Free Patriot Acts by Greg Rucka Page B

left it at that.
             
    The last operation was performed that March, five months after we’d fled the States, and it was a shorter procedure than the second, and at the end of it Frau Doktor Akrman declared it a success. Alena was discharged from the clinic eight days later, and we made our way back to Georgia by roundabout route over the next three days. She was on crutches, and despite the Frau Doktor’s optimism, we both knew it would be a while before she could move about reliably on her own.
    Vadim had located a new house for us outside the city of Batumi—the fifth we’d stayed in since fleeing the U.S.—down in the south along the Black Sea coast. It was easy to find places on the coast to rent or buy, and the Georgian economy being what it was, a little of Alena’s money went a very long way. Most of the dachas the Party bigwigs once used were uninhabited or had been converted to summer rentals, and if we were willing to pay in cash—and we always were—almost anything we needed could be obtained in relatively short order, from vehicles to accommodations to weapons.
    The house was larger and more ostentatious than I would have chosen if I’d made the pick myself, with too much space for only three people and a dog. The last of the Georgian winter was still with us, and keeping the house warm was a nightmare. Vadim acknowledged all of these faults, but then justified the choice by telling us that there was an indoor pool, and that it was heated.
    I was growing very fond of Vadim.
    Alena and I made the first, stuttering attempts at resuming our respective training regimens. We swam a lot, slowly resumed our routine of morning yoga. Alena still couldn’t incorporate ballet into her workout, but she took great glee in watching me attempt it, and never failed to find something wrong with the way I was moving, with a
jeté
here, an
entrechat quatre
there. I didn’t mind; I enjoyed my feeble attempts at dance, the way it focused my mind inward, honed my awareness of my own body.
    We brought up a physical therapist from Batumi three times a week to work with Alena. He worked with her in the pool, mostly, and with weights, sometimes, and after watching them together during the first half-dozen or so of their sessions, I left them alone. Vadim tailed him the first four times the therapist left the house, and his assessment was, and I agreed with him, that if this guy was going to try and kill any of us, it wouldn’t be because he was working for someone who wanted him to do it.

    Twice since the year turned Dan had contacted us via e-mail sent from anonymous accounts. There had been no sign of Illya, and in February, Dan offered the theory that whoever he’d been working for had tied up that particular loose end with a hollow-point to the base of the skull. Alena was inclined to agree. I wasn’t so certain.
    In early April, we received a third e-mail, and in it Dan asked if we could perhaps do without Vadim, that he had work for him back in Brooklyn.
    “He’s missing him,” Alena confided to me while watching my attempts at dance the following morning. “So he says he has work, because Dan doesn’t want us to think he is weak.”
    “He misses his son. How is that weak?”
    “He believes admitting such things makes one vulnerable. It can be exploited.”
    I thought about what Natalie had said to me six months earlier in the kitchen of the house in Cold Spring, and what I’d said to her in return. Her words had seemed so saccharine and manipulative at the time, an attempt by her to convince me to stay, and I’d resented her like hell for making something that was already difficult all the harder.
    At night, when I closed my eyes, I still saw her on her autumnal bed. It didn’t help things that the last words I’d exchanged with her had been bitter and spiteful ones.
    “It can,” I said, and left it at that.
             
    At the end of April we moved to a smaller house outside the