“So, you will transform this country to the Old West, eh?” The interstate was about two miles off. The trucks were passing by swiftly, their trailers lit in amber lights. There would be intercity buses, too, similarly lit, he hoped.
“That’s one of the things we’re going to do.”
“And you’ll carry your pistol everywhere?”
“Revolver, Dmitriy,” Foster corrected. “But, yeah. I’ll be like the guys I’ve read about, living out here in harmony with nature. Maybe find me a woman who thinks like I do, maybe build me a nice cabin in the mountains, like Jeremiah Johnson did-but no Crow Indians to worry me there,” he added with a chuckle.
“Foster?”
He turned. “Yeah?”
“Your pistol, may I hold it?” the Russian asked, praying for the correct response.
He got it. “Sure.” He drew it and passed it across, muzzle up for safety.
Popov felt the weight and the balance. “It is loaded?”
“Nothing much more useless than a handgun that ain’t loaded. Hell, you want to shoot it? Just cock the hammer back and let go, but you want to make sure your horse is reined in tight, okay? Jeremiah here’s used to the noise. That mare might not be.”
“I see.” Popov took the reins in his left hand to keep Buttermilk in check. Next he extended his right hand and cocked the hammer on the Colt, heard the distinctive triple click of this particular type of revolver, and took aim at a wooden surveyor’s stake and pulled the trigger. It broke cleanly at about five pounds.
Buttermilk jumped slightly with the noise, so close to her sensitive ears, but the horse didn’t react all that badly. And the bullet, Popov saw, grazed the two-inch stake, six meters or so away. So, he still knew how to shoot.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Hunnicutt asked. “If you ask me, the SingleAction Army’s got the best balance of any handgun ever made.”
“Yes,” Popov agreed, “it is very nice.” Then he turned. Foster Hunnicutt was seated on his stallion, Jeremiah, not three meters away. That made it easy. The former KGB officer cocked the hammer again, turned and aimed right at the center of his chest, and pulled the trigger before the hunter could even be surprised by the action. His target’s eyes widened, either from his unbelieving recognition of the impossible thing that was happening or from the impact of the heavy bullet, but what it was didn’t matter. The bullet went straight through his heart. The body of the hunter stayed erect in the saddle for a few seconds, the eyes still wide with shock, then it fell lifelessly backward away from Popov and onto the grassland.
Dmitriy dismounted and took the three steps to the body to make sure that Hunnicutt was dead. Then he unsaddled Jeremiah, who took the death of his owner phlegmatically, and removed the bridle, too, surprised that the animal didn’t bite him for what he’d just done, but a horse wasn’t a dog. With that done, he smacked the stallion heavily on the rump, and it trotted off for fifty meters or so, then stopped and started grazing.
Popov remounted Buttermilk and clucked her to a northerly direction. He looked back,saw the lit windows of the Project building complex, and wondered if he or Hunnicutt would be missed. Probably not, he judged, as the interstate highway grew closer. There was supposed to be that little village to the west, but he decided that his best chance was the bus stop hut, or perhaps thumbing a ride on a car or truck. What he’d do after that, he wasn’t sure, but he knew he had to get the hell away from this place, just as fast and as far as he could manage. Popov was not a man who believed in God. His education and his upbringing had not aimed him in that direction, and so for him “god” was only the first part of “goddamned.” But he’d learned something important today. He might never know if there was a God, but there were surely devilsand he had worked for them, and the horror of that was like nothing he’d ever known as a young colonel of the KGB.
CHAPTER 36
FLIGHTS OF NECESSITY
The fear was as bad as the horror. Popov had never experienced a really frightening time as a field-intelligence officer. There had always been tension, especially at the beginning of his career, but he’d quickly grown confident in his fieldcraft, and the skills had become for him a kind of security blanket, whose warm folds had always made his soul comfortable. But not today.
Now he was in a foreign place. Not merely a foreign land, for he was a man of cities. In any such place he knew how to disappear in minutes, to vanish so completely that scarcely any police force in the world could find him. But this wasn’t a city. He dismounted Buttermilk a hundred meters from the bus hut, and again he took the time to remove the saddle and bridle, because a saddled, riderless horse was sure to attract notice, but a horse merely walking about on its own probably would not, not here, where many people kept such animals for their pleasure. Then it was just a matter of easing his way through the barbedwire fence and walking to the bus hut, which, he found. wasempty. There was no schedule on the blank, whitepainted walls. It was the simplest of structures, seemingly made of poured concrete, with a thick roof to stand up against the heavy winter snows, and perhaps survive the tornadoes that he’d heard about but never experienced. The bench was also made of concrete, and he sat on it briefly to work on making his shakes go away. He’d never felt like this in his life. The fear-if these people were willing to kill millionsbillions-of people, surely they would not hesitate as long as a blink to end his solitary life. He had to get away.
Ten minutes after arriving at the hut, he checked his watch and wondered if there were any buses at this hour. If not, well, there were cars and trucks, and perhaps
He walked to the shoulder and held up his hand. Cars were passing by at over a hundred thirty kilometers per hour, which left them little time to see him in the darkness, much less brake to stop. But after fifteen minutes, a creamcolored Ford pickup truck eased over to the side of the road.
“Where you headin’, buddy?” the driver asked. He looked to be a farmer, perhaps sixty years of age, his face and neck scoredby lines from too many afternoon suns.
“The airport in the next town. Can yoga take me there?” Dmitriy said, getting in. The driver wasn’t wearing a seat belt, which was probably against the law, but, then, so was coldblooded murder, and for that reason alone he had to get the hell away from this place.
“Sure, I have to get off at that exit anyway. What’s your name?”
“Joe-Joseph,” Popov said.
“Well, I’m Pete. You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Not originally. England, actually,” Dmitriy went on, trying that accent on for size.
“Oh, yeah? What brings you here?”
“Business.”
“What kind?” Pete asked.
“I am a consultant, kind of a go-between.”
“So, how’d you get stuck out here, Joe?” the driver asked.
What was the matter with this man? Was he a police officer? He asked questions like someone from the Second Chief Directorate. “My, ah, friend, had a family emergency, and he had to drop me off there to wait for a bus.”
“Oh.” And that shut him up, Popov saw,blessing his most recent lie. You see, I just shot and killed someone who wanted to kill you and everyone you know . . . It was one of those times when the truth simply didn’t work for him or for anyone else. His mind was going at a very rapid speed, faster by a considerable margin than this damned pickup truck, whose driver seemed unwilling to push the pedal much harder, every other vehicle on the road whizzing past. The farmer was an elderly man and evidently a patient one. Had Popov been driving, he’d soon establish how fast this damned truck could go. But for all that, it was only ten minutes to the green exit sign with the silhouette of an airplane tacked onto one side. He tried not to pound his fist on the armrest as the driver slowly took the exit, then a right turn to what looked like a small regional airport. In another minute, Pete took him to the US Air Express door.
“Thank you, sir,” Popov said, as he left.
“Have a good trip, Joe,” the driver said, with a friendly Kansas smile.
Popov walked rapidly into the diminutive terminal, and then to the desk, only twenty meters inside.
“I need to get to New York,” Popov told the clerk. “First class, if possible. told the clerk. “First class, if possible.”