“Are you sure he said your name?” Toby asked, one hand on the basement door.
“That’s why I told you my cover’s already blown.”
He considered that, leaning against the door. “So you took the shot.”
She tried to say Yes but couldn’t get enough air, so she just nodded.
“Killed them both?”
She pursed her dry lips, thinking back to the two shots she fired—one straight through Layla’s chest into Peter’s, then a second one right in his face. Rachel, too, had been trained to kill; she’d just never had to do it before.
“He was going to kill the girl,” she finally managed.
Toby sighed loudly, as if that were a weak argument.
Was it? Was there an argument to be made for sacrificing a little girl so that a full-grown woman would survive a little longer? She remembered Layla gasping for breaths that wouldn’t come, her legs kicking spastically on the sticky packed earth. Not even enough breath for her to scream in pain.
“It’s funny,” Toby said.
“Funny?”
“Well, no. Horrible. Of course. But I’m thinking of how easy it is to manipulate these kids. To convince them of anything. Ever since 9/11 they’ve been ready to gobble up any conspiracy to make sense of the world. The rich are their enemies, the government too. You can get them to turn their hacking talents on some banks, or even convince them to commit murder. For some bleeding-heart ideal. So fucking naïve.”
She noticed how he spat those last words. These kids, the ones Rachel had spent the last months living with, truly disgusted him. “Well, Peter thought the same thing. But it didn’t work, did it? They didn’t murder the family. He did.”
“But it almost worked.”
“He’d drugged them.”
Toby rocked his head noncommittally, then pulled the bolt on the door and pushed it open. That dirty light from the solitary bulb glowed from below, and the foul smell mushroomed out. Toby patted his nose and said, “Whew,” before starting downstairs. Rachel followed, watching the previously hidden bald spot on the back of his head. When they reached the bottom she was struck by how peaceful everything looked on this side of the expensive wines. A million-dollar wall to hide the gore.
“This way?” Toby asked, pointing to the left.
“Either side.” She followed as he marched to the left and around the end of the rack and then paused, taking in the scene. Close to them lay Gary, doubled over in the last jerk of his death agony. Further to the left, lying on their backs, Grigory and Jelena Orlov. To the right, near the far wall, Layla was splayed on her back, arms out, close to Peter’s demolished face. The Colt was still in his death grip. And so much blood, everywhere.
A flash as Toby took a snapshot. Rachel blinked.
“Wait,” Toby said, turning to her. “Where’s the kid? Where’s Marina?”
“Upstairs,” she told him. “I carried her to one of the bedrooms. She can’t wake up to this.”
“Right,” he said, nodding. “She’s well and truly out?”
“I’d say we’ve got a couple more hours, at least.”
Watching where he stepped, he made his way over to Grigory Orlov and looked down at the face. “Yeah, that’s Orlov all right. Saw his picture a lot when he fled here, even talked to him once at a party.”
“About what?”
Toby hesitated, remembering. “The only thing exiles like him talk about: Vladimir Putin. The end of Russian democracy. All the billions they used to have.”
She watched the way he stared at Orlov’s face, a hint of judgment before he raised his camera for another shot. “What are we going to do, Toby?”
He squinted at her. “Well, we’re going to maintain your cover, right? Make sure there’s nothing to connect you to this place. I’ll have to take Marina Orlov somewhere—that’ll be up to headquarters.” He squatted by Orlov’s midsection, then pulled back the lapel of his jacket. It was stiff and heavy. “First I need to collect their documents.”
“Here,” Rachel said as she took Orlov’s wallet from her own jacket and tossed it across the room.
Toby caught it, said, “Thanks,” and began rummaging through Orlov’s jacket for more.
Rachel stepped over to Peter’s body. She crouched and reached into his pants pockets, touching that familiar and cold body, and discovered a wallet and a flip-phone. In the wallet she found his Veritude business card, some credit cards, and a driver’s license, all under the name Peter Kožul. Then she remembered earlier, when they’d just arrived. He’d kissed her deeply, asked where Nathan was, and as he brought them inside told them he had a quick call to make. She opened the phone, and it bleeped.
“What’s that?” Toby said, looking up from Orlov’s bloody jacket.
From the phone’s menu, she selected RECENT CALLS. “Nothing, I’m just checking his—” She stopped, seeing the list of calls Peter had made and received. At the top of the list, the most recent, was a number that was familiar to her. Familiar because it was the same number she had committed to memory months ago and dialed when she had discovered the Orlov family lying in this basement.
Despite the fatigue and the thickening haze of PTSD, this single piece of evidence scraped away the fog, just for a moment, leaving bare a small set of known and suspected facts that reshaped themselves like an impossible MC Escher drawing that made no sense even though it was, in its own way, real.
Peter had called Toby, because they were working together.
Toby was the FBI’s local Russia expert.
Peter was not a Serb. He was Russian.
Back to the start: They were working together. Which was why Peter had known Rachel’s name.
Which led to a final question that she could not yet answer: Where did that leave Marina Orlov?
She looked up just in time to see Toby rising to his feet and stepping toward her, and her body reacted before her mind could, turning and launching itself toward the space between the wall and the wine rack just behind her. She slipped on the bloody floor but didn’t fall, regaining her balance as she caught the rack with her hand and swung around it as Toby shouted, “Wait!” Then a bang sounded, followed by shattered glass and cracking wood.
She ran straight to the stairs, hearing a loud crash and Toby’s curse as he, too, slipped on blood but fared less well. She took the steps two at a time and burst into the hallway, then slammed the door shut, her fingers searching by feel until she found the dead bolt and ran it home. As she turned to run off another shot sounded, and wood cracked from a bullet slamming into the door. One more shot made it through and hit the far wall.
By then, though, she was running through the living room, past the spray-painted slogans, back into the foyer and out into the fresh morning light, past Peter’s Volvo and Layla’s Subaru, to Toby’s Mercedes. She jerked open the driver’s-side door and reached in, checking under the seat and in the glove box. She was searching for a gun—for anything that might help her. Another shot rang out inside the house, muffled by the thick walls.
The why was beyond her now. She didn’t have time to put anything together. The only thing that mattered was that Toby, her emergency contact, was her enemy, and if she fled now in order to save her own life, then the girl sleeping upstairs would not survive the night.
Under the steering wheel she found a latch and popped the trunk, because that was where she would hide a spare gun if she were him. Gravel scattered under her feet as she ran around and ripped open the trunk.
And stopped.
The trunk was full. Full of a shape under a dirty blanket. She took a breath, knowing she didn’t have time to collect herself but needing the moment anyway. She grabbed a corner of the blanket and pulled it back quickly, the way, when she was a child, her father would remove her Band-Aids. She looked down into the open, dead eyes of Nathan, who yesterday had been weeping into his beer because of a broken heart. Dried blood was crusted on his neck, and his shirt was thick with brown blood. He’d been shot through the chest.
More gunfire from inside the house. Toby cursing.
If she’d had more time, her own heart would have broken. Pitiful Nathan’s search for love had ended here, in the trunk of a Mercedes in wine country. It was fucking unfair.
When she covered him again, she noticed a dark glint in the deepest part of the trunk, just beyond Nathan’s body. She leaned over him and grabbed it—it was a heavy shotgun. A Mossberg pump action, pistol-grip stock. She pumped it once and felt the satisfying shudder of the cartridge entering the chamber.