interest.”
“You have a card?”
Logan took out his wallet and removed a card with his and his company’s name.
Bykov flipped it to one of his men, who disappeared through a door at the end of the room.
“Good,” Bykov said. “Maybe we do business.”
“Maybe,” Logan said. “I’m looking for soccer players on this trip, but I’m open to other things.”
Bykov’s eyes seemed to weigh the possibilities with a kind of ignorant cunning.
The man returned to the room and gave Bykov Logan’s card, neither with nor without a nod of approval.
Logan explained at Bykov’s prompting that the L.A. Galaxy team was searching for Russian players, to supplement their harvest of European talent. Soccer, he told Bykov, is going to be big business in America someday.
Bykov, it turned out, was a soccer fan. Logan hadn’t known that. They discussed the merits of various Russian players; the Spanish, Italian, and English leagues, the gambling possibilities, and other underlying opportunities that Bykov seemed equally interested in.
Finally, at half past one, Logan said he had to go. Food and then sleep, he said. Bykov insisted that they have dinner. He would take Logan to the best all-night restaurant in Moscow, open only to members and their women.
“Maybe you take home a couple of my women,” Bykov said. “Tonight, it’s on the house.”
Bykov was bored, Logan thought. There was nothing anymore that was extreme enough to excite his years of blunted senses. Well, that was just fine.
But he didn’t go along with the Russian immediately.
“Maybe I’ll do that,” Logan agreed, and after protesting that he was tired and needed a decent night’s sleep, and Bykov insisting that he would provide many things to keep Logan awake, Logan acquiesced with a display of reluctance to go to dinner.
There was a stretch Mercedes outside the club and two Porsche four-by-fours, one in front, one behind. All were black with tinted windows, and the Mercedes was custom-made, Logan noted, bulletproofed in its entirety, underneath too, against bombs.
There were four bodyguards in the Porsche in front of the Mercedes and three guards in the Porsche behind. The fourth guard who had entered the club with Bykov stepped into the front of the Mercedes, next to the driver.
They drove in convoy down towards Pushkinskaya and across the square.
The stretch limousine had windows between the nearly eight-foot interior where he and Bykov sat and the driver’s area. There were curtains, opened now, but which Logan assumed were there for when Bykov wanted to molest some female in the back seat. There was a television and a bar, a phone and fax machine, an office in fact. Bykov enjoyed showing off to Logan the communications systems, which included some kind of advanced satellite imaging system.
Bykov switched on the TV and flicked through DVDs of extreme pornography, children’s cartoons, the Australian Tennis Open, and then on to a video link with his clubs and properties. He finally chose a soccer match played the previous weekend between Spartak Moscow and Lokomotiv.
Logan sat with the crutches on his left side, away from Bykov, and slowly unscrewed the bolt that connected the two halves of the one closest to him.
They had travelled a mile from Patriarshiye when Logan made a suggestion.
“Why don’t I show you my company’s prospectus?” he said. “Then we can discuss exactly what I’m looking for.”
“Why not?” Bykov said, sounding bored. Perhaps
“I can pick it up from the hotel,” Logan said.
“Which hotel?”
The game on the TV flowed up to the goal Spartak were defending, and there was a roar from the crowd as a shot hit the bar. Bykov was only half listening to Logan.
“The Kempinsky,” Logan said.
Bykov grunted. He didn’t like others to make plans. Then, as if it had been his own idea, he switched on an intercom that connected them to the driver. “Kempinskya,” he ordered irritably. Then he flicked the switch to off.
He turned to Logan. “It’s on the way, why not?” he said.
The driver looked in the mirror, acknowledging the order, and turned to the bodyguard, who radioed the two vehicles in front and behind them with the new instructions.
As the driver indicated a right turn into Okhotnyy, Bykov sat back in his seat. He fiddled with the volume control, and as he did so, Logan cut his windpipe with the Damascus steel blade gripped in his left hand. Then he withdrew it and drove it in under Bykov’s ribs and up into his heart.
There was little sound, except for the noise of the soccer match. But there was going to be a lot of blood.
With his other hand Logan pressed the button that closed the curtain to the front. He turned up the TV’s volume as Bykov gurgled, pumping pints of blood, and finally slumped sideways.
Logan saw that his hand and lower arm were covered in Bykov’s blood. He slipped into his coat in preparation for getting out of the limousine. Then he propped Bykov up in the seat next to him, as they crossed the bridge over the Moskva River. The Kempinsky was just on the other side.
Logan’s last act inside the limousine was to rifle through Bykov’s pockets, careful to avoid the blood, until he found a photo ID, which he put in his coat pocket.
The limousine drew up under the arced, porticoed entrance to the Kempinsky Hotel. Logan stepped out with his crutches at the same time as the bodyguard stepped out from the front seat. The two Porsches were up ahead and behind him as he shut the car door and hobbled away inside the lobby.
Just inside the lobby, he laid the crutches against a wall and headed, as fast as he thought was unremarkable to any observer, out to the left and towards the restaurant.
Within thirty seconds he heard shouting behind him, and he ran blindly now, across the restaurant’s wide carpeted floor and out of the exit onto a street that was part of the hotel and joined it to a complex set of under- and overpasses that connected it to the bridge.
He ran to the right, away from the bridge and the majority of cars, and he didn’t stop running. He’d never run so fast. But it was the slowest half hour of his life.
Chapter 37
ON A CLEAR BLUE morning in late May, Anna walked back down from the high mesa towards the log house. From time to time she held Little Finn’s hand and, when he was tired, hoisted him up onto her good shoulder.
Snow still lay in drifts in the shadow of the forest above the house, and it would cover the high mountains that circled the valley until July. But as they descended to the cabin, spring was evident. Yellow sego lilies, red Indian paintbrush, and mauve lupins dotted the pasture, and, to Little Finn’s delight, the horses were back.
Larry walked up towards them, picked up Little Finn, and put him on his shoulders.
“See any bears?” he said.
“Lots,” the boy said.
Anna laughed and shook her head at Larry out of sight of her son. They walked in silence down through the pasture and into the house.
“Burt called,” Larry said when they’d removed their coats and Little Finn had run into the kitchen.
She didn’t reply.
“He’s coming down this evening. Wants us all to go to the ranch. It’s Friday, remember.”
She didn’t remember. The days of the week had become irrelevant up here in the mountains.
“Can’t he come here?” she said.
