Hidden Prey

didn’t feel much at all.
    Now he sat with his head down. Would a human be harder? He doubted it. He liked dogs better than he liked most people. And while the dog had been a test, this killing was absolutely necessary . . .
    Then headlights played across the wasteland, amid the railroad tracks. A car bounced along a rutted track, then stopped a couple of hundred yards out. There was a light on the roof. A taxi. Carl slipped the safety on the pistol, felt the weight in his hand; kept his finger off the trigger, as he’d been trained.
     
    R ODION O LESHEV HAD been left in the dark.
    The taxi turned away, the door locks snapped down, and it was gone, back to the hillside of light, back into town. Oleshev scowled at it: the taxi driver, a blockheaded Swede, according to his taxi license, wouldn’t go any farther off-road. He might break a wheel in the dark, he’d said. He might fall in a hole. Fuckin’ Swedes. The whole area was lousy with them.
    Oleshev was a broad man in a black leather jacket, black denim jeans, and plain-toed military dress shoes. He hadn’t shaved that morning and his two-day beard was a briar patch, chafing against his neck. He carried a black nylon briefcase. Inside were his seaman’s papers, a digital camera, a pair of Razor sunglasses, and a laptop computer.
    The night was pretty, with the thinnest summer haze over the cool water of the lake, and the moon coming up, and he could clearly see thelights of a building six miles down the shoreline. Ahead of him, closer, only two hundred yards away, the bulk carrier Potemkin sat in a berth beneath the TDX terminal. The deck of the ship was bathed in floodlights, as it took on durum wheat from North Dakota.
    There was a lot of light around, Oleshev thought; there just wasn’t any where he was. The whole area south of the grain terminals was a semi-wasteland of dirt roads, waist-high weeds, railroad tracks and industrial detritus, all smelling of burned diesel. The moonlight didn’t help, casting hard shadows everywhere, making holes look like bumps, and bumps like flat spots. Oleshev felt his way toward the Potemkin, stepping carefully; saw a shiny, knifelike streak in the dirt ahead of him, reached out with his toe, felt the steel rail of the first set of tracks.
    “Fuck this place,” he muttered out loud.
    Oleshev was an unhappy man, thinking about the satellite call he’d have to make back to Russia. Things were more complicated than anyone had expected. The Circle at the SVR had expected either agreement or rejection, had been prepared to react with either money, as a gesture of goodwill, or blackmail. What they’d gotten was . . . bullshit.
    What’d the old man say? “It is impossible to predict the time and progress of the revolution. It’s governed by its own more or less mysterious laws . . .”
    Vladimir Ilyich fuckin’ Lenin. Oleshev spat into the weeds, thinking about it. Bullshit and more bullshit. The people here swam in it. They were Communists. How crazy was that? Somehow, they’d been expecting Russians, and they’d gotten Communists.
    Politics complicated everything. He tripped again, swore into the quiet of the night, and stumbled on, cursing, scowling, toward the waiting ship.
     
    O LESHEV HAD JUST stepped into the light, onto the concrete pad around the grain terminal, when another man moved out of theshadows on the side of the terminal. The man stepped out backwards, and Oleshev saw that he was fumbling at his crotch, zipping up.
    Taking a leak: the idea popped into Oleshev’s head and he relaxed a half inch, enough that he wasn’t ready. The man turned around and Oleshev saw the pink apple-cheeks and the blond hair and the thought flashed through his mind that the blond was a crewman, a member of the night watch who he’d not often seen coming across the Atlantic.
    “Mr. Moshalov.”
    Not a crewman, not with those round, Swedish-sounding O s. The man’s hand came up. Not to shake. He was holding a gun and Oleshev saw it and another thought flew through his mind, one word from his training: Shout .
    Actually, what the manual said was Try to relax but be prepared to move instantly. If you see that your captor intends to fire, shout at him, to distract him. Even if you are killed, perhaps your companions will gain from the edge you give them.
    A lot of horseshit, Oleshev had thought when he first read it. Let somebody else shout. Still, at the critical moment, he thought Shout, but before he could