“ It works. The trick is how you do it.” Kagan went to her and pretended to put a hand behind the baby, demonstrating the technique. “Tilt him slightly back like this. Keep a hand behind his head to protect his neck. Hold the shot glass against his upper lip. Don’t pour. That’ll make him gag. If you let him control how much he sips, he’ll do fine.”
After a wary glance toward the window, Kagan went over to the stove and stirred the mixture, dissolving the sugar and salt. The spoon scraped against the pot.
“ Cole, any sign of movement out there?” Despite Kagan’s outward calm, he estimated that his pulse rate was now one hundred and twenty. His arteries felt the pressure that expanded them.
“ No,” the boy said.
“ You’re doing a good job. Keep watching.”
The baby squirmed as if it might start crying.
Kagan quickly used the spoon to dribble some of the mixture on the inside of his wrist. “Slightly warm. It’s ready.” He turned off the stove and spooned the mixture into the shot glass. “I filled it to the one-ounce mark. We can measure how much the baby’s drinking.”
Meredith held the baby the way Kagan had shown her, protecting his neck from tilting too far back.
“ Here we go, little fellow.” She took the glass from Kagan. “Does he have a name?”
Kagan didn’t reply.
“ Sorry,” she said. “I guess it’s not something I should know.”
“ Actually, I was never told his name.” Although Kagan’s instinct was to avoid revealing information, in a way it no longer mattered. If the men outside got their hands on Meredith, the outcome would be brutally the same whether she knew anything about the baby or not.
He changed the subject.
“ You’re dressed like you were going to a party.”
“ The parents of a boy Cole goes to school with invited us to their house.” Meredith sounded weighed down by thoughts of what might have been.
“ Will you be missed?” Kagan asked quickly. “Will they wonder what happened to you? If they can’t reach you on the phone, maybe they’ll become concerned enough to-”
“ Before Ted smashed the phones, he called them and claimed Cole was sick.”
“ Ah.” Kagan’s tone went flat. “Ted’s a clever man.”
“ Yes. A clever man.” Meredith took a deep breath and looked down at the baby. “I’d forgotten what it feels like to have something this helpless in my arms. That’s right, little fellow. Keep sipping. I bet you’re thirsty. Don’t worry. We’ve got plenty, and it’s all for you.”
“ Not quite,” Kagan said. Dehydrated from bleeding, he was terribly aware of his own thirst. He reached into the first aid kit, opened a container of Tylenol, and shoved four tablets into his dry mouth. Crouching to prevent his silhouette from showing at the window, he went back to the stove, tested the saucepan’s handle to make sure he wouldn’t burn himself, and poured some of the mixture into a glass he found next to the sink.
He took two deep swallows and got the pills down. He tasted the salt and the sugar. Instantly, his stomach cramped, aggravating the nausea produced by his wound. He waited, then took another swallow, feeling his mouth absorb the warm fluid.
“ See anything, Cole?”
“ It really looks like he went away,” the boy said from the living room.
“ Keep watching anyhow. It never hurts to be cautious. Spies can’t take anything for granted.”
“ I keep changing the channel on the radio you gave me, but I don’t hear anything. Maybe I’m not doing it right.”
“ If you play video games, I’m sure you can work that receiver.” The microphone in Kagan’s pants pocket was too far from his mouth to transmit his voice if Andrei happened to be listening on the frequency the team had first used. “Those men won’t talk unless they need to. There’s only a slight chance that you’ll turn to the frequency they’re using at the moment they happen to be talking. But we’ve got to try everything. You’re doing fine.”
Kagan switched off the night-light, noting that Meredith trusted him enough now that she didn’t object. Concealed by the deeper shadows, he opened the curtains a couple of inches.
Through the falling snow, he was able to see the upright poles of the coyote fence. He watched for movement in the shadows beyond it.
“ Meredith, describe the layout of the house.”
Andrei crawled hurriedly through the snow along the bottom of the fence. His breathing quickened as the heat of the renewed hunt dissipated the cold on his cheeks. When he was far enough down the lane that he felt safe to stand, he did so and peered up at a utility pole.
Two wires led from it toward the house. In the faint reflection off the snow, he strained his eyes and saw that one of them was attached to an insulator on the pole-that was for electricity. The other wire was either for telephone service or for cable television. Then he remembered the satellite dish he’d seen on the roof and decided that the remaining wire must be for the phone.
In adequate conditions, his marksmanship was exceptional. But now it took him four shots before a bullet connected with the thick wire at the pole and blew it apart. Because of the falling snow, the sound suppressor on his gun was even more muffled than usual, and the sound of hitting the wire wasn’t enough to attract attention.
Immediately, he removed the partly empty magazine, slid it into a pants pocket, and shoved a full fifteen- round magazine into the pistol. Only then did he speak to the microphone, his voice an urgent whisper.
“ I found him.”
Through the earbud under his cap, he heard an abrupt exhale.
“ Thank God,” the Pakhan’s taut voice said.
Andrei thought it ironic that his leader, who had also been raised in the atheistic Soviet Union, would use that expression.
“ Our clients are here now,” the Pakhan said. “I’ve never seen anyone so furious. How soon can you deliver the package?”
“ I don’t know,” Andrei answered.
“ What?”
“ Pyotyr took cover in a house. I need to figure how to get to him.”
“ Don’t let him escape again,” the Pakhan’s voice warned.
“ Not this time. He’s ours.”
“ I don’t give a govno about him! Deal with him quickly! The package! Just get me the package!”
It troubled Andrei that the Pakhan felt so threatened. Normally, he was content to provide barely adequate service. If clients complained, he ordered someone like Andrei to set fire to their homes. People who needed to employ the Odessa Mafia were desperate to begin with. The Pakhan’s attitude was that they ought to be grateful for any help they received.
But these clients were another matter.
The three million dollars they’d paid for a week’s work-at a resort city, no less-had been too tempting for the Pakhan to resist. At the time, he’d called it easy pickings.
“ They made all the arrangements. They bribed the necessary people. They learned the target’s schedule, exactly when and where the job can be done. It should have been easy for them. But they can’t carry out the actual mission. They need us because we can blend with the Santa Fe crowd, while they’d be spotted right away. So I charged those damned Arabs as much as possible.”
Accustomed to causing fear rather than being the subject of it, the Pakhan now understood the penalty for going into business with clients who were even more ruthless than he was.
Andrei stepped off the lane toward a fir tree that provided a hidden vantage point from which he could watch the house.
“ Did the rest of you hear?” he murmured to his microphone.
“ Yes.” Yakov’s voice came through the earbud. “Where are you?”
“ Follow the lane I took.”
A few minutes later, when he saw two heavyset men hurrying through the falling snow, Andrei said to the
