one side next to a twenty-four-hour convenience store that was dark. At the next light I took a left.

I passed farmhouses and modest split-level ranches built too close to the road. There were unmarked curb cuts, narrow lanes sliced through the woods, most of the roads dirt, a few paved. The only landmarks were mailboxes, most of them big, names painted on, occasionally press-on letters.

About three miles down a narrow tree-choked road I came to a roadblock. Hastily improvised: a couple of wooden sawhorses lined with red reflector discs.

This was Goddard Road. About two miles down this way was the Alderson farm.

If I’d guessed right, it was also where Alexa Marcus was buried in the ground.

And where I might find Dragomir Zhukov.

I nosed the car right up to the sawhorses, clicked the high beams.

The road was rutted, deep mud. Walking the two miles, especially down a road like this, would be tortuously slow, time I couldn’t afford.

I got out, dragged a sawhorse out of the way, got back in the Defender, and plowed ahead.

It was like driving across a marsh. The tires sank deep into the muck, and a curtain of water sprayed into the air. I kept it in third gear and drove at a steady pace. Not too fast, not too slow. You don’t want to be in too low a gear when moving through mud. Drive too slowly and you risk water seeping into the exhaust pipe and flooding the engine.

Gradually the road became a narrow dark lane choked with tall pines and birches. The only illumination came from my headlights, which skimmed over the river of mud.

The car performed like an amphibious vehicle, though, and soon I was halfway there.

Then the tires sank in a few more inches and I was finally stuck.

A mile to go.

I knew better than to rev it. Instead, I lifted my foot off the accelerator pedal, gave it some gas.

And I was still stuck.

A quick burst of gas, just a tap of the pedal, and it started rocking back and forth, and after a few minutes of this the car climbed out of the gulley and back through the brown soup.

Then my high beams lit up a rusty metal mailbox that said ALDERSON.

An absentee owner, a caretaker recently arrived. Earth-moving equipment: Might that include a backhoe?

Everything was pure speculation at this point.

But I had no other possibilities.

93.

The driveway to the Alderson property was the main access road. If this was indeed the right place-and I had to assume for now that it was-Zhukov was likely to have surveillance equipment in place: cameras, infrared beams, some sort of early-warning system.

Then again, it’s not easy to set up equipment like that outdoors and have it work effectively. Not without advance preparation.

But, it was safer to assume the driveway was being monitored.

So I drove on ahead, past the entrance, plowing through the muddy river another half mile or so until it came to an abrupt stop. There I drove up the steep bank as deep into the woods as I could.

According to the map Dorothy had sent to my phone, this was the far end of the property. The farm was two hundred and forty acres of land with a half mile of frontage on a paved road and a mile of frontage along this dirt path.

The house was easily a quarter mile from here. Given the topography, the road couldn’t be seen from the house.

The owner had for years permitted hunters to come through his land. Dorothy had looked at the state’s online hunting records.

This wasn’t unusual in New Hampshire. You were allowed to hunt on state or even private lands as long as they hadn’t been “posted”-in other words, unless the property owner put up NO HUNTING signs.

But I’d been concentrating so hard on trudging through the muck that I hadn’t until now noticed the NO TRESPASSING/NO HUNTING signs posted to trees every fifty feet or so.

They looked brand-new. Someone had put them up recently to keep anyone from approaching the house.

I had some decent overhead satellite photos of the Alderson property, but nothing recent. The photos could have been three years old, for all I knew. I was at a real disadvantage.

At least I had a good weapon: a SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic. The SIG P250 was a beautiful gun: compact and lightweight, smooth, perfectly engineered. Mine was matte black, with an aluminum frame. I’d installed a Tritium night sight and an excellent internal laser sight, a LaserMax. I’d also had a gunsmith in Manassas, Virginia, add stippling and checkering on the metal grips, round all the sharp angles for an unhindered draw, and funnel the grip for easier reloading. He tuned it like a Stradivarius, adjusting the trigger pull down to a zero sear, meaning that I hardly had to touch the trigger to fire.

There’s an elegance to a well-made gun, like any finely engineered machine. I like the precision engineering, the honed finish, the smooth pull of the trigger, the smell of gun oil and smoke and gunpowder and nitroglycerin.

I loaded several magazines with hollow-point bullets. They’re designed to do a lot of damage to a person: When they hit soft tissue they deform and expand and create a large crater. Cops prefer them because they won’t pass through walls-or the target, for that matter.

My Defender was painted Coniston Green, also known as British Racing Green, but it was so mud-spattered that it looked as if I’d sprayed it with camouflage paint. I stashed it in a copse of birch trees, where it couldn’t be seen from the road, and took some equipment out of the back. My binoculars: an excellent pair of Leicas. A pair of boots, still crusted with mud from the last time I’d worn them. I strapped on a side holster and jammed in the SIG, then clipped a few extra magazine holsters to my belt.

At the last minute I remembered something under the rear seat that I might need. It was an old military-spec Interceptor ballistic vest made of aramid fiber. It wasn’t bulletproof-no such thing, really-but it was the most effective soft armor you could get. It was supposed to stop nine-millimeter machine-gun rounds. I put it on, adjusted the Velcro straps.

If I’d come to the right place, I needed to be prepared.

Compass in hand, I set off through the woods.

94.

The ground was sodden, even spongy, and so slick in places I nearly lost my footing. Low branches and thorn bushes whipped and scratched my face and neck. The land rose steeply and then plateaued until, standing atop a knoll, I spotted in a clearing in the distance a small building.

I peered through the binoculars and saw a large, windowless structure: a barn.

A few hundred yards beyond it, according to the aerial photo, was the farmhouse.

I came closer and finally saw the house. But it was dark. That wasn’t promising. Either this was the wrong place, or Zhukov had already left.

Meaning that Alexa was dead.

I drew closer, weaving through the forest, keeping to the shadows, until the barn was close enough to see with the naked eye. Then I circled around. From there I could see the long expanse of yard leading up to the house. The sky had begun to clear, and there was enough moonlight to make out a patchy lawn, with more bald spots than grass.

And midway between the barn and the darkened house a neat oblong had been cut into the sorry-looking lawn. A rectangle about ten feet long by three feet wide.

Like a freshly dug grave.

But instead of the sort of earthen heap you see in a new grave, the ground was flat, crisscrossed with tire tracks, as if someone had driven a car or a truck back and forth on top of it, and the rain had later softened the marks.

I felt a tingle of apprehension.

At one end of the rectangular patch of dirt a gray PVC pipe stuck up like the sawn-off trunk of a sapling.

I dropped the binoculars, let them dangle on their strap around my neck, and I approached the edge of the woods.

The house was an old brown tumbledown wreck, its clapboard weathered and cracked, several roof shingles missing.

Mounted to the roof of the house was a white satellite dish.

It looked new.

In the shadows behind the barn I began to discern the contours of a tall piece of equipment. It loomed like an enormous, geometric bird, a seagull, a whooping crane.

I looked closer and saw that it was a Caterpillar backhoe loader.

95.

Peering through the binoculars, I focused on the house. Two floors, a sharply canted roof, small windows. No light inside. On the low wooden porch was another piece of equipment. An air compressor?

Yes. That made sense. This was how he kept air flowing into her box, or crypt, or whatever it was.

This had to be the right place.

For a minute or two I watched carefully, looking for some kind of movement in the darkness, a glint of reflected moonlight. I estimated I was about three hundred yards from the house, beyond the range of accuracy of my pistol.

But if someone was inside with a rifle, three hundred yards was no problem.

The moment I stepped into the clearing, I was a target.

I got on the cell phone and called Diana. In a whisper, I said, “I think she’s here.”

“You’ve seen her?” Diana said.

“No, I’m looking at what may be a burial site. A vent pipe in the ground. Signs of recently excavated earth.”

“Zhukov?”

“House is dark. I can’t be sure if he’s there. Tell your bosses that there’s not much doubt this is the place. They need to get up here right away. And bring shovels.”

I hit END. Checked to make sure the ringer was off.

Then I took a few more steps, emerging from the shadows. Walked across the barren lawn toward what had to be the burial site.

Something caught the moonlight, something near my feet, and suddenly the entire yard lit up, and I was blinded by the blaze of spotlights from two directions.

96.

I flattened myself against the ground. I could smell the rich loamy odor of the dirt. Gripping the SIG, the safety off, I felt for the trigger, careful not to apply any pressure. The slightest squeeze would fire a round.

In one quick motion I rolled over so I was facing up. The lights came from two directions: from the barn on my left and from the house on my right. I inhaled slowly, over the thudding of my heart, and listened hard.

Nothing.

I knew what had happened. I’d hit an invisible tripwire at ankle level.

Zhukov had served with the Russian army in Chechnya, where he must have learned all the standard army techniques, like how to string tripwire to detonate a mine or detect the enemy’s approach. The stuff we’d used was black and as thin as dental floss, made from a polyethylene fiber called Spectra. You could get fishing line made from the same thing. It was low-stretch and had high tensile strength. And you wouldn’t spot it in the dark unless you had a flashlight and knew where to look. He’d probably strung the filament around at least part of the perimeter, from tree trunk to tree trunk, rigged up to a microswitch to set off the beams. A low-tech motion detector.

So was he here, or not? Was he waiting for me to get up so he could take aim?

I listened for footsteps, for the scuff of shoes on dirt or gravel.

Nothing.

After two minutes, the spotlights went off and everything was black.

No shot was fired. No crack of twigs. Just the ambient noise of the forest: the rustle of leaves in the wind, the distant chirruping of a nocturnal bird, the skittering of a ground squirrel or a chipmunk.

The vent pipe was roughly a hundred feet from me. Would she hear me if I spoke into it?

Then I realized what a mistake that would be. If Zhukov was hiding in the house, monitoring Alexa over a remote connection, then whatever she heard he’d hear too.

Of course, if he was in the house, it was only a matter of time before he saw me.

So I had to take him out first.

Holster the weapon? Or keep it handy? I needed both hands. Jamming it into the holster, I rolled and spun into a crouch. Sprang to my feet.

And started toward the house.

97.

But I didn’t run.

I didn’t want to trip another wire. As I walked, I looked around for fence posts, stakes, anything a wire might be strung around.

Maybe I was walking right into a trap. Maybe he was waiting for me in the dark with a high-powered rifle.

Around to the side, past a set of wooden bulkhead doors, the wooden frame rotting, the paint blistering and peeling. No padlock.

Enter the basement? No. Maybe it wasn’t a basement but a root cellar: dirt floor, accessible only from the outside, no internal door to the upstairs.

On this side of the house was a door, behind a screen with a large hole in it. But I kept going around to the front. Past an oval of bare earth where cars probably parked and turned around. No vehicles there, though. None in the front of the house either.

He couldn’t be inside, or I’d be dead by now.

But what if Zhukov had simply abandoned the farmhouse? After all, he knew from Navrozov’s cutout that he was being actively hunted. Why stay here? Leave his victim in the ground, let her die.

A path had been worn across a scrubby lawn to the front door, though how recently it was impossible to say. I detected no movement in any of the windows, so I pulled open the screen door and tried the front door.

It came right open.

Someone had been here very recently.

98.

The smell of food that had been cooked not long ago: maybe sausage or eggs, something fried in grease.

A small entryway, low ceilings, a musty odor under the cooking grease. Cigarettes too, though fainter here, as if he smoked in another part of the house. I moved stealthily, the SIG in a two-handed grip, pivoted abruptly to my left, weapon pointed, ready to fire. Then to my right.

Nothing. The floorboards creaked.

Now I faced a choice. There were three ways to go. A doorway on my right led to a small front room. On my left was a steep staircase, the wooden treads worn and bowed. Straight ahead was another doorway, which I guessed led to a kitchen and the back of the house.

The stairwell was a potential hiding place. I listened closely, heard nothing.

I pivoted again, tracing an arc right to left. Then I lunged toward the dark stairwell.

I said, “Freeze.”

No response.

And then I heard a voice.

Not from upstairs, though. From the back of the house. A woman’s voice, muffled, indistinct, its cadence irregular, the tone rising and falling.

A TV had been left on.

I stepped through the threshold, searching the dim corners, my body a coiled spring. My finger caressed the trigger. I scanned the room, slicing with the pistol left to right, then toward the corners.

The kitchen was windowless, carved out of an interior space, an afterthought. The floor was dark red linoleum, a swirly white pattern running through it, the tiles chipped and cracked. An old white GE stove, vintage 1940 or so. A Formica counter edged with a metal band. A white porcelain sink with two separate spouts, one for hot water and one for cold. It was stacked high with plates and bowls that were crusted with food. An empty box of Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages lay discarded in the middle of a tin-topped kitchen table.

I heard the woman’s voice again, much clearer now, coming from the next room. From the back of the house.

Not from a TV.

The voice was Alexa’s.

99.

Amped with adrenaline, I burst into the adjoining room, gun extended.

“-Bastard!” she was saying. “You goddamned bastard!”

Then her tone changed abruptly, her voice wheedling, high-pitched. “Please, oh God, please let me out of here, please oh God please oh God what do you goddamn want? I can’t stand it I can’t stand it please oh God.”

And I saw that Alexa wasn’t in here.

Her voice was coming from computer speakers. A black Dell computer on a long wooden workbench that ran the length of one wall. In the monitor I saw that same strange close-up of Alexa’s face, with a greenish cast, that I’d seen in the streaming video.

But she looked so bad I almost didn’t recognize her. Her face was gaunt, her eyes swollen to slits, deep purple hollows beneath them. She was speaking out of one side of her mouth, as if she’d had a stroke. Her face shone with sweat. Her eyes were wild, unfocused.

In front of the monitor was a keyboard. To the left of it was a small, cheap-looking microphone on a little plastic tripod. Like something you’d find in a discount bin at RadioShack.

For an instant Alexa seemed to be looking at me, but then her eyes meandered somewhere else. She fell silent, then started whimpering, all her words rushing together. I could make out only “please” and “God” and “out of here.”

I spoke into the microphone: “Alexa?”

But she went on, uninterrupted. On the stem of the microphone was a little black on/off switch. I slid it down to ON. Said, “Alexa?” again. This time she stopped. Her mouth came open. She began to sob.

“Alexa?” I said. “It’s Nick.”

“Who-who is this?”

“It’s Nick Heller. You’re going to be okay. I’m at the house. Right nearby. Listen, Alexa, help is coming, but I need you to stay quiet and keep calm, all right? Can you do that for me? Just for a little while. You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

For a second I thought I saw a flash of light in the backyard coming through the window.

“Nick? Where are you? Oh my God, where are you?”

The light again. A car’s headlights. I heard the rumble of a car’s engine, then a door slamming.

Zhukov was here. It could be no one else.

But I couldn’t see him. He’d parked on the side of the house that had no windows.

“Nick, answer me! Get me out of here please oh God get me out of here, Nick!” She started screaming.

“You’re going to be okay, Alexa. You’re going to be okay.”

Finally she seemed be listening. “Don’t leave me here,” she moaned.

“He’s back,” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

She stared up, her lips parted, and as she nodded she began sobbing again.

“Everything will be fine,” I said. “Really. As long as you don’t say a word. Okay? Not a word.”

I gripped the SIG in both hands.

But what if it wasn’t Zhukov who’d just arrived? What if it was the police? It was far too soon for the FBI’s SWAT team. They were driving, since getting a helicopter there and loading it and all that, would take even more time, and would also deprive them of the heavy armaments.

Zhukov, if it was him, would enter the house through the front door, as I had. The worn path told me that. Yet he wouldn’t expect anyone to be here. That would give me a temporary advantage. If I positioned myself correctly I might be able to get a jump on him.

Heart thudding now. Time had slowed. I went into that strange calm place I so often did when faced with grave danger: senses heightened, reactions quickened.

A door opened somewhere.

But not the front door. Which one?

The side door I’d noticed earlier.

I needed to conceal myself, but where?

No time to hesitate.

A door next to the kitchen entrance. A closet, probably, with a wooden kitchen chair next to it. I slid the chair a few inches out of the way.

Opened the door with my left hand, stepped into the darkness-

And dropped into space.

Not a closet, but the basement stairs. I reached out and grabbed something to arrest my fall. My boots landed with a muffled thud.

A wooden banister. Swiveled myself around, pulled the door shut behind me. My hand on the knob, keeping it turned so the latch wouldn’t click.

Silently eased it shut. Lowering myself to my knees on the first step, I peered out through the keyhole.

Waited for him to appear.

100.

Dragomir Zhukov had parked at the side of the house just to vary the pattern. Never be predictable.

It was for the same reason that he’d shut off the satellite Internet connection. It was predictable that he’d want to stay connected. It was also a needless risk. There were ways to trace an Internet signal.

Of course he had left one cable in place: the one connecting his computer to the casket.

Before he opened the door, he glanced down at the baseboard and saw the tiny strip of transparent tape he’d placed between the door and the jamb. It was still in place. That meant no one had entered here.

Or probably not, anyway. Nothing was ever certain.

Long ago Dragomir had learned the importance of leaving nothing to chance. This was one of the many lessons he’d learned at the University of Hell, also known as Prison Number One, in Kopeisk.

The money transfer had been received in his account. The cutout had been eliminated.

Some time ago he had made provisions for a quick escape in the event the operation did not go to plan. In a steel box he’d buried in the Acadia National Park in Maine was a Ukrainian passport and wads of cash, in U.S. dollars and euros. The passport didn’t expire for another two years.

With a new identity, crossing the Canadian border would be quick and easy, and there were plenty of international flights out of Montreal.

The only chore that remained was hardly a chore at all.

It was his reward for all the long tedious days of vigilance and patience and restraint.

He knew how it would go: He had rehearsed it countless times, savoring the prospect. He’d tell the young girl what was about to happen, because there was nothing as delicious as a victim’s foreknowledge. Hour after hour he’d seen her fear, but when she learned, in precise and clinical detail, what was imminent, her terror would reach a whole new physical state.

Then he’d go about the business methodically: He’d disconnect the air hose from the compressor and attach it to the garden hose with the brass coupler. Once he pulled up the lever on the farmer’s hydrant, the water would start to flow. It would take a few seconds before the water began to trickle into the casket.

He had drowned small animals-mice, chipmunks and rabbits, a stray cat-in a trash barrel. But the squeals and the frantic scrambling of a dumb animal were ultimately not satisfying. They lacked apprehension.

She would hear the trickle, and then she would know.

Would she scream, or plead, or both?

As the water level grew higher and the air pocket grew smaller, she would flail and pound and most of all beg.

He had done some calculations. The interior volume of the casket was 230 gallons. Given the water pressure in the house and the diameter of the hose and the distance from the spigot to the burial site and then the nine feet down through the soil into the casket itself, it would take just short of half an hour to fill to capacity.

Then the water would reach her chin and she would have to struggle to keep her head above water, gasping her last precious breaths, her neck trembling from the exertion, her lips pursed like a fish.

He would watch in hypnotized fascination.

She would attempt to scream as her lungs filled with water; she’d flail and plead, and when she was entirely submerged, she would hold her breath until she couldn’t take it anymore and she was forced to expel the air from her lungs. And like a child in utero she would be forced to breathe liquid.

She would drown before his eyes.

It was a terrible way to die. The way his father died. For years he could only imagine it.

But now he would know.

Dragomir knew he was not like other people. He understood his own psychology, the way he drew sustenance from the fear of others.

As he entered the house, he paused.

Something was different here. A shift in the air? A vibration? He had the finely tuned senses of a wild animal.

Now that the cutout was dead, he wondered how long it would take for the Client to realize what had happened. They had some idea where he was based, but he was sure he hadn’t been followed after the last rendezvous.

Still, he wondered. Something was off.

He moved quietly through the parlor to the front door, where he’d placed another tell, a barely visible slice of Scotch tape at the bottom of the door next to the jamb, both inside and out.

A minuscule ribbon of tape lay on the floor. No one who wasn’t looking for it would see it.

But now he knew for certain: someone was here.

101.

I could hear footfalls, the creaking of the wooden floor, the sounds becoming louder, closer. Grasping the pistol in my right hand, the banister in my left, I squatted and looked through the keyhole and saw only the ice-blue light from the computer monitor.

Alexa on the screen. Such advanced technology in the service of such primitive depravity.

He had entered the room.

I saw a leg, clad in jeans, but just for an instant. Walking toward the computer, or at least in that direction. Then he came to a stop.

The man was standing a few feet away. I could see his back: large torso, broad shoulders, a dark sweatshirt.

Did he suspect anything? But his body language didn’t indicate suspicion.

He was standing at the window, I saw now, casually looking outside, a black knit watch cap on his head.

And the hideous pattern on the back of his neck.

The bottom half of an owl’s face.

102.

Dragomir Zhukov entered the back room, peering around at the filthy windowsills and the peeling yellow paint on the walls and the uneven floorboards.

A voice crackled from the small computer speaker. The girl was speaking.

“Nick!” she screamed. “Please don’t go away!”

The pistol was in his right hand even before he’d made the conscious decision to draw it.

ZHUKOV TURNED swiftly, holding a weapon, an enormous steel semiautomatic with a barrel like a cannon.

I recognized it at once. An Israeli-made.50 caliber Desert Eagle. Made by the same folks who gave the world the Uzi. It was the sort of thing you were far more likely to see in a movie or a video game than in reality. It was too large and unwieldy, so unnecessarily powerful. When Clint Eastwood declared, in Dirty Harry, that his.44 Magnum was “the most powerful handgun in the world,” he was right. In 1971. But since then, that title had been claimed by the Desert Eagle.

I saw his wide angry stare, his strong nose, a sharp jaw, a cauliflower ear.

“Nick, where’d you go? I thought you were here! When are the others coming? Nick, please, get me out of here, oh God, please, Nick, don’t leave me-”

Zhukov turned slowly.

He knew.

103.

Zhukov knew I was here somewhere.

Alexa’s voice, steadily more frantic: “Please, Nick, answer me! Don’t leave me stuck here. Don’t you goddamn go away!”

Zhukov moved with the taut, coiled grace of a cat. His eyes scanned the room, up and then down, ticking slowly and methodically in a grid.

I breathed noiselessly in and out on the other side of the heavy wooden door. Watching through the keyhole.

I’d come to rescue Alexa. But now it was a simple matter of survival.

The hollow-point ammo I was using might have had unequaled stopping power, but the rounds wouldn’t penetrate the thick old wooden door between us. The instant they hit wood they’d start to fragment. If they actually passed through the door, they’d be traveling at such a reduced velocity that they’d no longer kill.

I was all but defenseless.

Nor was my body armor meant to stop the.50 caliber Magnum rounds fired by the Desert Eagle. I didn’t know whether the rounds would penetrate the ballistic vest; they might. But even if they didn’t, the blunt-force trauma alone would probably kill me.

So I watched him through the keyhole and held my breath and waited for him to move on to another part of the house.

Zhukov scanned the room again. He seemed to be satisfied I wasn’t hiding here. I saw his eyes shift toward the kitchen. He took a few steps in that direction.

Slowly I let out my breath. As soon as I was sure he’d moved into the kitchen, I’d turn the knob silently, and step out as noiselessly as I could.

If I got the jump on him I might be able to drop him with one well-aimed shot.

Reaching out slowly, I placed my left hand on the doorknob. Ready to turn it once he was safely out of the room.

I continued watching.

Drew breath. Waited patiently. A few seconds more.

Then he swiveled around, back toward me. His gaze dropped to the floor, as if he’d just discovered something. I saw what he was looking at.

The railback chair I’d just moved out of the way of the basement door.

It was out of place. Not exactly where he’d left it.

His gaze rose slowly. He smiled, baring teeth that were brown and belonged in a beaver’s mouth.

He raised the Desert Eagle and pointed it right at the basement door, directly at me, as if he had X-ray vision and could see through the wood, and he squeezed the trigger-

blam blam blam

– and I lurched out of the way and everything was happening in slow motion, the thunderous explosions and the muzzle flash, fireballs that lit up the entire room, the splintering of the door, and as I let go of the doorknob and the banister and leaped backward I felt a bullet slam into my chest, the pain staggering, and everything went black.

104.

When I came to, a few seconds later, my body was wracked with excruciating pain. Like something had exploded inside my chest while my rib cage was being crushed in some enormous vise. The pain in my left leg was even worse, sharp and throbbing, the nerve endings shrieking and juddering. Everything moved in a sort of stroboscopic motion, like a rapid series of still images.

Where was I?

On my back, I knew, sprawled on a hard cold floor in the near darkness, surrounded by the dank odor of mold and old concrete and the stench of urine. As my eyes adjusted, I saw snowdrifts of what looked like shredded newspaper all around me, and a lot of rat droppings.

Something scurried by, made a scree sound, and I lurched.

A large shaggy Brown Norway rat, its long scaly tail writhing, stopped a few feet away. It gazed with beady brown eyes, maybe curious, or maybe resentful that I’d disturbed its den. It twitched its whiskers and scuttled away into the darkness.

Pale moonlight filtered in from above, through a gaping hole in the underside of a wooden staircase.

In an instant I realized what had just happened.

A bullet had struck me, slamming into the left side of my ballistic vest, but it hadn’t penetrated my body. I was alive only because two inches of solid oak had slowed the round’s velocity. But I’d been knocked off balance, shoved backward down the stairs. Then I’d crashed feet first through the termite-damaged, rotten planks and broken through, landing on the concrete floor below.

I tried to breathe, but each time I inhaled it felt like daggers piercing my lungs. I sensed warm blood seeping down my left leg. I reached down to feel the bullet wound.

But there wasn’t any.

Instead, the jagged end of a broken plank a foot long was sunk several inches into my left calf, through tough denim.

I grabbed the board and wrenched it out of my flesh. A couple of long rusty nails protruded from the wood. As painful as it had been lodged in my calf, it was far worse coming out.

I tried to recall the number of shots he’d fired at me. The.50 caliber Desert Eagle’s magazine held only seven rounds. Had he fired four or five? Maybe even six.

Maybe he didn’t have any rounds left. Maybe he had one.

I was short of breath and dazed and numb. A creak somewhere overhead, then heavy footsteps on the top steps. Zhukov was coming down the stairs.

Maybe he thought he’d killed me but wanted to make sure. Maybe he thought he could just finish me off. I had to move before he fired straight down as I lay here gasping.

I felt for my weapon but it wasn’t in the holster. I’d been holding it when the bullets struck me. Maybe I’d dropped it when I took a tumble. Now I felt for it on the cold floor, my hands sweeping over the concrete and the debris and the rat droppings. But it was nowhere within reach.

A light came on: a bare bulb mounted to one of the rafters about ten feet away. The ceiling was low. The basement was small: maybe thirty feet by twenty.

Wooden shelves were screwed on to the cinder-block walls, lined with old canning jars. Rickety children’s bookcases, painted with clowns and dancers, were heaped with newspapers and magazines that had been chewed through, cobwebbed, littered with rat droppings. In one corner, in a square hole cut into the concrete floor, a rusty sump pump was planted in gravel, collecting dust and cobwebs. Here and there were folding tables stacked with old toasters and kitchen implements and assorted junk.

He took another step. I lay absolutely still, held my breath. Lay flat, looking up.

If I made a sound, he’d locate me, and he’d get a direct, unimpeded shot straight down. The vest wouldn’t protect me.

He knew I was here. He’d heard me stumble down the steps. Surely he’d seen the broken boards, the gaping hole, the missing treads. But did he know I was directly below him?

As soon as he looked down, he’d know. Once he did, it was all over.

I looked over at the bare lightbulb again, and then I noticed the splintered two-by-four on the ground, the blood-spattered plank whose jagged end had sunk into my leg.

I grabbed it, and in one hard swift throw I hurled it, smashing the bare lightbulb, and everything went dark again.

In the dark I stood a chance.

But a few seconds later, a flashlight beam shone down the stairs. The cone of light swept slowly back and forth over the floor and the walls, into the dark corners. I could hear him coming down the stairs, slowly and deliberately.

Then the beam went off. The only light was the faint trapezoid cast by the open door above. Maybe he’d stuffed the flashlight in a pocket. He needed two hands to hold the Desert Eagle.

Now it was all a matter of seconds. I had to get to my feet to be ready to pounce, but do it silently. The slightest scrape would announce my location like a beacon.

The timing was crucial. I could move only when he did, when the sound of his tread and the creaking and groaning of the old wood masked whatever slight noise I made getting up.

Lying flat, I listened.

A dry whisking. The rat had come out of its hiding place, alarmed by yet another disturbance, maybe fearful that a second human being was about to come crashing down into its nest. It pattered across the floor toward me. Paused to make a decision, surveying the terrain with shrewd eyes.

Directly overhead another step creaked. Startled, the rat came at me, skittered across over my neck, the sharp nails of its paws scratching my skin, its dry hard tail whisking my face, tickling my ear canal. I shuddered.

Yet somehow I stayed absolutely still.

Abruptly clapping both hands over the thing, I grabbed its squirmy shaggy body… and hurled it across the room.

Suddenly there was a shot, followed by the clatter of metal objects crashing to the floor.

My ears rang.

Zhukov had heard the rat’s scuffling and assumed it was me.

But now he knew he hadn’t hit me. No one can get shot with a.50 caliber round without giving a scream or groan or cry.

So was that his last shot? Was that number six or seven? I couldn’t be sure.

Maybe he had one round left.

Or maybe he was on a new cartridge.

He took another step down, and I knew what I had to do.

105.

I had to grab his gun.

Through one of the missing risers in the decrepit staircase I could see the heels of his boots.

Then I heard the unmistakable metallic clackclack of the pistol’s magazine being ejected. The weapon was directly above me, close enough to seize, wrench out of his hands. If I moved fast enough, took him by surprise.

Now.

I shoved down against the floor with both hands, using the strength in my arms to rise into a high push-up. Favoring my right foot, I levered myself up until I was standing.

Then, reaching out both hands, I grabbed his right boot and yanked it toward me. He lost his footing, stumbled down the steps, yelled out in surprise and anger. The staircase groaned and creaked and scattered chunks of wood. Something heavy and metal clattered near my feet.

The Desert Eagle?

Go for the weapon, or launch myself at him, try to immobilize him before he could get back up?

I went for the gun on the floor.

But it wasn’t the gun. It was his flashlight: a long black Maglite. Heavy aircraft-grade aluminum with a knurled barrel, heavy as a police baton.

I leaned over and grabbed it, and when I spun around, he was standing maybe six feet away, pistol in a two-handed grip. Aiming two feet to my left.

In the dark, he couldn’t see me. I couldn’t see much either, but for the moment I could see more than he could.

I arced the Maglite at his head. He didn’t see it coming. It struck him on the bridge of his nose, and he roared in pain. Blood trickled from his eyes and gushed from his nostrils.

He staggered, and I lunged, knocking him to the floor, driving a knee into his stomach, my right fist aiming for his larynx, but he’d twisted his body so that I ended up delivering a powerhouse uppercut to the side of his jaw.

He dropped the weapon.

I landed on top of him, pinioned him to the floor with my right knee and my left hand. His blood was sticky on my fist. But he had unexpected reserves of strength, like an afterburner. As if the pain only provoked and enraged him and fueled him. As if he enjoyed the violence.

He levered his torso up off the floor and slammed a fist at my left ear. I turned my head but he still managed to cuff me hard just behind the ear. I swung for his face, but then something large and steel came at me and I whipped my head to one side though not quite in time, and I realized he’d retrieved his weapon.

Holding the Desert Eagle by its long barrel, he swung the butt against my temple, like a five-pound steel blackjack.

My head exploded.

For a second I saw only bright fireworks. I tasted coppery blood. My hands grabbed the air and I careened to one side and he was on top of me and cracked the butt of the gun on the center of my forehead.

I was woozy and out of breath. His face loomed over me. His eyes were an unnerving amber, like a wolf’s.

“Do you believe there is light at end of tunnel when you die?” he asked. His voice was higher pitched than I remembered from the videos and had the grit of sandpaper.

I didn’t reply. It was a rhetorical question anyway.

He flipped the gun around, then ground the barrel into the skin of my forehead, one-handed, twisting it back and forth as if putting out a cigarette.

“Go ahead,” I panted. “Pull the trigger.”

His face showed no reaction. As if he hadn’t heard me.

I stared into his eyes. “Come on, are you weak?”

His pupils seemed to flash.

“Pull the trigger!” I said.

I saw the hesitation in his face. Annoyance. He was debating what to do next.

I knew then he had no more rounds left. And that he knew it too. He’d ejected the magazine but hadn’t had the chance to pop in a new one.

Blood from his nostrils seeped over his beaver teeth, dripping steadily onto my face. He grimaced, and with his left hand he pulled something from his boot.

A flash of steel: a five-inch blade, a black handle. A round steel button at the hilt. He whipped it at my face and its blade sliced my ear. It felt cold and then hot and extremely painful, and I swung at him with my right fist, but the tip of the blade was now under my left eye.

At the base of my eyeball, actually. Slicing into the delicate skin. He shoved the handle and the point of the blade pierced the tissue.

I wanted to close my eyes but I kept them open, staring at him defiantly.

“Do you know what this is?” he said.

My KGB friend had told me about the Wasp knife.

“Dusya,” I said.

A microsecond pause. His mother’s name seemed to jolt him.

“I spoke to her. Do you know what she said?”

He blinked, his eyes narrowed a bit, and his nostrils flared.

That second or so was enough.

I scissored my left leg over his right, behind his knee, pulling him toward me while I shoved my right knee into his abdomen. Two opposing forces twisted him around as I grabbed his left hand at the wrist.

In an instant I’d flipped him over onto the ground.

Jamming my right elbow into his right ear, I tucked my head in so it was protected by my right shoulder. My right knee trapped his leg. He pummeled me with his right fist, clipped the top of my head a few times, but I was guarding all the sensitive areas. I gripped his left wrist, pushing against his fingers, which were wrapped around the knife handle. I kept pushing at them, trying to break his grip and strip the knife from his hand.

But I had underestimated Zhukov’s endurance, his almost inhuman strength. As we grappled over the knife, he jammed his knee into my groin, sending shock waves of dull nauseating pain deep into my abdomen, and once again he was on me, the point of his knife inches from my left eyeball.

I gripped his hand, trying to shove the Wasp knife away, but all I managed to do was keep it where it was, poised to sink in. His hand trembled with exertion.

“If you kill me,” I gasped, “it won’t make any difference. The others are on their way.”

With a lopsided sneer, he said, “And it will be too late. The casket will be flooded. And I will be gone. By the time they dig her up, she will already be dead.”

The knife came in closer, and I tried to push it back. It shook but continued touching my eye.

“I think you know this girl,” he said.

“I do.”

“Let me tell you what she did to me,” he said. “She was a very dirty little girl.”

I roared in fury and gave one final, mighty shove with all the strength I had left. He flipped onto his side, but he still didn’t loosen his grip on the handle.

I drove my knee into his abdomen and shoved his right arm backward. The knife, still grasped tightly in his fist, sank into his throat, into the soft flesh underneath his chin.

Only later did I understand what happened in the next instant.

The palm of his hand must have slid inward a fraction of an inch, nudging the raised metal injector button.

Causing his Wasp knife to expel a large frozen ball of gas into his trachea.

There was a loud pop and a hissing explosion.

A terrible hot shower of blood and gobbets spat against my face, and in his bulging amber eyes I saw what looked like disbelief.

106.

I was able to hold out until shortly after the casket came out of the ground.

It took five members of the FBI’s SWAT team two hours of digging by hand, using shovels borrowed from the Pine Ridge police. The casket was almost ten feet down and the earth was sodden and heavy from the recent deluge. They hoisted it out on slings of black nylon webbing, two men on one side, three on the other. It lifted right up. The casket didn’t weigh more than a few hundred pounds.

It was dented in several places and had a half-inch yellow hose coming out of one end. The hose had been trenched into the ground for two hundred feet or so and was connected to the air compressor on the back porch. A much thicker, rigid PVC tube came out of the other end, the pipe sticking out of the ground.

The team didn’t believe my assurances that the casket wasn’t booby-trapped. I didn’t blame them, of course. They hadn’t looked into the monster’s eyes.

If Zhukov had placed a booby trap in the casket, he would not have denied himself the opportunity to taunt me with it.

But he hadn’t. There was none.

Two of their bomb techs inspected the compressor hose and the vent pipe and the exterior of the casket, looking for triggering mechanisms.

Somehow they were able to ignore all the thumping and pounding and muffled screams from within. I wasn’t.

Diana had her arm around me. She was supporting me, and I mean that in a physical sense. My legs had turned to rubber. Everything before my eyes was moving in and out of focus, though I didn’t understand why. The blood loss was minimal. True, the pain in my chest had grown steadily worse. The blunt-force trauma had been bad, but I’d thought the worst had passed.

I was wrong. The escalating pain should have been the first sign. But I was preoccupied with getting Alexa out of her coffin.

“Nico,” she said, “you weren’t wearing trauma plates.”

“Hey, I was lucky I had a plain old vest with me,” I said between sharp gasps. “Trauma plates aren’t exactly standard equipment.” Breathing was getting more difficult. I couldn’t fill my lungs. That should have been the second sign.

“You should have waited for us.”

I looked at her, tried to smile.

“Okay,” she conceded, nuzzling me on the neck. “I’m glad you didn’t wait. But do you always have to be the first one on the battlefield and the last one to leave?”

“No. I’ll leave as soon as I see her.”

The hollow thumps, the remote anguished cries that could have been half a mile away. I couldn’t stand listening to it. Yet the bomb techs continued their methodical inspection.

“There are no explosive devices,” I said. I staggered across the marshy field. “He would have boasted about it.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get her out of there.”

“You don’t know how.”

But I did. I knew something about caskets. The Department of Defense provided standard-issue metal or wooden caskets to the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty, if they were wanted. A few times I’d had the solemn and terrible duty of accompanying the body of a friend on the plane home.

When I got to Alexa’s casket I shoved aside one of the guys in their bulky blast-resistant space suits. He protested, and the other one tried to block me. Someone yelled, “Back away!”

The other guys on the SWAT team stayed back as per standard procedure. I shouted to them, “One of you must have a hex key set, right?”

Someone threw me a folding tool with a bunch of Allen keys on it. I found the right one and inserted it in the hole at the foot of the casket and turned the crank counterclockwise four or five turns to unlock the lid.

The rubber gasket had been mashed in places where the steel casket had begun to cave in under ten feet of dirt, but I managed to pry it up.

A terrible odor escaped, like from an open sewer.

Alexa had been lying in her own excrement, or just a few inches above it. She stared up, but not at me. Her hair was matted, her face chalk white, her eyes sunken in deep pits.

She was wearing blue medical scrubs and was covered in vomit. Her hands were curled in loose fists that kept jerking outward. She couldn’t stop pounding the sides of her coffin. Her bare feet twitched.

She didn’t understand she was free.

I knelt over and kissed her forehead and said, “Hey.”

Her eyes searched the sky. She didn’t see me. Then she did. She looked directly at me, uncomprehendingly.

I smiled at her and she started to cry.

That was about the last thing I remembered for a long while.

107.

I hate hospitals.

Unfortunately I had to spend a few days at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where my FBI friends were kind enough to helicopter me from New Hampshire. The ER doc told me I’d developed a tension pneumothorax as a result of the blunt-force trauma. That my entire chest cavity had filled up with air, my lungs had collapsed, and I’d gone into respiratory distress. That it was a life-threatening condition and if one of the SWAT guys hadn’t done what he did, I’d surely be dead.

I asked him what had been done.

“I don’t think you want to know,” he said.

“Try me.”

“Someone with medic training stuck a large-bore needle in your chest to let the air out,” he said delicately.

“You mean like a Cook kit?”

He looked surprised.

“In the army we called that a needle thoracostomy. Every field medic carries a Cook pneumothorax kit in their aid bag.”

He looked relieved.

He ordered up a lot of X-rays and put a chest tube in me, had the wound in my calf cleaned out and bandaged, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me to another ward to recover. After three days they let me go.

Diana was there to give me a ride home.

EVEN THOUGH I could now walk just fine, the nurse insisted on rolling me to the hospital entrance in a wheelchair while Diana got the car.

She pulled up in my Defender. Nice and shiny and newly washed.

“Look familiar?” she said as I got in.

“Not really. It looks almost new. Someone find it in the woods up in New Hampshire?”

“One of the snipers. He drove it back to Boston and decided he liked it better than his Chevy Malibu. It wasn’t easy to pry it out of his sweaty little hands. But at least he washed it for you.”

“I want to see Alexa. Is she still in the hospital?”

“Actually, she got out a lot faster than you. She was treated for dehydration, they checked her out, and she’s fine.”

“I doubt that.”

“You’re right. I’ve dealt with plenty of kids who’ve gone through traumatic experiences. I know some good therapists. Maybe you can convince her to see one.”

“Is she at home?”

“Yeah. In Manchester. I don’t think she’s happy about it, but it’s home.” As we headed down Comm Ave toward Mass Ave, she said, “How about I cook dinner for you tonight? As a celebration.”

“A celebration of what?”

She gave me a sideways glance and pursed her lips. “I don’t know, maybe the fact you saved that girl’s life?”

“If anything was a team effort-”

“You’re doing that thing again.”

“Thing?”

“Where you give everyone else credit except yourself. You don’t have to do that with me.”

I was too tapped out to argue.

“Let’s make it my place,” she said. “I don’t want to be the first person to turn on your oven. Does it even work?”

“I’m not sure. Let me go home and get changed and take a shower. Or a sponge bath.”

“It’s just dinner, you know.”

“Not a date. Of course.”

“Like the thought never occurred to you.”

“Never,” I said.

“You know something, Nico? For a guy who’s so good at recognizing a lie, you’re a really bad liar.”

I just shrugged. She wasn’t so good at it either.

108.

ONE WEEK LATER

The waves crashed loudly on the rocks below, and the wind howled along the point. The sky looked heavy, a mournful gray, as if any moment it might begin to pour.

No more armed guards, I saw. The guardhouse was empty. I parked in the circular drive and crossed the porch, the floorboards creaking underfoot.

I rang the bell and waited almost a minute, then rang again. After another minute the door opened, and Marshall Marcus stood there.

He was wearing a gray cardigan and a rumpled white dress shirt that looked like it hadn’t been pressed.

“Nickeleh,” he said, and he smiled, but it was not a happy smile. He was weary and defeated. His face seemed to have sunk and his teeth seemed too big for his mouth and far too white. His face was creased and his reddish hair stuck out in crazy tufts. It looked like he’d been napping.

“Sorry to wake you,” I said. “Want me to come back?”

“No, no, don’t be silly, come on in.” He gave me a big hug. “Thank you for coming.”

I followed him to the front of the house where you could watch the sea. His shoulders slumped as he walked. The front room was gloomy, the only light coming from the fading late-afternoon sky. Crumpled on one of the couches was a cheap synthetic Red Sox blanket, the kind they sell at Fenway.

“She’s still not talking?” I said.

Marcus heaved a long sigh as he sank into a chair. “She hardly even comes out of her room. It’s like she’s not even here. She sleeps all the time.”

“After what she’s been through, she needs to see someone. It doesn’t have to be one of the trauma specialists Diana’s recommending. But someone, at least.”

“I know, Nick. I know. Maybe you can change her mind. Lexie always seems to listen to you. You feeling better?”

“Totally,” I said.

“Good thing you were wearing a vest, huh?”

“Yeah. Lucky break. You’re doing the right thing.”

He gave me a questioning look.

“Meeting with the FBI.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, only because Schecky says he can get me a deal.”

“Give Gordon Snyder what he wants,” I said, “and you’ll have the FBI on your side. They have a lot of influence with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

“But what does that mean? They’re gonna put me in prison? My little girl, look what’s she’s already been through-now she has to lose her daddy?”

“Depending on how much you cooperate, you might even walk,” I said.

“You really think so?”

“It depends on how much you give them. You’re going to have to tell them about Mercury. They know a lot already.”

“Schecky says I have nothing to worry about if I just do what he says.”

“How well has that worked out for you?” I said.

He looked uneasy and said nothing for a long while.

Finally I broke the silence. “Where’s Belinda?”

“That’s why I asked you to come here,” Marcus said. “She’s gone.”

109.

He handed me a pale blue correspondence card with BELINDA JACKSON MARCUS on the top in small navy blue copperplate. The script was big and loopy and feminine, but a few of the letters-the H’s and the A’s and the W’s-looked Cyrillic. Like they’d come from the hand of someone who’d learned to write in Russian as a child. The note said:

Darling-

I think it’s better this way. Someday we’ll talk.

I’m so happy Alexa is home.

I really did love you.

Belinda

“She said she was going out to meet a girlfriend in the city, and when I got up I found this propped up against the coffeemaker. What does it mean?”

It meant she’d been warned the FBI was about to close in on her. Though in truth, it would have been difficult to prove Anya Afanasyeva guilty of any serious crime.

“Sometimes it takes a crisis to find out who a person really is,” I said.

I doubt he knew who I was really talking about.

Marcus shook his head, as if he were trying to dodge a pesky fly, or a thought. “Nick, I need you to find her for me.”

“I don’t think she wants to be found.”

“What are you talking about? She’s my wife. She loves me!”

“Maybe she loved your money more.”

“She knew I was broke for months. It never changed anything with us.”

“Well, Marcus, there’s broke and there’s broke, right?”

A long pause.

He then turned away.

“Come on, Marshall. Did you really think you could move forty-five million dollars offshore without anyone finding out? It’s not so easy anymore.”

Marcus flushed. “Okay, so there was a little nest egg,” he said. “Money I wasn’t going to touch. Money I’ll need if I’m ever going to get back in the game.” He sounded defensive, almost indignant. “Look, I’m not going to apologize for what I’ve got.”

“Apologize? What do you have to apologize for?” I said.

“Exactly.”

He didn’t notice my caustic tone. “I mean, you’ve been consistent from the beginning-you’ve never stopped lying to me. Even back when Alexa was kidnapped the first time and you told me you had no idea who was behind it. You knew it was David Schechter’s people, cracking the whip. Making sure you did what you were told. I’m guessing Annelise had her suspicions, though. Maybe it had something to do with why she couldn’t live with you anymore.”

He hesitated a few seconds, apparently deciding not to deny it. “Look, if this is about money, then fine. I’ll pay your bill in full.” The ends of his mouth twitched as if trying to conceal a tiny smile.

I laughed. “Like I said, Marcus, there’s broke and there’s broke. As of nine o’clock this morning, you’re wiped out for real. Check with the Royal Cayman Bank and Trust. The entire forty-five million dollars was withdrawn this morning.”

“It’s gone?” Marcus sank into the sofa and started to rock back and forth. Like he was either about to pray or about to weep. “How could this happen to me again?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea to put it all in Belinda’s name.”

110.

David Schechter wanted to meet with me before the FBI arrived at his office. He said it was a matter of some urgency.

“I wanted to apologize to you,” he said. He sat in his rickety antique chair behind the tiny antique desk.

“For what?”

“I overreacted, I’ll be the first to admit it. I should have been up-front with you from the get-go. You’re a reasonable man. More than that, you’re a true American hero.”

He fixed me with a look of the deepest admiration, as if I were some great statesman, like Winston Churchill. Or maybe Bono.

“You’re too kind,” I said. “Apology accepted.”

“You of all people understand that our national security must never be compromised.”

“No question,” I said.

“I’ve already impressed upon Marshall the importance of not divulging to the FBI anything about Mercury that’s not germane to their investigation.”

“Why keep it secret from the FBI?”

“Nick, you know how Washington works. If it ever gets out that ten billion dollars in military black-budget funds has been lost because it was being privately invested-dear Lord, we’d be throwing buckets of chum upon the water. The sharks will come for miles. You were a soldier. Can you imagine what damage such a revelation would do to our nation’s defense?”

“Not really.”

He blinked owlishly behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “You don’t understand what a huge scandal would result?”

“Oh, sure. It’ll be huge, all right. Lots of people are going to wonder how you stole all that money from the Pentagon.”

He smiled uneasily.

111.

Because I’d finally learned the real story in a hotel suite at the Mandarin.

“You must realize,” Roman Navrozov had said, “how frustrating it is to sit on the sidelines with billions of dollars and billions of euros at my disposal, ready to invest in American industry, and yet every single one of my deals is blocked by the U.S. government. While America sells itself off to every country in the world. Including its sworn enemies.”

“I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” I’d said.

“Ten percent of America is owned by the Saudis, do you know this? And look what they did to your World Trade Center. The Communist Chinese own most of your Treasury bonds. Some of your biggest defense contractors are owned by foreign conglomerates. But when I try to buy an American steel company or an energy company or a computer company, your government refuses. Some anonymous bureaucrats in the Treasury Department say it would harm national security.”

“So you wanted the Mercury files for leverage? To force the U.S. government to rubber-stamp all of your deals?”

He shrugged.

“Then there must be something in the Mercury files that a lot of powerful people want kept secret.”

He shrugged.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

NOW, I leaned back in my fragile antique wooden chair. It creaked alarmingly. Schechter winced.

“Turning a slush fund into a hedge fund to funnel secret payments to some of the most powerful people in America for three decades,” I said. “That’s genius.”

I glanced pointedly at his ego wall. At all those photographs of him doing the grip-and-grin with former secretaries of Defense and secretaries of State and four former vice presidents and even a few former presidents. “But what was the point? Your own self-aggrandizement? What could you possibly have wanted? How much influence did you need to buy? For what?”

“You don’t have the slightest idea, do you?”

“About what?”

He paused for a long time, examined his immaculate desktop, looked back up. “You’re probably too young to remember that there once was a time when the best and the brightest went into government work because it was the right thing to do.”

“Camelot, right?”

“Now where do the graduates of our top colleges end up? Law schools and investment banks. They go where the money is.”

“Can you blame them?”

“Precisely. The CEO of Merrill Lynch pockets a hundred million dollars for driving his company into the ground. The guy who almost destroyed Home Depot gets two hundred and ten million dollars just to go away. Yet a hardworking public servant who helps run the fifteen-trillion-dollar enterprise called the United States of America can’t afford to send his kids to college? A general who’s fought all his life to keep our country safe and strong spends his retirement in tract housing in Rockville, Maryland, scraping by on a pension of a hundred thousand bucks a year?”

“This is good,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better rationalization for graft.”

“Graft?” Schechter said, red-faced, eyes glittering. “You call it graft? How about calling it retention pay? Stock options in America? The whole point of Mercury is to make sure that the best and the brightest aren’t punished for being patriots. Yes, Nick, we diverted the money and built a goddamn moat. We guaranteed that our greatest public servants would never have to worry about money. So they could lead lives of genuine public service. This sure as hell is about national security. It’s about rewarding heroes and statesmen and patriots-instead of bankers and swindlers who’d sell out their country for two basis points.”

I could see the veins on his neck pulsing.

“Well,” I said softly, “you make a good argument. And I’m sure you’ll have the opportunity to make it before a jury of your peers.”

“I’ll deny we ever spoke about it,” he said with a cruel smile.

“Don’t bother,” I said. I got up and opened the door to his office. Gordon Snyder and Diana Madigan were standing there, flanking Marshall Marcus. Behind them were six guys in FBI Windbreakers. “Marshall is cooperating.”

He shook his head. “You son of a bitch.” He pulled open his desk drawer and one of the FBI guys shouted, “Freeze!”

But it wasn’t a gun Schechter was after. It was a breath mint, which he popped in his mouth.

“Gentlemen,” he said with a beatific smile. “Please enter.”

He didn’t rise, though, which wasn’t like him.

“David, I’m sorry,” Marcus said.

I turned and saw that Schechter was staring at me, his eyes fixed. His mouth was foaming. I could smell almonds.

I shouted, “Anyone have a medical kit?”

A couple of the FBI agents rushed in. One of them checked Schechter’s pulse, at his wrist and on his neck. Then he shook his head.

David Schechter liked to brag that he always had all the angles figured out.

I guess he was right after all.

112.

Early in the fall I took Diana out for a drive. She wanted to see the New England foliage. I’ve never cared much about foliage, though the fiery red maples were impressive.

She had no itinerary in mind; she just wanted to drive. I suggested New Hampshire, where the leaves were further along.

Neither one of us spoke about the last time we’d been in New Hampshire together.

After we were on the road a while, I said, “I have something for you.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Look in the glove box.”

She gave me a puzzled look, then popped open the glove compartment and took out a small box, badly gift-wrapped.

She held it up and pretended to admire the wrapping job. “Aren’t you a regular Martha Stewart,” she teased.

“Not my skill set,” I said. “Obviously.”

She tore it open, gasped.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, staring at the octagonal black perfume bottle. “Where the hell did you get Nombre Noir? And a full ounce? And sealed? Are you out of your mind?”

“I meant to give it to you years ago,” I said.

She reached over and gave me a kiss. “I’m almost out, too. I thought I’d never have it again. Last time I checked eBay, a half-ounce of Nombre Noir was selling for more than seven hundred dollars. Where’d you get this?”

“Remember my friend the Jordanian arms dealer?”

“Samir?”

“Right. Sammy found it for me. One of his clients is a sheikh in Abu Dhabi who had a stockpile in an air-conditioned storeroom.”

“Thank Samir for me.”

“Oh, I did. Believe me, I did. You’d have thought I asked him for a nuclear warhead. But by the time he handed it to me, you were gone.”

“You could have sent it.”

“I don’t trust the mail,” I lied.

Diana once explained to me that Nombre Noir was one of the greatest perfumes ever created. But it was impossible to find now. Apparently the company that made it ended up losing money on each bottle. Then the European Union, in its infinite wisdom, decided to ban one of its main ingredients, something called damascone, because it causes sun sensitivity in some tiny percentage of people. The company recalled every bottle they could and then destroyed each one by running a steamroller over them.

As soon as she told me it was impossible to find, of course, I made a point of tracking some down.

“Well, that serves me right for leaving without letting you know,” she said.

“Yeah, so there.”

“So, um, speaking of which? They’ve offered me a supervisory special agent job in Miami,” she said.

“Hey, that’s a big deal,” I said with all the enthusiasm I could muster. “Congratulations. Miami could be great.”

“Thanks.”

“Hard to turn down a job like that,” I said.

The awkward silence seemed to go on forever.

“What about Gordon Snyder’s job?”

Snyder’s superiors weren’t so happy about his planting an unapproved, off-the-books tracking device in my BlackBerry and then trying to cover his tracks by claiming that a confidential informant had tipped him off to Mauricio Perreira’s location. He’d been demoted and transferred to Anchorage.

I’d heard he could see Russia from his desk.

“Nah, they’re looking for an organized crime specialist for that slot. So, Nico. Mind if I ask you something about Roman Navrozov?”

“Okay.”

“That helicopter crash in Marbella? A bit too convenient, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. A deal was a deal.

“Let me guess. Putin’s guys have been trying to get him for years. But he never made it easy for them. So you struck a bargain with one of your ex-KGB sources. Some sort of trade for information. It isn’t like what happened to Navrozov was a tragedy. Some might even call it justice. You probably figured it was win-win.”

“Or maybe it was just a cracked rotor blade, like they say.”

She gave me a look. “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

After a long moment, I said, “Sometimes, stuff just happens.”

“Hmph.”

“You see that story in the Globe a couple days ago about the accountant who was crushed to death by a falling filing cabinet? There’s no safe place. No guarantees.”

“I didn’t mean what I said about marrying a CPA.”

“No?”

“No. I’d settle for a database administrator.”

“I mean it. You can swathe yourself in five layers of security, but your luxury helicopter is still going to come down over Marbella. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather see the bullet that’s coming for me.”

We both stared straight ahead for a while.

“You know,” she said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we’re about to make an arrest in the Mercury case.”

“I was wondering if that would ever happen.”

The weeks had turned into months, and not a single one of Marshall Marcus’s “investors” had even been brought in for questioning. None of their names had surfaced in the press.

Marshall Marcus remained at liberty, since he’d cooperated fully with the FBI-and his new lawyers were still negotiating with the SEC. There were a lot of investors out there howling for his head. He’d certainly face some kind of prison time.

But apart from that, it was like nothing had happened.

Call me cynical, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether a quiet call had been placed to the attorney general. Maybe a whispered aside over steaks at Charlie Palmer’s in D.C.

“It’s complicated,” she said. “We’re talking about some extremely prominent individuals-senior government officials, elder statesmen. As the saying goes, if you shoot at a king, you must kill him.”

“But you have names and account numbers…”

“Suddenly there are a whole lot of very nervous people at the top of the Justice Department who insist on signing off on everything. They want us to cross every t and dot every i. They want everything completely nailed down before they’ll go ahead with such a high-profile corruption sweep. Something like this will destroy careers and reputations and, you know, shake the faith of the country in our elected officials.”

“Sure wouldn’t want to do that,” I said dryly.

“The Criminal Division is insisting on all sorts of bank records from around the world, including from offshore banks that won’t cooperate in a hundred years.”

“In other words, nothing’s going to happen.”

She was silent. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“You don’t find this frustrating?”

“I just keep my head down and do the best job I can.”

“So who are you about to arrest?”

“General Mark Hood.”

I gave her a sideways glance, then looked back at the road. “On what grounds?”

“Embezzlement, fraud… It’s a long charge sheet. He was the one who supervised the illegal transfer of covert funds out of the Pentagon’s black budget.”

I nodded. “I figured as much.”

“You were on to him, weren’t you? Before he fired you?”

“I guess so. Though I didn’t know it at the time.”

For several miles neither of us spoke.

Maybe, I thought, the only true justice was karma.

Take Taylor Armstrong. She claimed that when Mauricio Perreira pressured her into setting him up with her BFF, Alexa, she really had no idea what was going to happen. I believed her. Not that it made her any less narcissistic, sleazy, and underhanded.

Shortly after we last talked, Taylor was pulled out of school and sent to a place in western Massachusetts that specialized in “novel treatments” for students with severe behavioral problems, controversial for its use of electric shock as an “aversive.” It made the Marston-Lee Academy look like the Canyon Ranch Spa.

The place also required weekly counseling sessions with parents, which wasn’t going to be a problem, since her father, Senator Armstrong, had announced he was leaving public service in order to spend more time with his family.

I saw the exit sign and hit the turn signal.

“Where are we going?”

“Ever seen the Exeter campus?”

“No. Why would I…” Then, realizing, she said, “You think she’s ready to see you?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

*

DIANA WAITED for me in the car. She thought it was best for me to have some time alone with Alexa.

The girls’ field hockey team was practicing on the dazzling green artificial turf field in the football stadium at the far end of the campus. I knew nothing about field hockey, but it looked like a scrimmage. It was a cluttery game, hard to understand at first. The whistle was constantly sounding. A few of the girls really stood out, one in particular, and when she turned I saw it was Alexa.

She was wearing a headband, her hair tied back. Her arms were tan and muscular, her legs long and lean.

Her blue mouth guard gave her a fierce appearance, but she looked healthy and happy.

The coach blew her whistle and shouted, “Let’s get some water,” and the girls all popped out their mouth guards: a precise, automatic gesture. Some tucked the mouthpieces under the tops of their sports bras; some slipped them into their shin guards. They shouted and talked loudly and squealed as they straggled toward the drinking fountain. A couple of them hugged Alexa-I’d forgotten how much more affectionate girls are than guys at that age-and laughed about something.

Then she turned, as if she’d sensed my presence, and caught my eye. She spoke quickly to one of her teammates and approached reluctantly.

“Hey, Nick.”

“You’re really good, you know that?”

“I’m okay. I like it. That’s the main thing.”

“You play hard. You’re tough. Fearless, even.”

She gave a quick, nervous laugh. “Gift of fear, right?”

“Right. So I just wanted to say hi and make sure everything’s okay.”

“Oh, um, okay, thanks. Yeah, everything’s cool. It’s good. I’m…” She looked longingly over at her teammates. “It’s kinda not the best time, is that… that okay?”

“No problem.”

“I mean, like, you didn’t drive all the way up here just to see me or anything, right? Like, I hope not.”

“Not at all. I was in the area.”

“Business or something?”

“Yeah.”

“So, yeah. Um…” She gave me a little wave. “I gotta go. Thanks for coming by. Nice to see you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You too.”

I understood: Just seeing me brought on all kinds of dark and troubling emotions. I’d forever be associated with a nightmare. I made her uncomfortable. There were things in the subbasement of her mind she couldn’t yet deal with. Her way of recovering was to try to forget.

We all have our ways of coping.

As she returned to the field, her stride got looser. I could see the tension leave her body. One of her friends made a crack, and she gave a quick grin, and the coach blew her whistle again.

I stood there watching for a few minutes longer. She played with a fluid grace, almost balletic. Once I began to understand how the game worked, it was sort of exciting. She charged down the field, dished it off to another player in a give-and-go, and kept on going. Suddenly everything was happening too fast to follow. Just as she entered the striking circle she somehow got the ball back, and then I could see what all of her teammates saw: that the goalkeeper had been fooled and Alexa had a clear shot, and she smiled as she flicked the ball up in the air and it soared toward the goal.

She’d take it from here.