microphone, “I’m to your right. By a fir tree.”
The men paused, looking in his direction.
“ There you are,” Mikhail murmured. “Good. We wouldn’t want to shoot you by mistake.” Grinning at the joke, he and Yakov took cover behind the tree and assessed the house.
“ How many people are inside?” Yakov’s question could barely be heard.
“ No way to tell,” Andrei replied softly. “Someone walked off and made footprints earlier, but those are Pyotyr’s footprints that go through the gate toward the house.”
“ How do you know?”
“ Blood on the gate.”
“ Ah.”
“ There’s light-probably from a television-in the room on the far right.” Andrei pointed. “Maybe there’s someone in the house, someone who isn’t aware that Pyotyr snuck in. Or maybe the house is empty, and Pyotyr turned on the television to make it seem the place is occupied.”
“ A lot of maybes,” Mikhail said. “He lost his cell phone. But if he’s in there, he’ll use the land line to call the police.”
“ I shot the telephone wire,” Andrei told him.
“ He could have phoned before you did that. Or maybe there’s a cell phone in the house.”
“ Then why haven’t the police arrived? Why don’t we hear sirens?”
Yakov shrugged. “It’s Christmas Eve on Canyon Road. The crowd would make it difficult for police cars to reach here.”
“ But we can’t just leave or rush the house because we think the police might be coming,” Andrei insisted. “If we screw up, we’d better run and keep running. We’d never be able to stop-because we know our clients and the Pakhan will never stop hunting us.”
And my family, Andrei thought. If the Pakhan can’t find me, he’ll go after my wife and daughters.
“ Then what do you suggest?” Mikhail wanted to know.
“ We’ll approach the house from three sides,” Andrei decided. “Pyotyr can’t defend it from every angle. At least two of us are bound to get in.”
“ Those are pretty good odds, as long as I’m not the one who gets shot,” Yakov said.
“ Pyotyr’s wounded and weak from blood loss,” Andrei countered. “His aim will be affected. There’s a high probability that all of us will get out of this alive.”
“‘ High probability’ doesn’t fill me with confidence. Whoever goes in from the front takes the greatest risk. How do we decide who-”
“ The two of you sound like old women. I’ll take the front,” Andrei said irritably.
They stared at him.
“ Pyotyr knows I’m the one he has the most reason to fear. I’ll show myself in front of the house. He’ll be distracted. That gives the two of you a better chance to get inside from different directions. If we synchronize the attack precisely-”
“ We have company,” Yakov warned.
Andrei pivoted toward the lane. At first, he worried that police were arriving. But the figure he saw was alone, plodding through the snow: a man wearing a buttoned pale-gray coat and a hat with built-in earflaps. He walked with his head so low that he looked weary.
The holiday blues? Andrei wondered. Or maybe he’s just protecting his face from the snow.
A further thought occurred to him.
Maybe this is a policeman putting on some kind of act. If so, he won’t be alone. He’ll be setting up a trap.
Andrei thought of the Pakhan, of the clients, of Pyotyr.
Of his wife and daughters.
The man trudged closer, angling toward the opposite side of the lane, toward the gate.
I’ll take the risk, Andrei decided.
“ We’re going to Santa Fe for a baby?”
“ Yes, Pyotyr. For the child of peace.”
“ I don’t understand.”
“ Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you watch the news on television?”
“ The news? Bah. Everything they tell us here is propaganda, the same as it was back in Russia.”
“ Then you’ve never heard of Ahmed Hassan?”
“ Is that the child’s name?”
“ The father’s. He’s an obstetrician.”
“ Andrei, my English isn’t…”
“ Hassan delivers babies. He’s a surgeon who once specialized in treating Palestinians who were shot in gunfights with Israelis.
Over the years, he operated on two thousand combat patients. ‘But nothing got better,’ he said. So he changed his specialty and became a baby doctor. Thousands of children are in the world because of him, far more than all the gunshot patients he treated. As he tells his followers, he chose life instead of death, hope instead of hate.”
“ His followers? You make Hassan sound like some kind of religious leader.”
“ In a way, he is. Although he doesn’t have any religious authority, his speeches are so impassioned that a great many people are inspired by his sheer presence. He speaks like a prophet and attracts more disciples every day. They believe he has a vision. He preaches that war between Palestinians and Israelis will destroy the region and the rest of the world with it. Many-those who are tired of the decades of killing and destruction-agree with him.
“‘ The children,’ Hassan reminds them. ‘Think of our children. If we truly love them, if we treasure them as much as we claim to, we’ll give them a future and create a lasting peace.’”
“ Peace. You used that word to describe the baby.”
“ Yes, Pyotyr. The child of peace. Hassan’s child. His enemies are paying us three million dollars to steal it for them.”
“ The layout of the house?” Meredith sounded troubled.
“ Why do you need to know that?”
In the shadowy kitchen, Kagan saw her outline sit tensely straighter as she held the tiny glass to the baby’s lips.
“ No special reason,” he answered. “Just a standard precaution. A way to fill the time.”
“ Precaution?”
“ So I can anticipate.”
“ Anticipate what? You heard Cole. The man’s gone.”
“ Probably. The thing is, it’s always a good idea to have a backup plan.”
In the meager light, Kagan couldn’t see Meredith’s eyes, but he was certain that she studied him nervously. The silhouette of her head nodded toward a dark archway next to a recessed side-by-side refrigerator-freezer at the back of the kitchen.
“ The furnace and laundry room are through that arch,” she said. “There’s also a small bathroom, just a toilet and sink.”
“ Any windows back there?”
“ No.”
Kagan was grateful for that small blessing. “What about the rest of the house? Cole said his room is in front.”
“ Yes. In front there’s the living room, a bathroom, and then Cole’s room.”
“ What about in back?”
“ Ted’s office is behind the living room. The master bedroom is next to that.”
“ Across from Cole’s room?”
