“But I’m seeing ‘Got him’ in the subject line. Whom did you get?”
“I guess that should have been ‘recognized him,’” said Agent Vandenberg after a slight, embarrassed pause. “One of our guys immediately recognized the subject who stole the rifle. We know all about this guy. Igor.” He snickered at the name. “Igor has been the subject of many investigations. He’s a legal immigrant. But that’s the only thing about him that’s legal. This is the first time we have got him so dead to rights, though.”
“So are you going to pick him up?”
“We don’t see him as a flight risk. We don’t think he’s about to go do something bad. It’s been a week and a half since he stole that gun, and he’s been pretty inactive that whole time. So we blasted a judge out of bed, got ourselves a court order, and instituted surveillance on his domicile. It’s a crappy little house in Tukwila.”
“Where’s Tukwila?”
“Exactly. He shares it with another Russian, who has been his roommate there for, like, four years.”
“Gotten anything good yet?”
“It’s taking us a little while to rustle up an interpreter, so we don’t know what the three of them are saying.”
“Three?”
“Yeah. There’s three Russians in the house.”
“I thought you said two. Igor and his roommate.”
“They have a visitor. Just arrived. Surprised the hell out of them, apparently. We don’t exactly know what’s going on. Igor and his roommate were lounging around in couch potato mode, watching a hockey game on the satellite, and suddenly there was a knock on the door. Then they’re all like, ‘Who the hell could that be?’ I’m just guessing from their tone of voice. Then one of them goes and looks out the window and says something like, ‘Holy shit, it’s Sokolov!’ and then they sound kind of scared for a while. But eventually they let him in.”
It was fortunate that Agent Vandenberg was such a loquacious soul, since he then went on talking long enough to give Olivia a chance to get her composure back.
“I think I get the general picture,” she said, when Vandenberg paused to draw breath, and she felt she could keep her voice steady. “Did you say that the name of the surprise visitor was Sokolov?”
“Yes, we’re pretty sure of that. Why? Mean anything to you?”
“It is a very common Russian name,” she observed. “But you said that they were surprised to see him?”
“Surprised, and pretty seriously freaked out. Sokolov had to ring the doorbell three times. They left him cooling his heels on their front porch for, like, five minutes while they discussed how to handle the situation. I don’t know who this guy is — but he ain’t no Avon lady.”
“Thanks,” Olivia said. “That is interesting.”
ZULA ENDED UP retreating into her tiny tent and pulling her sleeping bag over her head. A natural reaction to shame. All she wanted was to have a bit of privacy while she finished her blubbering. This had the unintended, but useful, consequence that the others forgot she was there.
Not literally, of course. The friggin’ chain trailed across the ground and went right into her tent. Everyone knew exactly where she was. But some kind of irrational psychological effect caused them to act as if she weren’t right there, just a few yards away from them.
She wasn’t sure whether that was a bad or a good thing. It might cause them to blurt out useful information they’d never divulge if her eyes were on their faces. On the other hand, maybe it was easier to command the execution of someone you couldn’t see.
Abdul-Wahaab, Jones’s right-hand man, was the last of the hikers to depart the camp. Before hoisting his pack onto his shoulders, he gathered the stay-behind group around him: Ershut, Jahandar, Zakir, and Sayed. They were all of about twenty feet from Zula, standing around the stove and drinking tea.
“I’ll speak Arabic,” said Abdul-Wahaab. Somewhat redundantly, since he was, in fact, speaking Arabic.
Trying not to make obvious nylon-swishing noises, Zula pulled the sleeping bag off her face and rolled toward them, straining to hear as much as she could. She had been in the company of men speaking Arabic for two solid weeks and was continually frustrated that she hadn’t learned more of it. And yet she had come a long way; her time in the refugee camp had planted some seeds that had been slow to sprout but that were now growing noticeably from day to day.
“I have spoken with our leader,” said Abdul-Wahaab. “He has learned some things about the way south from the guide.”
Zula’s mental translation just barely kept up. Fortunately Abdul-Wahaab was not a torrential speaker. He uttered short, pithy sentences and paused between them to sip tea. Zula’s understanding was largely based on picking out nouns: leader. The way to the south. And this word “dalil,” which she had heard frequently in the last few days and finally remembered meant “guide.”
“The path is difficult, but he knows of shortcuts and secret ways,” Abdul-Wahaab continued, actually using the English word “shortcuts.”
“He thinks two days for us to cross the border. After that, one more day before we could reach a place with Internet. Maybe two days.”
The others listened and waited for Abdul-Wahaab to give orders. After sipping more tea, he went on: “After four days, if you hear nothing, kill her and go where you will. But we will try to get a message to our brothers waiting in Elphinstone. They will then come here and find you. We will send GPS coordinates showing the way south. God willing, you can then join us for the martyrdom operation.”
“In that case, should we kill her?” Zakir asked.
“We will give instructions. She might be useful to us.” He sipped his tea. “The guide states that there will be no phone coverage, unless we climb to the top of a mountain and have good luck. If this happens, perhaps you will get a text with other instructions.”
Beyond that, the talk turned to what they would all do once they had crossed the border: the challenges they would face there and their eagerness to pursue various opportunities for mayhem. Abdul-Wahaab discouraged all such talk, though, insisting that they maintain their focus on getting through the next few days. He seemed to become aware that he was holding up the rest of the group, and drained his tea, and accepted Ershut’s help in hoisting his heavy pack onto his back. Then, after exchanging embraces with the four stay-behinds, he turned away and began tromping down toward the trail.
Zula decided that she would make her move after dark tonight.
WHEN SOKOLOV HAD been a little boy growing up in the Soviet Union, he had been exposed to more than a few magazine articles and television programs depicting the misery of life under capitalism. A reporter would travel to some squalid place in Appalachia or the South Bronx and take a few depressing photographs, then jot down, or make up, some equally depressing anecdotes and package it into a story intended to make it clear that people back in the USSR didn’t have it so bad. While no one was stupid enough to take such propaganda at face value, all but the most cynical persons assumed that there was some truth to them. Yes, the standard of living could be higher in the West. Everyone knew this. But it could be lower too.
Both ends of that spectrum were on display during Sokolov’s hour-long journey from Golden Gardens to the home of Igor. He waited for a bus near a marina crowded with yachts. The bus took him to a sleek modern downtown, where he did a bit of shopping and then boarded a light rail train headed in the direction of the airport. During that journey, the view out its windows became steadily more like a photo spread from a Soviet propaganda article. The railway line had been threaded through the poorest neighborhoods. The urban part was a complex and densely packed mixture of black people and pan-global immigration; it wasn’t pretty, but at least it was striving. Then there was a light-industrial buffer zone that separated it from a sort of white ghetto in the suburbs. The train ran high above this on towering reinforced-concrete pylons, and he looked almost straight down into the backyards of tiny, rotting bungalows strewn with detritus.