Patriot Acts Read Free Page A

credible were pretty damn low. If she walked into the Federal Building in lower Manhattan, the only way she’d walk out again would be in full restraints, with a phalanx of guards, on her way to arraignment.
    If she walked out at all.
    Someone had hired Oxford to kill her, after all, and that someone was most likely connected with the government. Just because Oxford was currently bloating with swamp water in the Allendale Nature Preserve didn’t mean another attempt on Alena’s life wouldn’t be made.
    Even now, we didn’t know who had bought the hit. We didn’t have the first idea.
    I had given Alena my word that I would protect her. I had sacrificed friends and future because I believed her when she told me that she was a killer no more. I had promised her that she would be safe. The best way I could keep that promise was to button her up someplace safe and secure, and that someplace was this house in Cold Spring. Natalie would run the security, and Dan would provide the muscle and the firepower. Nothing fancy, just a safe place that could be secured and controlled for a week, maybe two at the outside. Long enough to be sure that the threat to Alena was gone, that Oxford was the end of it. Long enough for me to disappear someplace far, far away. It didn’t matter where.
    Just someplace where the people I loved didn’t die because of the things I’d done, or the man I’d become.
             
    Miata padded off into the darkness, in search of Alena, and I listened with half an ear to Natalie and Dan, standing around the kitchen table, discussing the security he’d put in place. Vadim up in the tree house had been a last-minute addition, it seemed, placed up there while Illya—the guard on the front door—had been dispatched to find me a car. While they talked I found myself a nearly clean glass and filled it with water, drinking it down. I was still wearing my Kevlar, and while it was a light vest, about as thin and comfortable as these kind of things ever managed to be, I was warm in it.
    I thought about taking it off, leaving it behind, but I could just imagine what Alena would say if she saw me remove it. She’d call me a fool, and ask me if I wanted to die, and if I answered that things, for the moment, seemed to be safe, she would have snorted that near-contemptuous snort of hers and left it at that.
    Natalie had given me a pistol before my meeting with Oxford, and that I did remove, setting it on the table. If I was going to be catching a plane anytime soon, it’d be best to go light. The vest could be ditched easily enough at the airport, if needed; the gun would be harder to dispose of, and since I didn’t know where she’d acquired it, I didn’t want to risk it being traced back to her. Better to leave the problem for Dan and Natalie to solve.
    “There are three,” Dan was telling her, indicating a rough drawing he’d made on a piece of paper that rested on the table. The drawing was a map of the house and the immediate area, and it looked quickly done, but more than serviceable. “Not counting Vadim on overwatch. He’s got a rifle up there, and night-vision.”
    “And hopefully a blanket,” I said.
    “You’ve got coms?” Natalie asked Dan.
    Dan reached into the outside pocket of his jacket, held up a Nextel mobile phone. Natalie nodded slightly, and he dropped the phone back where he’d found it.
    “What about the other three?”
    “Illya’s on the door, you saw him as you came in. We loaded his shotgun with the Brenneke rounds, better for dealing with vehicles if a vehicle should come. Yasha is covering the back door, and Tamryn is sleeping upstairs, in the room next to Tasha’s.”
    “So six altogether, counting you and me.”
    “You think more?”
    “No, six should be plenty, at least for tonight.”
    They both looked at me.
    “Dandy,” I told them.
    Dan considered my lack of enthusiasm, then said, “I’ll go check on Tasha, make sure she’s comfortable.”
    He left