The work was excellent, and on close examination I couldn't see any flaws. The documents were so good, in fact, that I was pretty certain they weren't strictly forgeries. In all likelihood, the crew of the good ship Lutra had a connection somewhere to get blanks of everything they needed. The first U.S. set said my name was Dennis Murphy, from Gahanna, Ohio, married, thirty years old. The other U.S. said I was Alex Klein, and that I lived in New York City, single, also thirty. The Canadian said my name was Paul Lieberg, from Vancouver, British Columbia, also single, but this time I was thirty-two. I appreciated the fact that none of the identities required my needing fluency in a second language.
Alena had finished her survey, was lowering the binos. "Nothing."
I stowed the papers in the envelope, and we headed back downstairs. I put the binoculars and the papers away. We grilled some fish for lunch, and after we had done the dishes, Alena said that maybe it was time that I assembled a go-bag.
"We'll be leaving in a hurry?"
"Good tradecraft demands you always be ready to go," she replied. "Now that you have the papers, we should not waste more time."
It was hard logic to argue with, even if I'd been inclined to, which I wasn't. She gave me a leather gym bag, and together we loaded it with a change of clothes for me, extra underwear and some basic toiletries. From the weapons locker in the hard room she took a little over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash, most of it in dollars, the rest in French francs, Swiss francs, and deutsche marks. I laid the money at the bottom of the bag. I put the Gahanna I.D. in one of the outside pockets, the Vancouver in the other. The New York I.D. we put in a FedEx envelope, and after some thought, I addressed it to Moore, adding a note asking him to hold it for Mr. Klein. I signed it, dropped it into the envelope, and sealed the whole thing up. The envelope went into the bag along with everything else, to be sent if and when we ever had to hoof it.
Alena took my bag and set it in the front closet beside her own. Then we headed back to the basement and watched a download of the Bolshoi performing Swan Lake.
There were no sounds from her room during the night, but the next morning, while we were working at the barre, Alena caught my eyes in the mirror's reflection and said, "I have nightmares."
"It happens," I said.
She had one hand on the barre, her left out in a curve, her left leg extended and raised behind her almost one hundred and twenty degrees. Her eyes stayed on me, steady.
"I have them often. Sometimes I cry out. It's not something I can help."
She was still watching me in the mirror, as if expecting a judgment.
"Sounds bad," I said lamely.
She brought her leg down, switched to the right, extending and raising it. "You're not curious?"
"You mean do I want to know what your nightmares are about?"
"Yes."
"No."
She considered that, then turned her attention back to her reflection. We finished our warm-ups, moving to the center, and I started working on a series of leaps that I'd watched the night before. The problem was I kept pulling my upper body out of line when I went into the air, so instead of making the move elegant or at least somewhat graceful, I felt that I was instead doing a rather convincing impersonation of an ox that had just been shoved from a passing plane. I spent a good twenty minutes trying to get the leap down, and finally I surprised myself by actually pulling it off, and then I really surprised myself by being able to do it again.
When I came down the second time I looked over to Alena, hoping that she'd seen my success, and was somewhat disappointed to find that she hadn't, engrossed in a problem of her own. She was launching a series of pirouettes, and at first it looked to me like she was doing fine – certainly a world better than my own sad attempts at dancing – turning around and around in demi-pointe, three, then four, then five times. It took me another minute of watching to realize that she was trying to push it to six, and that she was growing frustrated, or at the least, annoyed.
I waited for her to try again, and when she started spinning, opening her arms to second position, I moved in to spot her, putting my hands to her hips. She turned from the fifth to the sixth easily, and I thought she would stop, but she kept going another two times around before stopping.
"Try it again," she said, and I let her go, stepping back.
She put her weight on her working leg, swung the other up and into the turn, her arms again opening to second position, and again I moved in. She gave me some of her weight, spinning in my hands and then, at the sixth pirouette, coming out of it, pausing, and then going into a leap. I brought her up, set her down again, assisting as she went into a low arabesque. Her arms swept forward and up, and I guided her as she rose, her torso straightening as her right leg stayed extended behind her. I brought her against me, my hands on her hips, and when she was upright, the leg perfectly perpendicular to us, I lifted and turned. She spun fast, putting distance between us. I moved, trying the first of the leaps I'd been practicing, and I wasn't an ox, and when I turned back, the length of the floor was between us. She paused, then launched a grand jete. I tried one of my own, and we ended an arm's length apart. She took my hand, and spun back into me, her arms raised, her body arched back against mine, my hands on each side of her chest. After another moment, she let her arms descend.
Neither of us moved.
We had ended facing the mirror, and I saw her reflected, her eyes closed. Beneath my palms I could feel her breathing, her heart pounding. Mine was doing the same; we were both out of breath.
Her eyes opened and she watched me in the mirror. She gave me more of her weight to hold.
"That was dancing." She was still out of breath, and perhaps even surprised.
I managed a nod, still focused on our reflections.
I wasn't sure I liked what I was seeing.
I wasn't sure I didn't, either.
I thought about the fact that I needed to let go of her, and that after almost four months of contact between the two of us, of rubdowns and massages and teaching, her body and my own had become simply tools. Intimate though the knowledge of them was, they had become almost abstractions.
Now they seemed very real.
She turned her head from the reflection.
"Have you thought about it?" she asked, looking directly at me.
"I have." I let go, backing off a step, moving my eyes from her reflection to her person. "We shouldn't. We can't."
"No." Her voice was low. "We can't."
After a second, she moved to the post and began fighting her invisible foes.
The laptop on the counter began screaming for attention.
She beat me to the computer. The P7 was on the counter by one of the monitors, and I took it up as she checked the screen.
"Perimeter, someone on the driveway," she said. "One vehicle, coming to the house."
"Stay here," I said. As I hit the stairs she called something after me and I shouted back, "I mean it! Stay there!"
I didn't hear her answer, taking the steps two at a time to find Miata waiting for me at the top. With the gun in my right, I glanced around the corner into the living room, and seeing it clear, moved through to the back. I stopped and checked again, this time looking outside, and I saw no one. I doubled back across the space, sweeping the gun around with my survey. Alena stood at the top of the stairs, holding the Neostead shotgun from the weapons locker. I glared at her.
"It's not him," she told me.
I intensified my glare and gestured to her to back off. She shrugged and fell back to the stairs, backing up them and out of sight. There was a knock on the door, heavy and rapid and hard. I made my way to it, Miata at my heels.
There was another pounding at the door, and I thought that if it wasn't Oxford, whoever was outside was either forward, foolish, or insane. Using the wall to cover my back, I edged to the window that looked out to the front porch, taking a quick peek.