The cell phone in the box rang. Sam picked it up and said, “Hello.”
“Hello, Mr. Fargo. Since you received this telephone, then you also must have the picture and know we have your wife. She’s very beautiful, and seems to be very intelligent too. You must miss her terribly.”
“What is it that you want terribly?”
“Right to the point. All right. You have recovered three hidden portions of the loot that Attila the Hun stole from European cities when he conquered them in the fifth century. You have one found in Italy near Mantua, one from Châlons-en-Champagne, France, and one from the shore of the Danube in Hungary.”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t interrupt and don’t argue. I know that you have taken them, and now you will give them to me. I want those finds.”
“All three have been turned over to the national archives of those countries,” Sam said. “There are treaties and laws that prevent people from—”
“I told you not to argue with me. Do I sound to you like someone who cares about treaties between foreign politicians? Getting the ransom is your problem. As soon as you have the three hoards in your possession, call me by pressing the programmed number on your new phone that says Remi.”
“What happens if I can’t get the three treasures?”
“Why make yourself afraid and unhappy? I hope I don’t need to think of something terrible to do. I don’t want to promise you some horrible last videotape of your wife if you fail. Succeed. I would rather have you confident and strong, thinking only about collecting my gold and delivering it.”
“Even if I can do this, it will take some time.”
“Time is not weighing on me. If you don’t want her back for a week, take a week. A month? Take a month. Take six months.”
“Where can I—” and Sam realized that he had prolonged the conversation as long as he cold. The kidnapper had hung up. He turned off the new cell phone, took it to the bathroom and wrapped it in a towel, closed the door, and went back to his own telephone. “Selma?”
“I’m here,” she said. “I recorded that. But I didn’t learn anything except that he’s Russian, speaks English well, and isn’t afraid.”
Sam said, “How about you, Consulate? Do you have anything?”
The voice was calm, quiet, and American-accented—not Hagar, but someone who was a lot like him. “We have determined that a Russian trading partner of Arpad Bako is a man named Sergei Poliakoff. The Russian police are putting together a file for us.”
“Where does he live?”
“Nizhny Novgorod. He has an import-export business, and an estate west of the city. The Russians haven’t tipped us on what they know ahead of their report, but the officer who passed me the information implied that he’s a pretty unsavory character. He has people in a lot of places, possibly even the U.S.”
“Thanks. I’ll have to get started on this right away. I’m going to leave both cell phones in my room. If you can, please get somebody to move the kidnapper’s phone around a bit—drive it around, ship it to friends in Italy or France. He’ll be tracking the GPS to find out where I am.”
“But where will you be? You can’t go off alone in this country. You don’t even speak the language. You can’t operate without the Russian police and that means dealing through us. I want you to promise me that you won’t try to do anything like that.” The man, whose name was Owens, stopped talking and listened. There was nobody on the line.
He switched to an internal line. “We’re about to lose track of Fargo. He’s left the hotel. He’ll probably turn up near Nizhny Novgorod in a week or two. He left our cell phone and the kidnapper’s cell in his room. Send somebody to pick up both. Then send the kidnapper’s phone on a vacation to Rome, Paris, and Budapest. It’ll keep the poor guy’s wife alive for a while.”
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA
Sam is coming. Sam will come for me no matter what. He’s coming for me already. He will have found something to trace.
Remi lay in bed even though she suspected it was late morning. She had read somewhere that experimenters living in caves without sunlight or clocks would gradually lengthen their sleep cycles to a twenty-six hour day. She heard the quiet knock of the girl who would be bringing her breakfast. She was sensitive to Remi’s feelings. She knocked even though Remi was locked in and she had the key.
The girl’s name was Sasha—a boy’s name, usually, but maybe it was a nickname, or even a name that she’d assumed because she worked for a criminal and didn’t want to be identified. She was about eighteen, slim and blond, with pale green eyes. She had come in about five times now. Each time she entered, Remi would make sure to talk to her.
Remi said, “Good morning, Sasha. What a nice breakfast you’ve brought me. Thank you very much.”
Sasha put the food down on the small table and pulled out the chair for Remi as she always did. The girl never let on during the first few visits that she spoke English, but Remi had tested her. Remi had rattled on in English each visit as though the two were friends, and had planted ideas.
Once she had said she missed being outside and seeing the sun, and, most of all, she missed flowers like the ones that she had seen growing on the estate when she was brought here. The next visit Sasha put a bud vase on her tray with a small yellow rose in it. Remi had expressed great gratitude, and she repeated her thanks just as enthusiastically the next time a flower appeared. Remi liked the strong-brewed Russian tea Sasha brought in a glass with sugar in it. But the second time, she’d decided to sacrifice it. She had said, “It’s too strong for me. Would you like it?” and with a reassuring expression gave the tea to Sasha. Remi said that what she liked best was coffee sweetened with a little honey. The next day, Sasha brought the strong tea as usual and kept it as her own, but she also brought coffee and honey. Sasha sat on the bed with her tea and stayed with Remi while she ate.
Each breakfast included coffee and tea, each lunch had a flower. When Remi talked, she would ask Sasha questions about the world outside. When there was a particularly beautiful purple-and-white tulip, Remi asked where it grew, and Sasha used cups, napkin, plates, and silverware to make a little map of the estate. As she placed the pieces she called them “house . . . garden . . . road . . . stables . . . pasture . . . garage” in English.
With every visit, Remi kept trying to solidify the friendship and learn whatever she could about the house, the grounds, and its occupants. Sasha didn’t volunteer much information. Instead she listened to Remi, took a minute or two to ask herself whether the information could be dangerous, and then invariably devised some way to answer without saying anything that might get her in trouble.
Four days—twelve meals—passed this way. In the end, Remi knew—partly from observation the morning she’d arrived and partly from Sasha—the approximate layout of the house and grounds. She knew that there were twenty men on the estate who were not usually there and that they made Sasha’s work much harder since they required much more cooking, cleaning, laundry, and dishwashing. And they were the sort of men who gave Sasha the creeps.
What Sasha didn’t know was that Remi had slipped a fork up her sleeve the second day. Sasha would never have suspected that Remi had used a hole drilled in the steel bed frame to bend all the tines on the fork but one, that she had a husband who had taught her to pick a lock, and that she had broken one tine all the way off to use as a tension wrench.
During her sixth day of captivity, Remi unscrewed a small metal strut that strengthened the corner of the bathroom cabinet and tested its utility tapping on the pipes to make noise. That way, after using it, she could leave it where it belonged and never have it found if the room was searched.
She further endeared herself to Sasha by dividing her first dessert evenly and sharing it, all the while talking about what city they were near and which direction was Moscow in. When s
he was sure the house had gotten quiet for the night, she used her tine pick and tension wrench to line up the pins on the door lock’s tumbler and open it. She practiced again and again until she could do it easily and quickly. It occurred to her while she did that Sam would be amazed at how good she was at picking locks now that it mattered.
She slipped out and spent about five minutes exploring the quiet, dark hallway to find the back stairwell she had climbed to get here, looked out two different windows at the large estate and the big black river beyond, and found the room at the top of the stairway where she could hear two guards snoring. Then she had the feeling that she had ventured as much as she dared and went back to her room, relocked the door by poking the pins out of line, and slept.
On the seventh day she practiced the Morse code that Sam had insisted she learn for this kind of occasion despite her protests that no military organizations still taught it. She abbreviated her message to “Remi 4th floor” and began to tap it on the pipe that fed her sink. The taps had to be soft and at a low volume and continued for long periods so the regular occupants of the house got used to them and didn’t notice anymore. She and Sasha had a conversation in English about the mild, clear weather outside and the pretty view of the Volga from Sasha’s room. When the house was dark again, Remi picked the lock of her room and went out again into the dark hallway.
Remi had a light and agile fencer’s body, and her husband had taught her a few tricks about walking in a dark building. One was that boards tended to creak more near the center of a hall and that the way to walk silently was to move ahead a bit and then stop at the first creak and wait so that any listener would not associate it with the next creak that came, classifying the two as unrelated. Most noises made in this way would be thought of as having no human cause—just an old house standing up to a sudden wind or maybe a branch moving against the outer wall of the house.
Each day while Remi did her exercises to stay strong and limber, she reviewed all the tasks she had performed. She made certain that she had not neglected any of the preparations that Sam had made her practice in advance. During the long, happy times at the house on the Pacific at La Jolla, it had been hard to take all of the pieces of this drill seriously. Sam had kidded and cajoled her into learning the dull parts, but as she thought about them now, ticking them off in her mind, she realized that they had been helping her to stave off the terror that had been waiting to paralyze her. The drill had given her purpose and kept her occupied constructively from the very beginning of her captivity. Everything she did reminded her that she must not give up hope, but it also reminded her of Sam and made the tears threaten to come if she allowed them. Sam is coming, getting closer. I’ve got to be ready.
MOSCOW
MOVING THROUGH MOSCOW ALONE ON FOOT AT EIGHT in the evening, Sam was unidentifiable, a shadow, indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of Russians ending their workday and going home. Some were happy to go, and spoke to one another and laughed boisterously. Maybe a few had spent some time having a drink together. Others were just like Sam—tired, solitary men, getting onto buses that headed out into the distant suburbs where ordinary people lived. Sam waited until a line of them had boarded the bus and he’d seen how much they paid, and paid the same.
He had left the two cell phones in his hotel for the CIA, so he hoped the kidnappers were following the progress of their cell into and around Europe. Sam went east for as far as the bus went and then followed a few of the passengers at a distance. They entered high-rise apartment buildings collected together like the projects in big American cities.
The summer night was warm, so Sam managed to find a place to sleep outdoors at a construction site. A foundation had been dug, and there was a high pile of dirt with a tarp tied over it with several lines attached to grommets. Sam assumed that was to keep down the dust or prevent rain from turning the topsoil into a pyramid of mud. He climbed halfway up on the tarp so he wouldn’t be seen from the street and lay down. He hadn’t slept in two days and fell asleep immediately and woke only when the sun was high enough to shine on his face.
He got up and dusted himself off. As he was looking down at his clothes to be sure he had gotten them clean, he realized they were all wrong. He had bought them in Germany and Hungary and they didn’t quite look like the ones the men had been wearing on the bus the night before.
Sam climbed down and walked east, staying with streets that looked as though they might be commercial zones. As he walked, the army of ordinary people heading to work appeared and he tried to stay among them. Late in the morning he found a block-long street market. There were numerous small shops with tables in front of them, extending out across the sidewalk. He bought a flat tweed cap with a short brim like the ones American workers wore during the Depression. He had seen just a few of these on the streets of Moscow, mainly on old men, but he needed a hat to make it harder for the people who were watching for him to see his face. He bought a wool-and-polyester sport jacket in a faux herringbone tweed, because he had seen many of these. The cut was too short and too wide for him, so it made him look broader in the shoulders and a bit more muscular. He bought a pair of pants to go with the coat that had a loose cut too. The pale blue shirt he bought was an exact match with some he’d seen on the bus. His last purchases were a pair of shoes with a wide box toe that were comfortable for walking and a bag with a shoulder strap like the ones European students use to carry books. He changed into his new clothes in a curtained dressing stall. And then, as he was walking past another shop, he saw a display of used books in a bin.
Sam leafed through the piles of books, pretending to be casually browsing but actually searching desperately for something in a language other than Russian. He picked up and even pretended to leaf through many that were set in Cyrillic before he finally saw something different, a tourist’s guidebook in French. He immediately clutched it to his side and went to find the cashier.
After a few minutes of leafing through his French book, he found a map that seemed to show the area he was in. He walked away from the market, and kept walking, until he found a small urban park where he could sit on a bench and look at the maps of the Moscow area. After some study, he found that the various stations in the city had trains that went only to specific destinations. The one for Nizhny Novgorod was out of the Kursky Station, which was on the east side.
He folded down the corner of the page of his guidebook so he could easily find the map again, put the book in his shoulder bag with his extra clothes, and began to walk in the direction of the station. He walked steadily, stopping for food and drink at the sort of establishment where he could point at what he wanted and then hand someone a bill with a reasonable expectation of getting the right change.
It took him a whole day of walking to reach the right neighborhood and then he had to approach a family on the street, show them his French map, and say, “Ou est la gare Kursky?” He chose a family because it seemed safer for him than approaching either a woman, who might be afraid, or a man, who might be a cop. They pointed him in the right direction, with many friendly Russian words he couldn’t understand.
Sam made it to the Kursky Station in the evening, but it was still quite full and busy. Trains were leaving regularly for distant cities. He found a schedule board and looked up at it for a long time. To his great relief, he saw that the words were written in the Latin alphabet as well as Cyrillic. He recognized most of the names—St. Petersburg, Odessa, Vladivostok—but he couldn’t see anything that said Nizhny Novgorod. At first, he assumed that his exhaustion and his eagerness had combined to make him skip right over the name. He looked over and over, but still didn’t see it. He walked along the line of counters and cages where station employees helped customers, studying their faces. Should he try one of the women because women are naturally softhearted or would they be ready to feel irritated by his approach? The pretty ones must get asked for dates and flirted with all
the time, and who knows what the others would feel?
Then he heard words in English. There was a man behind a counter who wore a uniform reminiscent of a train conductor’s. He was telling a couple who looked American that their fare was nine hundred rubles. Sam turned his head to be sure he wasn’t cutting in line in front of someone and then stood in front of the man.
The man looked at him, expecting him to speak.
Sam said, “Sir, I can’t seem to find Nizhny Novgorod on the schedule.”
“Gorky,” the man said. “The city used to be called Gorky and the railway never changed it. All Russians know that, so we don’t have any trouble. Just people from other countries.”
“Oh, thank you very much,” said Sam. He was genuinely relieved. He had imagined another day walking to some other distant station.
“I’ll help you. When would you like to go?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Very good. There is a train at 2204. Would you like a ticket?”
“Yes, please.”
“It will be nine hundred rubles. One hundred eleven U.S. dollars and fifty cents for a one-way second-class ticket or fifty-five dollars for a third-class ticket.”
“And first-class?”
“I’m sorry, but those seats are all reserved already. It’s four hundred sixty-seven miles and takes eight hours and ten minutes, so people reserve the best seats ahead of time.”
“Second-class, then.” He added, “Two tickets.” Never miss a chance to mislead, he thought. Couples are less suspicious than lone men.