Patriot Acts Read Free

hand to me, and I raised one back. Another of Dan’s Russians, this one on overwatch. Whoever was up there was probably very cold and very bored, but again I appreciated the precaution.
    Miata nudged my left hand with his muzzle. He’d hung back to wait for me, and I reached down and gave him a scratch behind the ears. He looked up, fixing me with those soulful dog eyes, and I swear it was as if he knew what was going to happen next. Dogs’ eyes are like that. Sometimes you can see exactly what they’re feeling; sometimes, you see exactly what you’re feeling yourself.
    “Yeah,” I told him. “Stop wasting time, right?”
    By way of answer, Miata turned and headed up the path to the house.
    I followed the dog.
             
    Natalie and Dan were in the kitchen, which seemed to be the only room with its lights on, and that was fine with me because there was no way to see into the kitchen from the outside. Looking from the exterior, the house would appear dark, and that was how both I and Natalie wanted it.
    “Who’s in the tree house?” I asked, taking off my jacket.
    Dan’s expression was one of both disappointment and surprise. “You saw him?”
    “Not soon enough.”
    That mollified him, and he grinned. “That’s Vadim up there. He’s my boy.”
    Natalie arched an eyebrow. “You’ve got a son?”
    “Nineteen,” Dan said, then added, “He has promise.”
    I hung my jacket on the back of the nearest chair, fighting off a wave of sudden exhaustion while listening as Natalie and Dan continued discussing the security arrangements for the safe house. Oxford’s death diminished the threat against Alena, but none of us was willing to say it was gone, not yet. Three hours before Oxford had planted his dagger in Scott Fowler’s heart, Scott and I had met with two men at a Holiday Inn off Times Square. Two men who, we’d assumed, had been holding the end of Oxford’s leash. One had been a big stack of jovial threat who had done most of the talking, but the other had been a quieter and more thoughtful piece of menace named Matthew Bowles.
    Bowles and his partner hadn’t been the instigators, though; they were middlemen, the ones responsible for tasking Oxford, for directing him at some other’s request to clean up the mess that Alena and I had become. But Oxford had become a liability to them. In the end, Scott and I had persuaded Bowles and his partner to cut their losses. We’d watched Bowles make a four-second telephone call that terminated Oxford’s contract, firing the assassin with all the ceremony and care of ordering take-out.
    Oxford hadn’t liked that. He’d liked that I’d stolen most of the money he’d made from two decades of killing people even less.
    That was when he’d begun murdering anyone who’d ever had the misfortune of calling themselves my friend.
    He’d killed Scott in Madison Square Park while I was close enough to see it and too far away to stop it. Scott had died in my arms while Oxford had fled, unnoticed and unmolested. The irony of that—if there was an irony to be found—was that I was now wanted for Scott’s murder, for the murder of a federal agent.
    There were ways out from beneath the charge, of course. Most obviously, I could just turn myself in to the authorities and confess the whole story of everything that had transpired. It could probably work. Until I’d disappeared to Bequia with Alena, I’d had a good reputation in the New York security community; I’d had some respect and even a modicum of brief fame. With a strong lawyer and a little good faith, the truth behind Scott’s death would be revealed. At the least, I could be exonerated for the murder of my friend.
    But that would require Alena’s corroboration, and as Alena was known in certain law enforcement and intelligence circles as Drama, and as Drama was wanted in connection with something in the neighborhood of two dozen murders-for-hire, the odds of her corroboration being seen as