“What do I do if you get shot?” asked Conners, serious.
“Cash in the plane ticket in your pocket and go home.”
“Ferg.” Conners grabbed his shoulder. “You’ve been taking some awful chances lately.”
“Name one.”
“Walking into that police station, the DVD operation in Iran…”
“It’s okay, Dad. It’ll all make sense eventually.” Ferguson adjusted the shoulder strap on his leather duffel bag and started for the ferry.
“That I doubt,” said Conners.
Ferg waited until they were about halfway to Machachkala to call Corrigan. By then the clouds had thickened, and it looked as if they were sailing toward a storm. He stood out on the upper deck, wind whipping against his face as the call went through.
“Where you been?” Corrigan asked.
“Pulling my pud,” Ferguson told him. “What do you have for me?”
“The guy Kiro sent a message to is named Jabril Daruyev. You can download the full dossier anytime you want.”
“And the FSB investigator?”
“As far as we can tell, he’s back in Chechnya. I can’t run him down definitively.”
“You have him definitely ID’d as Kruknokov?” asked Ferg.
“If you had given us a better picture, I could be definitive,” said Corrigan. “But there’s a Kruknokov who was in Kyrgyzstan, then went to Chechnya. I have a picture and it looks like your guy. I see a yellow sports coat.”
“That’s got to seal it,” said Ferg.
He was being serious, though Corrigan thought he was making fun of him.
“Don’t you bust my chops,” said Corrigan.
“I wasn’t. How are Guns and Rankin making out with the Dragon Lady?”
“She’s not
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“Please stop busting my balls.”
“When I go online, am I going to have all that data on the prisons?”
“It’s waiting for you.”
“Fair enough, Corrigan. I take back everything I said about you.”
“What a guy.”
Ferg snapped off the phone.
6
Rankin reached over the seat, fishing for the bottle of water in the back of the car. He hadn’t screwed the top tightly enough when he’d put it on, and the carpet of the Fiat was soaked; worse, he had only a few small gulps left. Even though the train carrying the waste material had parked for the night on a siding, they’d have to stay there watching it, and that meant he wouldn’t be able to restock for another six hours, until Conners and Jack Massette took over. His few days in the Middle East had left him dehydrated, maybe permanently; he felt as if he could drink several gallons of water and not quench his thirst. Holding the bottle up in the dim light, Rankin gauged that there were four gulps’ worth left. He decided he’d have to parcel them out, a gulp an hour. Postponing the first gulp, he tightened the cap securely and rose in the seat to place the bottle more carefully against the transmission hump. Their gear was on the seat at least, and so remained dry.
A figure approached from the right side of the car. Even though he knew it had to be Corrine, Rankin tensed, caught awkwardly unprepared. He let go of the bottle and pulled his arm back as he saw her face, nodding, then reaching over to unlock the door for her.
“It’s cold,” she said.
“Everything seems cold to me,” he said.
She slid in, adjusting the seat though she’d fiddled with it several times since they parked there two hours before. Corrine had had to relieve herself at the edge of the woods. She hadn’t had to squat outdoors since a family camping trip when she nine or ten, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she could talk to Rankin about. The Special Forces soldier had hardly said anything since they’d taken the shift together watching the waste train for the night.
“I didn’t see anything from the road,” she told Rankin. “I walked up and around. There’s a gravel road out to the town.”
“Yeah,” said Rankin. “Listen, I spilled a bunch of water in the back.”
“Oh.” She twisted around to look.
“It’s on the floor,” he said. “Nothing really got wet.”
“We have another bottle of water,” she said.
“That’s yours.”
“We can share. I don’t have cooties.”
“Thanks.”
A small video screen projected and magnified the view from a set of night glasses positioned on the dashboard. They could see all five cars carrying the waste material from where they sat, though they couldn’t see the three diesels that drove the train or the flatcar and four boxcars that had been tagged on to the back, the flatcar for the guards and the others merely cars going south.
Starting from Buzuluk earlier in the day, the train had been escorted by a small detachment of soldiers in a second train, along with a pair of helicopters. Now it had only a small contingent of guards — Russian sailors in civilian dress, according to their backgrounder — and two local policemen. Most of the dozen sailors were asleep in the boxcar nearest the containment cars; the policemen were dozing in a car near the tracks. Four members of the six-man train crew had left earlier, presumably going to the local hotel for the night.
“You get to the point where you almost wish something would happen,” said Corrine.
“You got that right.” Rankin shifted in the seat. His back muscles were starting to tighten. “Shoulda brought a book or something.”
“What book would you read?” she asked.
Rankin shrugged. “Whatever.”
“You read thrillers?”
“Nah. Biographies,” said Rankin.
“Really?”
Rankin didn’t like the surprised tone in her voice. “Brant’s history of James Madison,” he said, naming the work he’d started the last time he was back in the States. It was a six-volume set of the man who’d been the country’s fourth president and principal author of the Constitution.
“Is it interesting?” Corrine asked.
“It’s long.” He leaned back in the seat, trying to stretch his back. “It explains the War of 1812 a little better than I’ve seen before.”
“How’d you get into that?”
“I just did,” said Rankin.
They were silent a minute or so. Rankin decided he didn’t want her to think he was mad at her — he wasn’t, really. He just didn’t like people thinking he was a stupid shit, when he wasn’t.
“What do you read?” he asked.
“Depends. If I’m in a mood for a mystery, I’ll read something by Lawrence Block maybe, or P. D. James. If I want to laugh, I read Wodehouse.”
“Bertie and Jeeves?”
“You know the series?”
