Moscow Sting

white in the fields where the low winter sun hadn’t reached, and there was a grey slush at the road’s edge.

“Back over your shoulder,” Burt enthused from the front, “you can see a light-coloured plateau, about thirty miles away. That’s Los Alamos.”

Anna turned and looked at the patch of light that was appearing as they headed higher towards the sky. The sun was illuminating a stretch of flat mesa, about halfway up another set of mountains, on which the weapons research station and the birthplace of the atomic bomb was bleached into the huge, empty land, its buildings invisible in the flat light.

As they came round the final bend and up to the edge of the village, she saw that the bare rock and infertile sand had gone. There were meadows up here, and a few scraggy horses and a herd of cattle were still finding something to eat in the winter pasture.

The first of the buildings they reached was crumbling sideways into the meadow, its brown adobe walls peeled back to reveal mud bricks. The whole imperfect structure leaned at an angle so extreme that the doorway had been distorted into a rhomboid.

A toothless old man with a weather-beaten face, wearing a beat-up Stetson and torn and faded denim overalls, shouted something at them as they passed the home and shook his fist.

Burt laughed.

“They can be pretty crazy up here,” he said. “They don’t get out much, if you know what I mean. They need to meet new people—not just the relatives,” he joked. “But don’t worry, you won’t be staying in the village,” he added.

He pointed at another long adobe hall structure, which came up beside them to the left of the truck. It had no windows, but a squat bell tower sat on its wavy roof.

“That’s the morada,” Burt said. “There’s a Catholic sect run by the hermanos, the brotherhood. Call themselves the pentitentes. You see them out here on the mountain at Easter time, carrying crosses, flagellating. They used to have crucifixions up here. Not with nails, but even tied to a cross, they had the occasional death. It’s cold around Easter time. Traditionally, a young man from the village was chosen by lottery to hang up there, and if he died, the hermanos would take care of his family and his obligations. They were excommunicated by Rome, for giving the church a bad name.” Burt guffawed, as if this were a preposterous thought. “They say they still crucify people up here in the out-of-the-way spots,” he added. “But they do it in secret now.”

Anna wondered how much more out-of-the-way it could get than this dismal collection of mud houses at ten thousand feet.

The truck moved into the quiet, impoverished village and pulled up at a general store. They all climbed out and stood in the damp earth street, feeling the icy air coming down from the mountains ahead. There were just adobe buildings, she now saw, their mud walls in various states of decay. The rooftops were made of corrugated iron, rusted and torn.

Apart from the crosses everywhere, it could have been a village in the foothills of the Caucasus—Chechnya or Dagestan, Anna thought. But this was America.

“Founded in 1754,” Burt said. “By the Spanish king. They came up that way”—he pointed south—“from Mexico. They first arrived in 1583, settled here, then got driven out by the Indians. Then they came back and stayed.” He took her arm. “Let me show you something.”

Anna took Little Finn’s hand as they crossed the dirt road, and they followed Burt into what looked like an unkempt field. But when they were inside it, she saw it was an untended graveyard. Burt pointed at the second gravestone they came to. “Kilt by Indians,” it read.

Anna shivered in the cold after the warmth of the car. Burt had promised her somewhere remote—that was all he’d said about their destination—but this was not the America she’d imagined.

Burt read her thoughts.

“Not what you expected huh?’

“No.”

“It’s like Siberia out here,” he said. “It certainly has about as much respect for Washington as Siberia does for Moscow. The Hispanics have been arguing—sometimes fighting—for a hundred years to have their land back. They don’t even speak English up here, many of them.”

Anna wondered how much she was in this empty hole on the map for her protection and how much to encourage her to comply with greater alacrity.

“You won’t be here long,” he said, as if reading her thoughts again. “It all depends on how we judge your safety. And Little Finn’s,” he added. “And how other things come into play,” he said vaguely. “We’ll see.”

Burt bought Little Finn a candy bar at the general store, which seemed, also like the remoter parts of Russia, to sell just a few oddments, whatever was available at the lowest end of the demand chain. Most of the shelves were empty; there were a few lightbulbs, their boxes dusty, a few boxes of screws, a chain saw, some jam. . . . Always tins of jam wherever you went, she thought. If there was nothing else, there were tins of jam. It was the same in Russia.

She wondered if Burt had brought them here deliberately, into this store. There was nothing here, except the message that there was nothing here.

And the place they were going to was thirty miles beyond the road’s end, farther into the mountains from the village. True wilderness, Burt had said, as if he’d been a travel agent selling a high-end Outward Bound experience to wealthy metropolitan adventurers.

“In winter there’s no way out of where we’re going,” he’d said. “Except by chopper.”

They climbed back into the truck. Little Finn was silent. They drove out through the village, past a few homes with metal arches with names inscribed in wrought iron. The dirt road got rougher, almost impassable even without snow. They crossed a riverbed, and beyond that the track was hardly visible. They were now driving over rock.

“It’s just a few more miles,” Burt said after nearly an hour. “Deep in the forest. Few people even know of its existence. All this land is part of the land grant of the Spanish king back when. It’s called Nuestra Senora del Rosario San Fernando y Santiago Land Grant.” He guffawed. “They sure liked a long name. I’m the only Anglo who got to buy land up here. The others got their houses burned down.” He chuckled at his own smartness. “It takes time, and luck, to be able to get a foot in up here. But they know me. I give to the church, fix the roof, buy their cattle in the winter, arrange their medical insurance. We’ve got a good relationship.”

The road improved as they went deeper into the forest. Anna guessed that they kept it almost impassable at the beginning where it left the village, in order to dissuade the curious.

Finally, after a slow, bumpy thirty miles beyond the hill where the village stood, the truck came into a clearing about a quarter of a mile in diameter. There was a meadow with a stream running through it. Some horses grazed behind wooden fencing. The place was as still and silent as anywhere Anna had ever been. But she saw that, in springtime, this would be a good approximation of paradise.

Little Finn saw the horses first, and then the chickens that roamed around the field. Then, wide-eyed with excitement, he saw some goats and a pair of llamas. He tugged Anna’s arm to go closer as they stepped out of the truck.

At the top of the meadow was a large log house.

“About as safe a safe house as you’ll ever see,” Burt said. “Welcome to your new home.” He beamed happily.

Chapter 15

IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK in the evening and Anna was putting Little Finn to bed when Burt, alone in the study of the log house, put the tape Adrian had given him into a machine for the second time.

Adrian had suddenly been supremely confident, he recalled. He’d clearly been waiting to spring this news on him from the moment they’d met in New York five days before.

Burt settled into a large leather armchair. There was a fire blazing in a grate in the corner of the room. But before pressing play, he went back over the background for what was on the tape, looking for inconsistencies. Adrian had given him the context of the information it contained, but he wanted to be sure.