“Do you understand me?” she asked.
“Yes, but I am sleepy.”
“Do you hurt?”
He had to take a moment, then said, “No.”
“The situation is this. You are injured, we have no car. I have to find a car, because I believe we have to move.”
Nikitin struggled to sit up, but she pushed him down. “Is Melor back already? What happed to Matvey?”
“Mel called from Milwaukee. Matvey is in the hospital. Melor will find a motel and try to sleep.”
“Then…where will you get a car?”
“I will rent one,” she said. “At the airport.”
“But how will you get there?”
“I have thought about this. Now, the doctor told me that when you feel pain, you should take three of these pills…They will stop the pain and help you sleep some more, keep you still.” She showed him three brown pills in the palm of her hand. “Can you do that?”
“I have no pain now.”
“I know. But you might, before I get back. I’ll leave you with the pills and a glass of water.”
• • •
She got theglass of water and they talked for another moment, and she left the pills and water on the floor within arm’s reach. That done, she went into the bedroom, got the smallest of the carry-on duffel bags, put in a dress, high heels, and a dressy woolen coat thatthey’d packed as disguise changes, along with a crushable brimmed hat. She added a lipstick and blush.
She changed into clean jeans, a woolen sweater over a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and topped it with a jacket too light for the morning cold—the temperatures were still well below zero—but she couldn’t use her blood-spangled parka, which she hadn’t had time to clean. She’d put the machine pistols back in the gear bag and replaced them with her familiar PLK. When she went through the living room, Nikitin was sleeping again, and she left as quietly as she could, locking the door behind her.
She was on a side road off the main highway, a mile and a half from the Minnetrista city hall and police station, two separate buildings on the highway; they’d noted the place in their recons as the closest police station. She put the duffel bag straps over her shoulders and started jogging, a long uphill stretch to start. The cold began seeping through the clothing within minutes, but by then the body heat began to catch up: still, her face felt the frost nipping at it, like acupuncture needles.
The run to the city services area took twelve minutes, the last few hundred yards downhill. When she got there, she walked through the parking lot, got out of the wind in the shelter of a small doorway at the city hall, and called for an Uber.
She’d hoped to get one within a half hour, but she got an almost instant reply: a car would pick her up in five.
The driver, a large, heavily wrapped, incurious man, sporting a black porkpie hat like a musician might wear, said almost nothing during the forty-minute drive to Minneapolis–St. Paul International. The brightest spark from him came at the city hall, when he grunted,“Working early, huh?” and again when she gave him a twenty-dollar cash tip at the airport, “Hey, man. Thanks.”
Inside the airport, she checked an arrivals board, picked out an arriving flight from Chicago, then found a women’s restroom, locked herself in a toilet booth and changed into the dress, high heels, and overcoat. She packed her running clothes in the satchel, touched her lips with the lipstick, decided she didn’t need the blush; she was pink enough from the cold. A two-minute train ride took her to the parking structure that housed the car rental agencies, where a Hertz agent told her that she had no reservation for a car.
“My goddamned husband,” she blurted…
The agent found the pretty lady a car, a huge seven-passenger Infiniti QX-60, for only $247 a day plus taxes, for a five-day rental.
“Wonderful,” she gushed. “I can take my entire family to the mall in that…”
• • •
She stayed withinthe speed limit back to Minnetrista. On the way, she switched the radio from satellite to local, searched the stations until she found local news, and immediately got caught with a story about an Orono-area manhunt for what was believed to be a Russian assassination team of three men and a woman.
While the news station had no details about the killing of a person in Orono, they had everything else: the cars the team had used, the wounding of three members of the team, the probable existence of a fourth member, their Russian accents, and even some information on the extent of the wounds.
The FBI had obviously interviewed the doctor, and the station had also reached two of the nurses from the Bison hospital whotold of the raid, and who mentioned that the Russian woman was a blonde.
“No! Not good!”
The beautiful QX-60 might not be viable for very long, if the rental agent put together the three things he knew for sure: the vehicle had been rented by a blond woman, without a reservation, but with a foreign accent.
