The Charm School

luck.” He held on to Burov and ran from the cabin, the smokescreen behind him. Hollis lay in the doorway with an AK-47 and fired a full thirty-round magazine in a sweeping motion across the tree line, getting little fire in return. He glanced back toward Mills and saw he had disappeared.
    Hollis rolled back into the
izba
and sat with his back against the log wall. As he reloaded, Alevy knelt by the window and fired long bursts into the black smoke. Spent shell casings clattered to the floor, and the smell of burnt cordite filled the cabin.
    Hollis said, “Okay, Mills and Burov are on board by now. You want to go first? I’ll cover.”
    Alevy glanced at his watch. “No, you go first. We have a few minutes.”
    Hollis moved toward the door, then looked back at Alevy.
    Alevy smiled. “Go ahead.”
    Hollis could hear the sound of the helicopter turbines coming from the clearing. “He’s going to leave. Come with me.”
    Alevy sat with his back to the wall beside the door but didn’t respond. Hollis thought he looked very relaxed, very at peace with himself for the first time since Hollis had known him. “It wasn’t sleeping gas that you dropped from the helicopter, was it?”
    Alevy replied, “No, it wasn’t.”
    “Nerve gas?”
    “Yes. I used Sarin. Tabun is good too, but—”
    “Why? Why, Seth?”
    “Oh, you know fucking well why.”
    “But… Jesus Christ, man… nearly three hundred Americans… the women, children—”
    “They can’t go home, Sam. They can never go home. They have no home.
This
is their home. You
know
that.”
    Hollis glanced out the window and saw the smokescreen beginning to dissipate. He rummaged through the leather bag and found the last smoke grenade and the last of the CS riot gas. He pulled both pins and flung the grenades out the door. There was still some firing directed toward them, but the predominant sound now was of vomiting and swearing. He said to Alevy, “So, the State Department and the White House got their way. This place never existed. And you went along with it?”
    Alevy glanced at his watch. “Go on, Sam. I’m not asking you to die here.”
    “Are you going to die here?”
    Alevy did not reply directly, but said, “I’m about to murder a thousand people.” He looked at Hollis. “It was my idea. The poison gas. It’s good for the country.”
    “
How
is it good for the country?”
    “It’s a compromise. In exchange for the CIA and the Pentagon not wrecking the peace initiatives and all that crap, we can keep as many as we want of the three thousand or so graduates of the Charm School that we’ll eventually round up in America. The rest we can dispose of without benefit of trial. That was made possible by you and General Surikov’s files. That’s what broke the deadlock. We’re starting our own Charm School in America. Get it?”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    “Don’t be a goddamned Boy Scout. We’re turning their intelligence offensive against them on this one. We’ll have a class A school for our agents, and Burov and Dodson will be sort of deans of students. Pretty neat, don’t you think?”
    “Your idea?”
    “Of course.” Alevy added, “But I’ll tell you something else that wasn’t my idea. Neither you nor Lisa were supposed to leave here alive. Your own people in Defense Intelligence, including your boss, General Vandermullen, agreed to that, though somewhat reluctantly, I’ll admit.”
    “Then why—?”
    “Oh, I’m not
that
inhuman, Sam. Could I really leave
her
here to die?”
    “Nothing you do would surprise me anymore, Seth.”
    “Thank you. But
that
I couldn’t do. As for you… well, I like you, so I’m giving you a chance to get out.”
    Hollis listened to the sounds of the helicopter’s turbines running up. He said to Alevy, “How about Surikov and his granddaughter, Seth? Did you lie to me?”
    “I’m afraid so. They’ll stay in Moscow awhile longer. They have to or the KGB will know that Surikov blew the Charm School graduates. We can’t have that until the FBI is ready to round them all up. You know that.”
    “You’re a bastard.”
    “I’m a patriot.”
    Bullets began slapping into the log walls again, and Hollis could now hear the deep chatter of a heavy machine gun. The walls began to splinter, and Hollis lay prone on the floor. “Get down.”
    Several rounds hit the radios, and they disintegrated. The porcelain stove shattered, and smoke and ash billowed out of it. The three corpses on the far