Hidden Prey

his elderly ass and matchstick legs.
    “Plenty of time,” he said. “He won’t be there for half an hour.”
    “Unless he’s scouting it out ahead of time.”
    “I think he would have already done that,” Grandpa said.
    They went back out to the garage, got in the Taurus, and headed north across town, out past the park, the night growing deeper and darker as they got away from the main city lights.
    “You actually talked to the head of intelligence at the embassy?” Carl asked.
    “Yes. They were quite . . . interested.”
    “What did you tell them?
    “I told them the truth—that I was working with Oleshev, that we had to coordinate, that we were running an operation approved by Moscow and what the hell were they doing in going after Spivak—that they’d given him away to the Americans.”
    “The truth?”
    Grandpa grinned: “Maybe I fictionalized it a little bit.”
    “Oh, yeah. A little bit.”
     
    T HE ROAD WAS narrow and bumpy, and went nowhere—there was a tourist site that overlooked one of the mine pits, but that was long closed. Nothing else was out there: they saw no cars or house lights.
    “If people saw us out here, they’d wonder.”
    “Won’t be here for long,” Grandpa said. He looked at his great-grandson. “When your grandfather was still alive, he used to come up here and neck with his girlfriends.”
    “I think Dad and Mom did, too. I probably will, if I ever get a girlfriend; Mom’s been bugging me again.”
    “You’re a man now. You should learn about women.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” Not a conversation he wanted to have. “I know all about the birds and the bees, Grandpa, so don’t lean on me, okay?”
    Grandpa laughed, and then coughed. “Where’s the gun?”
    “Right in the back of my pants. In the belt.”
    “Remember what I told you about it hanging up.”
    “That’s why I’m wearing the shirt. I was practicing with it before Mom came home.”
    “There are schools for these things,” Grandpa said, looking sideways out the passenger window, into the dark, remembering. “I’m trying to teach you the best I can, but I’m not as sharp as I used to be.”
    “Grandma used to say that I’m the Imperfect Weapon,” Carl said. “Remember? You said you’d make me the perfect weapon.”
    “You’ll get better. But you have to think about it. Then you have to go practice. But thinking . . . thinking is the thing. You have to imagine all the things that can happen and prepare contingencies.”
    “I haven’t thought of everything, but I’m trying,” Carl said.
    “You’ve been doing very well. One thing I’ve learned in all these years is that nothing ever goes exactly as planned. You plan, and then you adapt. You’ve done that.” After a while: “You know what Lenin said. ‘One man with a gun can control one hundred without one.’ What you are learning, this is critical for your life in the underground.”
    A bit later, he said: “I talked to Lenin once. My father took me to . . .”
    “The workers’ hall near the Kremlin, and it was snowing out . . .” The story was a familiar one.
    “He said, ‘You’ll grow up, and you’ll be a soldier like your father.’ And he slapped my father on the shoulder.”
    “Your father had medals on his coat . . .”
    “He was buried with them. He was there at the beginning . . .”
    “And that was one of the great days of your life.”
    “Yes, it was,” Grandpa said, and a tear trickled down his cheek. He wiped it away and said, “You’ll be a soldier, too. Maybe someday, you’ll tell your grandson about driving out here with me.”
     
    A MINUTE LATER : “I like the walkie-talkies. That was a stroke of genius.”
    Carl smiled in the dark.
     
    T HEN THEY WERE THERE . Carl swung the car into the parking lot, the red-white-and-blue façade of the Greyhound Bus Origin Museum lit in his headlights.
    “Down to the end,” Grandpa grunted.
    “If the cops come, they’ll look at us for sure.”
    “Football game. It should be getting out about now. Every cop in town will be down there.”
    “Hope,” Carl said.
    They sat in silence for a minute or two, in the dark, and then Grandpa said, “Do it as soon as you can be safe. Even if I seem to be agreeing with this man. I will seem to be agreeing. Lenin said, ‘It would be the greatest mistake to think that concessions mean peace. Concessions are nothing but a new form of warfare.’ The same here. I agree, I agree, I agree, I talk, talk,