Chapter 15
On Monday morning Magda drove a new olive green Subaru Outback to pick up Mikhail at his apartment.
She had chosen him because he had struck her as capable and had a serious demeanor.
When Mikhail had put his suitcase in the cargo bay, she said, “You drive. Take us to pick up one of the others.” He drove to pick up Maxim, whose tone had made her worry that he might be overconfident.
He drove to pick up Dmitri, the youngest and most cheerful, and parked the car at the bar.
She got into another car, a new blue Ford Explorer, and had Dmitri drive her to pick up Daniil.
She was gaining a sense of which of these men were closer friends, which of them were the best drivers, as well as learning bits of random information about them from listening to their talk and looking at their apartments and the surrounding neighborhoods.
“We’re going in two cars?” Maxim asked.
They all nodded or mumbled affirmatively.
“Anybody who doesn’t feel fit to drive right now?”
Nobody spoke up. They all finished their drinks, visited the restrooms, and went outside to the cars and headed for the Massachusetts Turnpike. The drive started with an hour of slow traffic caused by several stretches where crews had closed down lanes to repair the pavement.
She talked to the men while they were trapped in the car. “Who is the best marksman? What if we needed to take out someone at a distance? Who should do it?”
“Daniil,” Maxim said. “He was an army sniper.”
“Before they threw him out,” said Dmitri.
Magda said, “How about with a pistol? Who is the best?”
Maxim said, “I am.”
“No,” Dmitri said. “I’m better than you.”
“Why?” said Magda. “What makes you better?”
“Ten bullets in the center circle.”
“And you?” she asked Maxim.
“Two bullets in the enemy’s head.”
“Who is an enemy?”
“Whoever I kill.”
“Good. Just remember what we’re doing. Don’t shoot the wrong person,” she said. “If you kill the woman we’re after, aim the next round through your own head and save Mr. Obolonsky the trouble.”
The method of travel that Magda had adopted worked well.
It allowed her to mix up the occupants of each car, including herself, so she spent half the day with each of her men, getting used to them and learning more about them with each hour.
As the cars sped across the two states, she became satisfied that she had made good choices.
They were genuine vors, men who had done little in their lives that was legal.
They talked enough like Americans to be Americans.
Each of them looked like a man who was on his way home from some dull low-paying job to face a complaining wife and a couple of smart-mouthed kids. She felt better as the day passed.
With the rest stops and driver replacements, the trip took nearly ten hours.
It was after 1:00 A.M. when they left the New York State Thruway on Exit 50, outside Buffalo.
She sent a map from her phone to her men’s phones showing the way to a park along the Niagara River where there was an entrance road that led through a grove of old trees, turned and skirted some low, gentle hills, and led to a picnic area that was not visible from the main road.
They pulled onto the narrow drive into the park and turned off their lights, stopped at the picnic grove, and got out of the cars.
Magda opened the back of the Subaru. “We’re going to want to be hard to see in the dark.
Maxim and Dmitri, put on darker shirts.” She pushed aside a couple of suitcases, and then opened a carrying case.
She used the light of her phone screen to show the men what was in it.
“There’s a Glock 17 pistol and three loaded magazines for each of you. ”
She opened the back of the Ford so the other two could reach their pistols and ammunition.
She said, “There are New York license plates under the back rug. Now that we’re off the toll roads it’s time to take the Massachusetts plates off and put those on.
Then get back in the cars. I’ll drive this one to the house where we caught her last time.
Daniil, drive the other car. Follow me, but stay at least two hundred feet behind. ”
As she was driving, she kept the phone line open on speaker. “Remember, we want her alive. If she’s there, we take her now. Don’t kill her, but beyond that, there are no rules.”
Magda drove into the small town farther north along the Niagara River.
Inland beyond the park they passed a complex of grassy athletic fields, then parking lots and a high school.
She remembered this stretch of the trip.
It had been about this time of the night when she had come to this house before.
She remembered checking out of the hotel near the airport at midnight and getting into the big SUV.
She and Mr. Porchen and Albert McKeith and the two vors had driven to this town, come down this street, three or four blocks in from the river, and stopped near the house.
Albert was a very young man who didn’t know anything at all about the Bratva, or speak any Russian.
Magda had become comfortable with American men because she had spent a year sleeping with them to repay the cost of her immigration to America.
Albert had turned up because he had killed his girlfriend’s lover in front of the girlfriend.
She had testified against him, but he had been acquitted for some reason.
Through an intermediary Albert had asked Mr. Porchen to help find the girlfriend so he could kill her.
When Mr. Porchen had heard that the girlfriend had been helped to disappear by a tall, thin woman with black hair, Mr. Porchen had realized that he might be talking about the woman who had made people vanish.
Albert was weak-minded, he was lazy, he could not be trusted, but he was beautiful—young, with long, thin arms and legs, a flat stomach, and big, liquid blue eyes.
She had taken him as a temporary companion for that trip.
What made her nervous was that this had put her in the position of having to control him, explain him to the others, and be accountable to Mr. Porchen for him.
That night as they came to this very spot, passing under the blinking red light by the elementary school, Albert had guided the group to this valuable woman’s house.
Magda had kept wondering, would he turn out to only think he knew the address?
He had never been there. He had directions from a friend of his who had.
If Albert had lied, or appeared to have lied, would Mr. Porchen only kill him, or kill her too? But Albert had not lied that time.
She said into her phone to the men in the car behind, “We’re only two of these short blocks from the house now. I’ll show you the place, and then I’m going to park a block away. You turn at the corner after the house and park on a cross street.” She opened the windows in the SUV.
As she drove, she let the car idle, coasting down the very gradual incline.
It was a warm, still night, and she would pause at each intersection, and then drift into the center of it and look up and down the cross streets to see if there were any headlights or any silhouettes of parked cars with gear on the roofs or any faint glow from instruments on a dashboard.
In small American towns like this one, most of the traffic late at night was on the big highways.
The narrow residential streets were dark and empty after midnight.
She pulled the car up along the curb, pointed across the street, and said, “That’s it, the third house from the corner with the two big trees in front.”
Maxim and Dmitri looked at it. “She picked a good place to hide,” Maxim said. “Not new, not big, not fancy, one of about twenty right around here nearly the same style.”
“There are more like this all over town,” Magda said. “She’s good at not standing out. Mr. Porchen said what she does isn’t just to pretend she’s not the woman you’re hunting for. She makes up a whole new person, and becomes her. Do you understand?”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
Dmitri said, “Not looking like you’re a thief isn’t enough. You have to seem to be an electrical contractor or something.”
They saw the other two men, Daniil and Mikhail, approaching on the sidewalk. Magda said, “Here come the others. Time to get started.”
They got out, closed the car doors as quietly as they could, and walked across the street to the house. Magda stepped back and let her four men circle the building.
Outside the house she saw a dog bowl with water in it, a couple of tennis balls, and a rubber bone that had been chewed on.
She looked around the section of the back lawn.
There had been no dog here the last time.
She saw the garbage bins—green, blue, black—at the back of the house.
She opened the green, and could smell the cut grass inside.
She closed it and opened the black can, and tapped her phone’s screen for light.
There were a few little green bags that Americans used to pick up and throw away dog feces, all of them tied with the same simple knot.
But there was no smell. There was also a big black garbage bag with the top knotted, but that didn’t smell rotten, like garbage, either.
She whispered to Mikhail, “There’s no dog here. Get started.”
Mikhail knelt at the back door and fiddled with his pick and tension wrench in the lock and then turned the knob. Magda nodded at Daniil and he drew his pistol and stepped into the kitchen.