Hidden Prey

talk, and then you act, when he begins to go to sleep.”
    “Yes.”
    “I want you to treat me like I’m a little senile. Help me out of the car, talk me around a little bit. Sit here, Grandpa, like that.” A set of headlights flickered through the trees to the south. “He’s coming. Remember, do it as soon as you can be safe. Control your fire, control the gun. And remember what he did with Anton. He’ll have a gun of his own.”
    “Should we have some sort of signal, in case you want to call it off?”
    Grandpa nodded. “Yes. Good thought. I’ll say, ‘Carl, not tonight.’ If I don’t say that, kill him.”
     
    T HE ONCOMING CAR SLOWED , turned into the museum parking lot, hesitated, then turned toward them. The car stopped, the headlights on them for a moment, then it came on, swung out, pulled into a space about twenty feet away, stopped. The lights went out, and Carl got out of the car.
    The driver’s-side door on the other car opened, and a man got out. He was dressed in a black raincoat and he said, “You are . . .”
    “Here to meet you,” Carl said. “Anyway, my grandpa is.”
    “Come around the car with your hands up where I can see them.” The Russian looked like a Mafia guy from television; but then, so had Oleshev.
    Carl lifted his hands over his head and the other man moved closer, darkly visible in the thin security light from the museum. Carl saw that one hand hung down, long; he had the gun out. As he cleared the car, hands up, Carl said, “I’m not the one, I’ve got to get, uh, help Grandpa . . .”
    The passenger door popped then, and Grandpa pushed it open. He croaked, “Carl? Is this the man?”
    The man had moved closer and now his hand was up, at his side, the gun pointed at Grandpa’s door. The car’s interior light had come onwhen Grandpa pushed the door open, and the old man swiveled, and put his feet on the ground, his hands on his knees.
    “Carl? Could you help me get up?”
    “Yeah . . . Uh, he’s got a gun, I think . . .”
    “Of course he has a gun,” Grandpa said. “Could you help me, please?”
    The man was closer now, watchful, and Carl edged up the side of the car, both of his hands overhead, and he said, “I don’t have any kind of a gun or anything . . .”
    Grandpa tried to heave himself out of the car and stumbled, went down on the blacktop. “Ahhh . . .”
    “Ah, Jesus, Grandpa.”
    Carl stooped to lift him; actually had to lift him, and was amazed as his great-grandfather’s feathery weight. The old man might not weigh even a hundred pounds, he thought. Grandpa had him by the sleeve, steadying himself, and the other man was now only eight feet away.
    “Tell me who you are,” the other man said.
    “I’m the man who called the embassy,” Grandpa said. “I am the head of the Cherry Orchard ring.”
    “What? I was told that you were with Rodion Oleshev . . .”
    “What’d you expect me to say? The last man you talked to, you tried to kill. We want to know what’s going on—we’ve been working loyally for seventy years, and here you come trying to kill us.”
    “There hasn’t been a Cherry Orchard ring since the nineteen sixties,” the other man said. “We looked at the histories.”
    “That’s one thing you’re wrong about,” Grandpa said. He looked at Carl. “Carl, you don’t want to hear this.” He pointed to the swale between the parking lot and the road. “Stand over there where you can look down the road.”
    “I’d like to hear it,” Carl said.
    “Not yet,” Grandpa said. “Over there.”
     
    C ARL MOVED TWENTY feet away, and Grandpa slumped back against the car. He began talking to the other man, gesturing. Carl could feel the gun pressing against his back, walked over to a curb, stood on it, then stood on his tiptoes, saw from the corner of his eye the other man glance at him, then turn back to Grandpa. Carl pulled the back of his shirt over the butt of the gun, so the butt was clear.
    The other man said, “Nineteen eighty-one, we’d already lost touch with Glass Bowl.” Carl could tell that he was focused on Grandpa now.
    “I believe you . . .”
    Carl said, “If we’re going to have a long talk we should go somewhere else. Somebody’s gonna come. Kids’ll be coming down here to neck after the game.”
    “The game?” the other man said.
    “Football,” Grandpa said. “You probably saw the lights when you came into town.”
    Carl stepped toward them.