“That leaves room for conflict.”
Holmes shook his head. “There’s no room for conflict, only success. You know the stakes.”
“Does he?”
“Yes. He’s not the man who left you, Lana. He’s the man who wants, more than anything, to come back.”
“To me?” That was news to her.
“To you, his daughter, and his country.”
Lana stood, feeling numbed by the news, and started down the hall. Each step made her feel like she was boarding a pirate clipper, about to ship out with Blackbeard himself.
She went through security and found Don sitting alone at an empty conference table in the windowless room. Despite her every instinct, she smiled when he looked up.
CHAPTER 20
From the rest area in Sochi, Galina found an apartment building’s satellite dish and intercepted its signals, which had made it possible to comply with Lana Elkins’s request for a video link. But it was dangerous to spend so much time in one place and she desperately needed to head north to get out of the city.
Before leaving the rest area, though, she dug through an overnight bag, searching for Tylenol. Poor Alexandra’s joints and bones were hurting so bad. Six tablets so far today, and it was still only late afternoon. Galina shook her head because what Alexandra really needed was a doctor who could prescribe serious painkillers for her leukemia.
She found the Tylenol and a bottle of pineapple juice. Alexandra took two more tablets.
Galina hoped her daughter could hold them down. Her stomach was souring on acetaminophen; she’d vomited within minutes of her last dose two hours ago.
Looking left and right, Galina pulled onto a highway, feeling as obvious in the Macan as a goldfish in a bowl. She hoped to find a fishing village where boats were coming and going and chaos reigned because of sea-level rise, a crowded frenetic place where she and Alexandra could get lost among the panicky faces. That way if Lana Elkins failed her — and Galina would give her twenty-four hours, period, to exfiltrate them — she could use PP’s money to charter a boat and get Alexandra help in a country where the child was not the subject of a police search.
That was what outraged Galina the most: the authorities had announced — on television, radio, and the Internet, including social media — that both mother and daughter were wanted for the “brutal murder of Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov,” who was described as a “decorated war hero.”
Hero? Not how Galina thought of him. Beast was more like it. Probably had been a beast in Chechnya, too. So many were.
But it wasn’t about Sergey the Beast, anyway. It was about Oleg and his operation.
The late-model cars breezing by — cabriolets and six-figure coupes — worried Galina. She needed peasants, poor people who were not wired into the news of the day. She wondered if even among the impoverished there were people who fit that description anymore. And what did she know of the peasantry? She knew plenty about the sophisticated airs of Moscow’s nouveau riche who patronized the city’s finest restaurants and clubs — and also gobbled up whatever absurdities the Kremlin dished out. But she’d sooner trust her fate to a man riding a donkey than a celebrant of the capital’s splashy soirees.
She whizzed past Dendrariy, a picturesque part of greater Sochi, which stretched up and down the coast. The region’s renowned funicular caught Alexandra’s attention, as it undoubtedly had captured the eyes of millions of children before her.
“What is that, Mama?”
She told her, explaining, “It’s like a car on a cable. It goes all the way up the mountain. There’s a beautiful arboretum up there.”
“What’s that?”
Galina was encouraged that her daughter was energetic enough to ask questions. “It’s a pretty yellow-and-white building surrounded by the most colorful flowers and plants.”
“Can we go on the funicular and see the flowers… someday?”
Galina could have cried when Alexandra added “someday” so tentatively, as though she already knew how hopeless it would be to ask to stop now for anything resembling fun or beauty. They were on the run, that was clear even to a leukemia-stricken six-year-old.
Still, Galina said, “Yes, someday we’ll go. I promise,” knowing full well that if they ever escaped Russia, they would never come back.
But America had funiculars, too. She thought they called them trams, and America would welcome them and give them a home if Lana Elkins, to whom Galina had entrusted their lives, could actually find them safe passage out of the country.
In searching for a rural seaport, Galina was forging a backup plan, a redundancy, like you’d find in any sound computer software. Nobody with a conscience would bet the life of their child entirely on a stranger.
She soon spotted moorages, but they catered to cabin cruisers and large sailboats, whose hulls had risen with the sea and now shadowed the docks from heights she’d never seen before. Despite that, most of the slips were still occupied; the affluent boat owners were less concerned, perhaps, about their weekend pleasures than a fisherman who depended on his vessel for his livelihood.
She was surprised to see bearded men — Muslims, if she were not mistaken — walking alongside the road. More of them as she drove farther north, one with prayer beads in his hand. Headscarves on some women, too.
Galina checked her odometer — about fifty kilometers away from the heart of Sochi. She felt like a rube. How could she not know that Muslims lived in this region? She would have checked online right then but she planned to keep her phone power off unless she absolutely needed it.
Dimly, from a source she could not readily place, she recalled that there was, indeed, a sizable Muslim population up there.
Yes, that’s right, she thought. During the Olympics it was a reason given — not in the most overt terms — for heightened security.
That could be good, she realized. There might be people among them who despaired of the official Russian propaganda line, who might not even avail themselves of it. People who could sympathize with a woman who had killed a “hero” of the Chechnya war in which so many Muslims were ruthlessly tortured and murdered, including scores of children.
Galina took stock of her other resources. She had a bundle of cash and a gun. No bullets, but a gun. As a last resort, brandishing an unloaded derringer might be better than having no weapon at all, especially in the hands of such a notorious hero-slayer. Her reputation might not only precede her, but clear a path for them as well.
She glanced in the rearview mirror to see what such a murderer looked like.
Tired, she decided at once. Very tired.
The sun was going down across the sea. She didn’t dare look for an established hotel or inn. She passed billboards for a number of them with their locations and distances noted, but ignored them.
She had not seen the frantic small seaport she’d been hoping for, but the more Muslims she spotted, the more she considered a much different plan.
Farther north of Sochi she spotted a village from the road. She had to make a decision soon or she might find herself driving aimlessly through the night, when she would be able to see little.
Galina exited onto a freshly paved but extremely narrow road. Not hard to imagine that it had been resurfaced with macadam to accommodate vehicles other than carts pulled by beasts of burden — not all of them animals in the annals of Russia’s often brutal past.
When she found herself driving too directly toward the town, she turned onto a winding forest two-track through lush deciduous trees, still leafy in the subtropical climes of the coast.