Eternal Empire (30 page)

A
s promised, there was no hood this time. When Maddy entered the sitting room at the dacha, she looked at the men around her and saw them looking back. Vasylenko she recognized from his pictures. She had never seen the guard at the door or the man at the laptop. All the same, she knew that if any of them were allowing her to see their faces now, there was no way they meant for her to leave here alive.

Behind her, Asthana said something in Russian to the guard who had let them in, who withdrew. Taking a chair from the corner, she brought it over to the center of the room. “Sit down.”

Maddy complied, not taking her eyes from Vasylenko, who was seated on the sofa by the fireplace. In person, he was smaller than she had expected, but he did not seem fragile or tired. Instead, he had visibly drawn into himself, like a fist, as if the passage of time had left him all the more determined to stay alive. And she understood at once that all she had done for the last three years had only been to avoid finding herself in the same room as this man.

The man with the laptop was packing up an assortment of electronic gear. He spoke angrily to Asthana. “What is the girl doing here?”

“Insurance,” Asthana said, sliding a second chair across the floor until it was facing Maddy. “If Ilya made it off that yacht, he'll be coming for us. With the girl here, he may have second thoughts. We can keep her alive until we're safely away. Then we can let her go.”

As Maddy listened, she wondered why they were speaking in English instead of Russian, then realized that this conversation was meant for her ears. They had no real intention of letting her walk away. And if she wanted to make them see otherwise, her window for doing so was closing already.

Throughout this last exchange, Vasylenko had said nothing. Finally, he gave a nod to the man in the corner, who tucked his laptop under his arm and stood. He did not look at either woman as he left the room.

Asthana drew the curtains of the sliding glass door. Watching her, Maddy could sense the tension in the air. Although Vasylenko had remained silent, she thought she knew something about men like this, and that he would not be pleased to be taking orders from Asthana.

Once the curtains had been drawn, Asthana went to the chair she had set across from Maddy and took a seat, almost close enough for the two of them to touch. She got down to business at once. “Is Ilya alive?”

When Maddy said nothing, Asthana smiled reasonably, as if she were conducting a job interview. “Let me explain how this works. The more information we have, the better we can plan our response, which works to your benefit as well. I know a lot about you. You've always put your own interests first. And if you refuse to talk, we can find out in other ways.”

Glancing over at Vasylenko, who was still seated in silence, Maddy pretended to consider this point. She responded slowly, as if the words were being drawn out against her will. “I don't know if Ilya is alive. All I did was get him on board. Did he kill Tarkovsky?”

“That isn't really your concern,” Asthana said. “You knew all along what our intentions had to be, and you performed more than capably. If it matters, I can tell you that the situation was resolved as intended.”

“I know,” Maddy said, speaking more quickly. “I was there when the rockets hit. And I would have been killed if I had been on the lower deck, or if the yacht hadn't been built so well. But it's all the same. You've still won. Even if not everyone gets to share in the spoils.”

Maddy looked over at Vasylenko, addressing him directly for the first time. “I'm curious about you. I know why you agreed to fight for this cause, but I wonder if your men really know who they're working for. I've been told that collaboration used to mean death, at least among true thieves—”

Without a word, Asthana came forward from her chair and drove a fist into Maddy's stomach. Maddy doubled over, gasping, the weave of the carpet going in and out of focus as Asthana spoke in a low voice. “That was a warning. Don't think you know who we are just because you read it in books.”

“I know enough,” Maddy managed, feeling new dispatches of pain with every word, her hair hanging in her face. “I know Tarkovsky was standing in your way. The state controls almost all the oil in Russia, but you wanted the rest. And you couldn't just kill him like you've done with others.”

With an effort, she straightened up in her chair, looking up at Asthana, who was still standing. “If you wanted him dead, you could have used a sniper. Or poison. I don't need a book to tell me that. But you had to make it look like it was someone else. You told me so yourself.”

Asthana sat down again slowly. “And what, exactly, do you think I told you?”

Maddy flung the hair back from her forehead. “You said it was being treated as a terror attack. The rumors were in the air already, so you could pin it on anyone. Abkhazia, maybe, if you want to go to war against Georgia again. Islamists, if that's more convenient. When they pull that drone out of the water, I'm sure they can trace it wherever you want. Everyone wins. But that doesn't mean the thieves get to share in the glory. Not once they've done their part.”

She turned back to Vasylenko, dreading another blow, but also knowing that this was the only chance she would have to say these words. “Ilya knew this. They need you for now. But there isn't room for you in the new order. Not when so many others are waiting in the wings. And it won't be long. They already know you'll take orders from a woman.”

Silence fell. For a long moment, Maddy could hear nothing but the sound of her own labored breathing.

At last, Vasylenko rose from the sofa. Without looking at Maddy, he took out his revolver and opened it, allowing the bullets to fall into his hand with the air of a man sliding out a cigarette. He pocketed all but one cartridge, which he reinserted into its chamber, then closed the cylinder.

Asthana stood, her eyes on the
vor
, and asked something in Russian. Vasylenko gave a short response, only a few syllables, but they were enough to send Asthana backing into the corner.

Maddy sat there, heart thudding, as the old man studied her from a few paces away. Finally, he glanced aside, looking at nothing in particular, and asked, “Do you know how Russian roulette began?”

It was not the kind of question that seemed to require an answer. Vasylenko began to walk in a slow circle around the carpet, the gun held loosely in one hand. “It was invented by army officers, out of boredom. They were part of a closed world, with no possibility of change. It made them wonder if it was best for a man to kill himself. Many did. But some of them found another way.”

Vasylenko raised the revolver, still pointing it at the ground, and spun the cylinder. As it came to a stop, he said, “For a thief, there is no need for games like this. One's life is a game. I learned in the camps that there is only one rule. A dead thief is good for nothing. Which is what Ilya never understood.”

With one easy motion, he pointed the gun at Maddy's head. She heard herself exhale, her breathing growing quick and shallow as she forced her eyes shut. The pounding of her heart seemed very far away. She found herself fascinated, almost impersonally, by the thought that this was how it would end, as if this was the moment that had always been awaiting her, after all she had done to survive.

Vasylenko's tone of voice remained conversational. “I do not take orders from women or Chekists. So I want you to think carefully before you answer my next question. Did Ilya get off that ship alive?”

Maddy did not reply. As she waited for the click of an empty chamber, or for a shot that she would never hear, she told herself that it didn't matter what she said, any more than it mattered if there were six bullets or only one. This had never been a game of chance.

When she spoke, it was with the deliberation of one who knew these words might be her last. “I don't know if Ilya made it. But he would have been on the aft deck. If he was there when the rockets hit, he would have survived. And if he's alive, it means he's coming for you.”

In the silence that followed, Maddy felt the resolve that she had saved for these last few words begin to slip away. She listened for the click, or for nothing, waiting without hope for either to come—

—when instead, from somewhere outside the house, an alarm began to sound.

Her eyes flew open as Vasylenko withdrew the gun. Looking at the faces around her, she saw that the alarm was not her imagination, and at once, her arms and legs began to tremble.

From behind her came the sound of footsteps. When she turned, she saw the man with the laptop run into the room. Looking at the scene, he took in the situation at once, then spoke a few urgent words in Russian.

Vasylenko holstered his revolver. Without so much as a glance at Maddy, he said something to Asthana, who came forward, her own gun drawn, and hauled Maddy out of the chair. “Get up.”

Maddy got to her feet, her legs somehow managing to keep her upright, and met the other woman's eyes. In Asthana's face, she thought she saw something like fear. “Looks like Ilya is here after all.”

“It isn't Ilya,” Asthana said, pushing Maddy into the hallway. “It's Wolfe.”

W
olfe had checked two other locations before arriving at the dacha, using the addresses that Powell had sent to her phone and the map she had lifted at the terminal. The first two had been dead ends, vacation homes that she had seen at a glance weren't suitable for an operation like this, and even as she pulled over to the side of the road, a hundred yards from her latest destination, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was here on a fool's errand.

It didn't help matters that she was working on her own. She opened her driver's side door, making sure that the interior lights were off, and slid out of the car. Her equipment had been riding on the seat beside her. It wasn't much, just her identification, penlight, and handcuffs, which were all she had been able to bring on the plane. She checked that her phone was on silent mode, then closed the door, leaving it unlocked, and approached the final address on foot.

The street was very quiet, like the rest of the city, the eyes of which were squarely fixed on the port. As Wolfe crept along the road, she noted that at least the situation was promising, with trees to her right and the sea somewhere off to her left, beyond the houses lined up at the shoreline. Based on aerial photographs, the dacha she was approaching was set apart from the rest, with several acres of land, some of it wooded, but also with a fenced clearing.

Wolfe continued onward until she was across the street from the driveway of the dacha. Glancing to both sides, she headed in, keeping to the trees that extended to the edge of the drive. After a minute, she came within view of a brick wall topped with wire. A security camera was pointed at the area immediately before the gate, and a few feet away, a man was seated with a shotgun in his lap.

She halted at a safe distance, her eyes on the guard, whose head was a darkened cutout. As she watched, he rolled his head from side to side, stretching his neck, and for a second, his profile was caught by the yellow light. Then he turned away again, leaving his face as indistinct as before, but in the instant that his features had been visible, Wolfe had recognized him. It was one of the men she had seen on Mare Street on the day of the prison break.

Wolfe took a step back, not making a sound, and withdrew again into the trees. Once she was out of sight, she paused, halfway between the house and the road, and began to think.

She had known that the prisoners had been broken out for a reason, and she had suspected that they were heading east, using Vasylenko's connections to obtain safe passage. Whatever they were planning had been significant enough to risk the danger and expense of their escape. And as she considered the situation now, she saw that such men might be very useful for the project that had unfolded here in Sochi, especially for someone like Asthana.

For a minute, Wolfe remained where she was, torn between going back to her car and getting a better sense of the scene. At last, moving as quickly as she dared, she retraced her steps through the trees until she was back on the main road, where there was still no sign of life. She went down the street from the driveway, counting off her paces as she walked past the other homes, and finally saw a gap between two of the neighboring houses.

Picking her way carefully toward the shoreline, she ended up on a concrete embankment, about twenty feet wide, that sloped gently down toward the sea. Most of the houses had boat shelters on their lower levels, with metal tracks allowing the boats to be winched down to the water. Wolfe moved through the darkness along the concrete, stepping over the clumps of reeds that had sprouted at the waterline, and when she had taken the same number of steps as before, she found herself at a pier that could belong only to the dacha she had just left.

There was no fence here. Two large motorboats covered in tarps were moored at the pier, which was the sectional kind that could be screwed in separate pieces into the seabed. To her right stood a boathouse, with a footpath moving up a grassy slope toward the dacha itself. From here, she could not see the main house, but at the crest of the hill, there was a faint yellow glow.

Lowering herself to the ground, Wolfe felt her way forward on her hands and knees. A line of trees stood to either side, screening the dacha from its neighbors. As the ground began to level off, she flattened herself completely into the grass, advancing one inch at a time until the house came into view at last.

Wolfe studied the layout. The rear of the dacha was twenty yards from where she was lying, with a wooden pergola and trellis. Past the deck, a sliding door led into the house itself. Beyond the glass, the curtains were drawn, but the lights were on inside, and as she watched, she saw a shadow of movement.

On the roof, two security cameras were trained on the area directly to the rear of the house. A man was leaning against the pergola on the left side of the deck, smoking. She could see a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck, tucked neatly beneath the strap of his shotgun.

Wolfe lay there, watching, for another minute, although the situation had been clear at first glance. She had no choice but to call it in, sitting on the house in the meantime until backup arrived.

Keeping an eye on the dacha, Wolfe edged out of the guard's line of sight. When she was a few feet away from the trees to her left, she began to withdraw, and she had just started to inch backward when her other eye was caught by an object fastened to a nearby tree.

It was an infrared motion sensor. Wolfe recognized it at once and froze, but her left foot was still moving, and before she could pull it back, it was too late. The colored lights of the sensor blinked on, and from up ahead, a shrill alarm sounded. Wolfe closed her eyes.
“Shit—”

She heard footsteps and a shout in Russian, followed at once by a shotgun being racked, which put to flight any thoughts she might have had about trying to make a retreat. Opening her eyes, she saw the guard standing ten yards away, his shotgun pointed straight at her head, and faintly heard him order her to get to her feet, keeping her hands in sight.

Wolfe complied, rising to a standing position with her arms up, the fact of her stupidity pounding in her brain in time with the shriek of the alarm. Keeping the shotgun on her, the guard pulled out a radio with his free hand and pressed the button to talk, saying something in a low voice.

A response came over the radio, unintelligible to her ears, but the guard seemed to have no trouble understanding it. He slid the radio into his pocket again and took a step forward, his shotgun aimed at waist level, and there was no telling what he might have done next if a hole had not suddenly appeared in his forehead, sending him toppling over to the ground.

Wolfe spun in the direction of the gunshot to see a darkened figure emerging from the trees to her left, his pistol raised as he neared the circle of brightness cast by the house. It was Ilya.

For a fraction of a second, their eyes met. Then Ilya indicated the body. “Hurry.”

Wolfe didn't need to be told twice. As Ilya kept his pistol trained toward the dacha, staying out of camera range, Wolfe ran forward and pulled the shotgun from the dead guard's hands. Yanking up his shirt, she found a pistol in a breakfront holster, which she pulled out and tucked into her own belt a split second before her head snapped up at the sound of approaching steps.

She fell back as a shotgun blast tore through the area where she had been standing an instant before. As she rolled, she caught a glimpse of Ilya taking cover in the trees as the guard who had emerged from around the house fired again, and she did not stop moving until she had covered the open ground between her and the deck, ending up in a low crouch on its sheltered side.

A second later, the alarm ceased. In the ensuing silence, Wolfe heard nothing but her own ticking pulse, her cracked ribs aching with every breath. Her hands were shaking, but only slightly, and they stabilized considerably as she checked the shotgun and found that it held six shells.

From the other end of the deck, she heard whispers. At least two guards were taking cover at the far side of the house. She couldn't piece together their words from here, but it was easy enough to imagine what they were saying. Either they would split up, or they would radio for someone else to approach from the opposite direction, cutting off both lines of retreat.

With her back to the deck, the shotgun raised, Wolfe tried to remember what she had seen of the layout. If Ilya stuck to the trees, he would be unable to get a good shot at anyone at the other side of the house or on the deck, which was protected on that end by the pergola.

Wolfe looked over her shoulder at the deck behind her. A yard away, she saw a spot where the latticework had come loose, creating a narrow opening. Under the boards, there was two feet of headspace, and before she was fully aware that she had made the decision, she rolled onto her belly and squeezed herself into the darkened gap with something that was not quite a prayer.

Pulling her legs in after her, she found herself lying on a patch of rough ground covered in loose boards, the slats of the deck six inches above her head. A few flattened beer cans were rusting nearby. She turned herself around, the dirt gritting softly beneath her knees, and settled in to wait, her shotgun pointed at the place on this side of the house where she expected the next attack to come.

Almost at once, before she was ready, a pair of legs appeared in her area of vision, visible from the knees down. Wolfe fired through the latticework, the gunshot deafening, her face stung by blowback as the guard fell, howling, his shins blown away. The spent shell skittered off somewhere into the darkness as she racked the shotgun and fired a second time, cutting off the man's screams, and she was about to crawl out when she heard footsteps on the deck overhead.

Before she could move, the second guard fired down through the boards, missing her by inches. She felt a searing pain in her leg as a few stray pellets bit into her left calf, but she still managed to roll onto her back and fire up blindly, blowing a hole through the deck where she thought the guard might be standing. A hail of splinters flew in her hair and face as she racked the shotgun again. She heard the second guard's body fall. Then nothing.

Blood trickled warmly down her leg as she spat wood chips, wiping her eyes with the back of her arm, then rolled onto her stomach again and crawled to the spot where the first man had fallen. As she climbed out, she saw Ilya coming her way, gun raised. “Can you walk?”

Wolfe rose to a crouch, testing her leg. It hurt like hell but she could move. “Yes.”

They took shelter behind the deck as Ilya searched the dead man. “At least two more inside,” Ilya said, his head down, so close that she could see the tendons standing out on his neck. “We need to go in now. The noise will attract attention. And I don't know who else will be coming.”

He pulled an ammo pouch from the dead man's belt and tossed it to her. Wolfe fished out the shells and loaded them into her shotgun, her ears still ringing. “What exactly are you planning?”

“I'm here to finish this,” Ilya said, taking the dead guard's pistol. “Once and for all. This is all I ever intended.”

“I know.” In the faint light, Wolfe saw a gleam in his eyes she had never seen there before, as if the air of calm he wore like a shield remained only precariously in place. “But it won't be that easy. They have a hostage.”

For the first time, Ilya turned to look at her directly. “Is it Maddy Blume?”

Wolfe felt a jolt of surprise, but she pushed it away as something that could be addressed later. “Yes. Which means we can't just go in.”

Ilya was silent for what felt like a long moment, but which really could have been only a second or two. When he spoke again, it was with the voice of a man who had examined all courses of action and settled on the best of a bad lot. “All right. But we need to work together.”