Final Target

PROLOGUE

Eighteen Months Earlier

More surprising than spinning out of control, than smashing through the railing, than tumbling trunk-over-hood down the hillside; more surprising even than the sheet metal buckling around her, was that she was dying in English. The woman tried to die in Russian, then in Ukrainian, but the words had forsaken her. Even her given name had fled into the swirling dust at the bottom of the ravine. She remembered only what others called her: Katie.

Katie grieved the loss of the inner voice of her childhood, as she knew would her parents, then comforted herself with the knowledge that they’d never find out.

The police officers standing with an interpreter at their apartment door would say she died instantly, sparing them the horror that their only child suffered any final thoughts at all.

In truth, she felt no horror. Nor panic. Nor dread.

There was just the rush of wind in the eucalyptus, as if an overture to the passing of her life before her eyes. But her mind drifted not into the past, but to another place in her present: her SatTek coworkers gathering a mile away, under coastal redwoods surrounded by acres of spring grass. She wondered whether they would miss her, backtrack along the twisting road when she didn’t answer her cell phone, or notice the broken railing as they drove home sunburned and bleary-eyed, then scramble down the hillside to find her body. She wished she could freshen her makeup and comb her hair, just in case.

Katie inspected the red soil blanketing the gray vinyl interior, then looked through her burst side window at dust dancing and gliding in a beam of morning sunlight. She heard the rustling of tiny feet in dry leaves. Perhaps a rabbit, a gray squirrel, or a finch returning to its work, pecking at wildflower seeds scattered by the three thousand pounds of steel and glass that had thrashed the hillside.

A warm gust churned the air. She smelled her mother’s kitchen in the bay leaves sweating in the overhanging branches and in the sage and fennel crushed by her car. She then saw herself at the dining table a month earlier, hunched over her laptop, heart pounding, typing a San Francisco address, and then later, hands shaking as she slid a letter into the corner mailbox. Dear Mr. Special Agent in Charge: The president of Surveillance and Targeting Technologies of San Jose, California, is engaged in a massive-

Which of them knew? Which of those she saw in her mind’s eye just a mile away, starting charcoal, setting up volleyball nets, pinning down the corners of tablecloths with ketchup and mustard bottles. Those men tossing footballs and glancing over at the women in little outfits they’d never worn to the office. The women trying not to giggle at white nerd-legs stuck into brown socks and clearance-rack Nikes or stare too long at the Cancun-bronzed chests of the men from the loading dock.

Which of them knew? A chill vibrated through her body. Which of them knew that she knew?

The lenses of her eyes changed focus from the thistles and nettles beyond the fractured windshield to the pale green Tupperware lying upside-down on the dashboard, her potato salad still sealed inside. Wasted. Even back home in Lugansk among the collapsed coal mines, even in the worst of times, no one wiped off blood to eat the food of the dead. It would be- What did Father Roman say? It would be like eating the bread of the Eucharist without the sacrament.

Katie closed her eyes, her shallow breath once again infused with bay and sage and fennel-then a wrenching vertigo, as if she’d been tossed from a sailboat twisting in a hurricane. My name…I need…to know…my name.

She wanted to smile when it finally reached out to her from the whirlwind… Ekaterina. But there wasn’t time.