Field of Fire

Chapter 1

Jericho Quinn knew an ambush when he saw one. He rolled the throttle of his gunmetal gray BMW R1200GS Adventure, leaning hard over into the second of a long series of S turns. Sometimes called the two-story bike of the motorcycling world, the big GS flicked easily on the twisty road. A chilly wind bit the tiny gap of skin between the chin of his helmet and the collar of his black leather jacket. Behind him, riding pillion, Veronica “Ronnie” Garcia squeezed with strong thighs, leaning when he leaned, moving when he moved as he negotiated the narrow, seaside road. Her soft chest pressed against his back, long arms twined around his waist.

Popping the bike upright on a straightaway, Quinn shot a glance in his side mirror and watched the grill of a dark panel van loom behind him. It came up fast, pressing aggressively on the winding two-lane that ran on the narrow ledge between mountain and ocean. Quinn bumped the throttle again and sped up, easing farther to the right and buying some distance while he considered any and all options that didn’t end with him and Garcia as twin grease spots on the asphalt or Wile E. Coyoted into the mountainside.

The van accelerated, moving close enough that it filled Quinn’s side mirrors with nothing but chrome grill. Just as he was about to swerve onto a gravel trail that cut off toward the ocean, he got a clear view of the guy at the wheel. A kid with a thick mullet haircut pressed a cellphone to his ear while gesturing wildly with the hand that should have been reserved for steering. Quinn kept up his speed but took the shoulder instead of the trail, allowing the van to barrel past before the next blind corner. For all Quinn knew, the guy never even saw him.

He’d ridden the Seward Highway south of Anchorage hundreds of times while growing up and knew there was a passing lane less than a mile ahead. Cell phones, sleepy drivers, drunks, turds with mullets — all made Quinn want to beat someone to death with an ax handle — but road rage had no place from the back of a motorcycle. No matter the traffic laws, the reality of physics dictated a right-of-way by tonnage if you wanted to stay alive.

“I’m proud of you, Mango,” Garcia’s sultry voice, spiced with a hint of her Cuban heritage, came across Quinn’s Cardo Bluetooth headset as he flicked the leggy BMW back onto the highway proper. “You didn’t even mutter when you yielded to that dude.”

Quinn poured on more speed, sending up a tornado of yellow leaves from a tiny stand of birches along the road. “I’m not much of a mutterer,” he said.

“Yeah, well,” Ronnie chuckled, “you’re not much of a yielder either.”

Turnagain Arm, a narrow bay off the Cook Inlet of the Pacific Ocean, lay to their right, silty waters white-capped and churning as if her tremendous tides hadn’t quite figured out which way to flow. Craggy peaks of the Chugach Mountains loomed directly to their left in a mix of rock, greenery, and waterfall that tumbled right to the shoulder of the winding road.

Quinn moved his neck from side to side, letting the adrenaline brought on by the idiot in the van ebb — and taking the time to enjoy the ride until the next idiot barreled up behind him. He flicked the bike around a basketball-sized rock that had come to rest in his lane. Here and there, great swaths of stone and shattered trees that had been bent and torn by avalanche, fanned down the mountainside, just beginning to heal from the previous winter.

Quinn could relate.

It felt good to be back — back in his home state, with a badge back in his pocket, and back on his bike with the woman he loved on the seat behind him. Along with the two guns and Japanese killing dagger that hid under his black leather jacket, he bore as many scars as the avalanche chutes that cut the mountains above him. Some of the wounds were still painfully raw.

Ronnie bumped the back of his helmet with the forehead of hers and worked in closer behind him, giving him a playful squeeze. She was a strong woman, just a few inches shorter than Quinn, with broad, athletic shoulders and strong, alluring hips. Far from fat, her Russian father had called her zaftig. Her ex husband — a man who wisely steered well clear of Quinn — described her as having a “ghetto booty.” But if the powerfully aggressive BMW reminded Quinn of The Death Dealer’s black warhorse, Veronica Dombrovski Garcia was no helpless maiden, cowering at the feet of a Conan or John Carter of Mars. She was a beautifully fierce warrior princess, clutching her own sword and flanked by pet tigers. Quinn’s seven-year-old daughter had privately confided to him that Garcia looked an awful lot like Wonder Woman.

As strong as she was, Garcia’s squeezes were considerably weaker than they had been, absent the ferocity they’d once possessed. It was understandable. Her treatment at the hands of sadistic captors had left both shoulders badly damaged, one requiring a lengthy surgery and months of physical therapy to repair. There had been concerns that she might not be able to use that arm again at all.

It would take a while, but Quinn was sure she’d heal, maybe only to ninety percent — but ninety percent of Ronnie Garcia was ten percent above any other woman Quinn had ever met. She pushed the limits being out of her sling, but he wasn’t really in a position to admonish her.

Gripping the handlebars, Quinn rolled his own shoulders back and forth, feeling the tell-tale pop and grind of damaged gristle and working out some of the stiffness and after-effects of being shot by a Chinese terrorist just months earlier. Emiko Miyagi, friend and defensive tactics mentor, had done wonders with shiatsu massage and her specially designed, if incredibly painful, yoga routines. He could deal with physical pain. It was the thought of being incapacitated that haunted him.

The official written orders from the Air Force doc at Andrews had been to take it easy. But in an off-the-record chat, he’d told Quinn to work the injury until he started to “piss it off,” and then dial back some. Riding the bike definitely pissed off his old wounds. He found the hyperawareness and attention to balance it took to negotiate the mountain roads and prosecute the tight turns on the leggy Beemer to be just what he needed to put a bow on his recovery process — both mental and physical. In any case, disobeying doctor’s orders was part of his DNA. He’d been doing it for weeks, adding dead hangs and then pull-ups to his physical therapy regimen as soon as he could make a good fist. His old man had once lamented that Jericho could burn calories just sitting in the corner and looking mean. The older he got, the less that was true, so exercise was a necessity, injured or not.

Quinn knew he might not be a very good yielder, but he was a good healer. At nearly thirty-seven, the mending just took a little longer.

Both he and Garcia wore beaked Arai dual-sport helmets, his gray with an airbrushed paint job of crossed war-axes on the sides, hers canary yellow. Racing gloves and full black leathers protected them against an accidental dismount and the icy crispness of an Alaska autumn. Icon Truant motorcycle boots offered protection to his ankles but allowed him the freedom of movement to run should the need arise.

Though not a heavy woman by any stretch, Garcia was ample enough to make an extremely pleasant backrest. Her warmth seeped through Quinn’s leather jacket, bringing with it an added layer of comfort against the chill and an excited happiness that he hadn’t felt since his daughter was born.

Garcia gave him another playful squeeze. It sent a twinge of pain through Quinn’s bruised ribs but he didn’t care. His father had often urged him to lead the kind of life that bruised ribs. Now, as an agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations or OSI, he’d been assigned to work directly for the President’s National Security Advisor — doing the things that needed the heavy hand of his particular skill set. He wasn’t about to let a couple of old wounds — or some jackass with a mullet — stop him from enjoying this trip with Garcia. They’d been apart for far too long, and now he’d finally gotten her to his home state.

They’d been in Alaska for the better part of the week, going to the Musk Ox Farm and eating reindeer hotdogs in downtown Anchorage with his seven-year-old daughter Mattie. The two got along well enough that they shared whispered girl-secrets that they kept from him. To Quinn’s astonishment, even his ex-wife Kim seemed at ease with the fact he’d brought his girlfriend up to spend time with his parents — an obvious final step before any more permanent arrangement.

The trip was never meant as a test, but if it had been, Garcia would have aced it. Every new place Quinn took her threw her into a state of childlike awe. If anything, she appeared to love Alaska even more than he did — which was saying something.

The pavement was still clear and dry but the mountains along the Seward Highway had been dusted by snow that same morning. This “termination dust” signified the end of Alaska’s short autumn but gave the already breathtaking scenery an extra shot of beauty. Quinn couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted to impress anyone as bad as he wanted to impress Veronica Garcia. It was a difficult endeavor considering everything they’d been through together.

As if she knew he was thinking about her, Garcia moved even closer — if such a thing were even possible.

Quinn absorbed it all, flicking the BMW back and forth through a maze of rocks that had tumbled onto the road on the far side of a blind curve. Like Quinn, the bike was happiest when dealing with the rough stuff.

Garcia’s husky giggle poured through the Cardo earpiece in his helmet. “She wiggles like a sassy woman.”

“That she does,” Quinn said, his lips pressing against the foam microphone. “But she doesn’t wiggle herself. I wiggle her.”

“You got that right—”

Always scanning, Quinn tensed at a sight a quarter mile up the highway, causing Garcia to stop mid-sentence.

He could tell by the way her body moved — or stopped moving — that she saw it right after he did.

A white Anchorage PD patrol car sat parked in a paved pullout overlooking the ocean. The driver’s door gaped open and a uniformed officer crouched behind the back bumper. He was bent over the prone body of his partner, one hand on the downed man’s chest, the other at the radio mic clipped to his lapel. A scant three hundred yards ahead on a long straightaway, a red pickup and a white Subaru sedan sped away, southbound, past the turnoff to the ski village of Girdwood.

Quinn slowed, using his left hand to unzip his jacket and reach inside to retrieve a black leather credential case. Pulling up on a fallen officer without ID was a good way to get shot.

The downed officer lay on his back, surrounded by shattered glass from the rear window. His eyes were open and he writhed in pain. A good sign, Quinn thought as he put his foot down to steady the bike and flipped up the visor on his helmet. A line of what could only be bullet holes stitched the side of the police car. The other officer, a younger man with the earnest look of a full-grown Cabbage Patch doll, glanced up at the sound of the approaching motorcycle. His big eyes narrowed with adrenalized intensity. He nodded at the sight of Quinn’s OSI badge and returned to his radio traffic.

“… medics code red,” the officer said, calling in help for his injured partner.

The officer’s earpiece had come unplugged and the steady voice of the dispatcher spilled out of his radio. “All units, 10–33 for 25-Bravo-2,” she said, advising others on the frequency to yield to the officer’s traffic.

The young officer continued with his description. “Two white male adults, one white female. They… it… I mean… the vehicle’s still going south.” His face was flushed, his voice a half an octave higher than it should have been.

Quinn recognized the wounded officer as Greg Sizemore, a man Quinn had gone to high school with. A patch on the shoulder of his navy blue uniform identified him as an FTO or Field Training Officer, which made his partner a trainee. New or not, the rookie was doing everything right by applying pressure to an apparent gunshot wound just above Sizemore’s collar bone.

“Are both vehicles involved?” Quinn asked, nodding toward the tiny dots that were the pickup and the Subaru as they faded into the distance around a mountain curve.

“Only the white sedan,” Sizemore said, grimacing at the pain from his wound. “The pickup came by just before the shooting. I think the white car must have passed him. Driver and… front passenger are both armed. Don’t know about the girl in back.”

Quinn felt Ronnie tap him on the shoulder. He scooted forward against the gas tank, giving her room to get off the bike. The bullet looked to have caught Sizemore just above his vest, probably destroying his collarbone. Blood seeped up through the rookie’s clenched fingers but he appeared to have it stopped until an ambulance arrived. Ronnie peeled off her helmet, shaking out long black hair, and bent to help.

“You good for me to go get ’em, bud?” Quinn asked, looking at the downed officer.

“Hell, yes,” Sizemore grunted, stifling a cough. “Sons of bitches shot me. Tear ’em up.”

The rookie looked up at Quinn. “We have units responding from South Anchorage and a Trooper coming north from Summit Lake—”

“Tell them the man on the bike is a good guy,” Quinn said, before flipping down his visor and giving the highway behind him a quick head check. A cloud of smoke rose from the BMW’s rear tire as he rolled on the gas, falling in after the white Subaru.

The GS accelerated quickly, scooping Quinn into the seat as it ripped down the highway. He leaned hard, nearly dragging a knee as he rounded the first corner past the Girdwood cutoff. He pushed from his mind the fact that the only thing that kept him upright were the two rubber contact patches where his tires met the pavement, each about four square inches.

Chapter 2

Quinn’s mind raced ahead of the bike, looking for rocks, vehicles jumping out from side roads, and any other obstacles that could send him over the side of the Seward Highway in a flaming ball of twisted metal and leather.

He toed the Beemer down a gear, feeling the aggressive pull of the engine. The speedometer on the GPS display between his handlebars climbed past ninety and then a hundred miles an hour. The Subaru moved fast, and the red pickup stayed tight on its tail, but Quinn began to gain ground the moment he left the downed officer.

Still a mile back, Quinn watched the red pickup move up as if to pass the little Subaru on a long straightaway. Instead of passing, the larger truck jerked to the right, untracking the sedan and sending it spinning out of control and slamming it against the mountain on the left side of the road. The red pickup flew past, smoke pouring from its rear tires as it skidded to a stop, and them began to back down the middle of the road toward the wrecked Subaru.

Quinn reached back with his left hand, feeling along the metal cargo box until he found a one-liter metal fuel bottle.

He was still a little over a half mile behind the Subaru. At his present speed, the GS would close the distance in less than twenty seconds. It took Quinn a few of those precious seconds to flip the latches that held the fuel bottle in place, but he finally felt it snap and brought the bottle up by his handlebars, holding it tight in his left hand.

Ahead on the left, people began to boil out of the wrecked Subaru, surely stunned. They’d shot a cop, so Quinn still considered them plenty dangerous.

He eased off the throttle but kept the bike moving around forty miles an hour as he neared the man who’d climbed out the driver’s side of the Subaru — the shooter. The man from the red pickup was already engaged in a shouting match with the Subaru passenger, who’d made it out first. Quinn saw the gun in the Subaru driver’s hand when he was still fifty feet away. The sneaker-like Truants would allow him to fight and run better than his usual motocross boots, but he wanted to tenderize the men as much as possible before he even got off the bike.

Quinn goosed the throttle, closing the distance in an instant, bringing the aluminum bottle up just in time to catch the driver in the side of his head with a resounding “tink.” Two pounds of aluminum and fuel traveling over forty miles an hour dropped the witless shooter in his tracks. Quinn let the bottle go the moment after impact, grabbing a handful of brakes and skidding the bike to a hard stop along the asphalt shoulder. He drifted the rear wheel during the slide to bring the back end of the bike around so he was facing his threat.

He got the Beemer stopped in time to watch the driver of the red pickup, an older man with a tweed driving cap, slap the Subaru passenger in the ear with an open palm, driving him to his knees. The female passenger from the Subaru threw her hands in the air, wailing and cursing as if she was being beaten herself, but giving up immediately. Quinn drew his Kimber 10mm from the holster tucked inside the waistband of his riding pants and scanned the area.

The man in the driving cap had drawn a gun of his own and now trained it on the downed Subaru passenger.

“Jim Hoyt, DEA,” he shouted to Quinn. “Retired.”

The driver of the Subaru, a skinny twenty-something covered with meth sores, looked up at Quinn from were he sat against a slab of rock, a bloody hand pressed to the side of his head. “You could have killed me,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but I’m gonna sue the shit out of you, mister.”

“Hell of a thing,” Hoyt said. “You’d think a little shitass cop shooter who got smacked from the back of a moving motorcycle would be a little more sedate.”

Quinn raised an eyebrow, wondering how Hoyt knew a cop had been shot.

“Got a scanner in the truck,” Hoyt said. “Heard the description go out about the same time this rocket scientist flew past me.”

There was a no-nonsense air about the Jim Hoyt that made Quinn wonder just what he’d done for the DEA — and how long he’d been retired. A tall woman with long, silver hair and a sliver gleam in her blue eyes introduced herself as Mrs. Hoyt. She’d moved their pickup out of the roadway and now stood beside the open door, arms across the large bosom of her fleece vest. She looked at her husband and shook her head, giving a resigned sigh — certainly a policeman’s wife, accustomed to his behavior.

Quinn and Hoyt worked together to pat down the occupants of the Subaru, lining them up face down in the grass along the shoulder of the road. Bad guys secured, Hoyt stepped up to Quinn, keeping an injured elbow tucked in tight against his body. His cheeks were flushed, and he was obviously in pain judging by the way he treated the elbow. Pain or not, his green eyes sparkled with a mischievous grin. His jacket fell open when he extended a large hand toward Quinn, revealing a sweatshirt bearing a blue Air Force Academy Falcon logo.

“That was some good work back there pitting these guys, Mr. Hoyt,” Quinn said, nodding to the man’s shirt and giving him a knowing wink as they shook hands. “Fast, neat, average…”

“Ah.” Hoyt returned the wink with one of his own. “Friendly, good, good,” he said, providing Quinn with the second half of the phrase used by one Air Force Academy graduate to identify another. Taken straight from the Mitchel Dining Hall comment card, Fast, Neat, Average, Friendly, Good, Good were the only acceptable critique freshman cadets were allowed to give on the mandatory Form 0-96.

Hoyt stepped back to give Quinn a more thorough up-and-down look. “Class of seventy-five.”

“Two thousand and two,” Quinn said.

“Oh.” Hoyt rubbed his elbow. “That class.”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, “that class.” He decided to steer the subject away from the fact that he’d graduated from the Air Force Academy the same academic year Al Qaeda brought down the Twin Towers and crashed a plane into the Pentagon. “You sir, are a good guy to have around.”

“That was hellacious!” Hoyt grinned, shooting a glance at his wife. “Work as long as you can, son. Retirement’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Quinn chuckled, rolling his shoulders to relieve the pain in his ribs as he nodded to the Hoyt’s elbow. “You should probably have that looked at.”

“Don’t worry about him.” Mrs. Hoyt gave a little good-natured scoff. “He’ll be glowing about this for days,” she said. “Best thing in the world for him, getting to mix it up with some bad guys. Makes him realize he’s still relevant.”

A white Alaska State Trooper SUV approached from the north carrying Ronnie Garcia in the passenger seat. Quinn could tell immediately from the frown on her face that something was terribly wrong.

“What is it?” Quinn said when she opened her door. “What’s the—”

Half in, half out of the car, Ronnie waved Quinn over. “Jericho,” she said. “You need to come hear this.”

Chapter 3

Dr. Kostya Volodin inhaled the smell of popcorn and freedom as he left the windy tarmac along with the other eight passengers and entered through the metal doorway to the air-charter office. The buzz of people chattering in English made him feel heady as if he’d suddenly had a great weight lifted off his chest.

Dressed in a threadbare woolen blazer with patched sleeves and light wool traveling slacks that were half tucked in to ankle-high hiking boots, Volodin looked like the professor he had been and not the defector he had become. Gaunt and stooped, Volodin appeared to be much shorter than his six foot two inches. Numerous cowlicks caused his wiry head of gray hair to grow in all directions at once, leaving it in a perpetual state of bedhead.

Across the cavernous hanger, a smiling American Immigration and Customs official sat at a lone metal desk. Russians were accustomed to queuing up for bureaucrats so the other passengers who’d come across the Bering Sea with Volodin lined up without direction. Kaija stopped directly ahead of him, her head moving back and forth, birdlike. He could not blame her. This was her fist trip to America. There was a lot to take in.

At twenty years old, his dear daughter could pass for a much younger woman, but he would always think of her as a five-year-old with a skinned knee, before her mother had taken her away for all those excruciating years. The tail of her blue wool shirt hung to mid-thigh of her faded skinny jeans. Her sleeves were too long and frayed at the cuffs where they swallowed up her tiny hands. Red ankles were dry and chapped above thin canvas sneakers. He could have afforded more, but she would hardly accept a kopek from him.

Youthful lips trembled when she turned to look him in the eye, obviously frightened by something she’d seen. A black wool watch cap topped straw-blond hair that hung around narrow shoulders, framing a stricken oval face. A pair of white earbuds perpetually connected her to the music on her mobile phone, but even in her terror, she refused to remove both of them, leaving one in her ear and the other trailing down the side of her neck. She shook her head, mouth hanging open, the way she’d done when she was a small child. She’d borne the same expression the day her mother — Volodin’s dear Maria — had died.

“What is the matter, kroshka?” Volodin whispered. He put a hand on her shoulder. She was trembling and it broke his heart.

Kaija cast a hurried glance toward the door.

He followed her gaze but saw nothing but a handful of Native people, all dressed in wool and fleece and fur. He saw a few men, but mostly there were smiling women with round bodies and Asian eyes sitting on shabby furniture next to boxes of diapers and cases of canned soda pop in the open bay of the charter office that served as a combination waiting and cargo area. Fluorescent lights hummed in the high ceiling of the tin building, barely cutting through the thin fog of dust that rose into the chilly air.

“We are safe now, kroshka,” he said. “I will inform the Customs Inspector we mean to defect to the United States. He will escort us to the proper authorities. He will give us something to eat and warm clothes.”

Kaija clenched her eyes as if she was about to scream. “They are here, Papa.”

“Who?” Volodin shook his head, still holding the poor girl’s trembling shoulder. “Who is here?”

Kaija brushed a lock of blond hair from her eyes and tucked it up under the wool cap. She’d not been one to worry much with her hair after her mother died the year before. Volodin wondered for a time if she’d even bothered to bathe.

Kaija glanced toward the front of the building again, past the rows of customers waiting for their small charter flights within Alaska.

“You do not see the men?” Her breath came in short, tremulous gasps. “Outside. They are waiting for us. I am sure of it. Colonel Rostov has wasted no time in finding you.”

Volodin chanced a quick look at the door. The front window of the air charter building was covered in grime, but there were indeed two men outside, smoking cigarettes and chatting in the light swirl of blowing snow. The menace in their faces was all too evident. Of course they would be here, ordered to force him back — or kill him, which was the highest of all possible probabilities considering the man who sent them.

Volodin looked at the head of the line. There were now only six passengers between Kaija and the uniformed Immigration agent.

“Do not worry, my dear,” Volodin whispered, leaning down and forcing a smile for his daughter. “This man will protect us.”

“How can you be sure, Papa?” Kaija said. “Is it not possible he has been paid to detain us? He could at this very moment be in league with the men outside.”

Volodin rubbed a tired hand across the stubble on his face. The girl was as wily and wise as her mother. She made a valid point. Americans were brought up to trust people in uniform. In Russia it was quite the opposite — and sadly, the Russian perspective was often the correct one. Anyone could be bought.

It was a Herculean effort to look nonchalant as he scanned the air-charter office for anyone who might be waiting to shoot him in the back of the head. A bullet to the back of the head — that’s the way they’d done it in Mother Russia since the beginning of bullets. Considering the awful things he’d been a part of, a quick shot would be a merciful way to go. That time would come soon enough, but for now, he had to stay alive to take care of his daughter.

Volodin snugged the wool jacket tighter around his neck and used the tip of his finger to push a pair of thick, tortoiseshell glasses back on a large nose. He tilted his head, trying to get a better look out the window without being too obvious.

“You are right, Kaija,” he whispered. “It is KGB.” He kept his voice low in the unlikely event the Immigration officer was one of those rare Americans who spoke something other than English — or was indeed in league with the men waiting outside to shoot him in the head.

Kaija’s already pale face fell ashen. “What did you say?”

“I said you are right, my child,” Volodin said, working to control his breathing. He felt as if the entire world was leaning sideways, and he found it difficult to remain on his feet. He put a hand on Kaija’s shoulder, more to steady himself than to comfort her. “The KGB. They have come for us. I have no idea how they arrived here so quickly.”

Kaija’s gaze dropped to her feet. The fear in her face had been chased way by a look of shame. Instead of someone in mortal danger, she’d become a child whose father made her uncomfortable.

“How is this not embarrassing to you?” She whispered, suddenly much less terrified of the men outside.

A fluttering twitch blossomed in Volodin’s left eye. What was she saying? KGB thugs or not, he hated to embarrass Kaija.

He could see she was still upset but working to control herself. “I am sorry, Papa,” she said. “But there is no more KGB.”

Volodin groaned. What had he said? “Of course I know there is no KGB.” His face flushed red at the foolish mistake. “I meant to say FSB.” The runaway twitch forced Volodin to clench his eye shut. He removed his glasses, and rubbed it with his palm, willing the possessed thing to be still. “FSB… or more likely Army. Colonel Rostov’s goons from GRU.” He pronounced it GuRoo.

“What should we do?” Kaija said. Her emotions could change so quickly, from anger to embarrassment to an abject willingness to do whatever he said. Her mother had been just as mercurial.

“I suppose this was always a possibility.” Volodin shoved a shock of gray hair out of his face and replaced his glasses. He glanced toward the front window again.

The taller of the two men waiting to capture or kill them held his cigarette pinched between his fingers the way few Americans would. The other, an older, stockier brute had a tattoo that peeked from the cuff of his tight, European leather jacket when he gestured at his partner, pointing with his own cigarette to make some point. Such tattoos and jackets were favored by members of Russian organized crime. Mafia thugs or government operatives — the titles were not mutually exclusive — the men seemed oblivious to the blowing snow, chatting with each other and conspicuously ignoring the arriving passengers.

Volodin looked up at the round clock above the gate agent for the fifth time in as many minutes. Bony knuckles on long and slender fingers turned white as he grabbed the rumpled canvas duffel and moved forward a few steps with the line.

Kaija had retreated to her music, but her eyes still flicked around the room, a frightened fawn, frozen, but looking for a way to run. She gave a small start when he put a hand on her shoulder again, slowing her long enough to let another Native woman and her two children move ahead of them in the line. His mind was suddenly foggy, and he needed a little time to figure out how not to get shot in the head.

Kaija toyed with the dangling earbud. “Please, tell me you have a plan.”

“I know this must seem odd to you,” Volodin said, keeping his voice low. “But understand, króshka, the colonel has eyes everywhere. It is not outside the realm of possibility that he has KGB assets already in Alaska.”

“FSB, Papa,” Kaija said, muscles in her cheeks tensing. A spark of impatience flared in her green eyes, then subsided.

“Yes, yes, yes… FSB,” Volodin muttered. He tried to wave off the mistake but inwardly cursed himself for getting it wrong again. “That is what I mean.”

Kaija took the remaining bud out of her ear and stuffed the white cord in her pocket. “Do you think it is wise to trust this American agent?” Her nose turned up, clearing demonstrating that she did not.

Mind racing, Volodin looked around the hangar for any alternative. The professor knew he’d reached a point of no return. There was no flight back to Providenya. The die was cast, and he had crossed his Rubicon, his only choices now to move forward or perish.

His scientific brain, fevered and worried as it was, began to shuffle and sift through the possibilities, while his eyes dissected the architecture of the hangar. Kaija was maddeningly correct. It would be gambling everything to place his trust in the lone government agent seated at the table. The man was young, with honest eyes — but he also wore a ring, and with a ring there was the likelihood of a family — and with a family came responsibilities, which meant he would need money and might be ripe to accept a bribe to simply look the other way when two KGB… FSB operatives dragged away an old Russian scientist and his terrified daughter and stuffed them into the belly of a waiting airplane bound for Russia.

Volodin fought the urge to hyperventilate. Trusting a stranger at this point was far too dangerous. And still, they could not simply walk out the doors and into the waiting guns of Rostov’s thugs.

Still scanning the room for a way out, he followed the line of the high ceiling to a set of washrooms located along the wall that divided the area where they now waited from the adjacent hanger he’d seen as they’d disembarked the airplane out on the tarmac.

He put a hand on his daughter’s arm. Only one more person stood between them and the Customs official. Volodin gave a slight nod toward the far wall. Kaija followed his gaze. He did the math in his head to convert to Alaska Time — twenty hours ahead of Providenya. “It is almost 4:00 P.M. here,” he said.

Kaija gazed up at him, eyes wide. The little girl waiting to be told what to do had returned.

“It will be a risk,” Volodin continued, “but I believe it to be our only option. After we clear Immigration and Customs—”

A muffled gasp rose from the travelers crowded in with their bags around the ticket counter thirty feet away. Volodin looked up to see a Native woman carrying a baby throw a shocked hand over her mouth. All eyes in the room turned to a television mounted on the wall above the popcorn machine.

The news feed at the bottom of the screen said the shaky images were streaming live from Texas. Hundreds of people ran, trampling others, as those around them fell dead and dying from some unseen force — all amid the pageantry and waving flags at an American high school football game. News commentators stammered, trying to make sense of what they were seeing — but Volodin knew. His heart was a stone in his chest. This was his doing, his fault. He fought the urge to vomit.

Machinelike, he pushed his duffle bag forward with his foot and shoved his passport onto the simple wooden table. He doubted the Customs agent would make a scene in front of the other passengers, even if he were in league with the men outside. But the situation had suddenly changed with the awful scenes unfolding on the television. He and Kaija might make it past Colonel Rostov’s thugs, but if the Americans ever discovered Novo Archangelsk was his creation, they would stop at nothing to find him. He’d been certain he destroyed it all. And yet he was obviously mistaken. A batch had gotten away from him. His mouth hung open as he watched the horrible footage on the screen. Only a very few people even knew of the existence of New Archangel gas. Fewer still had access to his lab — but one of them had smuggled some to America. Volodin closed his eyes as a cold reality washed over him. The real question was not how they had taken the New Archangel, but how much.

Chapter 4

The interview with Allen Lamar’s high school teacher took less than twenty minutes — but it had scared the hell out of FBI Special Agent Joel Johnson.

Now, as he slammed the door to his forest green Dodge Durango and ran across the rapidly filling parking lot toward a packed football stadium, he wondered if five agents were going to be enough. The brassy blare of two high school bands greeted him on the crisp air of the Texas evening.

One of the two supervisors assigned to the Dallas Area Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF, Special Agent Johnson had done time in Pakistan, Central America, and a couple of refugee camps in Europe. He’d seen enough despair, madness, and evil that he was not an easy man to scare. Social media would have everyone believe that armed terrorists were lurking behind every rock and tree — a fact of life that only made it difficult to root out the real threats. But the teacher who called in the tip wasn’t some paranoid conspiracy theorist. Sixteen-year-old Allen Lamar appeared to be the real deal.

The teacher had recounted the cold hard facts of the boy’s downward spiral, how she’d watched Lamar change from an introverted math genius with few friends to a popular thug, disdainful and threatening to everyone in the school who wasn’t a member of his select group of acolytes. Allen’s new friends called him Tariq Mohammed — and he made it clear that this was his war name.

Allen’s teacher had seen this sort of behavior before — youth finding themselves, experimenting with boundaries and new sets of friends. She’d been ready to write the behaviors off as teenage angst — difficult to watch, but not out of the norm.

And then she’d found the manifesto. Her jittery principal, fearful of another “Clock Kid” scenario and the legal battles that went with it, was furious when she’d contacted the FBI directly instead of the boy’s parents. Agent Johnson felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding when he’d read the letter. Peppered with the hateful regurgitated spewage of at least three well-known Internet Imams who had close ties to the Islamic State, Lamar/Mohammed detailed, in his awkward handwriting, his fervent wish to kill as many infidels as possible.

The JTTF was comprised of representatives from federal, state, and local agencies and ordinarily capable of standing up a large surveillance operation at a moment’s notice. But late afternoon on “Federal Friday,” when agents tended to disappear early from the office, were problematic, even when stopping a suspected terrorist. Most of the agents, troopers, deputies, and detectives who made up the task force had families and all the attendant commitments that went along with them.

Countless high school kids followed the Hate-America crap that slimed the feeds of a dozen social media sites. Standing up a rolling surveillance on one of them at the last minute seemed a futile waste of a weekend. It was all too easy for otherwise good people to become cynical under the constant barrage of reports regarding sleeper cells of bearded men, strange women wearing hijabs at Walmart, and radicalized teens about to ship off to join the Islamic State. Johnson was on constant guard to make sure the bona fide threats didn’t get buried in the noise.

To make matters worse, Lamar was already on the move by the time the teacher called in with the tip, giving Johnson zero opportunity to brief his team — or put a real team together. It was like some unwinnable test scenario from the Bureau’s supervisory selection process. Everything had to be done on the fly, utilizing agents who were available rather than those who were chosen for their superior abilities. Johnson had been lucky to find five warm bodies who would answer their cellphones.

Nearing the stadium, Johnson stepped from the asphalt parking lot to the concrete sidewalk that led to the long bank of ticket booths. He lived just five minutes away from this very field, but his boys were too young to play football so he’d never been inside. A pressing crowd teemed like thousands of salmon trying to swim up four narrow streams. Static crackled in the tiny, flesh-colored bud in Johnson’s ear as he slowed with the crowd to funnel through the stadium gates. Hidden by shaggy blond hair, a clear plastic “pigtail” ran from the earbud and disappeared into the collar of the agent’s black leather jacket and the neck of a burnt orange University of Texas sweatshirt. The shirt was a size too large but covered the Glock .40 on his hip should he need to loose the jacket. A voice-activated microphone, sensitive enough to pick up his mumbling curses, was pinned inside that same collar, also out of sight. This surveillance kit negated the need to go all Hollywood and lift a hand to his lips each time he needed to communicate or, worst of all, touch a finger to his ear. A cellphone would have been even less conspicuous, but encrypted radios allowed each member of the team to hear the conversation of all parties in real time.

“I got eyes on,” Andrea Lopez said, sounding breathless and a little too eager over the radio. She was fresh meat, just four months on the job and still covered with the entire can of whoopass they poured on new agents before they left Quantico. Her training report noted that one of the male agents in her class had made the mistake of calling her Betty Bureau Blue Suit during defensive tactics training and earned himself an “accidental” elbow to the jaw. She could handle herself but she was a hair too aggressive for Johnson’s taste. Blind aggression combined with inexperience was a good way to get hurt in this line of work.

“He’s inside the ticket gate,” Agent Lopez continued. “A second male just walked up to him. Olive skinned, wearing a red hoodie. I’m moving closer so I can try to identify him.”

“Negative,” Johnson snapped, drawing a wide eye from the blue-haired grandmother who happened to be walking next to him. He lowered his voice. “Just keep your distance for now.”

“Welcome to the party, Joel,” a second female said over the radio. This one was much calmer, more seasoned. At fifty, Angie James had recently become a grandmother while working undercover inside a violent splinter group of the Black Israelites in Harlem. Fifty was the new thirty, she often said, and where Angie James was concerned, Johnson was inclined to agree. It was she who had guessed Allen Lamar was going to a football game after he’d left his house. She’d been ahead of the game since Johnson had given her a thumbnail brief and made it to the stadium less than two minutes after the boy pulled up in his mom’s Corolla.

“Our rabbit’s walking toward the concession stand,” James said. Rabbit might sound odd to anyone who overheard the conversation, but it was much less prone to inducing fear than target.

“Concessions under the grandstands?” Johnson’s New York accent made him immediately identifiable to his team on the radio. He shoved a twenty-dollar bill under the glass at the ticket booth and shuffled impatiently while he waited for his change.

“That’s negative, sir,” Andrea Lopez stepped on Agent James as both women tried to broadcast at the same time, sending a garbled mess across the air.

“Talk to me, Angie,” Johnson said, calling the agent he wanted by name, and at the same time shutting down the jittery Lopez. He used plain talk instead of radio codes, so the two guys from Dallas PD assigned to the JTTF who were already inside would be on the same sheet of music.

“West end of the field,” Angie James came back. “Concession stand is a series of trailers, located just past where the band lines up to go through the gate at halftime.”

“Copy that,” Johnson said, falling in with a river of football fans streaming toward the bleachers on the home-team side.

The smell of popcorn and chili warmed the crisp Texas breeze. Parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, church leaders, scoutmasters — all wearing jackets and sweaters of bright red, the color of the Fighting Rams of Reavis, Texas. A larger-than-normal press gaggle milled along the track — four from local news affiliates and at least two from major cable networks. It seemed like a lot for a local high school football game, even in Texas.

Johnson stopped in his tracks, thinking, letting the current of red booster jackets flow around him. “Why are there so many cameras?” he asked over the radio, to no one in particular but expecting one of the DPD detectives to answer.

“It’s an underdog story, boss,” Lopez came back, breathless, like she’d been running… or was just excited at the prospect of tailing a bona fide terrorist. “Reavis High just got big enough to make AAAA status. This is their first year to compete with larger schools. It’s getting them some real national attention.”

The knot in Johnson’s gut tightened. Huge crowds, nonexistent security, and media attention were just too juicy a venue for a radicalized teenager who appeared ripe to go over the edge.

A shorter, squarish man with dark hair shoved his way through the crowd and fell in next to Johnson. His tailored gray sports coat and black open collar shirt made him look like a New Jersey wise guy. Johnson felt a flood of relief. Special Agent Dave Gillette would make seven on the surveillance. It was almost getting doable.

“I thought your kid had a baseball game?” Johnson said, still processing the realities brought on by all the media attention.

Gillette raised dark eyebrows and scoffed. “It’s T-ball, and he’s not very good. I got your message a few minutes ago and then headed this way when I heard the radio traffic.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re here.” Johnson resumed walking toward the concession stand. He didn’t relax, but felt better. With Angie James and Dave Gillette they might actually make it through the evening.

Both former street cops — Gillette in Miami and Johnson with NYPD, they’d been assigned to NYFO — the New York Field Office — as their first duty station, then gone their separate ways before drawing the Dallas office by chance. Each of them had been promoted to supervisory agent but over different squads.

“What do you think?” Johnson said as they walked through the crowd.

“I think I could use a hot dog.”

“I mean about the kid,” Johnson frowned.

“I don’t know.” Gillette shrugged. “He’s fresh, isn’t he? Not likely to do something right away. Maybe he’s just coming to meet some friends at a ballgame.”

“What if we’re the ones who are fresh?” Johnson said. “Maybe this kid’s been under our radar for months blending in.”

“Or maybe he’s just a kid at a football game.” Gillette rubbed his face. “I read your briefing notes. The teacher said he was a normal little socialist shithead until two months ago.”

A line of Reavis High School cheerleaders, all red faced from the chilly evening air bounced and tumbled on the track in front of the band at the end of the grandstands nearest the gates. Young and pretty, their short uniforms allowed them to show a great deal of leg while still maintaining their apple-pie wholesomeness — the way only a high school cheerleader could. The Reavis High School band’s section belted an explosive drum-and-horn challenge that carried across the field to the rival school.

“That gets the blood up,” Johnson said nodding toward the band.

“El Degüello,” Gillette said. “Santa Anna played it before he stormed the Alamo. Means ‘Slit Throat.’”

Johnson released a pent-up sigh. “Let’s hope that’s not Allen Lamar’s theme music.

A line of twelve young women dressed in crisp white skirts and matching sequined cowboy hats twirled large flags in Reavis High colors, moving in perfect precision with the band. The drill team, blaring band, the smell of frying food in the air — it was like a county fair, about as American as a place could be.

Gillette ran a hand over his hair. “You think two months is long enough to radicalize a kid?”

Johnson scoffed, picking up his pace. “I think a shitty two-minute Islamic State video is enough to radicalize someone who already believes all this is an abomination.” He shook his head. “Lopez, what’s our guy up to?”

“Still at the concession stand, boss,” the agent said. “He’s getting nervous though. Keeps looking over his shoulder. Maybe he’s looking for—”

She fell silent for a moment. Johnson froze mid-step, half expecting the jittery Lopez to come back and say she’d been made.

“They’re coming your way now,” Robinson, one of the DPD detectives said at length. “Rabbit bought a can of potato chips and a Coke.”

“See,” Gillette said. “Told you he was just here to watch the ga—”

“Hold on a minute.” Angie James came over the radio, tension putting a quiet hush on her voice. “The guy who sold Lamar the potato chips and Coke just came out of the concession trailer and joined them. Looks Middle Eastern, but I can’t be sure from this vantage point.”

“All three of them are walking east,” Lopez said. “They’re on the sidewalk between the bleachers and the fence that runs along the field.”

“We’re moving up too,” Robinson said. “If you’re coming toward concessions, we should all meet somewhere in the middle at the foot of the stands.”

“Keep your distance until Gillette and I get there,” Johnson said, the pit in his stomach growing deeper. He used his peripheral vision so as not to look at Lamar directly. Animals and humans alike were wired to notice if someone was looking directly at them. A tiny difference in the amount of white around the iris was enough to spook someone from a block away. “Maintain a loose tail. I’ve got them in sight. Lamar’s in the middle in a white sweatshirt… passing two little kids playing catch.”

“That’s them,” Angie James said. “Hang on… Are you seeing that?”

“I am,” Johnson said, breaking into a trot. Lamar was still a good fifty yards away.

The two other youths fanned out, one on either side of Allen Lamar, backs against the fence, facing the bleachers — as if preparing to protect him.

There came a time to bring people in — before they had a chance to shoot up a football game. Johnson intended to do just that until a crowd of Reavis High School alumni came stomping down the stadium stairs to stop directly in his path. The announcer had everyone stand for the National Anthem — completely blocking any view of Allen Lamar and his two friends. “Can you see him?” Johnson snapped, clenching his teeth to keep from shouting.

“Nope,” Gillette said, shouldering his way through the crowd.

“He’s just standing there, Joel,” Angie James said. “All three of them appear to be looking at the flags.”

“For the Anthem?” Gillette said. “That doesn’t sound like a terrorist.”

“I don’t mean the American flag,” Angie James said. “The drill team flags — like they’re checking wind direction and speed. I don’t like it, Joel. That’s something I would do before I took a shot.”

“Converge,” Johnson said, knocking a bleached-blond Reavis alumni into the fence. “Everyone move in.” He made it to within fifty feet of Allen Lamar before the boy opened the cardboard cylinder that looked like a potato chip tube and dropped in the soda can like a mortar shell. White foam began to bubble over the top of the cylinder, like an open soda can after it had been shaken.

Red and white drill-team flags fluttered behind the boy, snapping in a gentle Texas breeze that blew directly toward the grandstands.

Chapter 5

Legs crossed at his desk, Rostov held the phone to his ear with his left hand and listened. Interrupting the general during one of his tirades was a good way to get shot. With his right hand, the colonel used the stub of a black pencil to compile a list of people he wanted to strangle. Judging from General Zhestakova’s tone, he had his own list of such names — and Rostov was on it.

The Chairman of the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye or GRU, Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, Zhestakova wielded immense power. He had the direct ear of the President and, more important, the collective backing of those generals who provided the presidential muscle. Nicknamed Koschei the Deathless, after the fairytale king who rode naked on horseback through the countryside stealing peasant girls, Zhestakova was also a difficult man to kill.

As a junior officer with the elite Special Forces Alpha Group, Zhestakova had at first been allied with hardliners during the Avgustovsky Putch to oust Mikhail Gorbachev. At the last moment, his boss had switched to the winning side, refusing along with other Alpha and Vympel commanders to move against the Soviet White House as had been planned. The coup failed, and Zhestokova won promotion over prison.

He had enjoyed a noteworthy and even prosperous career since that time, always seeming to be on the winning side, if not necessarily the right one. He made it very clear that his fortunes would not be the only ones to change should the situation with Novo Archangelsk not resolve immediately.

“Do you not see the magnitude here?” Zhestakova asked. It was his first actual question in five minutes, and Rostov paused to make certain it was not rhetorical.

Judging Zhestakova’s pause long enough to warrant a reply, Rostov decided to reply, but carefully. “I do understand, General,” he said. “The American’s are touchy. If they were to link the Novo Archangelsk attacks to Russia—”

“And therein lies my point,” Zhestakova said, his voice breathless as if he were running in place while he talked. “The President is about to give the preparatory command for Full Combat Readiness.”

Rostov held his breath. Full Combat Readiness was equivalent to what the American’s called DefCon 2—with forces from all branches prepared to mobilize at a moment’s notice. The president did it periodically. A trigger-happy Turkish government, an overly independent Ukraine — there had been many reasons for the elevation in operational tempo. But, such escalation came with a price, invariably rattling neighbors who wondered about hidden intentions.

“The Americans will ask questions,” he said, regretting his words immediately.

“Are you suggesting that we not protect ourselves?” Zhestakova said. Then, calming some, “We will blame our escalation on preparation for similar terror attacks.”

“Which is plausible,” Rostov said, showing that he was in full agreement. “U.S. sources say the perpetrator in Texas was an Islamist. Russia is also a target—”

“Which brings to mind several other questions the President would like you to answer.” Zhestakova cut him off.

“A question for me personally?”

“Indeed.” Zhestakova gave a quiet chuckle, as if were watching an old enemy roast on a spit. “The questions are for you personally, Colonel Rostov.”

The fact that the President would speak of him directly made Rostov’s head throb. At times of crisis, anonymity was far better than heroism.

“For instance, how did Novo Archangelsk end up in the hands of Islamists?” Zhestakova said. The sound of shuffling papers came across the line, then the tap of a computer keyboard. “And who do you have in command in Providenya?”

“Captain Evgeni Lodygin, sir.”

“That little shit,” Zhestakova said. “Was he not sent to Providenya because of some unpleasantness with a subordinate’s teenage daughter?”

“That is true,” Rostov said. “I have found him odd enough, but extremely competent and trustworthy.”

“Yes, quite,” Zhestakova said. Rostov could almost hear the saliva dripping off Zhestakova’s teeth as he dragged out the word. “Until one of our top scientists defected and a secret nerve agent turned up in the hands of terrorists under his watch.”

Rostov knew any indictment of Lodygin was an indictment against him as the commanding officer of the entire Novo Archangelsk project. “I assure you, sir,” he said, “trusted operatives are even now about to return Dr. Volodin. I, myself, leave within the hour for Providenya to oversee a thorough investigation of everyone with access to the laboratory.”

“Including Evgeni Lodygin?” Zhestakova said. “An investigation takes time…” He was breathless again, sounding like Rostov had imagined Koschei the Deathless when he was a small boy. “It might interest you to know that the President and I often find the simplest solution is often a bullet to the back of the head.”

“Of course, General,” Rostov said, dropping his pencil.

“Do you know how they did it, Ruslan, back in the Soviet days?” The general had never before addressed Rostov by his given name and to hear it spoken in that breathless hiss made it difficult for Rostov to swallow. Of course he knew how they did it. He’d done it himself.

Zhestakova told him anyway. The words brought a flood of memories that Rostov had worked very hard to suppress, particularly after the birth of his daughter.

“It begins with a surprise visit from a superior,” the general said. “A quiet walk down a dead-end hallway — and an unexpected bullet. Many progressives view the practice as barbaric, but I have always thought it kind — a tender mercy — quick and without the unseemly snot and fear on the part of the condemned. But then, I have always tried to be kind in my dealings with subordinates. Have I not, Colonel?”

“Yes, General,” Rostov managed to reply. He wondered if the reference to the bullet in the head was a suggestion on how he should proceed or a thinly veiled threat. In the end, he knew it was both.

Chapter 6

Special Agent Joel Johnson was fifteen yards out when Allen Lamar dropped to his knees, still clutching the cardboard tube the FBI agents had mistakenly thought was a can of potato chips. The boy pointed the canister toward the crowd like a mortar tube. Even from that distance, Special Agent Johnson had a clear view of Lamar’s face. His eyes had gone glassy, looking past the crowd in an unfocused, thousand-yard stare.

Agent Johnson’s breath caught like a stone in his throat as he watched the foam pour over the lip of the container in a seemingly endless flow. For the first time, he realized Allen Lamar was wearing latex gloves.

Gillette moved left toward the bleachers, vaulting a short fence to get a shot at Lamar without the stadium behind him. This new angle gave him a better target but put him downwind from the foam. He fell before he could raise his sidearm, knees slamming against the concrete walk, before pitching face-first into the fence he’d just jumped. His contorted face pressed against the chain links.

“Stay back!” Johnson shouted to the rest of his team as he himself rushed forward. His heart told him to rush toward his friend and save him, but his instinct told him he had to stop the threat.

Four seconds after Allen Lamar activated the cardboard tube an elderly man in the first row of bleachers began to laugh uncontrollably. A child of five or six seated next to him dropped a bag of popcorn and stared transfixed before throwing up and toppling sideways. Spectators all around the laughing man tried to get to their feet and put some distance between themselves and the vomit. Other bodily fluids were spreading among the crowd like a fast burning fire. Unable to control their muscles, those affected fell like ragdolls on the people below them. Some became hysterically angry, tearing at their clothing and screaming nonsensical threats into the night air. Eyes grew bloodshot in an instant. Mucous streamed from noses.

Muscles began to spasm, causing people to arch violently backward, throwing them down in a human blossom as if a powerful wind had been aimed directly at the grandstand. Allen Lamar and his two compatriots fell moments later, overcome by their proximity to the fumes pouring out of Lamar’s canister. The invisible cloud moved on the breeze, felling everyone it touched.

Spectators began to stampede, back pedaling away from their dying neighbors, yanking at spouses in a frantic effort to get ahead of the unseen monster attacking the stadium. Terrified parents grabbed their younger children and fled, slipping on the vomit of the person next to them, clutching their throats as they ran. The band fell silent and the air was filled with mournful wailing and the pounding of feet on aluminum stadium seats.

His back to the wind and still a dozen yards away from Lamar, Johnson pulled up short. He caught sight of Andrea Lopez running directly toward him. Of course she would be the one who disobeyed his order. She had an ass-magnet that pulled her toward danger with the gravity of ten thousand suns.

A father and his teenage son stumbled directly in front of her, and then fell headlong into the paved walkway. Lopez hit the invisible cloud at a sprint, chest heaving, drawing in a lungful of whatever deadly stuff this was. Her legs gave out as if she’d been hit in the head with an iron bar. Forward momentum carried her skidding across the concrete nose first. Her hands dangled at her sides on useless arms. Legs writhing, she struggled, trying in vain to rise.

Johnson slammed the top of the chain link fence with both hands, fighting the urge to rush in. It was much too late to save her — and there were hundreds more lives to consider. Instead, he vaulted over the fence and onto the track that surrounded the football field — pushing dumbstruck cheerleaders and the flag-waving drill team back farther, into the wind.

Angie James’s voice crackled across the radio. “Lopez is down—”

“Stay back, Angie!” Johnson screamed, for the benefit of his agents as well as all those around him. “Everyone stay back! This is gas! Repeat. We’re dealing with poison gas!”

The press gaggle, there to do a story on a state football championship, smelled something much more tempting in the carnage. The reporter’s mantra, “If it bleeds, it leads,” drew them toward the danger as surely as it had poor Lopez. One of them, a balding guy with a hefty belly, rushed past Johnson in the melee to get a closer look. His camera fell from his grasp moments later as he sagged to his knees, clutching his chest and staring at the night sky in shock. A group of four other cameramen watched him fall and skidded to a stop, deciding it was best to keep their distance.

“Are you getting this?” Johnson heard a female reporter ask one of the photographers.

“Oh, hell yeah,” the cameraman said, the giddiness in his voice belying the carnage spilling across the field. “We’re live.”

The death blossom grew as the invisible poison moved through the grandstands, felling everyone it touched.

Johnson looked back and forth, wracking his brain for some kind of plan. Well over a hundred killed by an unseen and apparently unstoppable force, their horrific deaths streamed on live television.

It was the stuff of terrorists’ dreams.

All the girls on the drill team but one dropped their flags and fled to the far side of the field. The remaining girl stood frozen in place, eyes glazed at the sight of so much death — the false maturity of high school draining away to expose the face of a frightened little child.

Her flag popped and waved in the breeze, folding in on itself as the wind shifted — to blow back toward the field.

In the stands, spectators broke in a full stampede, pushing and shoving, jumping over the dead and dying, trampling the small and weak, anything to escape — anything to live. A referee, not two steps away from Johnson, fell where he stood, laughing hysterically and ripping away his striped shirt. Beyond the ref, the Reavis High student dressed as the red-and-white ram mascot swayed on his feet before toppling at the sidelines. The gigantic horned head rolled off to reveal a shock of blond hair and the stricken face of a young man.

Johnson’s hands tightened reflexively into fists. A heated knot seethed low in his belly. For a fleeting instant, he wondered if it was the poison gas or anger. He decided he didn’t care. Taking three quick breaths, he ran for the horned head of the ram mascot, jumping the lifeless body of the referee on the way. Holding his breath, he scooped up the hollow costume head and carried it toward the cardboard canister that still foamed and spewed its deadly contents into the air from the grass beside the arched body of Allen Lamar. Johnson did his best to approach from upwind, and dropped the giant ram head over the canister like a lid in an effort to contain the gas. He thought it worked until he noticed the cartoonish screen mouth the mascot used to see through. Exertion and adrenaline worked to deplete his body of oxygen. His lungs screamed for air.

With no clear vision of what the threat actually was or where it was coming from, people ran in every direction. Some even stampeding across the field, street shoes slipping in the fresh grass, floundering to their feet and running on. Some were in a panic, hoping only to save themselves. In others, humanity bloomed, and they risked their lives to aid those falling victim around them. One of every two who got within fifteen feet of the spewing canister fell in their tracks, even now that it was covered with the costume ram head.

A half second before his lungs convulsed and forced him to draw a breath, Johnson stripped off his leather jacket and draped it over the mascot, plugging the screened opening.

The muscles in the agent’s back tensed as soon as he breathed, yanking his head back as if some unseen hand grabbed a handful of his hair. A searing pain ran like an electric current up both sides of his spine — a Taser jolt that didn’t abate. He fell backward, balanced for a long moment on his heels and the back of his head, his eyes wide and staring up at the stadium lights. The muscles in one side of his back overpowered the other, convulsing even harder so he fell sideways. He struggled to regain his balance, to push himself up, but there was nothing there. It was as if something had been scrambled between his brain and the muscles he wished to control. The tension in his back grew until he thought his bones would crack, but the pain eased, and he suddenly felt the uncontrollable urge to laugh. He lay on his side now, the cool grass of the football field pressed against his cheek. From the corner of his eye, he could just make out Andrea James directing people away from the overturned costume head. She must have seen him cover it and knew the threat was there. Johnson tried to close his eyes, but even the muscles in his face rebelled, drawing back into a grimace that he was sure looked like a terrifying grin. His chest heaved as if crushed by an unseen weight. Spasming lungs made him begin to giggle uncontrollably, even as a single tear escaped his eye and ran down his stricken cheek and into the trampled grass of the football field.

Twenty yards upwind, a slender brunette woman wearing a red fleece jacket and matching hat used two fingers on the screen of her phone to zoom in on the picture of the downed FBI agent. “This is gold,” she said to the cameraman beside her. “Tell me you’re getting this…”

Chapter 7

Quinn brought up a live stream from Dallas on his phone while he listened to the breaking news on the Hoyt’s truck radio. He’d spent enough time in Iraq to know the devastating effects of poison gas when he saw them.

An Alaska State trooper and three uniformed officers and a handful of detectives and brass from Anchorage PD rolled up but let the cop shooters sit handcuffed on the side of the road. Everyone stood in the shadow of the mountains alongside the Seward Highway, glued to their phones as the news of the terrorist attack unfolded.

Seeing enough, Quinn checked for traffic and trotted across the two-lane, pressing #2 on his speed dial as he slid his way down the gravel ledge on the other side of the highway. He came to a stop beside a set of railroad tracks that ran on a raised gravel bed between the highway and the ocean. The metal rails provided a convenient and relatively indestructible target for the toe of his riding boot and he kicked at them repeatedly while he waited for his phone call to jump through the series of towers, switches, and cables that would connect him to the White House. Ronnie Garcia followed, surfing down the incline on the loose gravel, one foot in front of the other to come to a stop beside him. Turning her head just right for the afternoon light to catch it, she gazed out across the frothy chocolate waters of Turnagain Arm.

“No answer,” Quinn said, looking at Garcia. A stiff sea breeze blew a thick strand of ebony hair across a deeply bronzed cheek. She didn’t bother to move it. If he’d had time, he would have told her how incredible she was standing in the wind wearing full motorcycle leathers.

Garcia shrugged, wonderfully oblivious to her own beauty. “Probably that whole National Security Advisor thing. I’m sure he’s busy.”

Quinn kicked harder at the rails and ended the call, redialing immediately.

This time, a female voice answered on the first ring. It was Emiko Miyagi, Quinn’s martial arts teacher and friend. The mysterious Japanese woman also happened to be Winfield Palmer’s right hand. The two were as close as people could be without being romantically involved. They’d even had that for a time, when they were younger, until Miyagi had decided Palmer knew far too much about her past.

Quinn was surprised to hear her voice. She’d been out of the country, trying to locate her daughter — and it had not been going so well.

“Quinn san,” she said. Miyagi was normally curt, wasting little time on pleasantries, but now she seemed strained. Quinn chalked it up to the futile search for her assassin daughter. “He is on another line at the moment. May I take a message?”

A message? Quinn shook his head in disbelief. This was a first. When Quinn needed briefing on something important, Miyagi was, more often than not, the one who read him in. They’d been through far too much for her to shut him out with the we’ll get back to you line.

“I’ll hold,” he said.

Winfield Palmer must have snatched the phone away because he came on the line a half moment later.

“Quinn,” he said, his voice a detached whisper. “I’m not sure if you’re watching the news, but we’re in the middle of something here.”

“That’s exactly why I’m calling, sir,” Quinn said. As much as he respected Palmer, he couldn’t remember a time in the three years they’d known each other that either man had called the other just to chat.

“I have your latest physical pulled up on screen right now,” Palmer said. “You’re barely even cleared for light duty.”

“I’m fine,” Quinn said. “And more than willing to take the risk.”

“This isn’t about you,” Palmer said. “I can’t run the risk of letting one of these bastards slip away because you’re not completely healed from your last endeavor. Don’t forget, you’re not our only asset. Now take the time to heal, and let me get back to work. That’s an order.”

“Boss,” Quinn said, coming as close to pleading as he ever had in his life. “I know my capabilities, and I am fine. Honestly. Let me help.”

“And how about Garcia?” Palmer asked. “She was still in a sling when I saw her a month ago. Are you telling me she’s good to go?”

“That’s a difficult issue, sir,” Quinn said, deadpan. He reached to stroke Garcia’s hair, knowing she might never let him touch her again when she found out what he was doing.

“Is she with you right now?”

“That would be correct,” Quinn said, still forcing the smile. He pressed the phone to his ear to make certain none of Palmer’s gruff voice spilled out for Garcia to hear.

“I’ll make this easy for you then,” Palmer said. “Yes or no? Has she healed enough to go back to work?”

“I don’t believe so, sir,” Quinn said. He sighed, watching Garcia absentmindedly massage her injured shoulder. She’d unzipped her riding jacket midway down her chest, making it difficult for Quinn to concentrate. The rich black leather was a perfect contrast to her deep coffee-and-cream complexion.

“But you’re good to go?”

“I’m afraid so,” Quinn said.

“Well, hell,” Palmer said. “Let me talk to her then.”

Quinn held his breath as he passed Garcia the cellphone. He could only hear Garcia’s end of the conversation, but that half told him it was Palmer, and he was in serious trouble.

“I’m fine, sir,” Garcia said. “Thank you for asking… No, sir, still some soreness, but I am definitely fit and ready to work… Quinn? No, he’s in good shape. I would not hesitate for a minute to put him in…” She gave Quinn a grinning thumbs-up. “Okay, sir.”

She handed the phone back to Quinn.

“Pack a bag,” Palmer said.

“Where to?”

“Still trying to figure that out,” Palmer said. “You interested to hear what your partner said about your fitness for duty?”

“I heard it all, sir,” Quinn said, feeling gutted.

“I’ll call you back with more news when I have it. The President wants to brief the nation within the hour.”

That’s fast, Quinn thought, but didn’t say it.

“We have damn little actionable intelligence as of yet,” Palmer said, as if reading Quinn’s mind, “but POTUS feels the American people need to know he’s ready to act the moment we have anything to go on. The markets are going to tank when the opening bell rings tomorrow, and he wants to do something to keep them from hitting bottom.”

Quinn nodded, thinking that through. Terrorists committed violence in order to destabilize nations — to tear the underpinnings out of a culture they didn’t agree with. President Ricks had vowed not to let that happen on his watch. A retired Navy Admiral, former SEAL, and recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Ricks struck Quinn as a man who knew where the keys to the Tomahawks were located and wasn’t afraid to use them. He’d taken the reins from the disgraced former president Hartman Drake in what had amounted to a necessary coup just months before, vowing to lead the American people with a reasoned but firm hand until the next election. Ricks had no ambitions when it came to politics — which made it much easier for him choose to do what was necessary rather than just politically prudent.

Quinn had met the new president only once since he’d taken office. He was tall and gave the impression of a man in uniform even when wearing a business suit. The ribbons and medals of his combat experience on land and sea were etched in the creases of his face and the gleam of his eye. The new president had stood from behind his desk in the Oval Office at that first meeting, extending his hand to Quinn and looking him up and down as he nodded in approval. “So,” he’d said. “This is my star henchman.”

Quinn liked him from the start. He’d never considered himself a henchman, but, he supposed, it was an apt description depending on your point of view. In fact, Quinn didn’t really care what anyone called him so long as he was henching for the right side.

Palmer’s patrician voice yanked him back to the present. The national security advisor liked to hear a certain amount of feedback when he talked on the phone, even if it was nothing more than a grunt. Quinn had been listening silently for too long.

“Hello?”

“I’m still here, sir,” Quinn said.

“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this,” Palmer said, “but we are in a shit storm of unknown dimensions here. I’ll get back with you shortly.”

Garcia worked to put on her helmet, wincing from the pain brought on by the angle of her shoulder. At first she slapped Quinn’s hand away, like a child wanting to zip her own coat, then grudgingly accepted his help. “What did he say?” she asked as he fastened her chinstrap.

“He said to pack.” Quinn slid the phone in his pocket and climbed aboard the BMW. He wracked his brain for an easy way to tell Garcia he’d thrown her under the bus just moments before she’d lied through her teeth to say he was okay. He planted his feet in the loose gravel and waited for Ronnie to climb on behind him — harder now with her bum shoulder.

“You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said, clenching her teeth to try and hide the fact that she was in pain.

“Are you going to have trouble hanging on?”

Garcia recoiled at the sympathy. “You just ride the bike. I’ll be fine.”

Quinn nodded. “We’ve still got dinner in a couple of hours at Marx Brothers.

“Seriously?” Garcia said. “I thought we had to pack?”

“We also have to eat.” Quinn shrugged.

She leaned forward as if to put her arms around him, then sat back suddenly, flipping the visor on her helmet. “Wait a minute,” she said. “He’s not calling me in, is he?”

Quinn shrugged. “I’m not sure.” Lie number three.

He pressed the start button, feeling the big Beemer’s familiar sideways torque as he revved the engine.

“Good to go?” He checked in one last time via the intercom, hoping for some sense of understanding.

“I told you I’m fine,” she snapped, in a voice that said she was anything but.

Quinn groaned. He’d planned this day to perfection. The gorgeous ride down his favorite mountain highway, a dance recital with his daughter, and a date with Garcia to a five-star dinner at his favorite Anchorage restaurant. But the ride had been cut short by the arrest of the cop shooter, and Quinn had ended up begging his boss to bring him in like some kid asking to join a ballgame. And now he had to make the hour ride back to Anchorage wearing a very angry woman like a backpack.

Chapter 8

Where American military aircraft were refined pieces of sleek equipment, they were also finicky and prone to sucking up runway debris. Russian military aircraft were engineered like tractors, capable of operating in the most austere of battlefield conditions — like the Providenya airstrip.

A steady rain pounded the drab gray buildings of the old MIG base by the time the Su 35 carrying Colonel Ruslan Rostov rolled to a stop over the gravel and decaying concrete of the Providenya military airstrip. The landing was timed to fall in between American satellite passes and across the bay from the village so as to be out of the way of prying eyes. The two-seat “trainer” version of the Sukhoi allowed Rostov to make the trip from his office in Khabarovsk to Providenya in just over two hours. The dart-like fighter jet could have traveled faster, but for the two additional external fuel tanks required to make the 3500-kilometer journey.

Captain Lodygin waited at the edge of the runway in an ancient black ZiL sedan, made clean and shiny by the rain. He emerged from the car wearing a gas mask and handed one to Rostov as soon as his feet touched the ground from the small boarding ladder. The colonel slipped it on over his head, feeling foolish since the pilot went about the business of fueling without one.

“Is this still necessary,” he said, glaring through the foggy lenses at Lodygin. “Has not the rain cleared the air?”

The captain shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not,” he said. “But the winds are notoriously unpredictable here between the mountains and the sea. Who knows what has happened to the residual gas…”

Rostov pulled the elastic strap tight behind his bald head.

“I assume you’ve heard about the attacks,” the captain said.

“Attacks?” The colonel sank into the tired leather of the ZiL’s rear seat and shut the door.

Lodygin made his way around the sedan and got in beside the colonel. His voice was hollow as it passed through the filter of the mask, like a science-fiction movie villain. It was impossible to tell behind the filter and rubber seal, but it looked as though the man was grinning. “The second attack was in Los Angeles — also on live television. Hundreds are dead from an unknown nerve agent. The way it moved so effectively through the crowds, it has to be Novo Archangelsk.”

“So it is beginning to surface…” Rostov had been shouting so much over the last two hours that he could muster little more than a croak. “Volodin must have put it on the market for sale to the highest bidder.”

“Someone has,” Lodygin said. “The formula for Novo Archangelsk is unknown to the Americans. Perhaps—”

“It was unknown to the Americans,” Rostov said, letting his head fall back against the headrest of his seat. “It will not take them long to analyze samples in the lungs and tissue of the victims. Do the Americans have a suspect?” Rostov asked.

Lodygin’s shrug was almost lost on his narrow shoulders. “Another high school student they believe to have been radicalized by Muslim extremists, much like the attack in Texas.”

“More damned jihadists!” Rostov pounded the armrest. He could picture General Zhestakova inviting him on a walk — down a dead-end hallway.

Lodygin interrupted the terrifying thought. “Perhaps these attacks will buy us some time to find Volodin while the Americans lick their wounds.”

Rostov scoffed. “Americans are not known for sitting back while they lick their wounds. They will be hungry to punish someone — and if they find the New Archangel leads back to Russia…” He shook his head, unwilling to even speak the thought. He looked at the driver, a young soldier who also wore a gas mask. “Take us directly to the laboratory.”

Lodygin’s eyes flicked back and forth, buglike behind the lenses of the mask as they rode together in silence. It occurred to Rostov that Volodin was not the only one capable of selling this new nerve gas to the highest bidder.

Still wearing the mask out of precaution, Rostov stalked toward Dr. Volodin’s office the way he went everywhere, leaning slightly forward at the waist, bald head pointed bulletlike at his intended target, steel-blue eyes slicing their way through everything in their path. The sociopath Lodygin’s heels clicked on the polished tile floor as he scrambled up from behind to step deftly around and give a discreet flick of his fingers. He motioned the guard to unlock the door to Volodin’s study. In point of fact, Rostov would have been put out had the Captain not stepped up in such a way.

The private leaned in just enough to turn the knob before snapping to in a hasty salute.

“As you were,” Rostov said over his shoulder, leaving Lodygin to shut the door behind him. The captain was four inches shorter than Rostov’s two meters. Hunched and narrow shoulders made him look smaller and caused his uniform tunic to sag in the center of his chest creating a loose pocket Rostov was surely big enough to hide a small cat. A flap of black hair was plastered across the man’s pallid forehead as if he’d never seen a photograph of Hitler. Rostov could not help but think there was a need for greasy instruments like Captain Lodygin, so long as they were kept in a different box and weren’t allowed to sully the other tools.

“Dr. Volodin is not very tidy for a brilliant scientist,” Rostov noted, standing just inside the door and letting his eyes play around the room. The office was a mirror of the man, furnished with a fine leather couch and a desk of rich mahogany — both covered with a thin patina of the glacial dust that seemed to coat everything in eastern Siberia. Microscopes, gas burners, and glassware of every shape and size occupied a row of metal tables running down the center of room. Several dark circles discolored the tile below the tables indicating mishaps with chemicals or even small fires. Computers and other scientific instruments both large and small occupied various stations along the sidewall opposite the mahogany desk, which seemed more fitting for a world leader than a cloistered chemist.

Three orange suits of thick rubber hung like skinned beasts on pegs along the far wall. Beside the suits, situated at waist height, ran a long window of reinforced glass looking into the pressure-sealed work lab complete with rows of stainless steel rabbit cages. But for all the cutting-edge scientific equipment, the most prominent fixtures in the room were the piles and piles of paper, some starting on the tile floor and reaching Rostov’s waist. One instrument that resembled a microwave had become home to a frayed stack of folders held together with several fat rubber bands. Volodin’s scrawled handwriting covered every scrap of paper in mathematical equations and drawings of chemical compounds. Oddly, a stack of neatly rolled woolen socks was stacked in the metal in-basket atop the doctor’s desk. A wicker laundry hamper sat off the end of the desk stacked with printouts of time sensitive e-mails and other important correspondence.

Rostov had been to the lab before and seen firsthand the scientist’s unorthodox and erratic behaviors.

“There is an extremely fine line between brilliance and madness,” he said, more to the stacks of paper than to Lodygin.

“A necessary risk, I suppose,” the captain said.

“I don’t remember it being this bad,” Rostov said, turning to shoot an accusatory look at Lodygin. This had, after all, occurred on his watch. “How long has he been living like this?”

Lodygin shrugged, affecting the narrow-eyed, deadpan drawl that made Rostov want to put a bullet in the back of his head. “To one degree or another… since well before I arrived, to be sure. The man’s methods are odd, there is no disputing that, but lately it has been difficult to tell where his mind is. But his methods produce results.”

“I’ll give you that,” Rostov nodded, beginning to pick through the piles of paper. “In a war, results are all that matters, I suppose…” He spun to face Lodygin. “But there are no results now that you have let him sell or destroy the entire supply of the gas!”

“There are other scientists in Russia,” Lodygin said, still unaware of how close he was to a concrete floor and a killing chair. “Might we not find someone else to decipher the doctor’s notes and manufacture more of the New Archangel without him?”

“Tread lightly there,” Rostov said, as he took a seat in Volodin’s chair and began to go through desk drawers. “The fewer people that know of this debacle the better. I am quite certain that I will be called back to Moscow at any moment.”

He flipped through the contents of the lap drawer, which consisted mainly of foil gum wrappers and broken pencils, preferring to think rather than speak any further to Lodygin. The man’s voice was like some toxic resin on his ears and it made him physically ill to listen to it for long. Or perhaps, Rostov thought, he was ill because he knew what his reception would be should he not have any answers before General Zhestakova summoned him to Moscow.

There were many in the Kremlin who had supported his idea to develop New Archangel — but in the end, all they would remember is that Rostov was in charge, and that he had failed.

The failure had not come because the gas was used against the United States. That had always been the idea. Even the use of cut outs in the form of radical Islamists had been discussed at length — on the right timetable, with the necessary backstops in place to keep blame from falling into Russia’s lap.

Captain Lodygin’s sullen voice pulled Rostov back to the present circumstance. “I’m certain there are other chemists who would do the job quietly… with the right… incentives.” The man spoke as if he relished the thought of applying said incentives, the more heavy-handed and cruel the better. “Do you wish me to begin at once?”

Rostov ignored him, removing a stack of shipping labels from the lap drawer, and ran a thick finger down the pages as he read the carbon copies of previous labels, ignoring Captain Lodygin. “This is interesting,” he said. “Volodin has been making shipments of what he labels “Vitamin supplements” to someone named Petyr Volodin in New York City.”

“A brother?”

Rostov shook his head, perusing the slips. “His son.” The consummate scientist, Dr. Volodin had even kept notes on his correspondence. Shipped eight canisters BGH to Petyr, the latest entry noted. Rostov flipped through the pages of the journal until he found another entry where Volodin had written out Binary Growth Hormone, rather than BGH.

Lodygin held up his mobile phone to show the Internet search image of a shirtless, muscular man with spiked black hair. He had a tattoo of a grinning skull on his belly and an eight-pointed star on the front of each shoulder, just above his chest.

The captain released a poisonous sigh. Rostov couldn’t help but wish he’d put the gas mask back on to hide his hideous grin. “Petyr Volodin is a marginally successful cage fighter who trains at a gym in Brighton Beach.” Lodygin sneered. “Apparently, he calls himself Petyr the Wolf.”

“He is Vory.” Rostov nodded at the star tattoos. “Those must be from time spent in a Russian prison,”

“It would seem so,” Lodygin said.

Rostov mulled this over. If the Bratva — the Russian Mafia — were involved in the theft of New Archangel, there was a chance the burden of blame would fall somewhere else. Rostov might actually be on the other end of the gun during that long walk down the dead-end hallway.

He glanced up at Lodygin.

“Brighton Beach, you say?”

The captain licked his lips as he perused the Internet information regarding Volodin’s son. “Yes. In New York City.”

Rostov thrummed his fingers against the counter, thinking of ways he might avoid a bullet. “We must send someone to visit this Petyr the Wolf.”

Chapter 9

There were countless times when Quinn and Garcia had been supremely content to sit together and say nothing at all. This was not one of those times. Thankfully, Quinn’s daughter jabbered away nonstop all the way to the dance recital in the backseat of the crew cab GMC Quinn had borrowed from his mother.

Outside the pickup, gray clouds loomed lower and darker than they had during the earlier motorcycle ride — threatening an all-out storm, just like Garcia’s demeanor.

Mattie had just finished telling them about a new boy from school named Zane who only ate peanut butter sandwiches, when they pulled up in front of his parents’ house. The story made Quinn wonder what kind of a father he’d be when she started dating. Luckily for the boys who were sure to fall in love with her, he probably wouldn’t live that long.

The front door opened as soon as they drove up. Kim walked out, making her way toward the driver’s side of the pickup, waving serenely at Jericho. She wore a zippered white hoodie jacket, open at the front despite the evening chill and threat of rain. Her blue Alaska Grown T-shirt was tight enough to show off her trim figure. Gray capris revealed the metal works of a high-tech prosthetic leg fitted to her above-the-knee amputation. The sniper who had shot her was dead, her neck broken by Quinn in Japan, but that didn’t excuse him from being the reason that sniper had come after Kim in the first place. Still, enough time had passed that Kim appeared to have forgiven him, or at the very least, nacred over any anger she still harbored like a pearl formed over a nasty irritation.

Mattie unsnapped her seatbelt and leaned in between the bucket seats. Deep brown curls fell across her face as she look back and forth between Quinn and Garcia. But for the dark hair she’d inherited from Jericho, she was a mini-me to Kim. “Are you guys having a fight?” she said, swaying back and forth between the two seats. Like her father, she’d never been one to sit still. “Because it seems like you’re having a fight.”

Garcia looked out the window, nodding toward Quinn’s ex-wife. “It looks like Kim wants to talk to you,” she said. Her passive-aggressive expression brightened as she turned to give Mattie a wink. “How about you play me that song again on the piano?”

Mattie shrugged. “Yep,” she said. “You’re having a fight all right.”

Quinn pressed the button on the armrest. The driver’s side window came down with an electronic whir. Mattie stopped to talk with her mom for a moment before dragging Garcia inside the house by the hand. Window down, a moist evening breeze hit him in the face, carrying the beginning mists of an approaching rain and the familiar scent of the towering blue spruce that dominated the Quinn’s front yard. It had seemed so big when Jericho and Bo were boys. Over the years, the brothers had lost at least two good hatchets, countless knives, and a half dozen of their father’s screwdrivers, throwing them at targets set up with the spruce as a backdrop. Now as tall as the chimney, the tree cast a huge shadow across the two-car driveway. Its rustling boughs sheltered Kim from the brunt of the north wind.

“Don’t you have dinner reservations?” Kim asked, leaning in so her forearms rested along the doorframe.

Quinn let his head loll back against the headrest. “We do,” he said, raising his wrist so he could see the time on his Tag Aquaracer. “Marx Brothers. In a little over a half an hour.”

“I love that place,” Kim said. “Great Caesar salads.”

She rested her chin on her arms, looking up at Quinn with the big blue eyes that had caught him back when they were still in high school. She stood in silence for a long time, working up to something. Quinn was used to it. There had been many silences between them over the years. Most of them, he deserved. The tiniest hint of a smile perked her lips when she finally decided to speak.

“From the look on your face I’m guessing you haven’t asked her yet,” she said.

Quinn sat up, gripping the wheel and looking directly at his ex-wife. The only other person he’d told about the ring was Jacques. His line of work had trained him to be an incredibly skilled liar, but he and Kim had too much history. She knew all his tells. Quinn decided to draw on his SERE training and stick with the original lie no matter what tricks the interrogator pulled. “Ask her what?”

“Come on, Jericho,” Kim said, her face serene. He knew a look of pity when he saw it. She gave a slow shake of her head. “There’s only one thing in the world that can make you jumpy — and that’s getting serious with a woman. I know, cause I was there the first time you ever got serious.”

Quinn fell back in the seat, surrendering to Kim’s wiles. “I have not asked her,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. I’d planned to, then things got… complicated.”

“I saw the news,” Kim said. “Figured they would.” She pushed off the door so she was standing up, her face level with Quinn’s now. She bounced her fingers on the doorframe, swishing air back and forth in her puffed cheeks the way she did when deciding whether to say something that she’d been holding back. “I gotta say, Jericho, you are hands down the best human being I know.” She peered at him, head tilted to one side so her blond hair pooled around her neck, still deciding. A resigned sigh told Quinn he was about to get an earful. He knew her tells too. “But I have to admit, there is a righteous stubbornness about you that made me want to pull your hair out a million times over. Lord knows I have no right to give you relationship advice. If I had it to do all over again, I’d try not to be so bitchy while you were out doing whatever it is you do. But I own the choices I’ve made.” Kim wiped away a tear with the forearm of her hoodie and stepped back from the window. The front door slammed as Garcia and Mattie come out of the house. They held hands and skipped toward the truck, jumping the cracks in the sidewalk, singing some nonsensical song.

Kim sighed. “You deserve a little happiness. I think you can have it with Ronnie. Just be patient with her. Because as righteous and perfect as you are, loving you is an awful hard thing to do.”

The boughs of the big spruce whispered and groaned as the wind shifted, bringing great drops of rain to spatter against the windshield. Mattie threw back her head to catch the rain on her tongue.

“She learned that from you,” Kim said. “I never can get her to come in out of the rain — no matter how cold it is. I think she’d rather freeze to death than miss something fun.”

Quinn watched as Garcia stood beside his little girl, head tilted back to catch raindrops on her tongue as well.

Kim patted the doorframe. “Your life is always going to be complicated, Jer. Just do what you need to do. If you wait for it to calm down, it’s going to be a long wait.”

Kim made her way around the truck to walk back inside, expertly navigating the wet pavement on her prosthetic leg, ignoring the rain. She gave Garcia a hug, then shooed Mattie toward the door. For that brief moment Quinn had a view of both women together. He and Garcia had fought, and bled, and even killed side by side. They had shared emotions and events that few human beings even discussed. And still, no one would ever know him as well as Kim.

For all his pitched battles and bloody hand-to-hand fights, Quinn could imagine nothing quite so fraught with danger as proposing marriage to Veronica Garcia. Since taking up martial arts in middle school, he’d approached everything in his life with the same strategic mindset: prepare daily to meet his opponent, then, when an opportunity presented itself, move directly to contact.

The evening had fallen from chilly to cold, along with Garcia’s mood. A pelting rain creased the windshield and turned the asphalt streets of downtown Anchorage into shimmering mirrors of neon lights. Sitting across from Quinn in the plush leather passenger seat, Garcia faced away, staring out the window. She’d hardly said a word since they’d left the house, and Quinn couldn’t help but wonder if he was about to walk into an ambush of emotion.

Three elderly couples in brightly colored rain jackets — the last of the tourists until ski season kicked in — walked from the corner of Fifth Avenue and H Street, toward the Glacier Brewhouse. Even inside the pickup, the smells of wood-fired salmon and hot bread made Quinn’s mouth water. It was a fine restaurant, but his parents had taken him there with Kim to celebrate the night they’d gotten engaged. That alone was enough to make Quinn choose a different place to propose to Ronnie. Marx Brothers was more elegant anyway, tucked into a tiny house on Third Avenue, a little over two blocks away.

Quinn waited for another group to cross at the intersection. These were locals, judging from their uniform of Helly Hansen rain gear over fleece jackets, blue jeans, and XTRATUF rubber boots. The windshield wipers thwacked back and forth, adding to the intensity of the silence inside the pickup. He was warm and dry, but Quinn wondered if he might not be happier riding alone in the rain.

He’d purchased the ring nearly two months before, while Garcia was still in the hospital. It started to burn a hole in his pocket immediately after he picked it up, but he knew the time wasn’t right. Ronnie Garcia had a prideful streak. She could take being slapped around by the bad guys, stabbed, or even shot, but she would not accept pity.

So Quinn had been patient, playing a game of watchful waiting, looking for the moment when she felt good enough about herself to feel good about them. In preparation, he’d brought her to Alaska to spend more time with his parents and the wild state that had raised him.

She and Mattie hit it off like long-lost friends. Quinn’s mother spent an entire day with her shopping in downtown Anchorage and getting pedicures together — which to Quinn’s mom had always been a right of passage for any of her sons’ girlfriends. Quinn’s old man, who had never been much of a talker, had invited Ronnie into the sanctum of his mancave, going so far as to open his walk-in gun safe and show her his prized Holland & Holland double rifle. A match to Theodore Roosevelt’s. 500/450 Nitro Express, “Big Stick,” the rifle, was worth well over a hundred thousand dollars. Few people outside the family even knew of its existence, let alone got to hold it in their hands. The old-school double barrel was once tough and ornate, functional and elegant, and a perfect metaphor for the elder Quinn. The fact that their father hunted with a rifle that had no scope and was easily worth twice what he’d paid for their house had caused many a hushed discussion between the two brothers as they grew up. The sacred but old-school Holland & Holland was a personification of their father, and there was a considerable amount of contention between Bo and Jericho over who stood to inherit it.

Quinn’s phone started to buzz inside the pocket of his leather jacket as he pulled alongside the curb in front of a parking meter on Third Avenue a half block from Marx Brothers.

Quinn sighed and answered the phone while Garcia gathered up her purse and raincoat. She’d wait for him to come around and open the door, as was their agreement when they weren’t on the job.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Chair Force, you go through with it yet?” Jacques Thibodaux’s rambunctious Cajun voice spilled out of the phone. Extremely intelligent, Thibodaux had graduated cum laude from LSU and was fluent in French and Italian. Some who didn’t know him took his hulking size and Cajun accent for a sign that he was slow — they were universally mistaken. If Quinn hadn’t known the giant was a square-jawed brute, straight out of a United States Marine Corps recruiting commercial, it would have been easy to picture him as the energetic and bouncy Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh stories he read to Mattie.

“Did ya? Well, did ya?” Thibodaux’s words bounced over the phone. Quinn pressed the device to his ear so they didn’t keep bouncing and wind up in Garcia’s ears. “If you didn’t, you’re a coward, and if you did, you’re an idiot.”

“No,” Quinn said.

“No, you just haven’t gotten around to it yet?” Thibodaux said. “Or no, you’ve come to your senses?”

Quinn gave a wan smile to Garcia, who was hopefully getting only his side of the conversation.

“Not yet,” Quinn said, keeping things noncommittal.

Thibodaux snorted. “Them’s the words of a man who feels compelled to walk up the gallows steps without bein’ ordered to.”

“The arrangement seems to be treating you all right,” Quinn said. There was no need to remind the big Marine of his supremely happy marriage and seven sons.

“It do, it do, l’ami,” Thibodaux said. “But what’s good for the goose… well, you know the rest—”

There was an audible click on the line and Thibodaux’s voice cut out for a moment. Quinn looked at his phone and saw it was a call from Palmer.

“I gotta go.”

“Okay,” Thibodaux said. “But seriously, I’m happy for you, beb. Just don’t want you to come crawlin’ to me down the road and say I didn’t give you no warning.”

Quinn ended the call and felt a creeping twinge of dread as he answered the next one. The national security advisor to the president wasn’t calling to encourage him on his date with Garcia.

“Ready to go?” Win Palmer said.

“That depends on where I’m going,” Quinn said.

“Don’t you people have television in Alaska?” Palmer said. His voice was pinched and more than a little annoyed.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, sir.”

“There’s been a second attack,” Palmer said.

Quinn held the phone away from his ear so Garcia could hear.

“Another deployment of lethal gas,” Palmer continued. “This one happened during the taping of some kind of celebrity-dating reality TV show in Los Angeles. A hundred and three dead at last count — cast, crew, and much of the studio audience. Cameras caught the whole damned thing on live television. It’s not enough that these bastards attack us at home. They have discovered the extra boost of terror from keeping the attacks in the media from the start. Every network and cable channel is running an endless loop of death and carnage — giving them hours of free publicity.”

“I’m with Garcia now,” Quinn said, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Palmer didn’t call just to give him news.

“I may have something for her,” Palmer said. “But I want her back here until we get a better read on her shoulder.”

Ronnie closed her eyes and groaned at the confirmation that she was on the injured list.

“Quinn.” Palmer plowed ahead. “There’s someone I need you to meet.”

Quinn looked at his Aquaracer. “We can catch a flight to Seattle in a hour and a half. Should be able to get a red-eye to DC or Baltimore.”

“Don’t bother,” Palmer said. “She’s already en route to you.”

“Coming to Alaska?” Quinn said. Garcia cocked her head to one side. Thick black hair pooled over her injured shoulder throwing her already dark face into deeper shadows.

“ETA at JBER is just before midnight Alaska time.” JBER was Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, adjacent to the city of Anchorage. “In the meantime, I need you packed and ready to fly to Nome.”

Quinn shrugged to Garcia. This was odd. Nome, Alaska, wasn’t exactly the cradle of terrorism.

“We’re still putting everything together,” Palmer said. “I’ll brief you all at the same time. I’m not sure how long you’ll be out, but be prepared to act as a guide for a Russian speaker who has never set foot in Alaska. I’ve arranged for a C12 to take you to Nome tonight.”

“Is Jacques coming?” Quinn asked.

“I have Thibodaux working on another matter,” Palmer said offering no more on the subject. “Be ready by 2100.”

Quinn returned the phone to his pocket, next to the lump that was the engagement ring.

Garcia turned in her seat so she faced him. “Why do you think he wouldn’t tell you who he’s sending?” she said. “What’s up with that?”

“I am not sure,” Quinn said working through the possibilities.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m sure of,” Garcia said, her full lips set, absent their normally humorous perk at each corner. “Palmer knows I speak Russian, but for some reason he has decided I’m not fit enough to go on this mission with you.”

“They nearly killed you,” Quinn said. “You know he’d bench me too if the roles were reversed.”

Garcia scoffed. “No, he wouldn’t. He hasn’t. I’ve seen you beat to hell, and he still let you work.” Her amber eyes narrowed, thick, black lashes fluttering with tension. “What the hell, Jericho? I can play through the pain as well as anyone. And I don’t need you and Palmer to coddle me.”

Quinn bounced the back of his head on the seat, watching rivulets of rainwater braid and crease the windshield. Garcia was right. He’d fought on after being shot, having his ribs broken, even after having a toe snipped off with pruning shears — all without Palmer so much as flinching.

“I guess we’re both just sexist pigs,” Quinn said.

Garcia nodded slowly then turned to stare out the passenger window. She rarely turned away during a conversation, and Quinn had learned to pay attention when she did.

Quinn felt the evening he’d planned so meticulously slipping away. He lived the kind of life where dinner plans were often interrupted or postponed, but he couldn’t help but feel like this was something beyond that. He started the truck and did a quick head check over his shoulder before pulling back out into traffic.

“Being overprotective is in my blood,” Quinn said. “I do it with my brother. I do it with Jacques. There’s zero chance I can turn it off when it comes to you.”

“I know,” Garcia said, still looking away. “And that’s becoming a real problem.”

Chapter 10

Deputy U.S. Marshal August “Gus” Bowen made his way through a narrow kitchen corridor, nodding to his new set of eyes. Bowen had befriended Bruce, the fat little sous-chef, earlier that evening with the gift of a couple of Cohiba cigars that he’d scored from a deputy working the Dominican protection detail. Bruce had balked at first, looking sideways at Deputy Bowen’s black eye and his raw and swollen nose. The split in his upper lip really required stitches but Bowen didn’t have the time for that. Anyway, it was beginning to scab already. His neatly trimmed salt and pepper goatee covered some of the damage to his face, but there was no way of hiding the fact that he’d been the recipient of a recent beat down.

His hair had gone prematurely silver following his last tour in Iraq, an outward sign of what his Army shrink called “a bevy of unresolved issues.” The shrink had advised him to take up quiet hobbies to relieve the stress in his life. He already sailed most weekends and had been drawing since junior high. The doc said he should do more of both if he didn’t want to hang up his gun — or worse. So he’d drawn more pictures of boats, and did his best to chill. He eventually moved on to drawing people — and it turned out he was a pretty good artist. He wasn’t about to quit his day job, but he gave away at least one sketch each week to someone he met in the course of his duties.

Bowen would never admit it, but those same unresolved issues were what earned him the beating the previous night. He’d ended up telling his detail supervisor the injuries were from a bar fight over a beautiful woman — which wasn’t too far from the truth — except they hadn’t been in the bar and the girl a long way from beautiful.

The Dominican cigars and a quick pencil sketch of the sous-chef standing over a simmering pot had earned Bowen that valuable set of extra eyes in the hotel kitchen. Contacts in the backrooms and basements of hotels and restaurants were priceless sources of information, and Deputy Bowen shamelessly curried favor with as many as possible when working this kind of job. The more eyes and ears he had working for him, the safer his protectee would be.

Department of State Diplomatic Security Agents attended enough formal functions that they were allowed to voucher the purchase of a tuxedo. The United States Marshals Service had experience protecting witnesses and federal judges, so they helped out State every year during the United Nations General Assembly. Door-kickers didn’t see much use for tuxedos so Bowen was told to voucher the rental of a nice black one for the evening. Accustomed to wearing khaki slacks and polo shirts — or at the most, an off-the-rack suit — the tux made him feel oddly out of place and stood in stark contrast to his injured face. Bowen was in his mid-thirties, a hair over six feet, and trim, with the powerful shoulders of a boxer.

Enough visiting federal agents needed formal wear for just a few functions that several tailors in Manhattan ran thriving businesses renting custom slacks with invisible slash pockets and belt loops — unheard of on regular tuxedos. Under his jacket, he carried a small Motorola radio, a Benchmade automatic knife, handcuffs, an expandable baton, a .40 caliber Glock, and two spare magazines. The gear made him look slightly less streamlined than James Bond, but his trim appearance helped to smooth the lines. He normally carried a second, smaller Glock of the same caliber in an inside-the-waistband holster near the small of his back. This arrangement proved too bulky for the tux so he made do by putting the second gun in an ankle holster — giving him a loadout of fifty-six rounds of ammunition. Considering the “friends” he’d made over the past year, Bowen knew even that might not be enough.

Dignitary protection was a matter of securing concentric rings — like the layers of an onion. NYPD handled the outer ring, blocking streets, placing extra patrol in the area, deploying truckloads of highly trained ESU tactical units to both preempt and deal with attacks. Bowen’s job was the middle ring, looking outbound from the protectee and checking the pulse of the people working at the event. He made his way down the line, relaying his information to the Diplomatic Security agent in charge who worked the innermost ring up in the dining room with the rest of the detail protecting the Uzbek foreign minister.

A light static crackled in the deputy’s clear silicone earpiece. “Babayev Advance, Babayev Advance, Babayev Shift Leader.” It was Special Agent Hancock, second-in-command of the protective detail for Uzbek foreign minister, Shuker Babayev.

“Babayev Advance here.” The deputy spoke into the small microphone pinned to the inside of his tuxedo shirt collar. “Go for Bowen.”

“Switch to Foxtrot 6,” Hancock said, using code to direct the conversation away from the open channel shared by the twenty-four other State Department protection details assigned to one of five different frequencies.

“I got a guy who wants to see you,” Hancock said, when they were both on the same channel.

Odd, Bowen thought. Visitors were not the norm while on an active protection detail. He assumed it was one of the two dozen deputy marshals assigned to a different delegation who wanted to bullshit about the latest drama going on in Marshals Service HQ.

“You got a name?” Bowen asked.

“What’s your location,” Agent Hancock said. “I’ll send him to you.”

Bowen told the DS agent where he was then asked for a name again.

Hancock remained coy. “Big dude. Kind of scary lookin’. He says you two are friends.”

“Okay…” Bowen felt his hackles rise. This was straight-up weird, and his gut told him that weird could only mean one thing.

“Azam is bringing him your way right now,” Hancock said. “I think our Uzbek friend is getting hungry and wants to sample the menu.”

The Uzbek minister’s single native security agent was a giant teddy bear named Azam. He seemed too gentle a man for his chosen profession but was big enough that Bowen wouldn’t have wanted to see him angry.

“Roger that,” Bowen said. “I got a guy here who will fix him something to tide him over until they feed us.”

Bowen had made it past the twin doors of a large walk-in freezer at the back of the kitchen and turned to hunt down the fat little sous-chef.

Steam snapped at the lids of a half dozen five-gallon soup pots sending the heady odor of lobster bisque into the air, already full of the cursing and tension that went along with feeding three hundred of the world’s elite including the U.S. Secretary of State.

Agents from several other details filtered in and out of the kitchen, feeding information to their respective detail bosses — but none of them had Bruce in their corner. Bowen asked for some bread and cheese for Azam. The sous-chef gave him a hearty thumbs-up, smiling as if he was part of a conspiracy, then shouted orders to his brigade of prep chefs who chopped, sautéed, and stirred the various sauces and side dishes that were being served at tonight’s banquet. One of them peeled away to see to Bowen’s request.

Bowen felt his stomach growl and looked at his watch. It was no wonder Azam was hungry. Bowen had come on shift at 0700, and he was starving. He was sure the Uzbek had been on the clock long before that, seeing to the needs of his boss, the Uzbek foreign minister, and working through the daily schedule so he could liaise with the DS agents about timing and routes. Dignitary protection required a certain artistic fluidity, often necessitating a move from one location to another at a moment’s notice. The Uzbek minister was a compulsive shopper during these trips to New York and had kept the eight people charged with protecting his life on the move all day. Bowen and the others on the detail had been able to wolf down a quick slice of pizza over the hood of the armored limo while the minister was inside being fitted for new suits. Other than that, it had been go, go, go all day long and none of them — including Azam — had had anything to eat but for the odd Skittle or breath mint they’d found hiding in a suit pocket.

New Yorkers seemed to have an affinity for late dining, but this was ridiculous. The Sultan of Brunei had spent the last two months vacationing in Hawaii and was accustomed to Hawaii Time. Since the Sultan was host and footing the bill for this event, he deemed it appropriate to eat when his internal clock said it was time to sit down to dinner — five p.m. in Hawaii was eleven in New York. And protective agents always ate after their protectees. Bowen felt his stomach growl again and thought how nice it must be to be a bazil-lionaire.

The annual General Assembly of the UN or UNGA, offered most of the one hundred and ninety-three member nations’ top diplomats an opportunity to visit New York City on an all-expenses-paid shopping trip. But one man’s boondoggle was another man’s opportunity for overtime, so Bowen had jumped at the chance when offered one of the few U.S. Marshals slots to assist Diplomatic Security protective details. Considering the ever-growing threat of terrorism, there was a fair bet the overtime would not be the relatively easy standing post and “smokin’ and jokin’” of times past. With attacks on American soil moving up the scale from possible to probable — Bowen’s chief had chosen him specifically for the assignment. Bowen’s experience in Iraq had earned him a Silver Star, along with silver hair and the “bevy of unresolved issues.” It had also made him one of the go-to deputies in the Marshals Service when it came to boots-on-the-ground tactical knowledge.

After the gas attacks in Dallas and Los Angeles, there was buzz that the Secretary General of the UN would pull rank and cancel, or at the very least postpone the late-night Plaza dinner. Many of the delegates agreed with the threat assessment, but none of them wanted to appear weak so they kept quiet. Ousted by the former President, Melissa Ryan, long-time romantic partner to the national security advisor had been reappointed Secretary of State by the new president. She’d arrived ten minutes before Bowen left to check the kitchen, flanked by a dozen dour DS agents who glared as if they viewed anyone who got in their path as food.

In the end, one hundred and sixty foreign minsters and their guests had weighed the possibilities of a gruesome death from poison gas against the benefits of a free meal and were now crowded into the Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom listening to a very talented Chinese woman play the cello. For the poorer countries’ delegations, Bowen suspected this would be the most lavish meal they would have in their lives. For some, accustomed to living off the backs of their people, lobster bisque and macadamia-crusted halibut was nothing out of the ordinary.

“Bread and cheese is for pigeons and rats,” Bruce the sous-chef said in a heavy Brooklyn accent, waddling up to Bowen with a plate of halibut, a folded linin napkin, and a fork. “I want that you should have real-people food.”

“I appreciate it,” Bowen said as he saw Azam round the corner beside the walk-in freezer. “It’s not for me. It’s for a friend—” Bowen gave a slow nod when he saw the man walking behind the Uzbek.

Now it all made sense.

Jacques Thibodaux gave Bowen’s face a sidelong look with his good eye. The other was covered with a black patch that only added to the menacing demeanor of the gigantic Marine. “Oh, yea, yee!” He said under his breath.

Where every other person at the Plaza Hotel event was wearing either formal attire or a hotel uniform, the massive Cajun had shown up in a skintight T-shirt and faded blue jeans. He carried a heavy leather jacket draped over his arm. “I thought I’d find you were out sailing around the world and instead I see you been playin’ it rough with somebody. What in the hell did you do to your noggin, cher?” he asked.

Azam stood by, smiling happily while he munched on his plate of food. He spoke excellent English and appeared as interested in the story as Thibodaux.

Jacques nodded toward the bloody knuckles of Bowen’s right hand. “You know, I delivered my fourth kid on our living floor so I’m pretty much a doctor. Let me know if you need me to take a look at that hand.”

Bowen chuckled, hoping to move on with whatever spy games had brought the big Marine his direction. Men like Jacques Thibodaux didn’t just drop by to catch up. “It wasn’t much.”

“Pshaw!” Thibodaux scoffed. “You forget that I’ve seen you fight. Ain’t nobody get that many licks in on you without bein’ on the receiving end of a good ass whippin’.”

Bowen sighed, knowing he’d have to tell the story before Thibodaux would get to his reason for coming.

“I was walking back from the Waldorf yesterday after the night crew relieved us and happened on this guy who was beating the shit out of his girlfriend on 50^th.”

Thibodaux gave a somber nod. “Must have been a big guy, judging from the looks of your swollen beak.”

“Big enough,” Bowen said. “Some kind of bouncer from the way he slammed my face into the sidewalk.” The deputy shook his head, remembering the fight in a whirlwind of painful detail.

Thibodaux’s eyes narrowed as if he was trying to come to grips with the story. “Don’t you marshals ever call for backup?”

“That’s the policy,” Bowen said.

“Why didn’t you then? Hell, cher, this is Midtown Manhattan. The place is crawlin’ with cops.”

Bowen shrugged. “The math just didn’t work out.”

The Marine’s brow crawled above his black eye patch. “What’s math got to do with it?”

“Well,” Bowen said, as if it was all so clear, “You know what they say, ‘When seconds count, the cops are only minutes away.’ Every second I don’t step in, this guy puts another smack on his girlfriend.”

Thibodaux nodded. “So you just waded in amongst this big sombitch, and he gave you a fat lip…”

“Not quite.” Bowen gave a sheepish chuckle. “The girl gave me the fat lip while I was putting handcuffs on her boyfriend. No good deed goes unpunished, you know.”

“You’re a good shit, Deputy Gus Gus,” the Cajun said. “Oh, yes you are.” He turned and gave a wink to Azam. “You mind givin’ us a minute?”

The Uzbek shot a glance at Bowen, as if to ask if he was okay to be left alone with the big Cajun.

Bowen gave an almost imperceptible nod. “I’ll be fine, my friend,” he said.

Thibodaux leaned in after Azam had stepped around the corner. He kept his voice low. “Remember that little fais do-do we got you involved in a few months back?”

“You mean when we committed a bunch of felonies and were nearly thrown in front of a firing squad?” Bowen scoffed. “Yeah, I seem to recall something about that.”

A contagious grin crept across Thibodaux’s broad face. “That was some fun, don’t you think?” He gave Bowen a mock punch in the arm. “Anyhow, just for grins, what would you say to a little more of the same? Minus the firing squad part.”

“I’m in the middle of an assignment.”

“Well, cher,” Thibodaux said. “As it happens, my boss is talking to your boss even as we speak.”

“Your boss…”

“Ain’t it convenient?” The big Cajun grinned. “My boss is your boss’s boss’s boss. Looks like you and me gonna be partnered up for a while.”

“Okay, then,” Bowen said. “I’m guessing this has something to do with the poison-gas attacks?”

“It do indeed.” Thibodaux turned his head slightly so he could look Bowen up and down with his good eye. “I hope you got extra clothes, cause right now you look like you were pretending to be James Bond and got your ass kicked for it.”

“Of course I have other clothes but they’re all at the DoubleTree.”

“We’ll swing by your room then.” Thibodaux rubbed his belly with a hand the size of a shovel blade. “The rubber chicken I had on the plane ain’t sittin’ right. You can change your clothes, and I’ll take me a tactical dump.”

Chapter 11

Petyr “The Wolf” Volodin stood naked in front of the grimy bathroom mirror in his filthy apartment and wondered when they would come for him. He was sure it wouldn’t be long. Mr. Anikin was a brutal man who surrounded himself with brutal associates. Their business was pain and they were extremely good at their job.

Petyr flexed his muscles, bouncing the eight pointed star tattoos at the top of each pec. The tats had gotten him into a world of trouble, but they drew attention to his muscular shoulders. Most guys worked too much on their biceps. That was all well and good, but in a fight, strong shoulders were all important. Petyr had heard somewhere that shoulders were the human equivalent of antlers on a bull elk, demonstrating social status and the ability to gather a harem.

“That’s right.” Petyr sneered at his own reflection, trying to psych himself up for what he knew was coming. “I got me some antlers, baby, and I’m gonna kick your ass…”

He stepped back and rubbed a swollen hand over two days of stubble on a blocky jaw. His girl, Nikka, pissed and moaned like he’d shot her whenever he went a day without shaving. She was just too stupid to get his fight philosophy through her dense skull. An opponent could grab a long beard and turn it into a murder-handle, but give ’em a rake with the bristles of an unshaven face and it was instant rug burn. Some fighters called the rake a bitch move, but in Petyr the Wolf’s mind, if it won the fight, there was no such thing. Nine times out of ten, the other guy flinched himself right into an arm bar or rear naked choke. The Wolf shaved his head three days before a fight for the same reason. The tactic wouldn’t go in the big leagues, but in the places he fought, the refs could be persuaded to look the other way at a little stubble.

Even under the looming threat, Petyr took the time to admire his impressive muscles. At six three and a hulked fighting weight of two-forty, his shoulders were massive. A thirty-two inch waist and sculpted obliques made him look even broader than he was. Admiring his muscles he couldn’t keep from thinking about the tattoos — and the world of shit they’d gotten him into. His shoulders sagged and his wide face fell into a dark frown.

He never should have let stupid Nikka talk him into getting the tats. Nikka had some issues — there was no doubt about that — but she was incredibly hot, and life was just easier so long as she wasn’t angry. So, he’d gone to her tattoo guy and got the ink she wanted him to get. It had seemed cool at first. The Wolf was “a tough Russian son of a bitch,” Nikka told him, and tough Russian sons of bitches had tattoos of eight-pointed stars on their shoulders and grinning skulls on their bellies. It was true. She’d seen it on TV.

And everything had been good for a while. The tats actually bought him a little deeper street cred. Then the scary looking dude with a tattoo of a spider crawling up his bony throat had come up ringside two nights earlier and pressed his ugly face against the ropes. The guy proceeded to machine-gun him in Russian with questions that were all but lost in the clamor and shouts of the crowd. It was loud, but Petyr was pretty sure he heard the word Vory—a thief. Still flushed with adrenaline from the beat-down he’d given his opponent, Petyr had waved Spider Neck off, thinking him a crazy Russian alky. There were plenty of those in Brighton Beach.

That had been a big mistake.

Now Petyr leaned in over the sink, closer to the mirror and touched one of the many scabs on his muscular chest. This one was between the fourth and fifth ribs — directly over his heart.

Petyr was big enough to intimidate most who would even try to cross him outside the ring. A simple glare from the dark shadows of his eyes was usually enough to send even the roughest gangbanger running for his mama. For those few who were ignorant enough to face him, Petyr had the youthful strength of his twenty-six years and the skills gained from expending gallons of sweat and blood in the gym — not to mention the potent elixir his chemist father whipped up for him that worked better than any steroids he’d ever tried.

None of that mattered to the Spider Neck. He’d waited in the alley behind the locker room, leaning against the brick wall when Petyr ducked out the back door after the fight.

“Hey!” the man said, not moving from his relaxed position against the wall. Night shadows fell across his face, giving him the appearance of a gargoyle on some creepy building. “You are thief-in-law?”

It was not a question, but a challenge. The eight pointed stars were tattoos of vory v zokone or thieves-in-law. Spider Neck wanted to know if he’d earned them the proper way, by spending time in a Russian prison.

Though Petyr outweighed him by at least eighty pounds, Spider Neck hadn’t been the least bit intimidated. Petyr hadn’t seen him move until it was too late. The man seemed to be everywhere at once, swarming all over the place like an entire hive of wasps. By the time he was still, the skeletal Russian had cut Petyr in at least two dozen places. All the wounds were superficial, slicing only skin and sparing the muscle underneath — but he’d made his point: if Petyr resisted, death was a forgone conclusion.

Spider Neck shoved him against the brick wall and delivered a message from Anatoly Anikin, a local who called himself a Pakhan or captain in the Russian mafia. Mr. Anikin was one of the few former guests of Russia’s infamous Black Dolphin prison who had been released in something other than a pine box. He was the real deal as far as criminal thugs went, but Petyr doubted he had any ties with the mob in Russia. More likely he was one of the many freelancers vying for positions of authority in the underbelly of Brooklyn, which probably made him even more dangerous.

According to Spider Neck, Mr. Anikin had caught a glimpse of Petyr’s tattoos during a recent mixed martial-arts fight that had been streamed online. It didn’t help that Anikin had bet on the other fighter and Petyr had won.

Spider Neck demanded to know how long Petyr had been in prison and where he’d done his time. The dude was scary enough but his face had twisted and darkened even more when Petyr admitted he’d never been in any prison other than the 60th Precinct lockup in Brooklyn due to possession of steroids. Nikka bonded him out after only two hours so he’d never even made it past the holding cells, but he kept that little factoid to himself.

Spider Neck had just looked at him and glared, turning the blade so it glinted in the scant light of the alley. “If you arrived in a Russian prison with ink that had not been earned, the men there would cut out your liver…”

He had gone on to explain that since they were in America and not a Russian prison, Mr. Anikin had graciously given Petyr forty-eight hours to have the stars and the laughing skull covered or removed. He also ordered Petyr to take a fall during his next fight. It was implied that if he chose not to comply, Spider Neck would remove the tattoos for him.

But two days came and went and no one came to cut out his liver. The more time that passed from the incident in the alley, the more of his bravery, however misguided, seeped back. Petyr hadn’t spent years training to fight in the octagon to run scared from some ugly dude with a bug tattooed on his throat. By the third morning, he reasoned that if this Russian mob boss wanted him dead, he would have killed him already. The Bratva, or Brotherhood, was into stolen credit cards nowadays. They didn’t go around whacking people over tats. By lunchtime, he’d felt ready to kick Spider Neck’s ass for treating him with such disrespect. He was The Wolf. Nobody treated The Wolf like that.

But a shadow of doubt crept into his bravado, diminishing his swagger now that almost seventy-two hours had passed. Petyr nearly jumped out of his skin when someone began to pound on his door. He leaned around the corner from the bathroom and stared hard at the knob, as if he had some kind of X-ray vision, trying to figure out who it was on the other side. For a moment he held onto the hope that it might be Nikka, but the banging was much too hard for her little hands. He thought about looking through the peephole but decided against it. Spider Neck would just shoot him in the eye as soon as he saw the shadow pass across the lens.

The banging got louder, like the person doing it owned the place, then suddenly stopped. The doorknob jiggled. Petyr froze. Metal scraped against metal as someone inserted a pick set into the lock.

Petyr shot a gaze at the back window. He’d already packed a bag with the important stuff — a change of underwear and the rest of the juice his father sent him. He could hit the fire escape and be gone in a flash. But if it was Anikin’s men, they would be expecting that. They’d make a big show of trying to get in, only to have Spider Neck waiting for him outside to cut out his liver as soon as he dropped off the fire escape. The door would have been easy enough to kick in if they’d really wanted to. No, this was an ambush. They expected him to run.

He took a long, calming breath, and then ducked back in the bathroom so he could get another look at himself in the mirror. He’d do the last thing they expected — meet them head on.

Slipping a loose cotton shirt over his head, he picked up a baseball bat he kept beside the door and held it over his head like an ax. Spider Neck had thrashed him so well the last time, Petyr doubted he’d brought more than a couple of helpers, and those just so he’d have an audience. Keeping well to the side of the doorframe in case someone out there had a shotgun, he reached out and flipped the lock before putting his hand on the knob, ready to fling it open.

Spider Neck had caught him off guard once. He wasn’t going to let that happen again. All he wanted was to be left alone to fight in the octagon, but if these guys wanted to mess with The Wolf, they’d feel his teeth.

Chapter 12

Quinn felt his phone buzz with a text message at the same moment one of the two young airmen pushed a black button on the back wall of the cavernous hangar. The button activated the floor to ceiling doors, opening the entire north wall so they could drive the tug out and pull in the aircraft with Quinn’s mystery guest who had just arrived from Boling Air Force Base. Metal doors rumbled on their tracks as they began to slide across each other, yawning open to reveal the black of an Alaska fall night. Blue and green lights winked in the chilly air beyond the approaching airplane. It seemed extra dark in contrast with the bright and sterile interior of the hanger.

Quinn looked down at the text and chuckled. Garcia was standing next to him and raised a wary brow at the message.

“Who’s that from?”

“Jacques,” Quinn said, still chuckling.

“Is he talking about me?”

Quinn cocked his head and looked her in the eye. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not nice to read over someone’s shoulder?”

“I work for the CIA,” Garcia said. “It’s my job to read over people’s shoulders.” She took on Thibodaux’s Cajun accent as she read the text aloud. “ ‘Watch your ass, l’ami. The woman is batshit crazy.’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“My guess is he’s talking about whoever’s on this airplane,” Quinn said, nodding to the phone. “He left me a voicemail. Maybe that explains it.”

Quinn called his voicemail but kept his eyes on the Challenger while it taxied with a high whine toward the hanger. He took a calculated risk and left the phone on speaker so Ronnie could hear. She was already what Thibodaux called “level-ten pissed,” so there wasn’t much of a chance she could get any madder than she already was.

“I don’t have much time, Chair Force…” The Cajun’s tone was dead sober, absent its customary irreverence. “You’re about to meet my cousin, Special Agent Khaki Beaudine of the FBI…” He stopped, taking a long thinking pause, odd for a man who never seemed to be at a loss for words, even in the middle of a running gun battle.

Ronnie’s eyes widened at the news. Quinn knew Thibodaux’s cousin was with the Bureau, but other than the fact that she was getting a divorce, the big Cajun had kept anything else about her to himself.

“Khaki’s a good kid,” the message finally continued. “But she has some… well, cher, she’s plum bracque—loony — and I ain’t just sayin’ that because she grew up in Texas. She’s been through some horrible shit…” There was a muffled sound on the other end, as if someone else was trying to talk to Jacques while he left the message. “Dammit, I gotta scoot.” His voice grew hushed, imperative. “You watch yourself with her, Jericho, no foolin’. I’m serious as nut cancer.”

Quinn watched as the two airmen marshaled the tug and waited for the floor-to-ceiling hanger doors to slide to their stops and lock open. Outside, starkly white against the darkness, the Bombardier Challenger 601 nosed its way toward the hanger. The beefy business jet was ostensibly assigned to the FAA but was in actuality at the beck and call of Winfield Palmer. This off-the-books aircraft allowed him to move operatives and human assets around the world without resorting to commercial aircraft or infighting between government agencies.

The Challenger rolled to a stop twenty meters from the open door, and twin GE turbofan engines whined down.

The spacious hanger off the end of the Elmendorf flight line could easily hold three planes the size of the nineteen-passenger aircraft, but the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States had enough pull that they had the entire place to themselves. Even the tug driver and his spotter disappeared down the hallway to the front offices as soon as they had the airplane chocked and the hanger bay secured.

The pilot stepped to the aircraft door as soon as it opened, lowering the folding stairs himself. He caught Quinn’s eye immediately, smiling a tight-lipped smile as if there was something he needed to apologize for. The first officer, a man with sandy hair, followed him off the plane. Winfield Palmer handpicked his pilots from Air Force Special Operations Command, and Quinn recognized the first officer as a former AC-130 “Spooky” gunship pilot out of Hurlburt Field.

“She does look a little crazy,” Garcia whispered as a small woman with a frosted blond pixie cut stepped to the aircraft door and stopped, her neck moving birdlike, as she looked around. Quinn estimated her to be about five three.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with Garcia, he leaned his head sideways, his eye still on Beaudine. “What do you mean?”

“I got ways of picking up on these things,” Garcia said. “Jacques is right. You should watch yourself.”

“It’s her figure, isn’t it?” Quinn said, earning an elbow in the ribs. “You’re jealous because she’s in shape.”

Garcia assured him she wasn’t the jealous type — but Quinn knew she didn’t relish the idea of him traveling into bush Alaska with a woman who wore a pair of Wranglers as well as Khaki Beaudine.

Along with the form-fitting Wrangler jeans, Jacques’s cousin wore a black turtleneck that highlighted her athletic build. Quinn felt the same way about turtlenecks as he did neckties, which was to say he hated them both. They made him feel as though a small and sickly child was trying to choke him to death. Khaki Beaudine wore hers well enough to earn an extra moment of glare from Ronnie.

Beaudine carried an earth-tone 5.11 backpack in her hand like a briefcase. She had a black parka shell draped over her left arm, exposing a Glock pistol, two extra magazines, handcuffs, and a gold FBI badge on her belt.

She nodded at Quinn as if she recognized him. Her eyes were bright aquamarine under the harsh light of the hangar, but they did not look particularly happy to see him.

“FBI.” She stuck out her hand. “Khaki Beaudine.” Quinn noticed a heavy twang, but wasn’t sure anyone in the world could say the words “Khaki Beaudine” without having an accent.

“Welcome to Alaska.” Quinn smiled, sizing her up without staring. “You’re Jacques’s cousin?”

“That’s right.” A half smile pulled into a pinched grimace as if she’d caught the odor of something unpleasant. “I can only imagine the things he’s told you about me.”

“Just that you were related,” Ronnie said, covering for Jacques.

“Well, I guess I got more to worry about than a tale-tellin’ cousin.” Beaudine dropped her backpack on the hanger floor and fished out a small tablet computer. She wagged her head at Quinn while she slid the computer from a black neoprene case and folded out the screen. “Truth be told, I never wanted anything to do with you spooks. Bureau counterintelligence is like a bunch of English professors who see some hidden meaning in every damn thing. ‘The whale represents evil… the whale is Ahab… the whale is a quest…’” Beaudine scoffed. “No Counter Intel secret squirrel mumbo jumbo for me. The Violent Crime Squads, they know how to handle their shit. Call stuff what it is, straight up — a dangerous whale that needs to be hunted down and killed.”

“I see,” Quinn said, wondering if she’d ever even read Moby Dick.

“Anyhow,” Beaudine said. “I’ve got orders to link up with the national security advisor as soon as I’m off the plane.”

Beaudine typed a password on the tablet, then consulted a small key fob from her pocket for the numbers she’d need to get through the second layer of security. This passcode changed every sixty seconds and only worked once she’d logged in with her password. The tech was years old, but the cumbersome nature of it made it secure, and changing the methods of the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country could be glacially slow.

Winfield Palmer’s ruddy, pixilated face appeared on screen a moment later. With the intense look of a man with heavy purpose, the national security advisor sat behind his expansive mahogany desk. Quinn recognized the off-site office he kept near Crystal City, Virginia. Still inside the Beltway but across the Potomac from DC proper, the quiet shopping district was a stone’s throw from the Pentagon and a dozen different intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

“Here’s what we know,” Palmer said a few moments later. “Preliminary test results on the stuff used in Dallas show it’s a binary nerve agent akin to VX and Soman — maybe one of the Russian Novichok agents that have worried us for the last decade.”

“Newcomer,” Garcia said, translating the Russian.

Special Agent Beaudine nodded at the translation.

“Correct,” Palmer said. “Only our guys say this stuff looks to be at least a dozen times more powerful than Sarin. It’s made of two relatively harmless components, but they become a fulminating compound when mixed, producing a heavy and lingering vapor. Extremely toxic stuff.”

“Twelve times as powerful?” Garcia frowned.

“At least,” Palmer said. “They’re telling me that if Aum would have had this stuff in the Tokyo subway attack in ’95 most of the thousand injured would have died instead of just twelve.”

“Not easy to manufacture, I’d imagine,” Quinn mused. “At least not without some serious lab equipment.”

Ronnie nodded. “I doubt the Islamic State or any one of the other wannabe groups of that ilk even have the glassware to produce something like this. They’d probably gas themselves in the process.”

Beaudine shrugged. “The Islamic State has been trying to recruit scientists,” she said. “But we don’t think they’ve been successful as of yet. This gas used in Dallas and LA was weapons grade, not some homemade pickle-jar variety. It takes a government facility to manufacture this stuff.”

“How does all this lead back to Nome?” Quinn asked. He caught the flightiness in Beaudine’s eyes. It was clear she’d rather be somewhere else.

Palmer laid both hands flat on top of his desk. The huge mahogany thing was big enough to warrant its own zip code, but he was meticulous about keeping it free of clutter.

“At any given time, the FBI keeps tabs on seventeen chemists,” Palmer said. “Men and women who they believe are capable of developing sophisticated nerve agents. Some work for foreign governments, some live right here in the U.S. We’re not ruling anyone out at this point.”

As if on cue, Agent Beaudine pulled a light-blue folder from her pack and handed it to Quinn. It was marked Top Secret in bold letters with a red diagonal stripe across its face. “Passport records show that a little over seven hours ago one of those seventeen scientists, a Russian named Kostya Volodin, passed through Immigration and Customs at the Nome, Alaska, port of entry.”

“That is odd he would come to the U.S. the day of the attacks,” Ronnie said.

Agent Beaudine rolled her eyes. “That’s true,” she said. “We have a contact in Russia who saw the doctor some four months ago and believes he’s in the early stages of dementia. The Customs official in Nome confirms that he seemed addled, which makes him an even less-likely candidate for developing a gas of this complexity. More likely he’s on a holiday. Guess that’s why the Bureau sent a junior agent to check him out.” She gave a little toss of her head. Quinn noticed she was smart enough to keep off camera so Palmer couldn’t see it.

“I thought they sent you because you speak Russian,” Quinn asked.

“I guess there’s that,” Beaudine said, still pouting like a child being forced into a chore.

Ronnie took a half step forward, making certain Palmer could see her on the screen. “Don’t forget, sir, my father was Russian. I speak the language fluently. I know I can help on this. I’m ready to go to Nome now if needed.”

“Durakov ne seyut, ne zhnut, sami rodyatsya,” Beaudine said under her breath and off camera.

Garcia shot her a hard look but said nothing, focusing instead on Palmer.

The national security advisor rubbed a hand over the top of his head in thought. It was nearly one in the morning East Coast time, and even on the small screen it was easy to see the strain in his eyes. Quinn was sure the man hadn’t had a moment to stop running since the attacks — and was not likely to slow down any time soon. He drove his people hard and himself harder.

“You’re going to be with me,” Palmer said to Garcia. “I have Thibodaux partnered with the deputy marshal you all worked with a few months ago.”

“Gus Bowen?” It was Quinn’s turn to look at Palmer a little cross-eyed. Quinn had broken Bowen’s nose back when they were in college — Quinn boxing for the Air Force Academy, Bowen for Army ROTC. Neither man had been too friendly with the other since. Beyond that, Quinn didn’t like the way Bowen grinned when he was around Ronnie. And the fact that he felt jealous at all made him annoyed at himself — which made him even madder.

“The marshal’s a hell of a manhunter,” Palmer said. “Dr. Volodin was married to a Ukrainian scientist who emigrated to the U.S. in the early nineties. They have a son together. The ex-wife passed away three years ago, but the son lives in Brooklyn. Just so happens that Bowen is assigned to New York at the moment. This may be nothing, but we have every available agent and case officer working round the clock checking every possibility. Chances are you’ll run these particular leads to the ground in a few hours. Call when you do and I’ll put you on something else.” He gave a slight nod to Ronnie. “Five of the scientists are Russian so I can use you back in DC. I want someone I trust in on the interrogations.”

“Of course, sir,” she said. “I’ll jump on the next flight.”

“The next flight is the one in front of you,” Palmer said. “Be on it.” As was his custom, he signed off without another word.

Beaudine scooped up her bag and went looking for the powder room. The Challenger pilots returned from the break room. Both were aware Garcia was to be their passenger and gave her a twenty-minute warning so they’d have time to push the plane back out and refuel.

Quinn leaned against the wall by a fifty-five gallon drum of engine oil next to Garcia.

“What did she say to you?” He spoke five languages but Russian wasn’t one of them.

“A Russian saying,” Garcia said. “She basically called me a fool for wanting to get involved.”

“Really? Because you want to help out?” Quinn groaned. “This is going to be rich.”

“I don’t envy you,” Garica said, glaring at the doorway through which Beaudine had disappeared, before breaking into a series of Spanish epithets that seemed strong enough to peel paint. “She’s one of those nails that stick up on the dojo floor that has to be pounded down…”

“I’ll have my mom send your clothes,” he said.

“I don’t like her,” Garcia said.

“My mom?”

“You know who I mean, postalita.” She sometimes called him a “little postage stamp” when she was angry. Quinn could never bring himself to ask her why, figuring she could have gone with a lot worse.

She turned to face him, toying with the buttons on his shirt. “Just be careful, Jericho.”

“You’re the one who needs to be careful,” he said. “I’m only flying out to check on a dead end. DC is a lion’s den even without a bunch of nerve gas and Russian scientists.”

Ronnie gave him a kiss on the lips, the first since they’d left for their afternoon motorcycle ride. “Jacques is right,” she said, her lips lingering near his. “This woman is crazy.”

“You know,” Quinn laughed, raising his eyebrows. “He’s always telling me the same thing about you.”

Chapter 13

Forty-five minutes after it had arrived, the Bombardier Challenger was wheels up and winging its way back toward Washington, DC, leaving Quinn and Special Agent Khaki Beaudine alone in the hanger.

“So,” Quinn said, nodding to the 5.11 backpack at Beaudine’s feet, “I guess you got all the gear you need?” The tough tactical bag was slightly larger than Quinn’s Sagebrush Dry pack, but his was completely waterproof. His father had told him from the time they started hunting together that the more comfortable he became in the outdoors, the less he would need to bring with him to survive. Still, Alaska was an unforgiving mistress, and some things were a necessity no matter how comfortable you were.

Beaudine looked at her watch and shrugged. “We’re lookin’ at nearly ten o’clock. If I forgot anything I doubt there’s anyplace still open where I can go buy it now anyhow.”

“True enough,” Quinn said. He shouldered his pack and walked toward the truck. “Come on. We’ll have to drive around the flight line and catch our ride from there. I’m sure you’re fine. As long as you have some kind of knife, a light, and a way to start a fire, you should be okay.”

“You didn’t even mention a gun,” Beaudine said.

“A gun is important,” Quinn said. “But bullets won’t keep you warm when it’s dark and you’re freezing to death.”

A half an hour later, Khaki Beaudine sat with her nose pressed to the window of the Air Force C-12, watching the lights of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson slip away beneath her. Quinn had fallen asleep as soon as they started rolling, kicked back in the worn leather seat across the aisle as if he was accustomed to flying on last-minute missions to track down Russian chemists bent on destroying the free world. There was a relaxed surety about him that could easily have come across as conceit — or at the very least intimidating. When he spoke with you, he appeared to be genuinely interested in what you said, rather than simply waiting for his turn to talk again.

Khaki had only been out of Quantico for a year, and she vividly remembered the buckets of testosterone exuded by so many of the male students itching to prove they were the best in their class of NATs — New Agent Trainees. Type A personalities were the norm in law enforcement, and the FBI in particular, but she could tell even from the short time she’d been around him that Quinn wasn’t so easy to put into neat descriptive boxes and columns. She was pretty sure Myers-Briggs had an entire “Q” category developed just for him. He was driven, to be sure. Mr. Palmer had told her as much. But now, he looked like he’d been run over by a truck.

It was apparent that he would have been more comfortable working with Veronica Garcia or Jacques. Khaki knew Quinn and her cousin were closer than brothers, so she was certain they had talked despite the vague denial from Ronnie Garcia. She just wondered how much Jacques had given up. Some things you didn’t even tell your brother. Quinn had his own dark secrets. She was sure of that. Everybody did, no matter how pretty and perfect their life appeared on Facebook.

Quinn must have known she was new to the Bureau. He could have quizzed her about her skills and abilities but instead decided it was best to catch up on his rest. Odd behavior for a warrior type who’d just had a new partner thrust upon him. Beaudine looked past her own reflection in the window and wondered what she would have done under the same circumstances.

The pilot climbed out to the north, banking slightly west as he flew over the Knik Arm of the Cook Inlet. A few moments later the lights of Anchorage winked out behind them as they flew into the inky blackness of Alaska. It was plenty warm inside the plane, but Khaki pulled her vest up around her shoulders and shivered. The vastness of the land outside made her wonder if there was a backpack large enough to bring all the things she might need to survive.

She’d been minding her own business, happy to be shed of her worthless husband, and working in the Washington Field Office. WFO was where the real work happened. And now she’d been sucked into this nothing assignment out in the middle of Iceberg, Alaska, chasing some Russian scientist who had, from all accounts, lost his marbles.

Her body and brain told her it was well past one in the morning, no matter what time it was in this frigid hellhole. She pushed the button to let her seat recline and let her head fall sideways to look at Quinn. His deep and rhythmic breathing was barely audible above the hiss of the aircraft ventilation. She couldn’t tell if he was relaxed or just completely exhausted.

She shoved the pack in the seat beside her, trying to remember what she’d stuffed inside it when she’d gotten her orders. This was a dead-end mission anyway, and you didn’t need much gear for that. It was just make-work for a brand new “breast-fed”—what her bastard ex and his cronies called female agents. She’d be in and out in a couple of hours, ready for some other no-action assignment.

Chapter 14

The UN dinner broke about the same time Bowen got permission from higher authorities to leave the assignment, flooding the already choked streets with armored vehicles as he and Thibodaux left the DoubleTree on Lexington. Snaking motorcades of over a hundred delegations — each blipping their sirens and flashing emergency lights to jockey for position — turned Midtown Manhattan into a honking, stagnant sea of black sedans and yellow cabs. Native New Yorkers stood bunched up at each intersection supremely unimpressed by the red and blue lights. Bordering on angry mobs, they glared at every passing Town Car and Suburban as if they were part of an invading army. Tourists lined the teaming streets with no idea of what was going on. They hoped, no doubt, to see someone famous when a motorcade pulled up in front of a hotel. Instead, they got the foreign minister of Togo — who turned out to be a very gracious, if not famous, personality.

Thibodaux had the rental car, so he drove, nosing his way through traffic toward the Battery Park Tunnel and Brooklyn, Petyr Volodin’s last known address. Bowen had changed into a pair of jeans and a navy-blue cotton polo, happy to be out of the monkey suit. He left the tail out to help conceal his pistol. A brown jacket of distressed leather gave him some protection against the chilly morning fog.

It was nearly two in the morning when they finally reached a shabby, five-story walk-up apartment building four blocks off the boardwalk in Brighton Beach.

The big Cajun pulled the rented Ford Taurus next to the curb half a block from the apartment building, across the street from a Russian grocery. He chewed on a flat wooden stir stick he’d swiped from the hotel kitchen and used it to gesture when he spoke, reminding Bowen of the way his grandfather chewed a sprig of hay on the family ranch back in Montana. Steam rose from a sewer grate in front of the car, entwining the beam of the headlights and giving the dark night an otherworldly feel.

“How do you want to do this?”

“Same way you would do it, I’d guess,” Bowen said.

“Okay,” Thibodaux tossed the wooden stick over his shoulder into the backseat of the rental car. Voices carried on the quiet street, so he began to whisper as he exited the car. “You knock. If our guy gives us any trouble, I’ll shoot him in the face.” He pressed the door closed instead of slamming it. Then turned to walk toward Volodin’s apartment as if that was all there was to planning.

“Hang on now,” Bowen said, trotting to keep up with the Marine. “You might want to modify your community policing style. We’re in the U.S., not driving insurgents out of Fallujah.”

“You think I’m bad.” Thibodaux grinned, bounding up the stoop and pushing open the glass doors. “You should try workin’ with Quinn.”

Bowen rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. He’d faced Jericho Quinn in a boxing ring in college — and been assigned to hunt him when he was wanted for murder. Bowen trusted the man, even respected him, but it was hard to like someone who’d done such a good job of breaking your nose. “How about we just show Petyr our credentials and see where that takes us.”

“Flash him your U.S. Marshals creds,” the big Marine said under his breath. He ran a thick forefinger up and down the lobby mailboxes, studying the names written on peeling masking tape. “Marines don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

“I thought Palmer had worked it out so you were on loan to OSI,” Bowen said. “Didn’t they give you a badge?”

“I got one, but I don’t like to use it.” The big Marine gave a mock shudder. “It makes me feel… I don’t know… all Air Forcey.”

Apartment 307 was located at the end of a short and dimly lit tile hallway to the left of the stairs.

Thibodaux stopped when he got to the top and sniffed the air.

“What?” Bowen said.

“Blood,” the Cajun said, closing his good eye while taking a deep breath through his nose. “And other stuff.”

Bowen nodded. Thibodaux was right. Amid the decaying smell of mothballs and peeling paint, the unmistakable copper tinge of blood stung his nostrils. Only someone who knew the smell of slaughter would recognize it, but the presence of “other stuff” hung heavy in the air. Bowen found the first blood smear half a minute later on the chipped tile floor outside of Petyr Volodin’s apartment. There was no more than a teaspoon worth, dark as chocolate syrup, pooled in the shadows below the mouth of the garbage chute. On the tile beside it was something more sinister, a fragment of bone, moist and pink, and about the size of a dime.

“Wonder if that’s a chunk of our guy’s skull?” Thibodaux whispered, tossing a look over his shoulder at apartment 307.

Bowen stepped to the side of the frame to take himself out of the line of fire should anyone inside decide to shoot through the door. Thibodaux took up a position on the opposite side, back a step. When the Marine nodded that he was set, Bowen reached across and pounded three times with the heel of his left hand, expecting a neighbor to come out at any moment to confront them for the noise at this time of night. If anyone was upset, they kept it to themselves.

“Want me to huff and puff?” Thibodaux said when no one answered, backing off another half step like he was going to boot the door.

Bowen shook his head and took a black leather pouch from the inside pocket of his jacket. He opened it to reveal a half dozen slender metal shims — his lock-picking tools. “Watch my six,” he said and had the door open in twenty seconds.

There is a particular stillness to a vacant house or apartment. For safety’s sake, Bowen assumed there was a bad guy hiding in some closet waiting to blow his brains out, but he could almost always feel it when there was no one home. Both men entered with pistols drawn anyway, rolling around the doorframe and doing a quick sweep for threats — stepping over and around the copious pools of blood and bone as they moved.

Petyr Volodin was long gone — judging from the carnage, probably long dead.

The overwhelming odor of dirty gym socks and the dead-animal flatulence of a gym rat on a steady diet of protein powder hung in an invisible cloud. Someone had done a cursory job of cleaning up, but there was enough blood and what Thibodaux called “spatter matter” on the tile floor to lead to the logical conclusion that Volodin — or someone — had been killed just inside the door. A bloody baseball bat lay on the floor next to the radiator, encrusted with matted hair. Bone does a lot of damage to wood and jagged shards were embedded up and down the business end of the bat. There was a divot in the tile where the killer had overshot his mark and hit the floor instead of his intended victim.

Bowen looked at the bat and closed his eyes, remembering too many bloody scenes from his time in the Middle East. Rage did terrible things to people. He’d once seen one man beat another with so much vigor he’d broken the handle off a claw hammer in the process.

“You okay?” Thibodaux said, snapping his fingers to break Bowen’s trance.

The deputy exhaled quickly, coming back to the present. “I am outstanding,” he said. “Thanks for asking.” He left the bloody bat where he’d found it.

The apartment was small, consisting of a living room and kitchen just inside the front door. The bathroom was tucked in behind the kitchen, adjacent to a single bedroom. The kitchen was tiny — what Bowen’s Coast Guardsman father called a one-butt galley. Thibodaux alone took up the entire space. Considering the piles of dirty laundry, porn magazines, and video games that covered the floor, the bedroom was too small for both men to stand in at the same time.

“Gallons of blood here,” Bowen said, looking across the empty apartment toward the door. “And blood on the garbage chute.”

“I know,” Thibodaux said. The big Cajun gave a sour grimace, as if he was sick to his stomach. “I guess we should go look in the basement. What you wanna bet we’re gonna find our shitbird down there with his head stove in…”

The darkness of the basement was greasy with diesel fuel and the sour stench of garbage from the twenty-four apartments on the floors above. Deputy Bowen reached around with his left hand to search inside for a light switch, pistol at waist level and standing outside the fatal funnel of the metal threshold. Jacques Thibodaux was two steps behind him. Some people liked to search an unknown area with flashlights, but in most cases, Bowen preferred to throw as much light on the matter as possible right from the beginning. The odds that anyone would hide where they’d dumped a body were long, but Bowen had never walked into any dark basement including his own without feeling there was something lurking in the shadows.

And there was — a black rat the size of a small dog. The thing looked up with pointed eyes and made a little phhht sound that Bowen imagined was the sound rats made when they were disgusted. It didn’t seem too fazed by their presence but waddled off, raising its tail toward the two men in what must have been the rat version of flipping them the bird.

“I hate rats,” Thibodaux muttered.

“I got more blood,” Bowen said, pointing with a bladed hand to the garbage chute above a rusty, powder-blue dumpster as soon as his eyes adjusted to the light.

They made a quick sweep of the room before stopping to investigate the blood, checking the double doors across from the Dumpster where the garbage truck would back up from the alley. It was secured with a padlock, but the dented metal man-door beside it swung freely, with nothing but a hole where the knob was supposed to be.

“Puddles of blood, rats, and lord knows what else,” Jacques said, taking a quick peek into the alley. “This place is spooky as shit. Apparently, the management feels that no one in his right mind would come in here to steal anything.”

Satisfied they were safe from ambush, Bowen held his breath and leaned over the lip of the Dumpster to find two bodies partially wrapped in blood-soaked sheets.

“Neither one of these looks like Petyr,” he said.

“Holy hell.” Thibodaux came up behind him to see for himself. He gulped, eyes glued to the carnage. “Neither one of ’em look much like anybody anymore,” he said.

The Cajun was right. Whoever bludgeoned the two men had left little to identify their faces. It was no wonder there was so much evidence of a violent death upstairs in Petyr’s apartment.

“I’m pretty sure they’re dudes,” Thibodaux said, regaining his composure by slow degree. “Middle Eastern maybe, but that’s about as far as it goes. Let’s get a couple of photo—”

The almost imperceptible scuff of a footfall on concrete drew both men’s attention toward the stairs. Thibodaux put a finger to his lips and drew his Kimber and pointed it toward the doorway. Bowen’s Glock was already in his hand. Bowen nodded that he understood and took up a position to the right of the door while the Marine stepped to the left, angled to avoid crossfire. Pistol muzzles angled toward the floor, both men froze, waiting. Bowen knew it was likely the super or someone else connected with the building but after seeing the bludgeoned faces, neither he nor Thibodaux was willing to take any chances.

The scuff of another footstep whispered down from the stairwell, followed a few seconds later by a third — then silence. Bowen was just beginning to wish he’d left the lights off when the point of a leather boot, followed by a knee, crept slowly into view.

Because of their angles, Thibodaux was closest. He gave Bowen a wink, and nodded to the Glock while he holstered his Kimber. Bowen understood immediately that he would provide lethal cover while the big Marine, one of the strongest men the deputy had ever seen, would grab whoever came through the door.

They didn’t have to wait long.

A glimpse of brown flashed through the doorway. Thibodaux pounced, snatching what appeared to be a sleeve. He ended up with nothing but an empty corduroy jacket. Whoever was on the other end turned and tore back up the stairs, heavy boots slapping the concrete steps in an all-out sprint.

“Cochons!” Thibodaux said, drawing his pistol and doing a quick peek around the threshold before bolting through the door and up the stairs. Bowen followed a half a step behind, catching just a glimpse of a bearded runner before he rounded the landing above, swinging himself around the steel railing with one hand as a pivot.

“I… hate… stairs…” Thibodaux ranted as he ran, in perfect time with his feet hitting the steps.

The bearded man hit the fire door hard at the top of the landing, shoved it open and ran onto the roof. The heavy door slammed shut behind him, echoing in the concrete well like a gunshot.

Faced with the closed door, both Bowen and Thibodaux slowed. Each knew better than to rush out into the unknown. The metal door opened outward. Crouching in the stairwell, Bowen tipped his head toward an exit sign above and frowned.

“Fire exit,” he said, catching his breath.

“Great,” Thibodaux said. “Our turd’s just waltzin’ his way down the fire escape while we’re trying not to get ourselves killed.”

“Or he’s waiting right outside the door to shoot us,” Bowen whispered. He glanced at the door handle, which was nearest to where Thibodaux stood. “What do you think?”

The Marine flung open the door in answer. Bowen did a quick buttonhook, rolling around the threshold to allow Thibodaux fast access behind him. It was too easy to get bunched up and play Keystone cops going through a door with a man as large as the big Cajun.

Through the blue darkness between the night sky and the black tar roof, the arched supports of a rusted fire escape ladder over the lip of the building squeaked and moved under the load of someone climbing to the ground. Bowen ran to the edge and peered over, just in time to see the bearded man jump into the passenger side of a dark sedan that waited on the street below. They sped away without any lights.

“Tell me you got a good look at him,” Bowen said as Thibodaux came up beside him.

“Oh, hell yes, I did,” Thibodaux sighed.

“It wasn’t Petyr,” Bowen said, waiting for Thibodaux to confirm what he already knew.

“Not unless he’s grown a black beard, lost fifty pounds, and turned into a track star.”

Bowen bounced his fist on the lip of the waist-high cinderblock parapet that ran around the edge of the roof. “I’ll get with NYPD. They may have some cameras down on the stree—”

The metallic squeak of the stairwell door sent a chill down Bowen’s spine. He froze, shooting a sideways glance at Thibodaux and held his breath. The quarry gone, both men had relaxed too quickly.

Somewhere in the darkness behind them, Bowen heard the unmistakable snick of a rifle safety coming off.

Chapter 15

Ahowling wind blew in from the Bering Sea, shoving at Volodin like the horns of an angry bully. Kaija stood hunched over as she worked on the man door to the hangar, assuring him over the screaming blizzard that she could get past the combination lock. He had thought the lee of the metal building would block the storm, but the wind seemed to come from every direction at once. There was no hiding from it. Crystalline snow scoured the exposed skin of his face and neck, forcing him and his daughter to withdraw into their scant clothing like tortoises in a sandstorm.

It seemed impossible, but the attack he’d seen on television was of his creation. Someone had sold or given away New Archangel. Only he and Lodygin had the codes to the lab, so it had to be Lodygin. If the Captain was involved, then so was Colonel Rostov. Evgeni Lodygin was a vile thing to be sure. Volodin warned Kaija to stay well away from the pervert. But from what Volodin had seen, the Captain would not so much as get a haircut unless he had the approval from his boss.

His back to the wind, Volodin pounded at his forehead with a palm, trying desperately to fill in the growing black holes that seemed to be taking over his mind. He knew he was a bad man. Chemical weapons had been called “a higher form of killing,” but Volodin knew that was a lie. There were no high and low killings. Only killing. It made no difference if it was for money or patriotism. Anyone who would create a substance as deadly as New Archangel had made a deal with the devil. Volodin cursed himself at the thought. He could not remember making the deal, but he must have. And if he made a bargain so vile, what else had he done?

“It is open,” Kaija said, entering the hanger without looking back. Her anger toward him was palpable. And why shouldn’t she be angry? It was his fault they’d been forced to hide for hours in the cramped attic above the lavatories of the air-charter building. They were unprepared, and they both knew it was his doing.

They’d waited another hour after the building had closed, moving only when they heard the last of the employees lock the door to the charter office.

It was Kaija who located another hangar where they could spend the remainder of the night. She was a supremely intelligent girl, and had, Volodin supposed, spent enough time around him to know that people, even smart ones, tended to write down things like door combinations. This one was scratched into the paint of the metal siding a few feet away from the push-button cypher lock.

Volodin lit a match as soon as he entered the pitch-black hanger. Kaija was quick to blow it out, using the light from her mobile phone to point to three high-wing bush planes and the assorted fuel cans stacked around them.

“Papa,” she said, shaking her head and glaring with her small mouth set in a hard line, the way her mother had looked when she was cross. “This is not a place to light matches.”

“Of course,” Volodin said, tapping at his forehead with an open hand again. “I should have known better. I am sorry, child.”

Kaija led the way across the rough concrete floor. A metal desk, a filing cabinet, and a small refrigerator set one area of the open bay apart as an office area. Thankfully there was a stack of candy bars and four plastic bottles of water inside the fridge. Kaija scooped them up along with something wrapped in white paper that turned out to be a pastrami sandwich.

Kaija cut the sandwich in half and handed part to Volodin. “Eat this,” she said, biting into her half. “It will help you get your strength back.”

They ate in silence for a time, with Kaija playing the light of her phone around the huge space, past shelving piled high with airplane parts and winter gear.

“I need to know something, Papa,” Kaija said at length.

“Of course,” he said. He’d dragged her this far. What else could he say?

“The spill into the river,” she said, eyes piercing even in the dim light of the phone. “What were you thinking?”

Volodin sighed. He’d taken only two bites of the sandwich before his stomach began to rebel. He carefully wrapped the rest and set it on the corner of the desk so Kaija could eat it later.

“Honestly,” he muttered. “I do not know. It seems to me that the entire lot of what I have done should be destroyed. I must have thought that if I released the chemicals one half at a time, they would be inert and cause no damage.”

“They would have, Papa,” Kaija said, frustration showing in her twitching brow. “But for some unknown reason you decided to release both components within minutes of each other. Had you not rinsed out the original batch you would have been killed when you simply flushed the second set down the drain.”

“Perhaps that would have been better than what is happening to me now,” Volodin said, hanging his head.

“We have been rushed, Papa,” she said, stating the obvious. But perhaps he needed the obvious. He certainly made enough mistakes. “Rushed into fleeing our homeland when we are unprepared.”

“I know this,” he whispered.

“Do you, Papa?” She was fuming now. “Do you understand how important it is that we discuss big decisions? There are many places in the world I would have wanted to go besides the United States. Your foolishness has put us in jeopardy. You have put everything in jeopardy.”

“I am a horrible man, kroshka. Tomorrow I will turn myself in to the American authorities. I will tell them you had nothing to do with this, and they will give you asylum. Perhaps you will like America.” He smiled. “It is not such a bad place. They have excellent universities”

“I do not wish to live in America!” Kaija screamed. “We will be at the mercy of filthy, thieving zhid!”

Volodin slapped her, hard, bringing a trickle of blood to the corner of her mouth. “Never use that word,” he said. “Your great-grandmother was a Jew.”

Kaija rubbed her jaw, staring at him. For a moment, he thought she might hit him back. Instead, she merely shook her head. “I am very tired,” she said.

“I am sorry, kroshka,” Volodin said. “I should not have struck you.” Her mother had held such racist thoughts, and it had been a constant source of friction between them.

Kaija held up her open hand. “The fault is mine, Papa.” She clearly had no remorse about what she’d said, only that she’d said it to him. “I will watch my words. We are both exhausted.”

There were no cots inside the hanger, but there were several pairs of nylon wing covers, quilted bags to protect the plane from snow and frost. Two of them folded made a serviceable if lumpy mattress to keep them off the chilly concrete. And two more proved large enough to climb inside and use as sleeping bags.

“Go to sleep, child,” Volodin said as he settled in against the stiff nylon. It smelled of oil and mildew, but it was American oil and mildew. “We must not be here when the owners of this place come in tomorrow.”

“Papa,” Kaija said, facing away in her own makeshift bag. “I am concerned about your plan to go to the authorities tomorrow.”

Volodin rolled onto his shoulder. His eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and he could just make out the lump of cloth that was his daughter in the dim glow from the computer on the desk a few feet away.

“What would you have me do?” He asked. “We cannot hide for long. Those men are surely still looking for us. I expect I will see more by tomorrow. Rostov has eyes everywhere. They will crawl through car and building until they find us.”

“I am sure this is true.” The heavy nylon wing covers rustled in the darkness as Kaija rolled up on her side as well, looking directly at him. “And that goes to my point. Nome, Alaska, is a very small place, barely larger than Providenya — and just as remote. We will eventually have to go to the authorities, but not here. It would be better to wait until we are in Anchorage where we have a better chance to find someone not in league with Colonel Rostov.”

“Anchorage?” Volodin said. “There will be people looking for us at the airport.”

“I have a friend,” Kaija said. “A girl who lives in a small village northeast of here. If we can get to her, she will help us. It will be out of the way, but according to her, the authorities do not check identification on small aircraft within the state. We can get to Anchorage without raising suspicion.”

“How do you know this girl?” Volodin said.

Kaija fell back in her bed, laughing. “You are such an old man, Papa. The Internet makes it possible to have friends all over the world. We will find a flight out to my friend, Polina, in the morning. She will help us.”

“So I should not turn myself in?” Volodin said.

Kaija gave an exasperated sigh. “No, Papa, you should not.”

Volodin stared into the darkness. She was angry with him again. They had been arguing about something, but he could not remember what it was.

Chapter 16

“NYPD!”

A blue-on-blue shooting — catching an acci dental bullet from another officer — was a constant danger to any law-enforcement officer in plain clothes. Bowen had been on the other end of the gun in the same situation and knew he was a hair away from catching a volley of bullets in the back. He let his pistol fall to the rooftop, breathing a sigh of relief when he saw Thibodaux was smart enough to do the same thing.

“We’re on the job!” Bowen yelled over his shoulder without turning around. Considering all the blood and bone the responding cops had walked by on the floors below, there was no doubt they would be a little twitchy on the trigger.

Bowen could feel more than one officer behind him and knew even without seeing them that several muzzles pointed in his direction. He’d felt the feeling before, and it was not an easy thing to forget. Thankfully the officers were well-disciplined and absent the melee of contradictory commands that were often issued under stressful confrontations.

“Step away from the guns!” a voice barked. It was deep and sure, accustomed to giving orders. “Hands away from your sides!”

A moment later both Bowen and Thibodaux were bum rushed by a swarm of police. Bowen caught glimpses of blue windbreakers and gold shields swinging from neck chains as he was forced face down. Detectives, Bowen thought. That made sense.

“U.S. Marshals,” Bowen said as the handcuffs ratcheted closed at the small of his back. His voice was muffled. He tasted tar from the roof. “My creds are in my left jacket pocket. Badge is inside my shirt on a chain around my neck.”

A hand reached around to retrieved the black credential case. “Wearing your badge inside your shirt is a good way to get yourself ventilated,” the authoritative voice behind him said.

“Can’t argue with that,” Bowen said. “This thing went from interview to shitstorm before we knew it.

“They got a way of doin’ that around here,” the detective said.

Bowen chanced a look over his shoulder. When no one kicked him in the head, he began to relax.

A stocky man with a flattened nose from one too many fights stood back a few feet, perusing both sets of credentials. From the way the other men seemed to look to him for direction, Bowen guessed he was the detective in charge.

“They’re good.” The man nodded to the contact detectives. He snapped the black leather cases closed, apparently satisfied. “Go ahead and take the cuffs off and help them up.”

Bowen and Thibodaux brushed the dust off the front of their clothes and took back their credentials in turn. The lead detective raised a blond eyebrow at Thibodaux. “What in the hell is OSI?”

The Marine shook his head. “I know, right?” he said, not bothering to explain.

“Detective Sean O’Hearn,” the detective said. “Sixtieth precinct organized crime squad. I’m assuming you guys came to speak to the mope in 307.”

“We did,” Bowen said.

O’Hearn rubbed his face. “Well, said mope has recently started keeping company with people who are on our radar.” He suddenly looked directly at Bowen. “Looks like you been on the wrong end of a fist.”

“You should see the other guy,” Bowen said, rubbing his wrists, but deciding not to go into detail.

“What do the feds want with the Wolf?”

“Who?” Bowen said.

“It’s Petyr Volodin’s fighting name,” O’Hearn said. “Petyr the Wolf. I know, he’s a dumbass. Anyhow, what do you guys have on him? I didn’t notice any warrants in NCIC.”

“Oh, you know,” Thibodaux gave a noncommittal grin. “National security stuff.”

“Of course it is,” O’Hearn grunted. He turned to walk toward the stairwell. “I got a shitload of blood in his apartment that looks like the floor of a butcher shop — and no Petyr.”

“I’m guessing you haven’t seen the two bodies in the Dumpster yet,” Thibodaux said.

O’Hearn spun in his tracks, interested now. “I have not. The babushka in 309 was up nursing her gouty arthritis and spied you two through her peephole when you were breaking into 307. We grabbed the call from the uniforms when we heard the location was Volodin’s. We barely had time to clear the apartment before we heard you two clomping up the stairwell. Is one of the bodies the Wolf?”

“They’re faces are pretty caved in,” Bowen said. “But I’m guessing them to be two Middle Eastern males.”

“No wonder the feds are involved.” O’Hearn unclipped a radio from his belt. “Ramos, do me a favor. The marshal says we got two dead in the basement Dumpster. Secure them until CSU gets here.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, sending the rest of his squad down to help.

“Roger that, boss.” Ramos’s voice crackled back. “I’m on my way down there now from the lobby.”

O’Hearn pointed the radio antenna at Bowen, giving him a wry look. “This leaves me wondering who it was you chased up the stairs.”

“Not sure,” Thibodaux said, “but he’s long gone. Some dark-complected dude with a black beard and short hair. Neither of us got much of a look at him. We were hoping to grab some security video and run it through facial recognition if you have anything street-side.”

“I’ll see what we got as far as cameras,” the detective said. “But don’t get your hopes up. The local gangs take ’em out with BB guns and paintballs as quick as we put ’em up.”

“Mind if we tag along on the investigation?” Bowen said. “We promise not to get fed gunk on anything.”

“Fine with me.” O’Hearn shrugged. “I got thirteen open homicide cases attributed to the wannabe Russian Bratva mobsters we got around here. Feel free to help me out all you want. I gotta tell you though, I don’t like Petyr Volodin for this one. He’s a hell of a fighter in the ring, but outside… he’s kind of a mook.”

“We need to talk to him in any case,” Bowen said.

“No doubt.”

“Any suggestions about where we start?”

“His girlfriend Nikka,” O’Hearn’s shoulders shook in a mock shiver. “She’s a stripper off Surf Avenue. A place called Cheekie’s. You’ll want to wear protection when you talk to that one.”

“Protection?” Bowen grimaced.

Thibodaux’s brow peeked out above his eye patch.

The detective gave a pensive chuckle. “I’m only half kidding. This broad fights us every damn time we make contact with her. Don’t tell him I said this, but Ramos — the guy checking the basement for me — he’s kind of sweet on her. She’d be kind of a looker if she wasn’t so mean. No kidding though, you should wear some kind of sunglasses when you talk to her. She slings spit like a St. Bernard dog when she gets mad.” The detective leaned in as if to drive home his point. “And it don’t take much to piss her off.”

Thibodaux frowned. “Slings spit, you say?”

“Yeah,” O’Hearn said. “It’s really more of an angry lisp. Hissy, like a wet cat. And gets worse and worse the madder she gets. Red blotches on her chest too when she’s nervous. Won’t be a difficult clue to spot if you can catch her when she’s working at Cheekie’s. They don’t leave anything to the imagination at that place.”

“Hey, boss,” Ramos’s voice came across the handheld radio again.

“Go ahead,” O’Hearn said.

“Negative on the bodies.”

Bowen shot a glance at Thibodaux at the news.

O’Hearn’s face darkened. “Say again.”

“I got plenty of blood, and what looks like brain matter on the floor and in the dumpster — but no bodies.

Bowen gave a slow shake of his head as he worked out the reality of what had happened. “The guy with the beard was a decoy. He drew us away long enough for someone else to move them.”

“All right, Ramos,” O’Hearn said into his radio. “Secure the scene and we’ll get CSU down there to see what they can find.” He took a business card out of his wallet and held it out to Bowen. “I’ll work on grabbing security footage from any street cams that happen to be working, if you want to start looking for Petyr.”

Thibodaux rubbed his palms together. “Vanishing bodies, killer Russian mobsters, and a blotchy spittin’ stripper — this is liable to get interesting.”

Chapter 17

It was after midnight by the time the Air Force C-12 Huron crabbed in over Nome to set down on an icy runway amid a stiff crosswind and blowing snow. The Air Force pilots handled the landing with steely-eyed grace, though Quinn was certain they wondered what was so important as to bring them out to Western Alaska in the middle of the night.

He’d been able to grab a short nap after they left Anchorage, but woke with a start an hour into the flight, his mind flooded with questions. It took him several hazy seconds to figure out where he was and what he was doing on a small plane with this blond woman who had her face pressed to the window. He found few answers even after his head cleared, so he sat with his eyes half shut, listened to the whir of the ventilation system, and rested his body, if not his mind, for the remainder of the flight.

The pilot, an Air Force Major named Sitz ducked his head to step around his seat and throw the lever for the door, before stepping back into the cramped cockpit to allow Quinn and Agent Beaudine enough room to exit.

Cold air flooded the stuffy cabin as soon as the door opened, bringing welcome relief along with the chill. Quinn was used to boarding and deplaning on the tarmac without the aid and protection of a skyway, so he’d put on his coat in anticipation of landing. Beaudine shivered and quickly shrugged on her coat. She didn’t complain about the cold, a fact that made Quinn feel slightly better about going on a mission with someone he knew next to nothing about.

A white Tahoe with the golden bear emblem of the Alaska State Troopers on the door idled fifty meters off the nose of the C-12 next to the ten-foot chain-link fence that secured the perimeter of the airport. The Tahoe sat in the shadows, just beyond the reach of the hazy yellow lights behind the Alaska Airlines terminal building. Exhaust vapor swirled around the back tires for an instant then disappeared, whisked away by the wind, making it feel colder than it actually was.

Just a few degrees below the Arctic Circle, temperatures in Nome could plummet to well below zero this time of year. Quinn guessed it was somewhere around twenty degrees — balmy weather by Nome standards — but the biting wind made it feel much colder. The Bering Sea had already brought in the first big storm of the season, and knee-high drifts and plow berms edged the fences and buildings. Pockets of snow clogged the gaps in the chain-link here and there like a giant crossword puzzle, remnants of the recent blizzard.

Quinn’s boots crunched as he trudged across the thin layer of crusted snow. The sea wind bit him hard on every exposed inch of skin. He resolved to get the wool liner for his jacket out of his pack at his first opportunity.

Beaudine ducked her head, a look of grim dismay seared into her face by the sudden cold.

The driver’s door swung open when they reached the Tahoe, and a smiling woman in a powder blue trooper jacket stepped out and waved. Her cheeks were a healthy pink. Matching rosy lips turned up in a natural smile. Blond curls stuck out from beneath her black wool watch cap. She didn’t have the battle-hardened look common to Alaska State troopers who’d spent much of their career assigned to the bush, and some might have considered her a pushover, but Quinn knew better.

“Jericho!” the woman said through her wide smile, grabbing him in a fierce hug that startled Beaudine enough she pedaled backward.

“Special Agent Khaki Beaudine from the Bureau,” Quinn said. He sniffed from the cold and stepped aside, giving the two women room to shake hands. “I want you to meet my mother’s younger sister — Trooper Abbey Duncan.”

Just three years older than Quinn, his Auntie Abbey was really more like a cousin. The two had virtually grown up together. They’d run the Mayor’s Marathon, the Crow Pass Crossing, and taken jujitsu classes together over the years. Other than harboring an unabashed hatred for motorcycles, which Quinn could partially overlook in a relative, she was the near perfect aunt. A senior in high school when he was a sophomore, she had been his first crush, though he’d never admit it. She’d stayed in Anchorage after high school, attending the University of Alaska. She’d taught middle school like Quinn’s mother but ultimately decided that putting felons in jail was preferable to grading papers and dealing with snotty parents.

“Khaki,” the woman said, taking Beaudine by the shoulders as if to size her up. “Is it a nickname?”

“Nope,” Beaudine said. “It’s on the birth certificate.”

“I love it.” Duncan hustled them out of the wind and into the Tahoe. “Call me Aunt Abbey.” She rested her hands on the steering wheel and waited for the C-12 to taxi out to the vacant runway. “You’re always into the big stuff, nephew, getting dropped off by an official Air Force plane that’s doing a turn and burn just to get you out here.” She drummed manicured thumbs on the wheel, glancing back and forth between Quinn, who sat in the front, to Beaudine, who was behind the Plexiglas prisoner screen.

“She’s the important one,” Quinn said, tossing a backward glance at Beaudine. “I came along to show her around.”

“Whatever you say.” Duncan smiled. She’d grown up in Alaska but for some reason had an accent like she was from Minnesota. “Anyways, you guys are lucky it warmed up. We’ve had one heck of a cold snap here for this early in the year. You gotta make sure you come by the house when you’re finished with your secret mission. Michael would love to see you.” She gave Quinn a chiding look. “Are you still riding those murdercycles?”

Quinn learned as a youngster that ignoring the question was much easier than arguing with Aunt Abbey.

“Our hotel’s the other way,” he said, as Duncan headed north off Seppala Drive at the end of the airport rather than continuing toward town and the Aurora Inn where he’d hoped to catch a few minutes of actual, horizontal sleep.

Her handsome face was tinged green in the glow of the dash lights when she turned to look at him. “I am familiar with Nome, my dear,” she said. “But we’re not going to your hotel. Not yet, anyhow. There’s been a break-in at the ticket office where your scientist passed through Customs.”

Beaudine poked her head through the open hatch in the prisoner screen. “You know about the scientist?”

“Hon,” Aunt Abbey said, “Nome is a very small place. The checker down at the AC store probably knows about your scientist.”

“Tell us about this break-in,” Quinn said.

Duncan turned the Tahoe off the main road and into the lighted parking lot of the air charter business that handled trips between Alaska and Russia. Snow drifted against the blue metal building, most of which served as a maintenance hanger with the remainder converted office and terminal space. Quinn guessed it was large enough to house five or six aircraft at least as large as the C-12 or a couple of larger birds.

A dark-skinned Inupiaq man wearing a wool watch cap and light jacket stood in a pool of yellow light in front of the building, seemingly impervious to the cold. The smoke from the ember of his cigarette was whipped away into the darkness. He gave a stoic wave when the Trooper vehicle pulled up. The headlights threw his long shadow across the driven snow.

Trooper Duncan introduced him as Angus Paul, a night watchman for the airport.

“I brought the feds, Angus,” the trooper said, her voice breathy against the cold air. “Show us what you found.”

Angus Paul studied them for a long moment, then picked a stray fleck of tobacco leaf off his lip before turning to walk around to the side of the building. He pointed to a broken window three feet off the ground and still outside the airport perimeter fence. The area was protected from the view of anyone who happened to be driving by and a logical place to try to force entry without being detected. It was also protected from the wind. Several spots of yellow snow suggested it was the spot Angus Paul stopped to relieve himself during his nightly rounds — which was probably the reason he’d discovered the broken window before sunrise.

Quinn took a small flashlight out of his pocket and stooped to look at the ground without approaching too close. Shards of glass lay scattered in two sets of tracks in the snow — the larger, a pair of boots with a lug sole and a well-worn left heel. The other tracks were narrower and smaller all around with a circular pattern in the tread.

Quinn glanced at Angus Paul’s boots.

“You won’t find any of my tracks around there,” the man said as if reading Quinn’s mind. He lit a fresh cigarette and blew the smoke into the relative still air in the lee of the metal hangar. “Anyways, looks like more of a break out than a break-in if you ask me. There ain’t any tracks walking up to the building, just the ones leadin’ away. I followed ’em as far as that drift over there by the road before the snow covered ’em over.”

Quinn nodded. “You’re right. Whoever made these tracks was leaving, not breaking in. The glass is pressed into the snow where they stepped on top of it. You see any sign of forced entry anywhere else in the building?”

Evidently tired of talking, Angus wrinkled his nose and eyebrows, the Inupiaq equivalent of shaking his head no.

Quinn held his flashlight so the beam fell across the tread, throwing a slight shadow and revealing what looked like the imprint of a flower among the circular treads.

“You know what that is?” Quinn asked, pointing to the design.

“A girl’s shoe,” Beaudine mused. She squatted down beside him, careful not to disturb the tracks. “Looks like a daisy.”

Quinn put his pen alongside the track for scale before snapping several photographs with his phone. “Could be,” he said. “Or it could be a chamomile, the national flower of Russia.”

Quinn took a couple of notes, gleaning all the information he was going to get from the few tracks outside the building by the time the emergency contact for the charter company showed up ten minutes later.

The break-in was really Nome PD’s jurisdiction, but with Alaska State Troopers and FBI on the scene, they were more than happy to yield the investigation. Aunt Abbey carried in a small crime scene kit, but the building manager, a balding man named Charles with a long goatee that was crooked from sleeping, could find nothing missing. It was Beaudine who found the displaced tile in the women’s restroom and scuff marks on the back of the toilet where someone had apparently accessed the false ceiling.

“Mind if I use some of your fingerprint powder?” Quinn asked.

Abbey handed over her kit. Quinn used the magnetic brush to dust the back of the toilet with finely ground iron powder, revealing the black outline of a shoe print where someone had stood on the porcelain with both feet. One of the prints was clear enough to make out the design of a chamomile flower in the tread pattern.

Aunt Abbey stood next to the toilet and peered up. “So they cleared Customs and then hid up in the rafters waiting for the building to close.”

“Apparently,” Quinn said. “Any flights leave Nome after dark?” He already knew the answer but asked anyway.

“Nope,” Angus Paul said. “Not even any charters tonight. Too windy.”

Quinn looked at Beaudine then checked his Aquaracer. He stifled a yawn when he realized it was a quarter after two in the morning. “Let’s get back to the hotel and catch a couple of hours sleep.”

“This makes no sense,” Beaudine said. “Why would someone go to the trouble of hiding after they cleared Customs?”

“You said he had mental issues,” Quinn offered. “But I’m guessing your doctor is hiding from someone other than the U.S. government. Maybe a welcome party.”

Agent Beaudine’s face fell into a thoughtful frown. “I’m wondering if that makes this more or less of a shit detail.”

Chapter 18

A stout bang on the door ripped Quinn from the blackness of his dreams and sent him reaching for the pistol he kept on a folded washcloth in the drawer beside his bed. He sat bolt upright, staring through the darkness toward the door. The nightlight from the bathroom revealed that the chair he habitually placed in front of any hotel door was still in place.

The pounding started again, followed by the urgent voice of his Aunt Abbey.

“Jericho!” she said, her voice a breathy stage whisper. “Open the door before I wake everyone in the hotel!”

There was no place to tuck the pistol since he slept in a pair of loose sweatpants, so Quinn set it back on his nightstand before opening the door. He squinted at the bright light of the hotel hallway. Abbey batted her naturally long eyelashes — dark for the blond that she was — and grinned, reminding him of why he’d always loved her. She shoved a cup of coffee in Quinn’s face.

Across the hall, the door to Agent Beaudine’s room opened a tiny crack revealing a tan strip of thigh and one extremely sleep-deprived eye. The door opened completely when she realized it was Aunt Abbey. She wore a pair of navy blue sleeping shorts and a simple white T-shirt that hid much less than she probably thought it did.

Beaudine ran a hand through the frosted hair of her mussed bed head. “Didn’t you just drop us off ten minutes ago?”

“Hours ago, my dear.” Abbey said. “Hours ago.” She handed Beaudine a cup of coffee as well. “I don’t know how you like it.”

“I like it now,” Beaudine said, taking the cup with both hands and using it to warm herself.

“It’s six thirty-five, dear nephew.” Abbey shrugged. “You can go back to bed if you’d rather, but I thought you might want to know we have another break-in — with the same chamomile print in the track.”

“Where?” Quinn was instantly awake.

“Another airplane hangar, about a quarter mile from the charter office where we went last night,” Abbey said. “Looks like your Russian scientist might have slept there. The guy who owns the place is pretty hacked off. I guess they ate the pastrami sandwich he had planned for his lunch today.”

Five minutes later Quinn had splashed water on his face and stuffed his gear in the waterproof pack. Two minutes after that, he and Beaudine sat in Abbey Duncan’s Tahoe heading back out toward the airport in the steel gray grip of predawn twilight.

“This your first trip to the bush?” Abbey asked, glancing at Beaudine in the rearview mirror.

“It is,” Beaudine said through a long yawn.

Abbey kept her eyes forward on the snowy road. “They say you find three things out here: money, missionaries, and misfits.”

“Which are you?” Beaudine said.

Abbey shrugged. “Jury’s still out.”

“No it’s not,” Quinn said.

The trooper radio on the dash crackled to life.

“Hey, Abbey,” the voice said. “I got more news about those folks you were lookin’ for.” It was Angus Paul.

“We’re on our way to take a look at the break-in now,” Abbey said. “Whatcha got?”

“Just talked to Millie Beaty at Tusk Charters. She says Earl flew out to Bornite Lodge about fifteen minutes ago with an older man and a teenage girl.” Gussaq was the not entirely friendly word Inupiaq people used for white people.

Abbey kept the microphone to her mouth, but shot a look at Quinn. “Interesting,” she said.

“You better come over here,” Angus said. “There’s somethin’ else you need to see.”

Angus Paul was waiting at the perimeter fence, still wearing no more than his light jacket against the morning cold. He held the gate open so Abbey could drive the Tahoe straight inside, and then jumped in his truck to follow her across the snowy taxiway. Private aircraft heaved against their tie-down ropes in a steady breeze. A few had quilted wing covers and appeared to be well maintained. Far too many were tattered and covered in snow, icicles drooping from their props as if they were sad at being abandoned by their owners.

“How far away is the Bornite Lodge?” Beaudine asked when they’d gotten out of the car. She wore her waist-length jacket hunched up around her neck. Her thin fleece watch cap was pulled all the way down around her ears, eclipsing all but the tiniest wisps of frosted hair.

“About two hours northeast,” Abbey said. She turned to Angus Paul. “You said there was something we needed to see.”

Angus’s eyebrows shot upward, the Inupiaq equivalent of nodding his head. A homemade sign bearing the image of a huge bull walrus hung on the small metal hanger behind him. It was the base of operations for Tusk Air Services.

He turned around without a word and started toward a bare patch of snow outside the hanger. Quinn motioned for Beaudine to follow.

“The Tusk plane was parked here when everyone got on board,” Angus said, squatting low and holding an open hand over a patch of snow ground. “See that track there?”

Quinn leaned in close enough to see the faint impression of a chamomile flower in the tread. “If we’re right, that’s your Dr. Volodin and the girl heading for the lodge.”

“That’s not the most important part,” Angus said. “Millie said three other guys came by right after Earl took off. She described ’em as Russian thugs. They told her they were supposed to meet a friend — some old guy. Sounds like it might be your escaped scientist.”

“He didn’t escape,” Beaudine said. “We just need to talk to him.”

“Anyhow,” Angus said, giving her a wary eye that said he didn’t quite believe her. “Millie feels really bad about it, but she accidently let it slip Earl was headed to the Bornite. They musta chartered Corey Morgan’s plane because Millie saw ’em leave a few minutes later.”

Quinn mulled over the new information. Russian thugs trying to locate a Russian chemical-weapons expert on the day after the attacks turned this into an entirely different mission.

Beaudine was on her phone immediately, talking to what she called HBO — Higher Bureau Offices. The pinched look on her face and the way she kept throwing her arms in the air said the conversation wasn’t going the way she wanted it to.

The roar of another airplane overhead pulled Quinn from his thoughts. Landing lights twinkled in the gunmetal morning sky as a blue-and-white Piper Cherokee Six crabbed in, angled into the stiff wind.

“That guy’s coming in early,” Abbey said. She craned her head to watch the plane touch down before she turned back to Quinn. “I’ll go to talk to Millie and see if I can get a better description of those three Russians.”

Quinn couldn’t help but grin as the newly arrived plane taxied off the runway and rumbled across the lumpy ice and snow toward them. “Actually,” he said, his voice rising to be heard over the roar of the approaching airplane. “I need you to do me a favor, Aunt Abbey.”

“Of course, my dear,” Abbey said. “What is it?”

“We have to get out to that lodge and our ride just got here,” Quinn said. “I need you to loan Agent Beaudine a bigger coat.”

Beaudine was still arguing with someone in the Bureau hierarchy as the pilot of the Piper Cherokee applied the brake to one wheel and gunned the engine to spin the plane so it faced back toward the runway before coming to a complete stop. A slightly built Alaska Native girl climbed out. Her chopped orange hair, uneven as if it had been cut with a pair of garden shears, hung almost to her shoulders. A pink fleece swallowed her up, two sizes too big and grimy around the cuffs from constant wear. A black ball cap was embroidered with LOVITA AIR in bold pink letters. Her faded jeans were ripped above both knees in the way city girls found stylish, but Quinn knew was evidence of the intensity with which Lovita Aguthluk lived her life.

“What in the actual hell?” Beaudine groused, hand over her phone. She enunciated each word like the angry Texas girl that she was. “How come she gets to wear denim jeans? I thought you said cotton kills.”

“All bets are off with the folks who live out here.” Quinn grinned. “We’re just wannabes. They’re tundra tough.” He nodded to the little thing walking toward them. “Especially her.”

“Quinn!” Lovita squealed when she saw him, standing on tiptoe to smile and give him a stiff wave like a schoolgirl with a crush. She was the twenty-two-year-old niece of his friend James “Ukka” Perry from Mountain Village down on the Yukon River. Giddy as she was at seeing Quinn, Lovita was an extremely traditional Alaska Native woman. A prominent tattoo of three green lines ran from the tip of her chin to her lower lip, tying her visually to the ways of her Yup’ik and Inupiaq Eskimo ancestors. At the same time, orange hair and a half dozen tiny stainless steel hoops in her left ear put her squarely in the modern world of a young adult trying to make a statement about her individuality. Lovita had become a pilot as soon as she was old enough to get her license, spending every penny flying and maintaining the Piper Super Cub she’d inherited — even saving Quinn’s life with her flying skill. Quinn recognized the young woman’s potential as soon as he met her and took her under his wing as best he could. With his help and a healthy dose of grant money, she’d recently invested in the twenty-five-year-old Cherokee Six and started her own bush charter service.

Quinn had contacted her before he left Anchorage. The roads leading out of Nome didn’t go anywhere, but there were quite a few of them and he thought a dedicated aircraft might come in handy in the search for Dr. Volodin. He figured he might as well give a little business to Lovita Air.

“That little nubbin of a thing is flying you out to the lodge?” Abbey looked up long enough to grimace before going back to rummaging through the back of her Tahoe. Every so often, she’d find something she deemed important enough to stuff into a tattered waterproof duffle.

“She is indeed,” Quinn said. “That little nubbin is one of the best pilots I’ve ever flown with. We’ve been through a lot together. I trust her.”

“Well that’s something.” Abbey paused, sniffing an extra pair of her pink wool socks before stuffing them into the duffle. “Because it looks to me like you’re about to head into the bush with an FBI lady who’s going to fight you every step of the way.”

Quinn shot a glance at Beaudine, who stood twenty feet away, gritting her teeth and grinding her cellphone against her ear. “She’s too busy fighting herself to have much of a war with me.”

Lovita ran up and threw her arms around Quinn, pulling him down in a tight squeeze that lit up his bruised ribs. She smelled of cigarettes and smoked salmon and was amazingly strong for such a little woman.

“What’s this?” Quinn frowned, eyeing the wad of punk ash — a mixture of leaf tobacco and burned tree fungus — she has tucked under her lower lip.

She groaned. “Don’t you start with me,” she said. “I’m still tryin’ to quit smokin’. One thing at a time.”

“Well, quyana,” Quinn said, using the Yup’ik Eskimo word for thank you. He decided it was best not to hound Lovita on her tobacco use since she’d flown through the darkness to get to him. “I know it was short notice.

“It’s okay,” Lovita said. “I saw the biggest herd of walruses ever, hauled up on a sandbar out in the sound.” She winked. “But I’m still gonna charge you for the flight.”

Quinn explained the change of plans and the need to make the two-hour flight out to the Bornite Lodge rather than just flying around the Nome area. Putting her pilot hat back on, Lovita nodded quietly then pulled a small salmon-colored book from the pocket of her pink fleece. It contained descriptions of virtually every airstrip in Alaska.

“Us Eskimos got a sense about the weather, but lemme check with the gussaq weather guessers just in case. I’ll top off with fuel.” She looked at her watch. Quinn smiled when he saw it was a TAG Heuer Aquaracer identical to his. It was big for her small wrist, but she didn’t seem to care.

“We can be in the air in twenty minutes,” she said, checking the weather on her iPhone while she spoke.

Quinn thought about the men with Russian accents who’d just taken off in pursuit of Volodin. “Ten minutes would be better,” he said.

Lovita raised both eyebrows. A silent “okay.”

Aunt Abbey came around from the back of her Tahoe with a duffle in one hand and a long black case in the other.

“Take my AR-10,” she said, handing the bags to Quinn. “I put three thirty-round mags in the case.”

“A state gun?”

“An Abbey gun.”

“Best aunt ever.” Quinn grinned in spite of the uneasiness in his gut. He kicked himself for coming to the bush with nothing but his pistol. A ten-millimeter had the equivalent stopping power of a .41 Magnum, but the rifle would make him feel better.

Khaki Beaudine stomped back a moment later in her own little bubble of discontent. She looked like she could melt the snow with her glare.

“Jackasses,” she muttered to no one in particular before turning to Quinn. “And, how come she gets to call herself an Eskimo? I was told they didn’t like it.”

“Some do, some don’t.” Abbey smiled. “I figure I’ll leave it up to them.”

“What did your brass tell you?” Quinn asked.

Beaudine rolled her eyes. “I gave my A-SAC a rundown of what we have going on.” The A-SAC was the assistant special agent in charge — always spelled out with the FBI since for some reason they didn’t want to be referred to as sacks. “Considering we got Russians chasing our guy, you’d think he’d free up some help for us. But nooooo.” She wagged her head for effect. “The stupid shit said every other agent in the Bureau is too busy running down more promising leads. I’m supposed to go to this lodge and interview Volodin, then report back.”

“Good,” Quinn said. “We need to go out there anyway. Since you have orders, I’ll let the FBI voucher out the cost of the air charter.”

In truth, Quinn didn’t mind not having a large group of backup agents. If Palmer hadn’t ordered him to take Beaudine, he would have left her behind as well. Some things, like dealing with thugs — Russian or otherwise — were best done alone, with as few witnesses as possible.

Chapter 19

Yegor Igoshin stared at the back of the pilot’s head. He would ultimately have to kill the man; that went without saying. Gachev was larger, so he sat in the front seat of the Cessna 206 to the right of the pilot, a young and underfed man who explained that he was building flight hours as a bush pilot so he could eventually work for a major airline. The idiot droned on as much as the airplane’s engine. Thankfully, Gachev would be able to fly the plane out once their mission was complete.

Mikhail Orlov sat next to Igoshin in the backseat, their shoulders overlapping one another in the cramped cabin. None of the men were small, each weighing well over 200 pounds. Igoshin was the tallest of the three and as a soldier, clean-shaven. He had deep brown eyes and kept his dark hair cut close to his scalp. Gachev and Orlov were soldiers once, and like Igoshin, had enjoyed the certain loose latitudes of behavior Russian soldiering brought them. Instead of staying in when their military commitments were up, they had moved on to the more lucrative world of the professional contractor — which, it turned out, provided an even wider latitude when it came to behaviors. They had let their beards go, and their hair reminded Igoshin of two shaggy dogs. Their kit, however, the weapons and gear in the bags on the seat behind them, was in perfect condition. Igoshin’s rifle, an American Remington 700 chambered for the powerful .338 Lapua Magnum topped with a Nightforce 5.5-22 power scope, lay lengthwise in a padded case in the back of the plane. One way or another, he was going to try it out on this trip, even if it meant letting the pilot make a run for the river. Igoshin made a lucky shot during his last deployment to Chechnya, killing a separatist leader with his Kalashnikov. An officer, who’d needed something positive to report to higher command, walked off the distance and announced in front of everyone that it was an 800-meter shot. It was probably half that if Igoshin was lucky, but it was enough to get him decorated so he had not argued. Russian needed her heroes — one of them might as well be him. Everyone assumed Igoshin was a crack shot and he began to believe them. He found he actually had an aptitude for long-range shooting and made an honest 1100-meter shot at the range. But he’d been sitting at a table, with the rifle resting on a bag. He’d yet to break in the rifle on a living, moving target.

Perhaps this would be the trip.

When they weren’t actually on a mission, each of the three men spent their time exercising their bodies or abusing them with vodka and women. Far from the sculpted muscles of the American gym rats, these men were thick and brutish, preferring the raw power of a barbarian to the look of a body builder.

Spitting rain shot past the wings and trailed along the windows as the little airplane banked into a tight downwind on their approach. The cloud ceiling was high, well above three thousand feet, providing a clear view of the lodge nestled among the pockets of green forest and brown tundra below. Out of habit, Igoshin built a mental map as they overflew the facilities.

Five small cabins fanned out behind the main log building, each with a matching red metal roof, shiny and wet from the rain. Even when viewed from over a thousand feet up, the lodge itself was impressive for such a remote location. It was built of peeled logs well over a foot in diameter with a gabled roof and a massive front porch that ran the entire length of the building. Four balconies jutted from the second floor of what the Russian guessed was the back of the building, leading him to believe there were at least four guest rooms upstairs. A wooden deck, complete with outdoor Jacuzzi, ran between the east end of the lodge and the bank of a small tributary that connected to the larger Kobuk River, two kilometers to the north. A long, slender building that Igoshin guessed was a workshop or garage separated the lodge from the runway.

There was no sign of anyone at the lodge, but they’d met another aircraft in the air a half hour before that was heading back toward Nome. Certainly this was the one that had brought Dr. Volodin and the Chukchi girl. They had strict instructions to capture the doctor or kill him and bring back some type of canisters that they were forbidden to open. Back in Nome, Orlov had pointed out that anything they were forbidden to open was likely worth a great deal of money — and all three men were considering their options as the babbling pilot slowed the aircraft on final approach.

A tall man wearing a green raincoat and a brown slouch hat stepped out of the shop building and walked through the drizzle toward the plane as it taxied onto the gravel apron at the end of the runway and stopped. A moment later an equally tall woman with her gray hair in long braids stepped out of the same building to join the man. The couple waved in unison.

“That’s Adam and Esther Henderson now,” the pilot said, peeling off his headset and hanging it over the yoke. “They’re usually not too busy this time of year, but I’ll wait around to make sure they have a cabin for you.”

“That would be most welcome,” Igoshin said. He spoke English but didn’t like the taste of it.

Igoshin pulled his rifle case from between the two back seats and climbed out the side door after the others.

Adam Henderson stepped up to shake everyone’s hand in turn. “I don’t remember when we’ve had so many people come in the same day without reservations,” he said. “We still have rooms in the main house. I’ve already winterized the cabins.”

“The main house is quite acceptable.” Igoshin brightened.

“I’ll go put on some more bacon,” Esther Henderson said, peering at the three men with narrow eyes. “You do eat bacon, don’t you?” She gave Igoshin a look that said if he didn’t eat bacon, he could get right back on the airplane.

“Bacon is also acceptable,” the Russian said looking around. The buildings seemed bunched much closer together now that he was on the ground and not a thousand feet up. “I assume our friends have arrived before us.”

“If you mean Kostya and his daughter, then yes, they have.” Henderson took off his hat and ran a hand through thick gray hair, nodding his head. “I was just calling them in for breakfast. They must have taken a walk downriver a ways because I can’t seem to locate them. We have a father and son dentist team here as well but they’re likely off fishing somewhere and won’t be back for breakfast.”

A stiff gust of wind carried in the sweet smell of wet willows and brought with it a stronger squall of rain. Esther looked at the pilot. “You can’t fly out in this. You may as well come in and have breakfast too.” She turned to make her way back to the lodge, seemingly oblivious to the rain.

Adam Henderson snugged down his hat and hunched the rain jacket up around his shoulders. “This should bring your friends back in a hurry.” He offered to help with the bags but didn’t argue when the men demurred, turning instead to scurry after his wife. Corey, the young pilot, trotted up beside Henderson, and the two men began to talk of the fat grayling and Arctic char in the nearby river.

Igoshin paused to let the two men get a few yards ahead, then leaned in so only Orlov and Gachev could hear him. “This fishermen father and son could be a problem,” he said. “Whatever the case, we will do nothing until we locate Volodin.”

Orlov raised a thick brow and stared back, as if letting the words seep in to his thick skull. “I see no sign of the doctor or the girl. This man says they have walked away.”

“They are here,” Igoshin said, nodding to the scrubby trees along the water and endless miles of tundra that stretched out beyond the woods. “There’s nowhere else for them to go.”

“And after we have Volodin?” Orlov said.

“Then—” Igoshin gave a benign smile. “Then we will kill them all.”

Chapter 20

The Cherokee Six, Lovita Air’s one and only plane, was set up to carry six passengers, two in the cockpit, two facing aft directly behind the cockpit, and two more facing those in a vis-à-vis configuration. The rear seats could easily be removed to allow space for more cargo through a small door on the left side of the airplane.

Quinn sat up front beside Lovita behind a second set of controls. He didn’t really care for small planes since they put his immediate destiny in the hands of someone else, but working in bush Alaska made flying a constant necessity. In any case, sitting next to Lovita was much more pleasant than being in the back with the spitfire Agent Beaudine, who, since the conversation with her boss, was engaged in what Jacques would have called one long hissy fit.

“No offense,” Beaudine’s voice came across the headset intercom. “Does it make you mad that they call this plane a Cherokee?”

Lovita shot a glance at Quinn. “It’s a great airplane. Fast, strong, nimble. Native name fits if you ask me.”

Beaudine nodded and sat back, lost again in her own world.

Quinn’s leg bounced in time to the Imagine Dragons song spilling out of Lovita’s green David Clark headset. Her orange hair bobbed back and forth as she mouthed the words to “I Bet My Life on You.” Quinn smiled. Mattie loved that song — and it suited all three of them perfectly.

Lovita had brought smoked salmon strips — Quinn’s favorite — and a plastic margarine tub of akutaq, also known as Eskimo ice cream. It was a blindingly sweet concoction made from whipped fat, sugar, and berries. Most people now made it with Crisco but Lovita preferred the more traditional ingredient of caribou fat. Tasting surprisingly like buttercream frosting, the rich stuff was the perfect survival food when the temperatures dipped. Beaudine turned up her nose at both treats, but Quinn had gone through a half-dozen salmon strips twenty minutes into the bumpy flight. Each strip was roughly the size of a fat fountain pen and dried to the consistency of soft jerky. A piece of silver gray skin ran up one side of the smoky, orange-brown flesh. The fish still contained plenty of its natural oil, and Quinn could feel the nutrients and energy flowing into his body with each greasy bite. Strips just like these had been carried into the backcountry by Eskimo and Athabaskan hunters for centuries. Some whites called the stuff squaw candy, but in Quinn’s experience, calling it that was a good way to earn a kick in the teeth from a Native female.

Unable to help himself, Quinn took another strip from the plastic bag between the seats and used his teeth to peel off the skin. He held the skin out to Lovita who popped it in her mouth the same way she’d done each of the earlier strips. She seemed to love the skin as much as the smoky meat — enough to make her spit out her punk ash tobacco — and chew on it like gum while she flew the plane.

As a start-up, Lovita Air had no access to the fancy navigational aids and avionics. Her console was made up of simple analog instruments that gave her measurements like oil pressure, altitude, and direction of travel. A handheld GPS attached to the dash with Velcro provided her with a moving map, but she generally navigated with a paper chart and compass, preferring traditional navigation as well as traditional food.

Suddenly animated, Lovita’s voice crackled over Quinn’s headset. “Look at all those caribou off my wing.” She slowly shook her head as if it was hard to believe. “Must be thousands of them.”

Quinn lifted out of his seat so he could look. He turned to point them out to Beaudine who slumped in the backseat with her eyes closed. She’d taken off her headset and put in earplugs, which Quinn decided was just as well. She was looking a little green, the bumps likely making her sick to her stomach.

“Thank you for helping me out with my business,” Lovita said, turning down the volume on her music. She used a paper towel to pick up an errant piece of salmon strip from her seat and popped it in her mouth before cleaning up the oily spot. “The way I figure it, I’ll be able to get a loan on a second plane and hire another pilot in about three years.”

“You’re a good investment.” Quinn couldn’t help but smile at the energy that oozed from the tiny Native woman.

“So far as you know.” She grinned back at him, her head almost disappearing into the neck of the well-worn pink fleece. “I joke.” The traditional tattoos on her chin only added to the mischief of her grin. If anyone could grow a charter business in the remote corner of the world, it was Lovita.

“We’ll be coming up on the lodge in two minutes.” She leaned forward to consult the GPS, and then nodded off the nose of the aircraft. “I’ll overfly it so I can make sure what the wind is doing down there and you can have a look before we set down.”

Quinn nodded, turning to wave and get Beaudine’s attention. “We’re nearly there,” he said when she removed one earplug.

“Good,” she said. “Because I need to pee.”

“There’s another plane off the strip,” Lovita said.

Quinn pointed out the window to the Cessna parked at the end of the runway so Beaudine would see it.

“That’s Corey Morgan’s 206,” Lovita said, blushing. “He’s kinda got a crush on me. Keeps tellin’ me we should get together and raise lots of bush-pilot babies.”

“I’ll have to have a talk with the boy,” Quinn said, feeling a rush of paternal jealousy.

“That’s Adam Henderson going inside now,” Lovita said. “He’s the owner. Always feeds me breakfast when I bring clients out here. I like him.”

Quinn was quiet now as he studied the buildings around the lodge and started building a map in his mind. It was fine to eat salmon strips and dream about future business plans while they were flying in, but now he needed to focus on Dr. Volodin and the dangers surrounding him. Odds were that the men who’d come after him were FSB, making certain he didn’t intend to defect. A defection could make for a sticky situation if Quinn got in their way.

Things appeared to be peaceful — but questioning the way things appeared kept Quinn alive when he should have been otherwise.

“Agent Beaudine,” he said. “You carry my aunt’s long gun but keep it out of sight.”

Beaudine canted her head and glared. “Let’s remember one thing, okay. I’ve heard about your tactics. You’re working for me out here, not the other way around. We’re not going in with guns blazing.”

Lovita shot Quinn a protective look, and for a moment, he thought she might climb over her seat and claw out the agent’s eyes.

“Suit yourself,” Quinn said. “My aunt’s rifle is there if you want to use it. But good tactics are good tactics, no matter who’s in charge — and out here, we are our own cavalry. No one is going to show up and rescue us.”

Agent Beaudine snatched up the rifle case and slung in over her shoulder.

Quinn turned back to Lovita. “Would you mind staying with the plane until we check things out. If you hear shooting, take off and try to get a call out on the radio to the troopers.”

Quinn knew the chances of getting a call out over the radio from this far out were slim to none. He also knew Lovita was so devoted that she would never leave him behind unless she had a mission — but telling her to made him feel better.

Two minutes later Lovita brought the Cherokee to a stop at the end of the gravel runway, far enough behind the Cessna that either plane could make an easy getaway without turning around. She watched as Quinn and the whiny FBI agent made their way to the front porch. The agent grudgingly carried the rifle in a flat case over her back, out of sight. Lovita could tell there was something bugging the woman, something heavy. Whatever it was, that was just too bad, because Lovita’s first allegiance was to Quinn. If the grouchy agent popped off again at Quinn when they were in the air, Lovita resolved to fly loops until she puked her guts out.

Standing by her airplane, a good fifty yards away from the porch, Lovita tried to hear what Quinn was saying but the drizzling patter of a steady rain made it impossible. She didn’t really care. She trusted he would do what he had to do and then come back to the plane when he was ready. She thought Corey Morgan might come out to see how she was doing, but he was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Adam Henderson came back to the door. He smiled at Quinn and waved, so Lovita turned her attention to the weather. She didn’t mind flying in the rain, but the clouds to the north were growing darker by the minute. She intended to be an old pilot, not a bold pilot, and if Quinn didn’t finish with his business before the front rolled in, they were all going to stay the night at the lodge.

With little else to do but wait and watch the clouds, Lovita decided to do what pilots did and try to check the forecast. She’d just reached the door of the airplane when she heard a crunch in the gravel behind her. Smiling at the thought of a chat with her friend and fellow bush pilot, she turned, expecting to find Corey Morgan standing behind her. There was no one there.

A wet wind rustled the dark boughs of the spruce trees along the runway. The few golden leaves that clung to white birch fluttered and hissed, sending a chill up Lovita’s legs. A flash of movement caught her attention, and she peered into the tree line. From the time she was a toddler, her grandmother and aunties had told her stories about the enukin, small, gnome-like beings that dressed in caribou skin and lived in little houses beneath the mountains. Sometimes enukin helped stranded hunters, but they were impish in nature so they could just as easily bring misfortune.

The wind picked up again, shaking the airplane and whipping the treetops. Her back to the Cherokee and peering hard into the darkness of the forest, she caught a flit of movement — but missed the crunch of footsteps in the gravel behind her. She’d never seen one of the little people, but her granny had, and whatever it was out in the woods, it was definitely the right size to be an enukin…

Gravel crunched again, somewhere near. She cocked her head to one side, straining to figure out where the noise came from amid the swirling, moaning wind. She heard it again, coming from directly beneath the airplane. A half breath later something grabbed her by both ankles, jerking her feet out from under her. She slammed face first into the gravel. It was on top of her in an instant, pounding her face with big, hamlike fists — much too large to be an enukin.

Chapter 21

Bowen made a quick call, then asked Thibodaux to drive directly from Petyr Volodin’s apartment to the Brooklyn office of the U.S. Marshals Service. The supervisory deputy happened to be one of his academy mates, and let them in with a promise to reset the alarms before they left.

Bowen believed in gathering all the intel he could when he hunted someone, and he ran computer searches on both Petyr and his girlfriend to check national criminal histories. He’d printed two sets of everything he found, including photos, and threw together two powder-blue investigative folders. It was four in the morning when he finished, and Cheekie’s was closed by the time they got there. Rather than banging on more doors and tipping their hand, they’d decided to postpone their hunt in favor of a couple of hours of much needed sleep.

Thibodaux picked Bowen up at his hotel at eight a.m. looking more well rested than he should have. The chilly morning air, along with a stainless-steel mug of black coffee, helped to make Bowen feel almost human again. By the time Thibodaux worked his way through the sea of yellow cabs and clogged morning traffic to hit the Brooklyn Bridge that carried them over the East River, he was ready for business.

A large neon sign made up of two tilted wine glasses forming the outline of a female backside, hung above the red double doors of what could have only loosely been called a gentleman’s club. Nikka Minchkhi’s rap sheet noted that she lived in a small apartment above the place. Thibodaux drove around the block to get a better view of the back entrance. He parked the rented Taurus along the curb a half block away beside a kids’ playground that seemed to Bowen to be horribly close to a tittie bar.

“I think I’m more excited to find this spittin’ stripper than I am to find Petyr the Wolf.” Thibodaux tapped the steering wheel with his big hands. “He’s gonna be boring next to her.”

“She’s our best bet to find him.” Bowen leaned back in his seat and opened the blue folder to flip through Minchkhi’s file.

Thibodaux stared out the windshield, deep in some thought. “She worked until the wee hours of the mornin’ not counting any… side business. My bet is she’s still sleepin’ this time of day.”

“No rest for the wicked.” Bowen sighed. He set the file on the dash so he could check out Cheekie’s website on his phone. “Apparently there’s enough of a demand for skanky pole dancers during the day that they open back up in a few minutes.”

He slipped the phone back in his pocket and returned to the file to learn what he could about Nikka Minchkhi.

Originally from Tbilisi, Georgia, she had apparently come to the U.S., as did many women from Eastern Europe, with the promise of a job to be a nanny that somehow evaporated when she arrived. Since then she’d been arrested nine times for prostitution, the first shortly after she’d gotten to America when she was only eighteen years old. She looked terrified in that booking photo but still relatively normal in well-kept brunette hair and a loose gray sweater that hung off a pale shoulder. The arresting officers and the prosecuting attorney had been certain the girl was forced into prostitution and basically living as a slave — but Minchkhi had steadfastly refused to give them any information. The charges had been dropped.

Something happened after that first arrest because the photos that came afterword became increasingly terrifying. Apart from her crimes in the sex trade, Nikka had a record for shoplifting, a couple of minor drug offenses, and one arrest for stabbing a fellow prostitute in the thigh with the pointy end of a rattail comb. Each time, she’d also been charged with resisting arrest and assault on a police officer — and each time, the charges were reduced to disorderly conduct.

“I’d like to see what the judges would charge her with if she attacked one of them,” Thibodaux said, perusing an identical copy of her arrest record from behind the steering wheel.

Bowen chuckled. It was impossible to dispute the point.

The last five of Nikka’s later booking photos portrayed a tall woman with broad shoulders caught mid-swing in a fight with the jail photographer. Bleached blond hair stuck out in all directions like some sort of Medusa. Heavy makeup ringed tired, but still crazy, blue eyes. Ruby red lipstick smeared a full mouth, as if she’d been interrupted while trying to wipe it off. In one photo, her face looked as if it had been ground against a curb, complete with a giant raspberry of pink flesh on a swollen cheek. Another showed a split lip and a broken front tooth. Black eyes and torn clothes were common to all the later booking photos — along with blotchy red flesh from beneath her sullen chin that Detective O’Hearn told them about.

Bowen looked up from the file at the Marine. “Fighting a girl is bad enough,” he said. “Naked girls are the worst.”

“You’re tellin’ me.” Thibodaux shuddered. He tossed his file folder on the center console and put a hand on the door. “Guess we better get this show on the road.”

Bowen sat up straighter. “I usually like to sit and watch the address for a bit — see who comes and goes.”

“You kidding me, Gus Gus? Lookin’ at your wounded face I’d peg you for more of a barge-in-and-see-who’sin-there kind of guy.” Thibodaux checked over his shoulder out the window for traffic, ready to fling open the door.

“Depends on the moment,” Bowen said. “If things are chill and nobody’s getting hurt, then it’s better to wait.”

Thibodaux let out a deep sigh. “Sittin’ and starin’ at the outside of a strip club ain’t much of…” His voice trailed off, and his jaw fell open.

Bowen followed the Cajun’s gaze out the front window to see a familiar tall woman with broad shoulders unfold herself from a little red Miata that had pulled up to park along the curb in front of them. Ronnie Garcia wore the car like a cute little blouse that was a touch too tight. Full, ebony hair hung over each shoulder, dappled in the shade of a sycamore that stood like a sentinel between the playground and the strip club. Bowen couldn’t take his eyes off of her as she leaned down to get her purse from the passenger seat. It was a pretty sure bet Quinn would have shot him had he been there to see him gawking.

Garcia backed out of the Miata with her purse and pulled on a zippered hoodie.

“Hey, boys,” she said, after Bowen had regained the partial use of his brain and rolled down the passenger window on the Taurus. “Palmer gave me a quick brief on Nikka while I was driving over to meet you.” She rolled her bad shoulder for effect. “Maybe I’m still on the injured list, but I think I can still be of some use getting information in an upstanding establishment like this.”

“Palmer tell you she’s a fighter?” Thibodaux said.

Garcia grinned. “Yo también.” Me too. “But I’ll leave the fighting to you he-men. If we want to find out if Nikka’s hiding Petyr, then we need to get inside without giving him a chance to run. Crashing in like you boys were about to do is likely to get us nada.”

Bowen nodded and shot a quick glance at the Cajun, who’d wanted to do just that, but didn’t linger long enough to gloat.

“I have an idea that will get us inside,” Garcia said, throwing open the back door to climb in behind Bowen. “You boys avert your eyes a minute.”

A series of grunts and cursing came from the backseat for the next few seconds, followed by a black sports bra flying forward to land on the dash. “Thanks, boys,” Garcia said. “No way a girl of my… stature could do that in the Miata with a bad shoulder.” She opened the door again and got out, stopping beside Bowen’s window to draw a folding knife from her jeans. Flicking it open, she stuck the point under the fabric of her polo shirt below the bottom button, and cut a small slit. Returning the knife to her pocket, she used both hands to tear a three-inch rip in the garment — sending a shudder up Bowen’s spine.

“Anyway,” she said through a tantalizing smile. “I think you get the gist of it. I’ll explain the rest on the way.”

It stretched the bounds of believability to think that the sad-eyed waif swinging idly around the center of three dance poles was a day over seventeen years old. O’Hearn had been dead right. Cheekie’s was not the sort of establishment that liked to leave much to the imagination, and the poor thing wore little but a hungry look and a back covered in fading bruises. Techno music thrummed and blared, heavy with base. Multicolored lights flashed and spun in a layered haze of cigar and cigarette smoke, smoothing out the girl’s flesh and muting her injuries, but Bowen saw them clearly enough. His knuckles cracked as he clenched his fists, walking between the front row of semicircular booths that surrounded the stage, hunting for someone to punish. Two sorry looking men in their late forties slouched over half-empty beer bottles, either still glassy-eyed from a long night, or getting an early start on a day of drunken leering. Bowen considered busting a bottle over each man’s head on principle alone. Ronnie must have felt him tense and let her head loll against his shoulder as they walked past the men.

“Remember,” she said, “we’re here to see what crawls out of the woodwork, not send everyone running. You’re my manager, not Dudley Do-Right here to save the day.”

“Got it,” Bowen grunted. “But when we’re done here, I’m smackin’ the hell out of somebody.”

Regaining a semblance of control over his emotions, Bowen gave a toss of his head toward a big-jawed fat man who pecked away at a laptop computer at the farthest booth from the door. The stubby big toe of a cigar smoldered in a ceramic ashtray beside the computer, providing the fat man with his own personal cloud. Greasy black hair was slicked backward from a high forehead and bristled over the collar of a dingy white shirt. A minuscule pair of reading glasses perched on the end of a large nose. The glasses didn’t quite reach the fat man’s ears and seemed held in place by the sheer width of his face. A green lamp sat on the table in front of him beside a stack of cash-register and credit-card receipts.

The man snatched off the glasses when he saw Bowen and rubbed his eyes between a chubby thumb and forefinger. His vision apparently cleared enough to see Ronnie and a fleshy smile took over his jowly face. His cheeks moved upward at the effort, causing him to squint.

“Word is you’re looking for dancers,” Bowen said over the thrumming noise. He gave a toss of his head toward Garcia.

The fat man picked up a handheld remote control and turned off the music, throwing the strip club into a startling quiet. The skinny thing on stage continued her half-hearted gyrations, and the two men in the booth behind them didn’t appear to notice the silence.

“I always have need for dancers,” the fat man said, his eyes crawling up and down Ronnie like bugs. “Provided price is right.” He spoke with a strong Eastern European accent that Bowen couldn’t place — like Russian, but not quite. “It also depends on what she is willing to do on side.”

“Take a look at her first,” Bowen said, imagining he was showing a prize racehorse — barely able to hide his disgust. “Then we’ll talk specifics.”

Ronnie winced when he took her by the arm and nudged her forward, gritting her teeth and drawing away. Bowen had forgotten about her injured shoulder, and his heart sank to think that he’d hurt her. The fat man grinned. It was common for men in this business to tenderize their female merchandise.

“I am Gugunova,” the fat man said. The drooping smile on his face was absent even a shred of kindness. “Those fortunate to work for me call me Gug.” He pronounced it Goog, and Bowen wondered if he knew how fitting the name seemed for his ponderous size.

Gug canted his head to one side, squinting through the smoky bar haze at Garcia. “What is your name and where are you from?”

“Veronica Dombrovski.” Ronnie began to speak in halting English, playing the nervous girl fresh to the big city. “I am from Moscow, er, Drezna really. My parents… my brothers, they work textile mills. Very poor—”

She launched into a string of perfect Russian, presumably saying the same thing again to make sure Gug believed her story.

Bowen, who was lucky to get the grammar correct in an English sentence found himself mightily impressed.

The fat man held up his hand to shush her. “You speak English well enough for Drezna River kitten.” He flicked fat fingers in a circle beside his face, motioning for her to turn around. “Let us see if you speak the important language, Veronica Dombrovski.” His eyes slid up and down her body. Bowen grabbed the edge of the booth to keep from slapping the man’s eyes out of his head. Gug suddenly turned to look at him, eyeing the injuries on his face.

“And who are you to her?”

“Manager,” Bowen said, knowing that if he said any more he’d come unglued.

“How would someone like you manage beautiful kitten like our Veronica?” Gug scoffed. “It appears to me that you have trouble managing yourself.” He looked at Ronnie again and licked his carpy lips. “The world is a mean and lowly place, kotyonok. I think you are in need of real manager to take care of you.”

Bowen took a half step forward, but Ronnie blocked him with her hip. Her eyes flew wide, more innocent than Bowen knew them to be. “I dance maybe?” she said.

A new man wearing a tight, muscle-mapping T-shirt swaggered in through the darkness from some door beyond the leather booths in the back. Knee-length gym shorts showed off his cantaloupe calves. Obviously Gugunova’s muscle, he stood behind his boss with folded arms, glaring at Bowen as if he’d been summoned to throw out the garbage. Younger than the deputy, probably not yet thirty, he wore an overconfident smirk along with the tight gym clothes. His head was shaved, his face shiny and youthful — oblivious to what he was about to get himself into. It made sense that the corpulent boss would have a duress button somewhere under the private table. Guys who called themselves Gug were not likely to stomp their own snakes.

A slender Asian woman wearing a tight halter top and white short shorts seemed to materialize from the same darkness to ask if Bowen wanted a drink. She shot Ronnie a look of pleading despair, as if warning her not to jump into this pit of vipers in which she found herself.

A tinkling bell of the front door preceded Thibodaux’s entrance. The big Cajun took a minute to look around the place, as anyone would when walking into a dark strip club in a shady part of town. Apparently satisfied, he waved at the Asian waitress to get her attention, and then took a seat at the booth on the other side of the two drunks. He would have a good view of the stage and it put him within launching distance of Gug’s table should Bowen need assistance.

Bowen looked back and forth from Jacques to the muscle-bound kid standing behind the fat man, before tapping Ronnie on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “I don’t trust a man who has to call in his ugly bodyguards to watch a chick dance.”

Roaring with laughter, Gug smacked the flat of his hand on the table, causing the Asian girl to flinch as if she’d been slapped.

“I only have one bodyguard, Mr. Manager,” the fat man said. “This new gentleman is not on my payroll. He is patron. People come to my place for entertainment. How about you let Veronica Dombrovski entertain?”

Bowen leaned in so only Ronnie could hear. “We can still stop this,” he whispered.

“Let’s see what happens,” Ronnie whispered. “Just try not to swallow your tongue.” She tossed him a mischievous wink before climbing up onto the stage.

Chapter 22

Quinn approached the lodge quickly, wanting to cover the distance between the airplane and the front door before anyone decided to shoot him. His mother had often told him that there was “no right way to do a bad thing.” It was a great sentiment, but the older Quinn got, the more he realized that bad was on a more or less sliding scale. His particular skill set dictated a job that routinely found him neck deep in things that would have made his mother weep — no small feat for an Alaskan middle school teacher. Heaven knew he’d given her enough to cry about over the years, so he tended to keep most aspects of his life to himself.

Still, his mother’s credo stuck with him, and when he found himself doing something bad — or particularly dangerous — he at least did his best to do it quickly.

Moving just short of a committed trot, he kept his head on a swivel, eyes flicking across the face of the lodge as he neared the imposing log structure. Set in a gentle oxbow of the Bornite River, a few hundred meters from the Kobuk, the lodge was at least fifty feet long. It was built of peeled spruce as thick as Quinn’s waist and varnished a rich honey color for protection against the bitter winters and rainy summers of interior Alaska. Four connecting balconies jutting from second-floor windows formed a porch over the front door and lower windows of the building.

Quinn trotted up the steps, wondering how many eyes had watched his approach from behind any one of eight sets of curtains.

He didn’t have long to find out.

An older man who had to be Adam Henderson opened the door, moving like an automaton. Quinn didn’t wait to be invited and brushed past the man to get inside. To her credit, Beaudine moved two steps to the left rather than staying directly behind Quinn after they came through the door. The warmth of the room hit Quinn immediately, along with the almost imperceptible static of fear.

An older woman with silver hair, still damp from a recent trip out in the rain, sat in an overstuffed chair with her back to a floor-to-ceiling chimney of melon-size river rock that occupied the center of the vaulted great room. Her face was slack, and she seemed to be avoiding any eye contact with Quinn. A large man with full red beard and an erect military bearing stood behind her, his hands low and behind the chair so Quinn couldn’t see them.

On the far side of the fireplace, to the woman’s right sat a young man with a forced smile painted on his sallow face. A blossom of bright red blood stained the shoulder of his tan Carhartt jacket. Quinn tagged him for the young bush pilot who had a crush on Lovita. It looked like he’d been shot, but he was still sitting upright and breathing. Quinn couldn’t help but think he and Beaudine had interrupted a little group interrogation by the Russians.

A hallway, presumably leading to guest rooms, ran off the far end of the back wall behind the injured pilot. A stairway of split logs rose up beyond the fireplace, leading to a long balcony complete with varnished log railings. Another large man, this one with shaggy hair and a matching beard the color of a rusty nail looked down on them from the balcony. This one looked twitchy, half hiding behind a thick log support column. Quinn figured they’d interrupted him searching for Volodin on the upper floors. Like his partner, he “bootlegged” his gun, keeping it ready, but behind his thigh and out of sight.

There was no sign of Dr. Volodin or of the young girl who’d supposedly departed Nome with him. Quinn took a deep breath, noting the position and distance of each person in the room. The woman at Tusk Charters had said there were three Russians — which left one unaccounted for, a fact that added to the nagging feeling that pressed against Quinn’s gut.

Once back inside, Adam moved toward his wife. Quinn caught him by the shoulder with his left hand, never taking his eyes off the big man standing at the chair.

“Stay behind me,” Quinn said, the cold hiss of his voice leaving no room for argument.

Henderson did as directed but couldn’t help but call out. “How you doin’, Esther?”

The silver-haired woman cleared her throat. “Just fine, Adam,” she said, swallowing hard in an attempt to get the words out.

Hearing the terror in his wife’s voice was too much for Adam and he started to move again. Esther tried to rise and go to him, but the bearded Russian grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back into the chair. He looked up at Adam and bellowed: “Stay back!”

“You son of a bitch.” Adam’s voice boiled over in a mixture of rage and unsteady terror. “Take your hands off my wife or I’ll—”

“Oh, Mr. Henderson,” the man said, his voice thickly Russian. “My friends and I have little problem.” His eyes narrowed, his voice grew more intense. “And now our problem has become your problem.”

“Now y’all just hang on a second!” Beaudine said, lifting her hands. “My mama always told me that you don’t so much solve a problem as work it through—”

“You are not in charge here,” the man behind Esther Henderson said, letting his gun swing out ever so slightly from behind the chair to drive home his point. “Little lady,” the Russian said, imitating Beaudine’s Texas accent. The man on the balcony joined him in a derisive chuckle. “Some problems, they are more difficult to solve than—”

Action was always faster than reaction so Quinn knew he had to make the first move. He’d left his jacket unzipped, his shirttail pulled up over his pistol. All he had to do was sweep and draw. His hand moved toward the Kimber while the two Russians were still making fun of Beaudine’s drawl.

Quinn’s first round caught the man behind the chair directly in the forehead. He rushed his second, catching the man on the balcony in the knee. He followed up with a third that took him center mass. Both men crumpled to the floor.

“Problem solved,” Quinn said.

“What the hell?” Beaudine stared at him in horror.

Quinn ignored her, moving to grab Esther Henderson and pull her back toward her husband. His eyes followed the muzzle of his Kimber as he swept the interior of the lodge for other threats. There was still one Russian unaccounted for. He motioned the young pilot toward him with a flick of his hand. “Where’s the third one?”

The kid shook his head, looking like he was about to cry. He looked at both the men Quinn had shot. “Do you think they’re dead?”

“Pretty sure,” Quinn said. “But it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you went upstairs and kicked the gun away from that guy.” Quinn nodded toward the kid’s wound. “Are you able to do that?”

“I was feeling woozy.” The young man nodded. “But I think I’m okay now.”

Beaudine moved to check the dead man behind the chair.

“Any idea where the third Russian went,” Quinn said to no one in particular. He kept his Kimber up, moving it back and forth from the balcony above to the hallways below.

“He ran out the kitchen door right after we heard your plane touch down,” Esther said.

“Lovita!” Quinn said under his breath.

“Hang on,” Corey said, starting after him, but swaying in place and cradling his wounded arm. “You mean Lovita flew you in?”

“She did,” Quinn said, already moving toward the door.

Corey gave a pitiful groan. “Then that other guy’s out there with her.”

The front door flew open an instant before Quinn reached it. The third Russian was darker and even more menacing than his friends. Clean-shaven and broadly muscled, he looked like some sort of super soldier. He strode into the room giving orders and spewing angry demands. It apparently hadn’t occurred to him that anyone besides his two comrades might be the ones shooting inside the lodge. He had a pistol in his hand, but it dangled down by his side like an afterthought.

The bellowing Russian charged when he realized his friends had been shot, bending low for a double-leg takedown. He was much too close for Quinn to bring his weapon to bear. The point of his shoulder hit Quinn in the belly, driving him backward and slamming the Kimber out of his hand. Quinn reacted without thought, letting his body bend forward naturally from the impact. Face down against the Russian’s broad back, he wrapped his arms around the man’s chest and let his legs collapse, allowing the Russian’s forward momentum to roll him backward onto the floor. He landed between the two overstuffed chairs in a jujitsu throw called tawara gaeshi. Ignoring the searing impact of the unforgiving hardwood against his bruised ribs, Quinn grabbed one fist with the other as he rolled, pulling the monstrous Russian against his belly and bucking his hips to roll him feet first and on his back. The Russian crashed against a wooden coffee table beside a startled Esther Henderson, reducing it to kindling.

Quinn kept moving as he heard the table splinter behind him, scrambling sideways and working to regain his bearings. Stunned but not out, the Russian had lost his pistol as well and now knelt on all fours, blinking as he pushed himself up. Quinn beat the man to his feet and drove a quick knee into his face. The blow should have ended the fight but the big Russian absorbed it like he took knees to the face for breakfast. Instead of reeling back, he exploded upward, roaring at Quinn and coming in for another charge. Quinn was more prepared this time and stepped offline like a matador, slapping the Russian in the ear as he plowed by, stunning him further, but still not putting him down. The Russian was larger, more powerful — and not weighed down with fatigue and injury. Quinn knew the man would eventually kill him if they simply traded blows.

But there was a lot more to a fight than a simple contest of size or strength. In fact it was not a contest at all. A contest would have implied that there were rules.

Crouching next to the fireplace now, Quinn snatched up a wrought-iron poker. When the Russian turned to come back for more, Quinn bent the metal bar around his face. The big man staggered sideways, still not out, so Quinn hit him again, this one sending him careening headlong against the stone hearth. His eyes rolled back in his head and blood covered what was let of his demolished face.

“Holy shit,” Agent Beaudine whispered, her voice a little shaky. “This escalated quickly.” She let her gun hand fall down by her side, blue eyes locked on the Russian’s battered skull as she spoke to Quinn. “I’d like to see how you fight when you’re not on the sick list.”

Chapter 23

Corey Morgan flung open the front door and staggered out to check on Lovita. Quinn wanted to follow but didn’t dare leave until the situation inside the lodge was completely secure. He retrieved his Kimber from where it had come to rest under one of the chairs, returned it to the holster over his kidney, then stooped beside the big Russian. The man stirred when Quinn began to go through his pockets, laughing a slurred laugh as if he held some great secret that Quinn wasn’t privy to.

Stifling a groan from the tremendous pain in his side, Quinn ignored him and did a quick search for more weapons. He found a vicious little hawksbill karambit-style knife that thankfully the Russian had been unable to snatch from his belt during the fight.

“You are dead man,” the Russian slurred, blood and spittle hanging in ropy lines from his tattered lips.

“How’s that?” Quinn said, looking at the depression in the man’s skull. The orbit of his right eye was now more octagon than oval. The fire poker had done a number on him and without medical attention the swelling in his brain was likely to kill him during the night.

“Americans think you are so smart… we are not the last.” The Russian began to laugh again. “You will never see him coming…” He lapsed back into Russian before falling back against the floor, panting, squinting up at Quinn as if he was having trouble keeping things in focus.

Quinn glanced at Beaudine. He counted his breaths to consciously slow his heart rate. The fight was over, but their mission had just moved up several notches in priority. He stood and moved away from the Russian before he spoke, not wanting to put all their cards on the table.

“You get anything new from what he said?”

“Something about a wolf hunter and the moon,” she said. “He could just be babblin’. You cracked his head a pretty good one.”

“Maybe,” Quinn said, working through the possibilities. In his experience, babblers often gave up actionable intelligence. It was just a matter of sifting through all the garbage. “In any case, I think we know that Volodin’s visit is more than a coincidence. We need to give your people a heads-up. The Russians want him bad enough to send out a plane full of gun thugs.”

Beaudine brightened at the thought. She took the satellite phone out of her jacket pocket and unfolded the antenna, heading toward the door.

“Won’t work,” Adam Henderson said, nodding at the phone. “I suppose you can try, but we’re so far north the satellites are too low to get a signal most of the day. It might work later this evening. The radio’s usually the best option but these bastards smashed ours up right after they shot Corey.”

“We’ll try and call out from the plane,” Quinn said. “I’ll get someone here to take care of these bodies as soon as we’re in the air—”

The clomp of footsteps on the porch turned everyone’s attention to the front door. Lovita came in a moment later, pressing a wadded pink bandana to her bloody nose and clutching Corey’s good arm. He was obviously feeling woozy again and Quinn couldn’t tell who was holding up who.

“I’m fine,” she said, before Quinn could ask. “Not much of an Eskimo to let some gussaq creep up on me like that though…” Her eyes played around the room until they fell on the battered Russian who slumped beside the fireplace. Beaudine had cuffed his hands behind his back, but Lovita stayed well away from him.

“That’s the one who hit me,” she muttered, nodding. “Serves him right that you broke his head.”

The Russian glared, spitting disdainfully at her.

“Somebody gonna tell us what this is all about?” Esther Henderson said, collapsing into the recliner farthest away from any dead bodies.

“FBI,” Beaudine said, making the rookie mistake of believing that was an explanation.

Adam’s face screwed into a half frown. “What’s the FBI doing way out here?”

“There’s another Russian man here who came in with a young woman,” Quinn said. “We need to speak with them.”

“Take them with you,” Adam said, hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I got no use for guests who bring this kind of shit rainin’ down on us.”

“They’re gone anyhow,” Corey Morgan said, looking toward the door. “I just watched them leave in your boat, heading downriver toward the Kobuk.”

Adam stepped out to the porch and returned a moment later. “The kid’s right,” he said. “They took my damn boat.”

“It’s very important that we find this man,” Beaudine said, her Texas accent coming on strong as she poured on the charm. “Do you happen to have another boat we could borrow?”

“Not one that works,” Henderson said.

Quinn looked at Lovita’s swollen nose and frowned. It had stopped bleeding, but jutted to one side, clearly broken. Her top lip was swollen and blue, ruptured where it had been caught between her teeth and the big Russian’s fist.

“Are you well enough to fly?”

“She’s not flying anywhere!” Corey said.

Lovita shot the boy a withering look. “You speak for your own self,” she said. “I been hurt worse than this from a mosquito bite.”

“I’ll fly you where you need to go,” Corey said, blinking back his dizziness. “I won’t even charge you, but she needs to see a doctor.”

“Forget about a doctor,” Lovita said. “I grew up in the village. My head’s harder to crack than that. You’re hurt worse than me.” She looked at Quinn. “Anyways, I’m not gonna get left out on your manhunt.”

“Maybe Corey’s right,” Quinn said, gingerly touching his rib to check for more damage. A punctured lung was not out of the question. “I know from experience how hard that guy can hit.”

“And see,” Lovita said. “You’re not givin’ up. Come on, Quinn, you can’t shut me out ’cause some Russian son of a bitch punched me in the nose. It ain’t my fault.” For the first time since he’d met her, the tough little Eskimo looked like she might cry. “We been through too much together for you to scrape me off like mud on your boots. Haven’t we?”

“I’m not scraping you off, Lovita.” It was impossible for Quinn not to remember how he felt when Palmer had threatened to bench him. Still, Quinn knew himself — and the risks that went along with charging in half broken.

Lovita put a hand on his arm, squeezing. Her eyes gleamed with welling tears — tears of tension, not pain. “Seriously, Jericho,” she whispered. “I’m okay.”

He sighed, throwing a glance at Beaudine, who just shrugged.

Quinn turned away, ignoring Lovita’s plea while he made up his mind. Corey could hardly stand up, so he wasn’t flying them anywhere, but it remained to be seen if Lovita was in good-enough shape to get behind a yoke. He decided to search the dead Russians while he mulled it over. They were following Volodin, maybe they had some information about where he was going.

“Tell me exactly what happened, Lovita,” he said as he worked.

The Native girl sighed, eyes on her boots in embarrassment. “I got lazy, that’s all, and let that stupid gussaq sneak up and punch me in the face.”

Quinn stooped over the first man he shot to begin going through his pockets. “Did he knock you out?”

Lovita paused, touching the bandana to her split lip.

“Were you unconscious?” Quinn asked. Contrary to the movies, getting knocked out was a big deal. It left you wobbly and disoriented for some time and could very well mean a concussion.

“He hit me, and I fell on my ass, okay?” She threw her hands in the air. “I saw stars, but that’s it. I’m sure he intended to kill me, but the next thing I knew, you guys started shootin’. I guess he came back here to check it out.”

Quinn stood, stretching his sore back. He wondered if he really had an alternative. They had to follow Volodin. He climbed the stairs to search the second dead man, mulling over the decision as long as possible.

Each of the three Russians carried forged identification as oil workers from the North Slope. They had American names like Tony and Gary. According to his Louisiana driver’s license, the guy slumped by the fireplace was A.J. The IDs looked convincing but were most certainly forged. Each man had been armed with a pistol as well as a blade similar to A.J.’s hooked karambit.

“That one brought in a rifle,” Adam Henderson pointed at a padded canvas case leaning against the far side of the fireplace hearth. Slightly tapered and the length of a rifle, the case was olive drab and equipped with carrying handles as well as backpack straps. Quinn recognized it immediately as a drag bag. He unzipped it far enough to see it contained a Remington bolt-action rifle and a Nightforce scope with extreme long-range turrets. The Nightforce alone cost over two thousand dollars. This setup was a serious sniper weapon.

Tapping the case in thought, Quinn turned to Beaudine.

“If they’re sending a sniper after this guy, they think he’s a valuable target — and if he’s valuable to them—”

“He’s valuable to us,” Beaudine said, finishing his sentence.

The Russian leaning against the fireplace began to laugh, staring at Quinn. His eyes were wild and slightly askew from the beating with the fire poker.

“Fool,” he chuckled, slowly shaking his head as he lapsed into Russian.

“He’s still talking about a hunter,” Beaudine whispered. “And wolves.”

“Hey, girly,” the Russian called out toward Lovita. “You had better run if you know what is good for you.” He followed with something that sounded neither Russian nor English. Whatever he said sent a terrified Lovita fleeing back behind Quinn’s back.

Quinn turned and put a hand on the terrified girl’s shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

“He spoke in Chukchi,” Lovita said, “It’s close enough to Alaskan Yup’ik that I understood. He says there is a bad man coming for us.”

“A bad man?”

Lovita nodded. Her wide eyes gleamed like a frightened child’s. “The elders tell stories of a hunter who comes across the water from Siberia,” she said. “They say this man hunts our hunters when they are out on the ice. They say he is a giant with eyes as white as a winter blizzard. The old women call him Worst of the Moon. I always thought the scary stories were to make little kids stay close to camp when we’re out picking berries.” Lovita peered at the Russian over her wadded bandana. “I never heard no gussaq talk about it before, though.”

“Worst of the Moon?” Beaudine mused.

“Listen,” Lovita said, shooting a worried glance over her shoulder as if she expected some monster to burst through the door. “I know this sounds crazy to you guys, but weird shit happens out here in the bush. The tundra, these forests…” She looked at Quinn for support. “Tell her. You’ve been out here long enough to see it with your own eyes.”

“I have seen some odd things,” he said, “all over the world.”

Lovita gave a fast nod, thinking she’d found an ally. “I think I even seen an enukin just before this guy attacked me.”

“Wait a minute.” Beaudine put up her hand. “What’s an enukin?”

“Like a Native leprechaun,” Adam Henderson said. “Usually harbingers of bad as far as I can tell, but they’ve been known to help folks in trouble.”

Quinn rubbed his eyes. “Let’s focus on this Worst of the Moon character.”

Lovita shivered. “It’s what my people call February, the cruelest time of winter. He ain’t been around since ancient times like the enukin or the hairy man. My granny started puttin’ Worst of the Moon in her stories about eight or nine years ago.”

The Russian threw his head back as if to howl at the ceiling. Instead, he grimaced against what had to be an agonizing headache. The worst of the pain apparently ebbing enough for him to talk, he began to babble in Russian. Quinn recognized one word he used over and over—okhotnik. Beaudine told him it meant hunter. The Russian’s eyes flicked open. One of them stared directly at Lovita. “The stories are real, girly. Okhotnik is real.”

Quinn took a moment to load a full magazine into his Kimber. He stuffed the partially used one in the pocket of his jacket, resolving to top it off as soon as he got back to the plane and his backpack. This was no time to be walking around with a half-empty gun. Everything this guy said made sense. Most of Russian operatives Quinn knew were meticulous in their thuggery. If they wanted one of their own scientists dead bad enough to send a sniper team to America, they were certain to have a backup plan. Quinn couldn’t help but glance out the window to make sure Spetsnaz paratroopers weren’t at that very moment dropping into the skies of Alaska Red-Dawn style.

Beaudine folded the satellite phone and returned it to her jacket pocket, apparently satisfied that it wasn’t going to work. “Okay, Quinn,” she said. “You’re the Alaska expert. What are you thinking?”

“Nearest settlement is Needle Village,” Adam said. “Not quite thirty miles up the Kobuk. If they go downriver they’ll be out on their own for a couple of days and neither one of them look like they were dressed for a night in the bush. The weather’s supposed to do nothing but get shittier.”

“They might not even know where they’re going,” Beaudine offered.

“They know,” Corey said. “They told me. And I’ll tell you, but you have to let me fly you. Have you looked at that storm coming in from the north? I don’t want Lovita out in it in her condition. Let me fly you, and I’ll tell you where they went.”

“Oh, hell no.” Beaudine walked up to the boy with a swagger to match her Texas accent. She thumped him in the forehead with her index finger. “We got no time for games, son.” She hooked her thumb toward Quinn. “Do either of us look like we bargain much?”

“Okay.” Corey rubbed his head, shying away as if he were afraid she might thump him again. “The girl said her friend worked here at the lodge. Said they wanted to surprise her.”

Esther Henderson looked at her husband. “She had to be talking about Polina.”

“Polina?” Quinn said.

“A Russian girl,” Esther Henderson said.

“One of those mail-order brides,” Adam Henderson said.

“We don’t know that,” Esther chided her husband. “Married to a school teacher upriver in Ambler. She comes out and does deep cleaning for us a couple of times a month.”

“When was Polina here last?” Beaudine asked.

“Two weeks ago,” Mrs. Henderson said. “She was supposed to be back next week but she’s having some troubles with her pregnancy.”

“Where does she stay when she’s here?” Quinn asked.

“Usually in one of the cabins,” Henderson said. “But she’s six months along. Esther insisted she stay here in the main lodge the last couple of times — so she could be closer to the radio.” He walked to a knotty-pine door off the back corner of the lodge’s great room, opposite the fireplace, and pushed it open. “This is where we’ve been putting her.”

“Does she leave anything here?” Quinn said. “In between visits, I mean.” He stepped past Henderson, scanning the room. It was rustic but cozy with pictures of loons on everything from the duvet to the hand towels outside the private bathroom.

Henderson shrugged. “A few toiletries and some rain gear I think so she doesn’t have to haul it back and forth from Ambler. She got a package last week.” He stopped short, pointing to a short table at the end of the varnished log bed frame. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” Quinn asked, though he already knew the answer.

“The box,” Henderson said. “I left it right there.”

Beaudine stood in the doorway, keeping an eye on the wounded Russian. “What was in this box?”

“Polina sometimes had packages delivered here,” Henderson said. “She told us they were her special cleaning supplies from Russia, but I’m guessing that’s not the case.”

“Not likely,” Beaudine said. “Did Polina take it the last time she was here?”

Henderson shook his head. “It came last week. She hasn’t been out here yet. Come to think of it, that girl was puttering around back here. She must have taken it.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve been out this way,” Quinn said. “Ambler is up river past Needle, right?”

“Another forty miles or so,” Henderson said.

“That puts it what, seventy miles from here by water?” Quinn said, picturing the winding Kobuk River. He’d taken a three-week fishing trip from the headwaters to Kotzebue with his brother, Bo, and their Aunt Abbey when he was in high school.

Henderson gave a non-committal nod. “Closer eighty by airplane. Over a hundred by river because of the oxbows.”

Quinn remembered the Kobuk’s meandering path very well. In some places the river turned back on itself so sharply, he had Bo had been able to scramble up one bank and look over the top to see the portion of the river they’d be paddling on two hours later.

Quinn looked at his Aquaracer. “Fiver hours of daylight,” he said. “Plenty of time to fly ahead to Needle and then on to Ambler.”

Lovita squealed, uncharacteristically giddy. She jumped up and down like a schoolgirl, causing a thin trickle of blood to weep from her crooked nose. “I wanna be where you are if Worst of the Moon is comin’ after us.” She grinned at Quinn around a chipped tooth he hadn’t noticed before. “You won’t regret this, Jericho.”

“Worst of the Moon,” Quinn muttered, pulling the straps on the drag-bag containing the sniper rifle tighter onto his shoulder. He regretted his decision the moment he opened the door. A bank of thick clouds rolled in from the north, black with trailing green edges that meant hail. Lovita marched past toward her airplane, seeming not to notice the storm moving directly into their path.

Chapter 24

August Bowen chewed on the inside of his cheek and thought of angry nuns, dead kittens, anything to try to keep his brain in focus while Ronnie Garcia climbed the narrow wooden steps. It didn’t help.

The sultry Cuban took the stage like she owned it. Her back to the audience, she moved only her hips and arms at first, starting slowly, and half a beat off the music. It didn’t matter. Bowen doubted anyone in the club could hear anything but the sound of their own throbbing pulse. Far from tentative, Garcia’s every movement was relaxed and natural, as if she were dancing alone and for herself rather than the pitiful audience. Somehow, she had the uncanny ability to make the men in the room believe she was actually enjoying herself, a fantasy they all gripped as fast as their beers.

Bowen folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the edge of the padded leather booth next to Gug’s table. A cold surge of empathetic embarrassment for Garcia washed over him when he thought she might actually take off her clothes. Then he realized it made no difference. Veronica Garcia didn’t need to strip to send every jaw in the room dropping to the floor. The sad-eyed waif who had held the stage before her even stopped to watch, bony arms dangling, head shaking in disbelief that this fully clothed woman had stolen the eyes of what had been her small audience.

The younger girl’s head snapped up suddenly, looking offstage. She peered through the darkness behind Ronnie for a moment, then down at her own bare feet. Something had startled her, and that something was walking toward Garcia.

A tall woman wearing a gauzy red robe and matching princess slippers stopped next to the gleaming stripper pole on the far right of the stage. Blessed with the same curvy body type as Garcia, this new woman walked with a heavy, cowlike gait, unable to carry the thickness around her hips and chest with the same ease and grace. She stopped for a moment, folded arms pushing up an ample chest, with her hips and a single knee cocked to one side. Her black hair was cut in a twenties-style bob — short in the back and slightly longer in the front. It shimmered under the glaring stage lights as if it had been combed with oil. Pink blotches of skin covered her neck and chest, making her look like she’d just run a mile. Her face was flushed as red as her robe.

Her hair was different from any of the booking photos, but there was no doubt that this was Nikka Minchkhi.

“And who ith thith?” the woman bellowed, pointing at Ronnie with a forefinger that bore a costume-jewelry ring the size of an apricot.

Bowen shot a quick glance at Thibodaux, nodding toward the woman in red.

Gug stopped the music with the remote and raised his eyebrow as if interested to see what was about to happen.

“I athked you a quethchon?” Nikka said, wiping the spit from her mouth with the sleeve of her robe.

“A new dancer?” Gug said, shooting a conspiratorial glance at Bowen. It killed the deputy inside to think that this slob believed they were on the same team.

Nikka leaned in, glaring. “Well, she can’t come into our plathe and danth with clothe on. Itth. Not. Right.”

“This is tryout,” Gug said. “She’ll get there soon enough.” His eyes went back to Garcia, and Bowen went back to wanting to knock the guy out.

Garcia stopped dancing and leaned against the center pole, rolling her eyes at the woman.

“She ith too clean,” Nikka stammered. “I thay she thmellth like a cop.”

“You are jealous of my new kitten, dear,” Gug said. “I’ve never seen a cop dance like this.”

Thibodaux took the opportunity to walk up and ask Gug where the toilet was.

“Saba,” Gug said to the muscleman behind him, flicking his fat fingers. He was more interested in the women on stage than some customer who needed the john.

Saba frowned, put out at having his attention drawn away from the women, but stepped forward to point out the small neon sign in the back corner that led to the restrooms. He shot a quick glance at the big Cajun but waved him past, a hyper-inflated ego binding his mind like his bulging muscles tied up his body.

Bowen made his way up on stage as if to escort Ronnie off, but turned midstride to face the lisping stripper.

“Turns out you’re right,” he said. “U.S. Marshals, Nikka. We need to talk to—”

Minchkhi’s face screwed up like a red raisin. She clenched her fists like a child throwing a tantrum.

On the floor, Saba took a half step forward but stopped in his tracks when the twin barbs from Thibodaux’s Taser caught him, one in between the shoulder blades and one at the fold where his butt cheek met his right thigh. His muscles knotted and he fell like a stiff pine board, bouncing off the filthy carpet nose-first.

Gug raised his fat hands. “I not move,” he said. Thibodaux drove the contact points at the end of the Taser into the man’s neck, shocking him on general principle. The barbed prongs, still buried in Saba’s tender parts, conducted the second shock as well, keeping both men compliant.

The two drunks sipped their beers, blinking sleepily as if this was all part of the show. The Asian waitress smiled at Thibodaux, looking like she wanted to kiss him.

Nikka’s entire body shook so badly that Bowen thought she might be having a seizure. She shot a glare down at her boss, before turning back to the deputy. “I cut your heart!” she screeched. Slinging spittle, she launched herself toward him.

Bowen moved to one side, preparing to snag her as she came by but Garcia swooped in out of nowhere, catching the screaming woman with a devastating palm heel to the chin that slammed her teeth together with a loud crack. Nikka had obviously been hit many times before, and the blow dazed her but didn’t stop her. Stunned but still furious, she ramped up her attack, bright red fingernails clawing the air. Using the woman’s own momentum against her, Ronnie grabbed a handful of hair and yanked, pulling Nikka face first into the nearest stripper pole with a sickening metallic thud. Nikka slid down it to land in a heap of red silk and blotchy flesh, finished fighting, but still muttering lispy threats.

“That’s the trouble with you good guys,” Ronnie said, winking at Bowen. “It’s hard for you to really hit a girl like you mean it. Even if she’s trying to gouge your eyes out. Me, I’m an equal-opportunity ass kicker.”

“That was pretty damn smooth, Cheri.” Thibodaux grinned, still holding the Taser above Gug’s neck. He used his free hand to take a flat toothpick from his mouth and pointed it at Garcia, wagging his head as he spoke. “But mercy! The next time I gotta watch you dance like that, I’m puttin’ in for danger pay.”

Chapter 25

Gug and his goon, Saba, slouched on the grimy carpet with their hands cuffed behind their backs. It took two pair of cuffs linked together to get Gug’s arms behind him. Three would have been better, but Bowen didn’t really care if the fat slob was uncomfortable or not. The two drunks had been shown the door, and the Asian waitress and skinny dancer now sat together in one of the booths, wearing thick terrycloth robes while they wolfed down bowls of stew Gug had been preparing in the kitchen for his lunch.

Nikka Minchkhi sat in the center stage where she’d fallen when Ronnie decked her, knees up, legs splayed, her red lace robe blossoming like a trodden red thistle flower. Garcia had secured the spitting dancer’s hands behind her around the stripper pole to keep her from flying off the handle again. One of her red princess slippers had come off during her rant, revealing a hole in her pink stocking through which poked a stubby big toe, pedicured, but blackened on the bottom from dancing barefoot.

Thibodaux stayed down by the two male prisoners while Bowen and Garcia stood on the stage around the sullen dancer, arms folded, waiting for her to answer their questions.

“I do not know what you are talking about,” she said, refusing to look either of them in the eye.

“Are you saying you don’t know Petyr Volodin?” Bowen said, shaking his head in disgust. “Everybody we talk to says you two are an item.”

“Then everybody you talk to ith misthtaken.” She tried to throw her head back in a scoff, but accidentally banged it against the stripper pole in the process. The blotches on her chest flushed to a bright crimson.

“We’re not the regular cops, you know,” Bowen said. “It’s against the law for you to lie to us.”

“Tell us where he is and we’re outta here,” Ronnie said. “You get on with your life or whatever it is you call what you do.”

“I do not know where he ith,” she said.

“Lithen thweety!” Thibodaux raised the brow over his good eye. “Get your stories straight. You don’t know him or you don’t know where he is?”

“You are not copth.” Nikka glared back at him. “You will only try to kill my Petyr, but you will never find him.”

Gug craned his fat neck as best he could. “Hey,” he said, getting Thibodaux’s attention. “Why you not tell me you are looking for Petyr. She’s one of his girlfriends.”

Nikka screamed. “His only girlfriend, you piece of—”

“Shut up!” Garcia stepped closer to cut her off. “I’m sure your man is completely faithful, chica.”

“Seriously,” Gug said, putting on a somber bargaining face. “I have information on my computer to help you find Petyr. Maybe you could do a little to help me.”

“I cut you for thith,” Nikka spat. The red blotches on her chest began to move up her neck.

Bowen hopped off the stage and moved to the booth where Gug’s computer sat on the table by the smoldering stub of his cigar.

Bowen snapped his fingers at Gug. “Give me the password.”

“Petyr isth not an idiot,” Nikka screeched through clenched teeth. “He knowth anyone would come here to look for—”

In the back of the club, the kitchen door swung open to the sound of someone whistling, loud and off-key.

“Hey, Zaychik moy,” a young and muscular man said as he rounded the far booth. He wore a white wife-beater shirt under a maroon velvet tracksuit. A large yellow duffle bag hung from a beefy hand. Earbud wires trailed from both ears, rendering him oblivious to the fact that he’d stumbled into his girlfriend’s interrogation. It had to be Petyr Volodin.

Apparently used to seeing his girlfriend tied to a stripper pole in the middle of the day, he hardly gave her a second look. His eyes instead fell to Ronnie as a lascivious grin spread across his face. “Lucky I got here in time,” he said. “Let’s see some of that ass, sweet—!”

Nikka screamed, yelling a warning in Russian. His head snapped up and he turned on his heels to run. Bowen caught him with a well-placed snap kick to the groin.

The Wolf’s eyes rolled back in his head. The duffle slid from his hand. His knees buckled and he toppled over sideways, green around the gills.

Bowen couldn’t help but chuckle when Nikka threw back her head in exasperation at the stupidity of her boyfriend and banged her head against the stripper pole.

“Too smart to come here?” Bowen mused.

“You son of a bitch,” Petyr groaned.

“Hey!” Bowen cut him off. “There are women present.”

“Strippers!” he said, breathless. “I think they’ve… heard it… before. They are whores…”

Bowen gave him a smack in the back of the head. “Language,” he said.

“Okay,” Petyr said, curling up from the pain.

“Just don’t kick me in the ba… in the privates again…”

“Privates,” Bowen laughed. “That’s fitting. I call mine ‘the generals.’”

Volodin’s head sagged, resting against the filthy carpet. He moved his jaw back and forth like he was about to vomit.

“Well, ain’t this a surprise,” Thibodaux said, looming over Petyr and pulling him into a seated position to pat him down for weapons.

“It’s no surprise,” the younger man groaned. “You obviously expected me to be here.”

Thibodaux gave a genuine belly laugh. “No, sir,” he said. “We expected to have a little chat with your spittin’ stripper girlfriend. We honestly had no idea you were such a dumb shit.”

“Go ahead and do it then,” Volodin said. His entire body slumped as if he’d given up.

Bowen shot a glance at Garcia, then Thibodaux. “Go ahead and do what?”

“Kill me.” Volodin shrugged. “Isn’t that what Mr. Anikin sent you to do?”

“We don’t aim to kill you,” Thibodaux scoffed. “Unless you start in with that whistlin’ again. That was some awful shit.”

“Why does this Anikin guy want to kill you?” Ronnie asked.

Volodin looked at Garcia, then looked away as if afraid Bowen might kick him again. “Vory would never allow a woman to ask your questions.”

“Vory?” Bowen looked at Garcia. “Whatever that is, we’re not it.”

“Vory v Zakone, Russian prison gang,” Ronnie said. “What have you done to piss off the Vory?”

Volodin pulled back one shoulder of his tracksuit jacket to reveal the eight pointed stars tattooed on his shoulders above the neck of the wife-beater shirt.

“Listen up,” Thibodaux said, “We could give a shit about your fictional ink. We need to talk to you about your daddy.”

Volodin’s head snapped up. “My father? Is he all right?”

“You’re close to him then?” Bowen asked.

“Not close.” Volodin shook his head. “I guess he wants to make amends for abandoning me and my mother years ago. He’s some kind of scientist so he helps me out with Russian body-building supplements.” His eyes turned pleading. “He swears it’s all legal shit.”

“When’s the last time you talked to him?”

“I don’t know… an email about two weeks a—”

A heavy rapping at the front door cut him off.

Thibodaux moved to Gug’s computer and checked the surveillance cameras outside the building. “Four dudes with guns,” he said, looking at Petyr. “I’m bettin’ these are the Russian mob boys you’re worrying about, coming for your fake ink.”

“You led them here!” Volodin fumed. “That’s the only way they could find me so fast.”

Nikka rolled her eyes at his stupidity, clunking her head a third time on the stripper pole. “You are idiot,” she said. “I am your girlfriend. This is first place anyone would look for you.”

“I should go,” Volodin said, grabbing the yellow duffle and pushing himself to his feet.

“Sit your ass down,” Thibodaux snapped.

The banging grew louder, followed by a loud crash as the door gave way.

The Asian waitress and the bony stripper both ducked out of sight under their booth. Gug and Saba knew enough to roll to the floor, but Nikka was a sitting duck ziptied to the stripper pole. The pop of small arms fire rattled down the front hallway and bullets began to thwack against leather upholstery and wooden rails. Two of the stage lights exploded in a shower of sparks. Petyr fell, face forward, doing a pushup over his yellow duffle.

“Get her down from there!” Bowen yelled at Ronnie as he moved in a crouch around the end of the stage toward the door. He returned fire blindly down the entry hall, hoping to hold the attackers at bay long enough for Garcia to cut Nikka free and move her out of the line of fire. Minchkhi was a hateful woman, but few people deserved to be gunned down while chained to a Cheekie’s stripper pole.

“One of the four just turned tail and ran,” Thibodaux said. The big Cajun had drawn his weapon but he’d turned the computer around so he could scan the camera feeds while keeping an eye on the back entrance to the club. “Conserve your ammo, Gus Gus,” he said.

“Thanks, Gunny,” Bowen shouted over his shoulder, sending three more rounds down the hallway. “But this isn’t my first prom.”

“Never mind,” the Marine yelled back. “I keep forgettin’ you were Army. You’re not apt to hit nothin’ anyhow.”

Ronnie came up beside Bowen and tapped the elbow of his support arm. “I cuffed Minchkhi under a booth. We’re good,” she said. Her tight clothing had made carrying impractical during her dance, so they’d agreed beforehand that he would loan her his ankle gun if things turned rodeo. Now that Minchkhi was out of the way, he passed Garcia the baby Glock 27.

Between the two of them, they were able to lay down a steady rate of fire that didn’t burn up their meager ammunition supply.

“Looks like they’re haulin’ ass,” Thibodaux said, watching the computer.

Bowen took a deep breath, heady from the gun battle, not to mention the proximity of Garcia. Her chest heaved beside him as she worked to slow her breath now that the shooting had stopped.

“How about the back door?” Bowen yelled over his shoulder, thinking the shooters might have circled around.

“Nope, Gus Gus,” Thibodaux said. “They’ve definitely hauled… What the hell?” The Cajun jumped to his feet and pounded the table with his fist.

Bowen turned to find nothing but scabby carpet in the spot with Petyr Volodin used to be.

“Damn this eye patch,” Thibodaux said. “That meatheaded son of a bitch took advantage of my blind side and beat feet while I was lookin’ at the screen.” He hit the table again, his face as red as Nikka’s at having let the prisoner escape. “I am gonna beat his ass for sure.”

“That’s enough playin’ around,” Thibodaux said to Nikka ten minutes later. “You need to do yourself a favor and tell us where your boyfriend went.”

“I want lawyer,” the woman said, before breaking into a litany of slobbering Russian.

“What’s she sayin’?” The Cajun asked, looked at Garcia.

“You know how your wife only gives you five non-Bible curse words a month?”

Thibodaux nodded.

“Well,” Garcia said, raising her eyebrows, “the words she’s using would probably cause a Bible to catch fire.”

Thibodaux’s huge jaw clenched tight. His face was red, still steamed from letting Petyr Volodin slip away.

Bowen sat at the center booth, going through a pile of papers he’d grabbed from Minchkhi’s room. The pile was mostly made up of lottery tickets and receipts from her doctor for STD treatments, but he’d learned over years of fugitive work that tiny slips of paper often caught very bad men.

“I think I might have something here,” Bowen said, holding up a training schedule for a fight gym in Spanish Harlem. There was a phone number scribbled on the back as well as the cost of a cot and showers. He showed the flyer to Garcia who read it over before passing it to Thibodaux.

“You think it could be that easy?” she said. “Surely he would run further than Harlem.”

Nikka’s head snapped up when she heard the mention of Harlem. She’d not been able to see what they were looking at, and it had taken her by surprise.

“He’th not thtupid enough to go there.” She twisted sideways, trying to conceal the blotches on her chest that were a sure indicator that she was upset. “It ith next plathe anyone would look for him.”

Thibodaux rolled his good eye, grinning now that he once again had hope for catching Petyr the Wolf. “Yeah, and this is the first. And he sure enough showed his brilliance by not showing up here.”

Chapter 26

The Piper Cherokee jumped off the gravel runway and banked to the left, with Lovita bringing it around to the north as she climbed.

A shaken Adam Henderson had promised to take care of the wounded Russian until Quinn could make contact with a passing airplane or pick up a signal with the satellite phone and get more authorities out to the lodge. Corey Morgan stood on the porch and held himself up against a log pillar as he watched his would-be girlfriend fly away.

The wind had died down but the boiling storm loomed like a black wall to the north, throwing the vast tundra below into muted shadows. A drizzling rain, pushed ahead in advance of the larger storm, streamed along the airplane’s windows and peppered the dozens of tiny, unnamed lakes. A small herd of about forty or fifty caribou strung out in a long line were moving at a good trot along a gravel moraine that formed a natural highway on the boggy tundra.

“Enukin are real you know,” Lovita said, turning to face Quinn as she flew. With her big green headset and dyed orange hair, the little woman looked pretty impish herself. “They’re strong enough to lift a whole caribou over their head and run with it. My friend Jason’s a bush pilot and he’s seen it happen — caribou traveling along the tundra on their sides…”

“I’m not arguing with you,” Quinn said. Running through plans and possibilities of the pending confrontation with Volodin and what had to be a box of deadly nerve gas, little imps were the furthest things from his mind.

Lovita’s shoulders relaxed when Quinn didn’t call her crazy. “You guys should try some of my akutaq,” she said, changing the subject. She leaned forward and gave one of the gauges a little tap with the tip of her finger. “I picked the berries and caught the caribou myself.”

Quinn couldn’t help but smile in spite of the situation. He’d always liked the way Alaska’s Yup’ik and Inupiaq Eskimos referred to hunting as catching instead of killing. Caribou and seal were caught the same way you caught a fish. And he’d eaten enough traditional Native dishes to know there wasn’t much that went unused. From fish eyes to seal guts, most of any animal could be turned into what someone somewhere considered a delicacy.

Lovita licked her lips and looked sideways to wink at Quinn. He caught the glint of something in her eyes that he couldn’t quite make out. If she’d been any other person, he would have said it was worry, but Lovita wasn’t the type to fret over much. “Man that bou had some nice backfat,” she said. “Whiter than Crisco—”

Beaudine’s muffled voice interrupted her. She’d forgotten to put on the headset again. Instead of taking his off, Quinn pointed at the set hanging off a bungee above her armrest.

Lovita fell silent waiting for Beaudine to speak. Quinn pressed his nose to the window, studying the terrain below. They followed the twisting silver snake that was the Kobuk River. Row after row of oxbow lakes, left isolated when the river had changed its meandering course, bracketed the slow moving water in countless parentheses of green and gray. Beyond the river the tundra turned to forest, and the forest rose into green hills that nestled into the lap of the Kobuk Mountain Range a dozen miles to the north. Lone spruce trees shot upward spirelike, here and there, from thick stands of willow. They dwarfed their tiny tundra cousins and choked the riverbank in thick green and yellow.

“What do we do when we find them?” Beaudine asked once she’d situated her headset.

“We’ll find a place to land,” Quinn said, scanning the water for any sign of Volodin or a boat.

“Are there any?” Beaudine asked. “Places to land, I mean.”

“A few,” Lovita said. “Not right here on the river, though. We’ll have to go up and look around some when we spot them.” She gave the temperature gauge another tap and then looked at Quinn. “You want to try the radio again?”

“Whoa,” Beaudine said. “Are those what I think they are?”

“Depends,” Quinn said, twisting in his seat to look out Beaudine’s window. “If you think it’s a brown bear sow with a couple of two-year-old cubs, you’d be right.”

“She looks like she could take care of our Dr. Volodin problem,” Beaudine said under her breath.

Quinn shrugged. “We’re part of the food chain up here.”

He keyed the radio mike and tried to hail a passing plane, with negative results. No one else was foolish enough to be out with the approaching storm.

Lovita tapped the gauge harder this time — the way pilots did when they sense something is wrong but don’t want to believe it.

Quinn snapped the mike back in its clip on the console. “Okay,” he said. “You’re about to knock that gauge through the firewall. Want to tell me what’s up?”

“We’re runnin’ a little hot,” Lovita said, chewing on her bottom lip the way she did when she held something back.

“Hey,” Beaudine said, her voice buzzing as she pressed her face against the window. “I see them. I see the boat!”

“Keep an eye on them,” Quinn said, eyes still fixated on Lovita. “How hot?”

“Just touchin’ the redline,” Lovita said through clenched teeth. She shot a worried look at Quinn, the thin vertical lines of chin tattoos quivering slightly as she spoke. “But the needle’s still climbing.”

“What do you think it is?” “Quinn asked.

“Engine’s not getting’ enough oil,” Lovita said.

Quinn’s ears began to pop as she put steady backpressure to the yoke, adding just enough power to keep them climbing.

“I need to climb higher,” she said. “Look for a place to set us down if it doesn’t correct itself.”

“Wait. What?” Beaudine poked her head up from the back seat. “What has to correct itself? Why are you taking us higher if we need to land?”

A sudden thought crossed Quinn’s mind. “Could you have been unconscious long enough for someone to mess with the engine?”

Lovita began to chew on her lip again. She said nothing, nodding instead as she took the plane up through four thousand feet.

Beaudine pounded on the backseat. “Somebody better tell me what’s goin’ on!”

Quinn rummaged through the pocket in the door beside him, finding the chart for the area he believed they were flying over. He unfolded it while he spoke, knowing it would do no good to scold Lovita now. She needed all her attention to fly the airplane.

“Any ideas of where to put down?” he asked, running a finger over the paper chart.

Left hand on the yoke and right on the throttle levers, Lovita scooted forward in her seat. She peered over the console, then glanced back and forth out the side windows. She looked incredibly small in her oversized pink fleece jacket, like a child in charge of the airplane — and all of their lives. But as small as she was, she was handling this emergency like someone with twice her flying experience.

“That’s not good,” Lovita muttered, half to herself as a spider of black oil began to crawl up the windscreen. There was a loud pop and an instant later oil covered the screen completely, robbing her of any forward visibility. She checked her console, then looked at Quinn.

“I was hoping we’d make Ambler or at least Needle, but that’s not going to happen.” She banked the plane slowly to angle farther north, away from the river — into the storm. “There’s a little mine about three miles up.” Lovita’s teeth were beginning to chatter from nerves, but she continued to fly the airplane.

Quinn found the airstrip on the chart noted by a single line in a circle — which told him it was at least 1500 feet long. “How much room do you need to put us on the ground?”

“About a thousand feet,” Lovita said without looking at him.

Quinn looked over his shoulder at Beaudine who’d buckled herself in and sat on both hands staring out her window. “See if you can get a call out on the sat phone,” she said. “We need to report our position.” He gave her a weak thumbs-up in an effort to let her know everything would be okay — which was a bald-faced lie. Things were completely and hopelessly out of his control. He could not remember a time when things had been much further from okay.

“Quinn!” Lovita said, drawing his attention back to the front. She nodded toward a trail of thick gray smoke pouring out of the engine compartment, streaming down both sides of the plane. A terrific clattering noise rose from the engine. Quinn stifled a cough as the entire cabin filled with the acrid smell of burning metal.

“We’re not even going to make it to the mine,” Lovita said, banking slowly to the left, nose against the side window. “Looks like a wide spot in the gravel by that stream below us. I’m gonna get set up for a crash while I still got an engine.”

Chapter 27

Quinn knew how to do a lot of things, but flying an airplane was not one of them, so he left it to the twenty-two-year-old expert. The way Lovita managed the airplane — and herself — during the middle of a life-and-death crisis made him hope his daughter Mattie would be able to keep her cool in such a way. Mattie. Of course he would think of her at a time like this. She was the one and only constant in his life.

The airplane went suddenly quiet as the engine locked up, starved for oil and pouring smoke but yet to catch fire. Absent the roaring noise of engine and propeller, the whir of wind and spatter of rain seemed deafening against the thin metal fuselage. Quinn’s stomach rose in his chest as the bottom of the plane seemed to fall away and they dropped toward the hills three thousand feet below.

“Make sure you know how to get out of your seat-belts,” Lovita said through clenched teeth. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the yoke. “Good chance we’ll have a fire with this much fuel. Get out quick.”

The Inupiaq girl moved like a machine, making minor adjustments to her aircraft. With her windscreen completely obscured by thick black oil, she slipped the plane sideways every few seconds, crablike. The maneuver sacrificed altitude and airspeed but gave her tiny increments of forward visibility.

Quinn caught the glimpse of a silver ribbon of gravel out the side window during one of her slips. The tundra was rising up quickly to meet them. Green hills and now treetops loomed out the windows, shooting by at an alarming rate.

To her credit, Agent Beaudine kept trying to get through on the satellite phone through the entire process.

“Everybody hang on,” Lovita said raising her chin and looking out the side window as she slipped the Cherokee sideways one last time. She straightened out the nose a moment before touchdown.

The last clear picture Quinn had before impact was the bright orange of the Eskimo girl’s hair resting on the dingy collar of her pink fleece. It brought back memories of the year before, when she’d saved his life flying a Piper Super Cub.

The plane hit hard, slamming Quinn forward against his shoulder harness, before bouncing and driving him back into his seat. Behind him, Beaudine gasped but didn’t scream. Quinn reflexively gripped the narrow leather grab strap on the door. Lovita continued to fly the plane without a word.

A loud bang split the frenetic air followed immediately by the groan of protesting metal as the nose gear snapped off, and the airplane’s belly gouged into the earth. Quinn was vaguely aware of being thrown sideways, then up, and then sideways again. Smoke choked his lungs and seared his eyes, making it impossible to see. Everything was a blur — the console, the trees whipping by outside the window, even Lovita beside him. Yanked back and forth, he felt as if he was caught up in the jaws of a great bear that was shaking him to death. The pressure of the harness against his chest combined with the thick smoke to choke the life from him. His head bounced off the window post as metal screamed and groaned.

And then they were still.

Quinn wasn’t certain if he’d been unconscious for minutes or moments. He could hear the static chatter of electrical circuits arcing somewhere in front of him. His head felt oddly heavy and it took him a few precious seconds to realize he was upside down, trapped in his seat harness. Through the smoke he could see Lovita hanging beside him, the arms of her pink fleece trailing above her head, hands in the rising water. The creek outside didn’t look deep, but the plane must have dug a trench as it slid to a stop in the gravel bed, a trench that was now filling rapidly with water.

Quinn braced himself against the dash so he didn’t break his neck, and then popped the release on his harness. His ribs lit up with pain as he slammed against the ceiling, shocked into full consciousness now by the incoming hiss of freezing water. Floundering in the overturned airplane, jammed between the dash and the backrest of what had once been his seat, Quinn peered into the back passenger compartment to find Agent Beaudine also hanging upside down in her harness, arms trailing above her head as if she were riding a roller coaster. Blood covered her face like she’d been scalped.

“Hey!” Quinn shouted. “We have to get out of here!” Beaudine moaned but didn’t move.

It was often necessary to triage medical patients during an emergency, prioritizing the nature of their wound or illness by urgency of treatment. Quinn had no idea which of the two women had the most severe injuries. The dead often moaned, and for all he knew they were both gone already. But if they weren’t dead yet, they certainly would be in moments if the water covered their faces before Quinn did something about it.

Lovita was the shorter of the two, which gave her marginally another few seconds over Beaudine, who hung lower in the water. Quinn left Lovita were she was and went for Beaudine first. Ducking his head underwater, he wriggled along the ceiling between the headrests. The release on her harness gave way as soon as he touched it, and he did his best to break her fall. Her head went under but he brought her up before she could suck in any water. A quick dunk in the river water momentarily exposed a deep gash across her forehead and nose. Typical of a head wound, a curtain of blood washed down her face a moment later. She stirred, blinking and sputtering.

Quinn gave her a pinch on the back of her upper arm to get her attention. She winced, opening her eyes long enough to look at him.

“Wait here!” he said, propping her against the side window of the airplane. The water was to her waist, and still rising, but she could breath. In another ten seconds, Lovita would not have that luxury.

Quinn didn’t wait to make sure Beaudine had heard him. He wriggled backward, crawfishlike between the headrests, making it to the front as Lovita took a last desperate gasp and the water rose above her face.

Quinn took a deep breath and ducked under beside Lovita’s face, covering her mouth with his to give her a rescue breath as he reached up to release her harness. She fell away in his arms and he pushed her to the surface, kicking at the passenger door again and again until it finally opened enough to pull her out.

Fuel dripped from the shredded metal sheeting. Steam rose from the engine compartment, but so far at least, the initial splash of impact had extinguished any flames.

Sliding and slipping over snot-slick rocks, Quinn cradled Lovita’s limp body in his arms and carried her to the gravel shore twenty feet away. Her breath was shallow, but she was still alive. Quinn got her situated as best he could on the damp ground before sloshing quickly back into the icy water, moving on autopilot to retrieve Beaudine.

From the perspective of even this short distance, Quinn wondered how any of them had survived. The Piper looked more like a crushed beer can than an airplane. He smiled in spite of himself, chalking it up to Lovita’s ability to fly all the way to the bitter end. She was a tough girl, and she’d saved his life again.

Cursing spilled from inside the plane as Quinn made his way toward the rear cargo door. That was a good sign. Deeper water piled up in the trough of gravel behind the wreckage and shoved him sideways. The fuselage was badly twisted and Quinn was unable to pry open the rear door, even when hooking the fingers of both hands inside the lip. Beaudine was on her belly, already working her way forward by the time Quinn made it around to the front door. Leaning inside and half submerged in the freezing water, he grabbed her flailing hand and fell backward, pulling her under the headrest and through the narrow crack in the door like he was delivering a newborn baby. He floundered in the stream with Beaudine on top of him.

“You okay?” she sputtered, clamoring to her knees. Achingly cold water rushed in around them, and she had to hang on to Quinn’s shoulder to keep from being upended in the current. A cloud of white vapor blossomed out of her mouth with each unsteady breath when she spoke. A nasty mixture of drizzling rain and wet snow began to fall, peppering the river and making it feeling even colder.

Outside of the shadowed interior of the plane, Quinn was able to get a better look at the nasty gash that ran down Beaudine’s forehead, splitting her left eyebrow and bisecting the bridge of her nose. River water and blood plastered sodden hair to her face. The wound didn’t look like it went to the bone, but it was deep enough that they would have to do something about it.

Beaudine swayed as she struggled to her feet, rapidly falling into shock. Unless they did something to get dry, hypothermia would follow in a matter of minutes.

“Lovita?” she said, her teeth chattering in time with the raindrops. She pushed sopping wet hair out of her eyes and then held up her fingers to look at the blood.

Quinn nodded toward the bank. “The crash knocked her out,” he said, panting. Water dripped from the end of his nose. “But she’s a tough kid.” He held Beaudine by the arm as they walked, bracing her against the shove of the icy current. If his assistance bothered her now, she didn’t mention it.

“Am I hurt bad?” Beaudine said, dabbing at the wound again with her fingertips as they staggered into the shallows and up onto the bank.

“It’ll be… a cool… scar,” Quinn stammered. His teeth chattered so badly it made his jaw sore.

Slogging out of the water, he dropped to his knees beside Lovita. Water drained from his clothing. His soaked wool shirt had grown several sizes too large and his sleeves hung past his hands.

Lovita’s eyes fluttered at the growing intensity of the rain. She turned slightly at the crunch of gravel to look up at Quinn, her lips pulling into a tight grimace from even that slight movement.

“Hi, Jericho,” she whispered, licking chalky lips.

“Hey, kiddo.” Quinn peeled off his jacket and draped it over her. It was wet but would provide some protection from the drizzle. “I’m going to get us a shelter put up. We need to get you dry and warm—”

She reached for his arm but missed, flailing feebly at nothing but air. He took her hand in his and patted the back of it.

She opened her mouth to speak but broke into a series of ragged coughs that wracked her entire body. Her face seemed to grow even paler than it had been. “Stay,” she whispered once she regained control, swallowing hard. “Please, just stay with me.”

Quinn nodded. “But just for a minute,” he said. “I need to get a fire going.”

Lovita’s eyes rolled back, and then fluttered shut. She struggled to swallow again, then gave his hand a weak squeeze. “I think I broke somethin’.” She used the grimy fingers of her free hand to point at her left shoulder.

Beaudine staggered up beside them to collapse in the wet gravel, legs akimbo, hands cradled in her lap. Quinn was afraid she might fall forward on Lovita, but her body listed heavily to one side. Her eyes drooped as though she might pass out at any moment. “Can… I… help?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Quinn said, fighting back a futile panic that pressed at his chest. He brushed a matted strand of orange hair out of Lovita’s eyes. “Okay, hon,” he said. “The pain, you say it’s in your shoulder?”

“Uh-huh,” Lovita whispered. She strained to roll toward him to take the pressure off her shoulder blade, like she was attempting a sit-up but couldn’t manage it. Tears welled in her eyes. Her tongue flicked over pale lips. She was beginning to hyperventilate.

The fact that she complained of pain in her shoulder but was still able to move both arms sent a flood of worry over Quinn. This was something far worse than a broken bone. Hoping he was wrong, but knowing he was not, he moved to unzip the pink fleece jacket, and inadvertently brushed Lovita’s abdomen. He barely touched her, but she recoiled, screaming the unintelligible noises that humans make when pain or fear was too overwhelming for them to form words.

Quinn’s heart fell when he lifted the tail of her shirt. Her belly was tight and distended, an ugly purple bruise forming a donut around her navel. The harness should have prevented such an injury, but Lovita was so small she’d had to scoot her seat forward to reach the airplane’s foot pedals. This put her dangerously close to the yoke during the crash. Intense pain in the left shoulder after impact very often meant a damaged spleen. It was called Kehr’s sign. Quinn had seen it far too many times when vehicles hit IEDs and the driver was slammed against the steering wheel. Lovita was bleeding inside — and bleeding badly. Quinn put a hand to her neck. Her pulse was fading fast, hardly even there.

Stifling a scream, Quinn fell back on his knees and squeezed a handful of gravel in his fist until his hand shook. A man of action, the tremendous weight of helplessness pressed him down, threatening to grind him into the earth. Three years of tactical medical training, dozens of real-life operations as a Combat Rescue Officer in some of the most austere and dangerous environments on earth — and he could think of absolutely nothing to do. There were really only two options with traumatic internal bleeding — transport to the nearest surgeon… or stand by and wait for his friend to die.

Lovita reached for his hand again. Her breath came in short, shuddering gasps now. Eyes clenched, her small, almost Asian face twisted from the unbearable agony as blood filled her gut. Quinn smoothed the hair out of her eyes, gently resting the back of his hand against her cheek. He was covered with oil and his hand left a black streak across her copper skin.

“I’ll stay right here beside you,” he said, willing his teeth not to chatter, his hands not to shake. “I promise.”

The wind kicked up from the north, and the drizzle turned into heavy snow.

Beaudine’s mouth hung open. Her eyes grew wide and stricken as the gravity of the girl’s injuries dawned on her.

“I’m… sorry, Quinn,” Lovita whispered. She tried to cough but couldn’t summon the energy. “I guess that Russian gussaq… he did knock me out… long enough… to mess with my airplane…”

The wind stiffened, and snow began to fall in earnest.

Snowflakes landed on Beaudine’s hollow face and stayed there, her skin too chilly to melt them quickly. A tear creased the grime on her bloody cheek.

Lovita’s lips drew back with another wave of pain. Slowly, the grimace fell away and she relaxed, grinning. She looked up, seeming to focus on the falling snow. It was her old grin, the one she’d give Quinn when she joked and called him names or tried to feed him her strange Native foods. “You know what I always wished, Jericho Quinn?” Her gaze fell back to him. She sounded amazingly calm — her normal self.

“What’s that?” he said, forcing words from a throat so tight he could hardly breathe.

“I… wish… you woulda been about ten years younger…” Her tiny hand gave him a final squeeze and then fell away.

Quinn felt for a pulse again. He collapsed back, slouching in the wet gravel when he found none and stared up at the falling snow.

He knelt there beside his frail little friend for some time, letting the silent rage close in around him with the cold that seeped through his soaking wet clothes. Soon, even anger was not enough keep him warm, and he began to tremble from grief and exposure. At length, he folded Lovita’s hands across her chest and climbed to his feet with a low groan.

Beaudine looked up at him with drowsy, unfocused eyes, chin against her knees. Her hair was covered with a cap of fresh snow.

Quinn’s feet crunched in the gravel as he slogged over to her. Her lips and the backs of her hands were blue.

“Hey,” he asked, reaching to touch her forehead. “Can you remember what happened?”

“Do what?” Beaudine jerked her head away. “Of course I remember what happened. What kind of dumbass question is that?”

“Hypothermia,” he said, struggling to stay on his feet. “Your skin is cool and clammy… and you’re even more irritable than normal. You are still… shivering, so it’s not as bad as it could be.” He turned toward the river.

“Where… are you… going?” Beaudine gasped through ragged, shaky breaths.

“Back… to the plane… to get my pack.” Quinn’s chattering teeth were now so out of control that any conversation was difficult. Physically and emotionally spent, instinct alone carried him forward.

He’d just reached the water’s edge when he heard a sickening moan behind him, like a beached fish croaking for air. He turned in time to see Beaudine topple over.

Mechanically, he staggered back up the gravel incline and dropped to his knees beside her. He made certain she was still breathing, then got his jacket from where he’d left it over Lovita’s body. Dragging it across the snow and gravel by one sleeve, he made it back to Beaudine and draped it over her shoulders. She stirred at his touch. Her eyes blinked half open and then flicked back and forth, confused.

“Hang on… a… couple… minutes,” Quinn said, trying desperately not to crack a tooth. He knew he should probably say something more, something to try to rally her hopes, but he had little hope left himself. Any time now his core temperature would fall so low his body would lose the ability to warm itself. One thing was sure; if he hoped to save Beaudine, he had to save himself first.

Struggling to his feet, he slogged back down to the bank. His arms dangled and flopped at his sides, far too heavy to lift. His legs barely obeyed his orders to move. Memories of the crash, his mission, even Lovita’s death, slipped from his mind. A single truth drew him forward, through the cold water and into the darkness of the mangled plane — without a fire, both he and Beaudine would be dead by nightfall.

Chapter 28

Ronnie Garcia found a bottle of aspirin in the first-aid kit mounted to the wall in Gug’s kitchen and marveled that even a skanky strip club like Cheekie’s was subject to OSHA rules. Bowen talked on the phone with his people, securing babysitters to keep Nikka and Gug under wraps and ensure that no one tipped off Petyr about their new lead to the MMA gym. Thibodaux sat in Gug’s booth, a cell phone pressed to his ear, trying to get in touch with Palmer. Elbow on the table, he rested his chin in his hand, still brooding over letting Petyr slip away.

Garcia rubbed her aching temples and washed down the aspirin with a glass of water — knowing it might calm her headache, but wouldn’t even dent the pain in her shoulder. Attempting an erotic dance on a strip club stage in front of your friends was about as exhausting as running a marathon. It was no wonder the poor girl dancing naked had such a desiccated look to her soul.

Ronnie had seen the way Jericho hobbled around early in the morning as the wounds on his body woke up one at a time. He often joked that the injuries he got in China stayed on Beijing time and took a while longer to loosen up than the ones he obtained in the good old U.S. of A.

Ronnie smiled, remembering how she’d take a Sharpie and threaten to label the geographic location of each place he’d earned a scar. Since so many were from growing up in Alaska, she made it a point to work in reverse alphabetical order, beginning with a knife wound on his right bicep from a short stint he’d done in Yemen. She’d pretend to label a bite wound on his forearm from the UK, a gash from a broken bottle in Turkey, before moving to an interesting half moon arc an inch above his bellybutton from a mission in Thailand. It took him a year to tell her about that one.

Garcia closed her eyes, imagining she wasn’t in this stinking strip club but back with Jericho when he’d held the Sharpie. He always started with the scar she’d earned in Afghanistan, and when he started there, the game moved away from the marker in short order…

“Hello, Boss.” Thibodaux’s deep Cajun drawl jostled Garcia out of the pleasant memory and back to the sad reality of the strip club. Thibodaux flicked his fingers to motion her closer. The President’s national security advisor was a bombastic man in word and action, so she had no trouble hearing both sides of the conversation when she plopped down in the booth next to Thibodaux.

“Situation report?” Palmer said. He was never one to chitchat, but his tone was even more brusque than usual. The tap of his computer keyboard was clearly audible in the background.

“Sounds like you’re busy,” Thibodaux said. “I’ll call back.” The big Cajun had a pet peeve against people typing or scrolling the Internet while he talked to them — on the phone or in person. Ronnie gave a silent chuckle, surprised he’d enforce such a notion on a man who was the right hand of the President of the United States.

The tapping stopped.

“As a matter of fact I am extremely busy, Gunny,” Palmer said, giving an exasperated sigh. “We have five chemical weapons experts in custody — two Russians, a Pakistani, a Kuwaiti, and a card-carrying member from the Sword of God’s Chosen from some place in Idaho. Every one of them is capable of manufacturing the stuff behind these attacks. I’ve got six more chemists who have dropped off the radar, not including your guy’s father. So how about you tell me some good news?”

“Well,” Thibodaux said, “it looks like Petyr Volodin is in the grease with the Russian mob so we’re not the only ones lookin’ for him. You want us to come in and help follow up any of those other leads?”

“No,” Palmer said. “Stick with him until we hear back from Quinn. He’s yet to find Dr. Volodin, and the kid may know where he’s going. Quinn can tell us when we can close the book on this trail.”

“Roger that,” Thibodaux said.

“How’s Garcia holding up?” Palmer asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

Thibodaux grinned and gave a thumbs up for Ronnie’s benefit. “She’s good to go, Boss,” he said. “Doin’ great. Any word from our little buddy?” The Marine asked the question about Jericho that was ever on Garcia’s mind.

“Nothing since this morning,” Palmer said. “When last we spoke he was about to follow Volodin out to some remote fishing lodge with Special Agent Beaudine.”

“Oh ye yi!” Thibodaux gave an audible shiver. “I feel me some sorry for Chair Force if he’s gotta fly anywhere with my crazy cousin.”

“Are you saying she’s not capable?” Palmer said, his voice tight and annoyed.

“Oh, she’s plenty capable, sir,” Thibodaux said. “But that don’t mean I’d want to spend a day in the woods with her.”

Chapter 29

Quinn made it a practice to carry an extra set of wool long johns in a vacuum-sealed bag whenever he went into the woods. Inside the same bag he kept a box of windproof matches, a candle, and a baggie of cotton balls. Thankfully, his aunt Abbey had grown up in Alaska and shared the same sentiments. She had stuck a similar sealed packet of extra woolies in the duffle she’d thrown together for Beaudine.

The snow came down hard now, driven by a stiff north wind. What had been a barren gray gravel bar just minutes before was now covered in white. Beaudine, cloaked in the same blanket of snow, no longer stirred. Quinn wasn’t even sure she was still alive, but it would only waste valuable time if he stopped to check. Without a fire, there was nothing he could do for her anyway. He estimated the temperatures to be in the high twenties — not particularly cold for interior Alaska — but the wind chill on wet skin was sucking the life out of both of them. With most of his blood rushing to warm his core, Quinn’s hands were little better than useless claws by the time he’d dragged enough standing dead wood to start a fire beside a large boulder, away from the cold sink of the stream bed. He staggered up and down the bank, swinging his arms in an attempt to drive blood into his extremities while he searched for a dead black spruce that was small enough for him to push over in his weakened condition. He located one the diameter of his ankle and wiggled the spiky gray trunk back and forth. Thankfully, it was easy to tip out by the roots in the shallow topsoil. It was a poor excuse for a tree, but Quinn didn’t care that it had few limbs bigger than a pencil. He was looking for the nestlike crown of needles and twigs the sorry spruce wore like a ratty wig.

Dragging the tree to the flat spot beside the boulder, he dropped it next to the rest of the wood he’d already gathered. Exhausted, he sank to his knees in the snow. His hands shook so badly he thought he might drop the four cotton balls he’d taken from his survival pouch. Leaning over the spruce nest to shield it from falling snow, he stuffed the cotton at the base of the twigs that made up the crown of the little tree. The simple act of grasping a match between his fingers was a Herculean task and he wasted three matches, dropping them into the snow with his clumsy efforts. Delirious, he laughed out loud that his life could hang in the balance over whether or not he had enough dexterity to hold on to a two-inch sliver of wood. The fourth match ignited before he dropped it, landing in the spruce crown rather than the snow. In a state of near euphoria over the tiny flame, he slowly, carefully, began to nudge the match close enough to catch one of the cotton balls. Thick, gray smoke seared Quinn’s eyes and threatened to choke him, but he didn’t dare move for fear that blowing snow would put out the feeble beginnings of the fire. Damp twigs in the spruce crown sputtered at first, but in no time the entire sappy mass burned as if it had been doused with gasoline. The flames cast long shadows in the cold gray twilight, illuminating Lovita’s lifeless body. Quinn wiped a tear from his eye with a trembling hand and allowed himself a moment of melancholy, thinking of how Lovita often said, “turn on” instead of “light” the fire.

Quinn piled on pieces of kindling no bigger than his thumb at first, allowing the fire to dry and ignite them before adding several more the size of his wrist, eventually forming a knee-high teepee around the blazing spruce crown.

It was all Quinn could do to keep from squatting down and letting the warmth of the flames overwhelm him. Still, the notion that a fire was there warmed him mentally, allowing a small sliver of hope to creep back into his mind. Forcing himself to leave the warmth, he half dragged, half carried an unconscious Beaudine to the fire.

Less than ten minutes later he’d stretched a silicon treated nylon tube tent on a piece of parachute cord strung between two likely spruce trees near the fire. When weighted down at the corners with stones from the riverbank, the single tube of waterproof cloth formed a triangular shelter that was open at both ends. Roughly three feet high at the center and seven feet long, the open end nearest the fire caught the warmth of the blaze as it reflected off the split boulder some ten feet away.

Quinn stripped out of his wet clothes now that he had someplace that would offer a relatively dry shelter. Popcorn-size snowflakes gave wet kisses to his shivering body as he hurried to pull the fresh wool underwear over clammy skin. Like pulling a dry sock over a wet foot, convulsive shaking made it even more difficult. He was panting by the time he finished, but he could think, and his hands were working again.

Wearing nothing but the black long johns and his unlaced boots, he was still shaking as he pulled Beaudine’s jacket up over her head. Then he used his teeth to tear open the vacuum-sealed bag Aunt Abbey had sent along. If it made Beaudine angry for him to make suggestions about tactics, he could only imagine how she’d feel when she woke up in the tent and realized he’d changed her into dry underwear — assuming she ever woke up.

The job done, he shoved and prodded the still unconscious Beaudine into the tent, taking care not to rip the fabric. He was sure Lovita carried several sleeping bags in her plane, but he’d only been able to find one in the wreckage, sealed in a compression bag under the co-pilot’s seat. Rather than risk more time in the icy water, he’d decided to make do with the one sleeping bag and a large Mylar survival bivy sack. The outer layer of the bivy was bright orange to make it easier to spot and facilitate a rescue. The inside was lined with reflective foil and large enough for two people to share, maximizing body heat in an emergency.

Quinn knew the cold ground would suck away massive amounts of body heat so he spread their only sleeping bag as flat as he could get it to give them some measure of insulation and padding. He put the bivy on top, rolling Beaudine’s body into the foil envelope. Her skin was blue and cold. The periodic rise and fall of her chest was the only thing that told him she was still alive. The hollow hopelessness of complete exhaustion fogged Quinn’s brain. He collapsed against the relative softness of the sleeping bag, giving in to the painfully overwhelming urge to sleep. The tension in his muscles began to fade, but the moment he closed his eyes, the thought of a faceless Russian killer crept in through the fog. Groaning, he pulled the bivy over Beaudine, and rolled over once again to crawl back out of the tent and through the blowing snow to the pile of gear he’d left by the boulder. A howling wind turned the fire into a forge and Quinn piled larger pieces of wood onto the blaze, knowing it would burn down all too fast. He grabbed the small Tupperware bowl of Lovita’s rich akutaq from his pack and picked up the rifle, dragging it back to the tent. The last of the gray was fading from the sky by the time he once again wiggled and crawled his way into the bivy bag. Lying on his side, he popped the top off the plastic tub and sucked a big glob of akutaq off his fingers. He could feel the fatty stuff begin to warm him at once, maybe even enough to keep him and Beaudine alive through the long Alaska night — if Worst of the Moon didn’t kill them in their sleep.

He pulled both their shirts up high so they were belly to belly and wrapped his arms around Beaudine, drawing her to him. Her skin was cold and clammy and he nestled in as close as possible, offering what little warmth he had left, and hopefully, at some point, drawing some back from her. Sleep was the enemy when hypothermia loomed — too many people dozed off and never woke up. He should have tried harder to wake her, but his mind was too frazzled to focus. Exhaustion finally pushed him under, the last thoughts in his mind of Lovita’s grin and the sweet taste of akutaq on his lips.

Chapter 30

The three stubby candles Kostya Volodin found in the deserted cabin did more to remind him it was dark than provide any usable light. Little more than a pile of decaying logs and earth, the place offered no more than a spot to get out of the wind. They were fortunate to have even seen it tucked in along the banks of the river through the blowing snow.

Volodin stooped under the sagging roof and shook out a tattered wool blanket in front of him. Rodent droppings clattered against the rough wooden floor like BBs. A red-backed vole glared sullenly from the corner, flicking its little ears at every noise. Tiny black eyes glistened with accusation at the theft of its nest.

An incessant wind howled through numerous cracks in the log walls, bellowing the blue tarps that had been nailed over the collapsing window holes and nudging the piece of heavy carpet that hung from a wooden crossbeam over the flimsy door.

Even in this sorry condition, the cabin had seen recent use. A grease-spattered rectangle on the dusty shelf showed the place where someone, presumable hunters judging from the pile of caribou hooves outside, had used a small camp stove. The smell of fried meat and cheap whiskey mixed with the odor of humans living in close confinement made the windy drafts a welcome addition to the sour air.

The five crumpled blankets the hunters had left behind were long past their prime. Volodin was elated at first, but when he shook out the vole droppings, he discovered it would take at least three to make sure none of the rips and holes overlapped. He kept the two that were in the worst shape and handed the others to Kaija who accepted them without a word.

They hadn’t eaten since leaving Nome. A narrow escape from the lodge left them unprepared, and this blizzard soaked them to the skin by the time they reached the cabin. Volodin didn’t feel it prudent to start a fire. There was too great a danger that the smoke would give away their location even with the storm. A relatively dry place out of the snow and wind would have to do.

Thankfully, he and Kaija had been outside when the three Russians arrived at the lodge.

He’d not gotten much of a look at the men at the lodge, but they were surely sent by Rostov to bring him back — or perhaps just kill him. Poor Kaija. She had been terrified when the plane landed, but insisted on running back inside to retrieve her black plastic case. He’d not noticed it when they left Providenya, but his mind was slipping. He had not noticed many things. They’d fled to the river, hiding in a small building that contained fishing equipment.

When the second plane landed, presumably with reinforcements, Volodin saw the boat was their only means of escape. Kaija directed him where to go. She was such an intelligent child. Her friend would help them, she assured him, sitting at the bow of the boat clutching the black case in her lap.

Now Kaija stretched out on one of the two plywood beds ten feet away, facing the wall. She’d gone silent once they were on the river, brooding like the approaching storm. She blamed him, and he certainly deserved the blame. This mess was of his creation. He longed to talk with her, to explain, if only to hear a few accusatory words. But she’d put in her cursed earphones. When she listened to her music, he might as well be on another planet. Perhaps the battery on her mobile would die soon, and they would have a chance to talk, father to daughter, before they reached civilization — if they reached civilization.

It killed him inside to put someone he loved so deeply in such a dangerous and uncomfortable position. He folded the remaining two blankets on a rough wooden bench beside a crude wooden table so he’d have some padding to sit on. Kaija had left the case on the floor beside her bed. Perhaps, he thought, they had packed some food that he’d forgotten in his foolish stupor. Kaija didn’t stir as he picked up the case. The pulsing music pouring through her earphones rendered her as good as deaf.

He was surprised to find the case so heavy. It must have been important for them to have dragged it all the way from Providenya — but try as he might, he could not recall what was inside. Made of hard plastic with what looked like a waterproof seal, it looked like an expensive suitcase — the kind in which engineers or traveling photographers might carry delicate equipment. Touching it did bring back a faint memory. Perhaps he’d had enough forethought to bring food after all. He flipped the latches and lifted the lid, inexplicably worried that his daughter might turn over at any moment and catch him. To his amazement, he found a selection of a dozen metal canisters, each about the size of a soft drink can. A hard plastic divider separated six blue canisters from six yellow ones, identical but for the color. A vision of the proteins and growth hormones he’d prepared for his son, Petyr, suddenly rushed back to Volodin. The supplements were powerful stuff if he remembered correctly, packed with enough calories to see them through until they made it to the village the next morning.

“I have found us something to eat, Maria,” Volodin said, smiling at his luck. “This will keep you warm, my love.” He held two of the canisters, one blue, one yellow. There were no instructions, but the binary nature made it easier for him to get past U.S. Customs Inspectors. He remembered that he had to mix them.

“I am Kaija,” the young woman on the cot said without turning around. “Maria was my mother.”

“Kaija?” Volodin’s heart sank, but at his absentmindedness and the fact that he would not see his dear Maria. “Of course,” he whispered. “I knew that. You are my daughter.” He clanked the canisters together. “Kaija, my dear, help me find a pan and we will have our supper.”

Kaija sprang from the bed in an instant. Her lips pulled back in a horrifying scream and she flew at him, yanking the canisters out of his hands.

“You are such a fool!” she spat. “What could you be thinking?” Her chest heaved. She was angry with him — again.

“What’s wrong, Maria?” Tears welled in his eyes.

“Kaija!” she screamed. “You would have killed us.”

“Killed us?” Volodin fell back, collapsing on the bench stunned by his daughter’s outburst. “This is the same protein and growth supplements I have sent to Petyr.”

“You sent this to Petyr?” Kaija held up a canister in each hand before returning them gently to their respective spots in the plastic case.

Volodin nodded. “It is the least I could do as a father. Your half brother has so little, my dear.”

“Oh, he has something if you sent him this?”

“Petyr works very hard at his fighting. You should not begrudge—”

“Are you certain you sent him these?” Kaija groaned. “Yellow and blue?”

“Yes,” Volodin said. “Although that is odd. I used to label them red and white. I wonder why I changed the coloring…”

“How much?” Kaija said, fuming.

“Why does it matter?”

“Because, Papa.” Her chest heaved and spittle flew from her lips as she screamed at him. “This is Novo Archangelsk. It is the reason we are here in this forsaken place. These two canisters alone would release a cloud of enough deadly gas to kill us and anyone who passed by on the river for days — anyone who came in this cabin for the next ten years.”

“Oh…” Volodin buried his face in his hands. The uncontrollable twitch returned to his left eye. “Novo Archangelsk,” he whispered. “Do you think Petyr even knows what he has?”

“I doubt Petyr knows what day it is at any given time,” Kaija scoffed.

“I am awful human being.” Volodin rocked back and forth, head still in his hands. “But why… why would I bring such a thing as this with me? I thought I destroyed the remainder of the stockpile.”

“You did not bring it, Papa.” Kaija stood in front of him, vapor blossoming around her head in the candlelight with each exasperated breath. “I did.”

“Why?” Volodin said. “Oh, my dear, what do you plan to do?”

“Go to bed, Papa,” Kaija said, panting as her rage began to ebb.

“Are you angry with me, Maria?” An inexplicable melancholy gripped Volodin’s heart. He’d done something to make her mad. “I am sorry I didn’t bring us any food.”

“Kaija,” the girl said, her voice soft now. “I am Kaija, Papa.”

“Right,” Volodin smiled. “Do you think there might be some food in that case?”

Kaija shook her head. “No,” she said, snapping the latches on the black plastic case and carrying it to bed with her. “There is nothing but clothing in here. I’ve already looked. Go to bed, Papa. We have a long way to go in the morning.” She lay down in her tattered blankets, replaced the earphones, and turned to face the wall with her body between him and the plastic case. Her slender chest still heaved from something he’d said or done. He was such a fool to keep calling her by her mother’s name.

Without taking his eyes off his daughter, Volodin took the fountain pen from the pocket of his shirt and wrote “Kaija” on the inside of his wrist. Perhaps that would help him remember she wasn’t his Maria.

He settled his weary bones onto his own rude bed and drew the tattered blankets up around his chin. Kaija was still angry with him. The heaviness of it filled the dark cabin. He certainly deserved it. His mind was slipping, he knew that, but he couldn’t help but feel he should have been angry with her as well.

Chapter 31

Ruslan Rostov slammed the phone back in its cradle, an angry, drowning man. Lodygin sat across the office, pale fingers to his lips as if to physically stop himself from saying something he might regret. It was his desk and his phone. Rostov picked up the phone so he could slam it down once more, glaring at the greasy captain, daring him to protest. He was a senior colonel in the GRU. He had every right to take over a subordinate’s office and set his phone on fire if he wanted to.

Lodygin sat in the corner, a visitor in his own office. The man had a habit of crossing his legs, knee to knee, in a feminine way that Rostov despised. It looked affected for a man in uniform and made Rostov want to beat him to death with the phone. In fact, the whole office was too girlish for Rostov’s way of thinking. They were leaders of men. A competent leader’s office should reflect the odor of leather, the color of flags, and the instruments of bloody war. It should be sparse and clean and slightly uncomfortable, demonstrating a clear preference for the field of battle over an easy life in a garrison.

Lodygin’s office was highly decorated with nesting dolls, ornate copies of Fabergé eggs, and even woodblock prints of two Orthodox saints on either side of the requisite photograph of Putin. A scented candle did little to mask the stench of his moral decay.

“I assume it was bad news,” Lodygin said, both hands on his knee, drawing small circles in the air with the toe of his polished boot.

Rostov put both hands flat on the desk in an effort to compose himself. “General Zhestakova is not a patient man,” he said. “I will be summoned to the Kremlin at any moment.”

“Today?” Lodygin said.

“No,” Rostov said, wondering if he would ever see his wife and daughter again. “Not today, but soon.” He glared at the captain. “I should take you with me.”

“Perhaps you will be able to reason with the general,” Lodygin said. “The events in America… they are not exactly contrary to the hopes and dreams of the Kremlin. Are they?”

Rostov’s head snapped up. He’d only heard half of what the idiotic captain was saying. “What?”

“The directive to develop New Archangel came from the Kremlin, did it not?” Lodygin gave a flip of his hand. “You and I are both aware of the strategic plans — keep the Americans busy fighting a war on their own soil so the Motherland has time and room to become the world power we deserve to be.” He shrugged. “Is that not exactly what is happening now?”

“Apparently, General Zhestakova does not take the same optimistic view,” Rostov said. “Perhaps he has taken the time to think through the Americans’ reaction when they discover this gas is tied to Russia and not some cretin jihadist from the Middle East.”

A vaporous smile spread over Lodygin’s face as if he’d won an argument. “One man’s cretin jihadist is another man’s operative.”

“Shut up,” Rostov said.

The captain did have a point. Someone had smuggled the New Archangel out of Russia. It was not beyond the realm of possibilities that this same someone was an agent of the Kremlin. Lodygin had remained much too calm throughout the unfolding of these events, even for the sociopath that he was. Rostov glared at him, trying to see through the smarmy façade. Lodygin was odd without being awkward, terrifying without a shred of bravery, and dangerous with no physical strength. He was intelligent enough to pull it off, but who in the Kremlin — or anywhere else — would trust such a vile man?

“Still no word from your best soldier?” Rostov asked. The last dripped with open disdain.

“None as of yet, Colonel,” Lodygin sighed. “But he will contact us as soon as he is able.” The captain pursed his lips. “I do have news that will certainly interest you.”

“Very well,” Rostov said.

“I was fortunate to spend a delightful three hours in the company of one Rosalina Lobov, a school friend of Kaija Merculief…” He stopped, eyes glazing for a moment as if he was remembering and savoring some sordid detail.

“And?” Rostov prodded. “Spit it out.”

“Kaija,” Lodygin said, “I mean to say the young woman with Volodin is not his child mistress after all. She is his daughter by a woman named Maria Merculief.”

“His daughter?” Rostov mused. “That makes sense.”

“There is more,” Lodygin said. Rostov thought he detected a slight wag in the man’s head, as if he was on the verge of gloating. “According to Rosalina Lobov, Miss Merculief is not fifteen as we had previously believed but in reality is twenty years old.”

“She attended secondary school?”

“She did,” Lodygin said.

“And no one at the school thought to verify her age?”

Lodygin bounced his knee. “I’m sure they did, Colonel,” he said. “But I doubt that they were very thorough. Who would lie about their age in order to attend school all over again?”

Rostov leaned back in the chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face. This was interesting news. “And what of this girl’s mother?”

“Maria Merculief,” Lodygin said. “Deceased. Apparently she and Dr. Volodin were together for several years while he taught at the university in St. Petersburg.”

“What did she do?” Rostov asked. “The mother.”

“Ah,” Lodygin said. “That is where it gets interesting. We have no record of her doing anything. Everyone assumed both she and the girl were prostitutes.”

“But they were not?” Rostov said. “Get to the point, Captain!”

“According to Rosalina, both mother and daughter were involved with the Black Hundreds.” Slender hands still holding his bouncing knee, Lodygin gloated, triumphant in this revelation.

Rostov’s hands dropped to the desk again. This was news. The Chornaya Sotnya, or Black Hundreds, was an ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic group from the early twentieth century. Extremely Russia-centric, they had denied the existence of the Ukraine and considered all borders of Russia prior to 1917 to be sacrosanct. In recent years a new Black Hundreds had emerged. These were as fiercely protective of all things Russian as the earlier group had been of the monarchy. They held fast to a fervent belief in a Novorossiya, free from the Zionist tyranny of the United States and the World Bank.

A fringe group to be sure, but even the Kremlin utilized their watch cry of a New Russia when it suited political aims.

“I want to talk to this Rosalina Lobov,” Rostov said.

Lodygin’s hands fell away from his knee. He uncrossed his legs. “That would be… I mean to say, that would not be advisable, Colonel.” He gave a smile capable of curdling milk, and then steered away from the subject.

“How did you get her talk to you so openly?” Rostov looked at him through narrow eyes.

Lodygin shrugged but said nothing.

“Is she in custody?” Rostov asked.

“Of a sort,” Lodygin said.

“Are you…” Rostov raised his hand, turning away. “I do not want to know.”

“I think that is best, Colonel,” Lodygin said. “Dear Rosalina did divulge to me that Kaija Merculief is quite the scientist herself, sometimes assisting her father with his work on the New Archangel.”

“Rosalina Lobov knows of the work on New Archangel?” This was too much.

Lodygin nodded. “I am afraid so. According to Rosalina, Kaija is brilliant, and has a photographic memory.” The captain inhaled through his nose, closing his eyes as he mulled over some delightfully nasty memory. “But I have a strong feeling the girl is holding something back.”

“Where is this Rosalina Lobov now, Captain? New Archangel is a state secret. She cannot be allowed to speak of the things she has heard.“

The smirk on Lodygin’s pursed lips slowly crawled across his face to form a tight smile. “You have my solemn word, Rosalina Lobov poses no future risk to this endeavor.”

Rostov resolved to shoot Lodygin in the face if the man ever so much as looked at his daughter. But still, there was a need for animals like him in moments such as this.

“I assume you will cover your tracks,” he said, feeling the urge to wash his hands in extremely hot water.

“Of course, Colonel,” Lodygin said.

Rostov drummed his fingers on the desk, his mind whirring with old problems and new possibilities. If Volodin’s daughter was a member of the Black Hundreds, she was certain to have contacts around the world, contacts who could help her deploy the New Archangel in Dallas and Los Angeles. Strategically focused, such a network could be useful to the Kremlin. As it stood now, they were a liability, likely to incite an American response that could level the Russian map.

“Volodin and his daughter must be stopped,” he said.

“My men will locate him,” Lodygin said. “I mean to say, you have my assurance of that.”

“No, Captain,” Rostov said. “I am in no mood to depend on your assurances. If your men ever do get around to contacting you, remind them that Zolner is already en route. If they value their lives, they should stay out of his way.”

The smile brightened on Lodygin’s lips at the mention of the name. “I have always admired Zolner’s work.”

“I do not doubt that,” Rostov said. In truth, the two men were both savages, though Zolner carried his savagery under the guise of a man’s man.