“Sure. You’re a great businessman. You plant bombs with one hand and sell bomb shelters with the other. What could be better?”
Volkov’s eyes were wary now. “Don’t mock me, Max,” he said. “We’re serious here.”
“I’m serious,” Max said.
“You admitted you have nothing to go back to.”
“I’ve spent too much time looking backwards,” Max nodded. “ But now I’ve finally found that positive use for my skills.”
Long pause, the two of them staring each other down, no one willing to be the next to speak. Finally, Volkov said, “And that would be?”
“What you just said: Standing against you- there’s something positive I can do.” Max was actually smiling, as relaxed as I’d ever seen him. “Probably better than anyone.”
“Stand against me here?” Volkov spat. “In my own building? With white noise generators and guards? You won’t get three feet.”
“We’ll see.”
“And how do you expect me to respond? Lock you up? Imprison you?”
“That won’t work-not for long.”
“Then what? Kill you?”
“Would you?”
“I could call Marat back-he’d do it without a single conscious thought. Don’t make me choose.” It was a plea and a threat at the same time.
“Alright-here’s another idea: let me go.”
Volkov coughed out a laugh, a deep laugh of real surprise. “I forget, sometimes, what a fantasist you are,” he said. “This is the real world, Max. You must join us. You know we can’t let you wander around now that we’ve had our talk.” He waited several long seconds for Max to reply. Max just stood, waiting-for what, I didn’t know. When it became clear he wouldn’t be offering any reply, all the emotion drained from Volkov’s face. “This will not end well,” he threatened.
“That’s correct,” Max agreed and looked me in the eye. And gulped. His eyes were wide on me and I knew right away that it wasn’t a casual move, that there was a message in it. He nodded- c’mon, you can get this — and gulped again. And somehow, I did-I got it. I gulped myself, gulped in a deep breath and held it. Max held out his fingers to Volkov; they crackled with electricity.
“No!” Volkov yelled to the guards. “Stop-”
That was as far as he got. Max snapped his sparking fingers, there was a flash of light and a loud crack in the room and all at once the others were gasping and gagging and staggering around like drunken sailors. The guards keeled over onto the floor almost immediately. The fire alarm was squawking, red lights flashing and sprinklers sprinkling. Volkov lunged for Max, but he gasped and slumped over halfway through the motion. Max reached out to catch him, searched his pockets for a moment and then dropped him flat on the floor. He stuck Volkov’s cardkey in the door lock and we ran into the hall.
“What the hell happened?” I demanded as the hall filled with drones and guards exiting in response to the flashing alarms and sprinklers.
“Oxygen burns,” Max said, “if you know how to ignite it.”
A burly guard rushed up the hall.
“Ozone!” Max yelled, pointing through the door window. “They keeled over! I saw them! You need a mask!”
“Shit! 10–45 in R36!” the guard shouted into his headset. “Bring masks! Gas masks!”
One second later, the overhead speakers began advising all personnel to evacuate in an orderly fashion, please; move directly to the exits and do not open any closed doorways. Not that it made anything more orderly-the hall was packed, the crowd pushing and shoving toward exits far down the end, more nervous and insistent by the second. Max pulled me out of the stream and down a narrow side corridor. “Tauber’s here,” he said, pointing.
“How do you know?” These rooms looked like storage closets, certainly nothing big enough for a man.
“Remember I came here? When they were chasing you around the hillside? You were jumping off the balcony and I was hovering over this place, all eyes and ears and no body.”
He stopped in front of the fourth closet and slipped Volkov’s keycard into the lock. Crammed inside was what was left of Mark Tauber once the pack of wolves had finished with him. His cheeks, arms and legs were bruised blue and full of cross-cuts, chunks of his hair seemed to be missing and his nose looked more crooked than I remembered.
“Feel like a ride in the country?” Max asked and Tauber started, as though expecting someone to hit him. One of his eyes was puffed closed-it was painful to look at. But he broke into a crooked smile as he realized who we were. Maybe one or two of his teeth were missing too, but they hadn’t been that great to begin with so it was hard to tell.
“I could use a little fresh air,” he croaked and we helped him to his feet and out into the flow of staff rushing out of the building.
When we burst into the afternoon air, Max led us around to the front parking lot, the executive section with the high-zoot machines. He pulled Volkov’s keycard from his pocket- a very fancy car key hung from the ring-and pushed the red button. A BMW nearby gave an answering chirp; we jumped in. “Pietr always liked nice cars,” Max said as we sped for the exit gate.
Ten
At first, I assumed we were trying to get away.
It at least made sense to try-the black vans were all around us and I could feel the thickness in the air as Max blocked all of us at once, locking us out of the collective unconscious of the neighborhood, trapping all our free-floating thoughts inside the narrow car. Or maybe all that was in my head-now that we were free, my shoulders and neck felt like they’d been released from a clamp. I ached all over from sudden relaxing.
After ten minutes of changing roads and directions, I could see we really hadn’t gone very far. The airplanes were still close overhead. That got me real upset. I started sweating. We had to head back to the mountains, to the house on the cliffside. I don’t know why I fixated on that place but it all came rushing back to me at once. The wall of windows and the balcony and the crazy awning, the hillside I scrambled over like a maniac, trying not to get cut in half by Marat’s lightning bolts-and the town with the dance floor and Tess and Cindy. That whole memory was clear-I was in it, living in it. That was where we had to go. We’d be safe there, if only because that’s where they caught us, which made it the last place they’d expect us to go.
Every few minutes, some new airliner threatened to land on the roof of our car. And then we came out of a sidestreet and Max bought a ticket and we were in the long-term parking lot at Dulles Airport. We circulated the rows until he found a Maxima he liked. It had one of those touchpad things on the door and he was able to fry it with his fingers; Tauber hot-wired the car in about seven seconds. And then we were back on the road again. But again, we weren’t making any effort to get away. Max made a series of turns, as though looking for a location.
“Volkov lives ‘roundabouts,” Tauber said. “Miriam took me to his house when we first got up here.” He’d pulled a bottle of water from the center console and was holding it up to his puffy eye. “I was an idjit for staying with her.”
Max shook his head. “You knew her-you didn’t know me.”
“They want ya bad. They did everything to try to get your whereabouts out of me.”
“Which they knew immediately you didn’t have.”
“They didn’t trust my thoughts.”
“Ha! Spies not trusting? I’m shocked.” Max’s look at Tauber was sympathetic and even grateful.
“Volkov thought he could turn you,” Tauber continued. “Avery said you wouldn’t give, that they’d have to kill you. Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. We’ve got to get the hell outta here-they all live nearby, the whole area’s crawling with shooters.”
“Shooters?”
