The house was easily a quarter mile from here. Given the topography, the road couldn’t be seen from the house.
The owner had for years permitted hunters to come through his land. Dorothy had looked at the state’s online hunting records.
This wasn’t unusual in New Hampshire. You were allowed to hunt on state or even private lands as long as they hadn’t been “posted”-in other words, unless the property owner put up NO HUNTING signs.
But I’d been concentrating so hard on trudging through the muck that I hadn’t until now noticed the NO TRESPASSING/NO HUNTING signs posted to trees every fifty feet or so.
They looked brand-new. Someone had put them up recently to keep anyone from approaching the house.
I had some decent overhead satellite photos of the Alderson property, but nothing recent. The photos could have been three years old, for all I knew. I was at a real disadvantage.
At least I had a good weapon: a SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic. The SIG P250 was a beautiful gun: compact and lightweight, smooth, perfectly engineered. Mine was matte black, with an aluminum frame. I’d installed a Tritium night sight and an excellent internal laser sight, a LaserMax. I’d also had a gunsmith in Manassas, Virginia, add stippling and checkering on the metal grips, round all the sharp angles for an unhindered draw, and funnel the grip for easier reloading. He tuned it like a Stradivarius, adjusting the trigger pull down to a zero sear, meaning that I hardly had to touch the trigger to fire.
There’s an elegance to a well-made gun, like any finely engineered machine. I like the precision engineering, the honed finish, the smooth pull of the trigger, the smell of gun oil and smoke and gunpowder and nitroglycerin.
I loaded several magazines with hollow-point bullets. They’re designed to do a lot of damage to a person: When they hit soft tissue they deform and expand and create a large crater. Cops prefer them because they won’t pass through walls-or the target, for that matter.
My Defender was painted Coniston Green, also known as British Racing Green, but it was so mud-spattered that it looked as if I’d sprayed it with camouflage paint. I stashed it in a copse of birch trees, where it couldn’t be seen from the road, and took some equipment out of the back. My binoculars: an excellent pair of Leicas. A pair of boots, still crusted with mud from the last time I’d worn them. I strapped on a side holster and jammed in the SIG, then clipped a few extra magazine holsters to my belt.
At the last minute I remembered something under the rear seat that I might need. It was an old military-spec Interceptor ballistic vest made of aramid fiber. It wasn’t bulletproof-no such thing, really-but it was the most effective soft armor you could get. It was supposed to stop nine-millimeter machine-gun rounds. I put it on, adjusted the Velcro straps.
If I’d come to the right place, I needed to be prepared.
Compass in hand, I set off through the woods.
94.
The ground was sodden, even spongy, and so slick in places I nearly lost my footing. Low branches and thorn bushes whipped and scratched my face and neck. The land rose steeply and then plateaued until, standing atop a knoll, I spotted in a clearing in the distance a small building.
I peered through the binoculars and saw a large, windowless structure: a barn.
A few hundred yards beyond it, according to the aerial photo, was the farmhouse.
I came closer and finally saw the house. But it was dark. That wasn’t promising. Either this was the wrong place, or Zhukov had already left.
Meaning that Alexa was dead.
I drew closer, weaving through the forest, keeping to the shadows, until the barn was close enough to see with the naked eye. Then I circled around. From there I could see the long expanse of yard leading up to the house. The sky had begun to clear, and there was enough moonlight to make out a patchy lawn, with more bald spots than grass.
And midway between the barn and the darkened house a neat oblong had been cut into the sorry-looking lawn. A rectangle about ten feet long by three feet wide.
Like a freshly dug grave.
But instead of the sort of earthen heap you see in a new grave, the ground was flat, crisscrossed with tire tracks, as if someone had driven a car or a truck back and forth on top of it, and the rain had later softened the marks.
I felt a tingle of apprehension.
At one end of the rectangular patch of dirt a gray PVC pipe stuck up like the sawn-off trunk of a sapling.
I dropped the binoculars, let them dangle on their strap around my neck, and I approached the edge of the woods.
The house was an old brown tumbledown wreck, its clapboard weathered and cracked, several roof shingles missing.
Mounted to the roof of the house was a white satellite dish.
It looked new.
In the shadows behind the barn I began to discern the contours of a tall piece of equipment. It loomed like an enormous, geometric bird, a seagull, a whooping crane.
I looked closer and saw that it was a Caterpillar backhoe loader.
95.
Peering through the binoculars, I focused on the house. Two floors, a sharply canted roof, small windows. No light inside. On the low wooden porch was another piece of equipment. An air compressor?
Yes. That made sense. This was how he kept air flowing into her box, or crypt, or whatever it was.
This had to be the right place.
For a minute or two I watched carefully, looking for some kind of movement in the darkness, a glint of reflected moonlight. I estimated I was about three hundred yards from the house, beyond the range of accuracy of my pistol.
But if someone was inside with a rifle, three hundred yards was no problem.
The moment I stepped into the clearing, I was a target.
I got on the cell phone and called Diana. In a whisper, I said, “I think she’s here.”
“You’ve seen her?” Diana said.
“No, I’m looking at what may be a burial site. A vent pipe in the ground. Signs of recently excavated earth.”
“Zhukov?”
“House is dark. I can’t be sure if he’s there. Tell your bosses that there’s not much doubt this is the place. They need to get up here right away. And bring shovels.”
I hit END. Checked to make sure the ringer was off.
Then I took a few more steps, emerging from the shadows. Walked across the barren lawn toward what had to be the burial site.
Something caught the moonlight, something near my feet, and suddenly the entire yard lit up, and I was blinded by the blaze of spotlights from two directions.
96.
I flattened myself against the ground. I could smell the rich loamy odor of the dirt. Gripping the SIG, the safety off, I felt for the trigger, careful not to apply any pressure. The slightest squeeze would fire a round.
In one quick motion I rolled over so I was facing up. The lights came from two directions: from the barn on my left and from the house on my right. I inhaled slowly, over the thudding of my heart, and listened hard.
Nothing.
I knew what had happened. I’d hit an invisible tripwire at ankle level.
Zhukov had served with the Russian army in Chechnya, where he must have learned all the standard army techniques, like how to string tripwire to detonate a mine or detect the enemy’s approach. The stuff we’d used was black and as thin as dental floss, made from a polyethylene fiber called Spectra. You could get fishing line made from the same thing. It was low-stretch and had high tensile strength. And you wouldn’t spot it in the dark unless you had a flashlight and knew where to look. He’d probably strung the filament around at least part of the perimeter, from tree trunk to tree trunk, rigged up to a microswitch to set off the beams. A low-tech motion detector.