"I'll start now. You can catch up."
I straightened. The register came back for one beat under my ribs the way it always came back when one of them used the family name on me without meaning to, and I felt my shoulders set themselves the way our father had set his shoulders in a doorway.
Mikhail caught me at the door. A hand on my upper arm. Not a stopping hand. A holding hand. He kept it there until I turned my head and looked at him.
"Be careful on the road, brother. We have a traitor in the house. We have not found him yet. I do not like you driving alone tonight."
"I am fine."
"Take Yuri."
"I am taking the Maybach. I will not let her wait one more hour because I was being followed by my own caution."
He held the look another beat. He had a way of looking at me that was older than him and older than me and older than the room we were standing in. He nodded once.
"Then drive like you are being followed. Because you might be."
I went out through the hall. The compound was quiet at this hour. The gravel of the drive was the gray it went in the last of the light. I got into the Maybach. I closed the door. I sat for onebreath with my hands on the wheel and I waited for the breath to be a real one and then I turned the key.
The road out of the compound was the road I had been driving since I was sixteen. The trees along the parkway were half stripped. The light was going from afternoon to evening the way it goes at this part of the year, the gold of the den windows turning to a thin blue at the tops of the bare branches. I had the radio off. I had my hands on the wheel. I had my mind on her, on the four calls I had let go to nothing, on the question I had not been letting myself answer for three days about what I was going to put my mouth around when I stood in front of her and she opened the door.
Two miles down the parkway I checked the rearview.
There was a dark sedan three cars back.
I let my eyes go back to the road. I drove. I checked again at the next overpass. The sedan had moved up by one car. I drove another mile. The sedan held the gap.
Not new. He has been with me since the second mile.
I took the next exit to see if the sedan would. The sedan took the exit.
The smaller road past the off ramp went into the woods. Two lanes. Old asphalt. No shoulder to speak of, only a soft lip of dirt and then the bank and then the trees. I knew the road. It went a long way through nothing before it came back out at the river crossing. I had picked it on purpose because I knew it.
I pressed the brake at the first curve.
The pedal went soft under my foot.
I pressed again. The pedal went to the floor.
I pressed a third time. The pedal did nothing at all.
The car kept its speed.
Brake line. Tonight. Smart. Whoever it is.
I worked the gears. I dropped one. The engine bit. I dropped another. The engine bit harder. The Maybach is not a car youdownshift on a back road and she did not like it and she did it because I told her to. The needle came down. Not enough. The next curve was coming up faster than the needle was coming down, and the sedan was closer in the mirror now, the gap eaten in two seconds, then in two seconds more.
Two cars between us became one.
One became none.
They were running me off the road. They knew it. I knew it. There was a stretch of old oak fifty yards ahead where the shoulder dipped into a soft bank and the trees stood close, and I picked the tree. I did not let the sedan pick it for me. I picked the angle that would fold the front of the car and not the door. I put both hands on the wheel. My knuckles went the white they go.
The Maybach went off the road into the bank.
The front went into the tree.
The world did the thing the world does when a car has hit a tree at speed. The hood came up at me. The glass went. The airbag opened into my face and went flat in the same breath. My head hit something to the left of the wheel, the pillar, the edge of the visor, something hard and small that took a piece of me with it. The horn locked on. The red of the dash went red at the edges of what I could see and then the red went wider.
