Chapter 36
Jane spent time online. She had finally found a way of separating the one Obolonsky who mattered to her from all the other Obolonskys in the Boston area.
He was the one who lived at the address on Grove Street.
She learned his first name was Pavel. She ran several searches for him, and finally found a photograph.
His picture taken at some charity event showed he was about fifty years old with a slightly receding hairline and a face that struck her as so untroubled and relaxed that he seemed almost featureless.
She found another picture of him as a member of a business group, identified as an investor and entrepreneur.
She studied his pictures until she was sure she would recognize him if she saw him.
Then she studied the pictures she had taken of the big house and its grounds, expanding the images and looking for its defenses and vulnerabilities.
Jane stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tied her hair in a tight bun.
She put on the black clothes, and then slid one knife into her left-side pants pocket and the other into her right.
She put the Glock into the inner left-side jacket pocket and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door to be sure the jacket hung naturally and hid the pistol.
When she walked across the lobby, she placed herself among a group of people who were going out the front entrance to ask the parking attendant to bring their cars.
As they lined up along the street to wait, Jane separated herself from them and walked down the street toward the side street where she’d left her rental car.
She looked at her car’s dashboard clock. It was after ten. She drove to the space where she had stopped early in the day and parked at the side of the road. She sat in her dark car, watched the gate and the lighted windows in her mirrors, and waited.
As she sat in the dark, she thought about the old people, the ancestors.
There was always war or the possibility of it.
Warriors would appear out of the forest, some of them from far away—Hurons and Ojibways from the western Great Lakes, Cherokees and Catawbas from as far south as what would later become Georgia—kill a few people and disappear again.
Or they did what she was doing now. They would go out in parties as large as a thousand, as small as three, or even one man, and make their way to the villages of enemies, either to strike to prevent an attack or to exact a price for past battles.
Sometimes they would be out for as long as two years at a time. Jane waited two hours.
In her rearview mirror she saw first one car, and then a second car, drive out of the gate.
She leaned to the right so she would not be visible, pulled out her pistol, listened for the approaching cars, and watched the car ceiling for moving light, but neither came.
The cars were both moving away from her. She put the pistol back in her jacket.
She got out of her car and walked along the perimeter of the property, going slowly with her left shoulder almost touching the wall so she would not be visible to the security cameras she had noticed on the eaves of the house and would not trigger any motion detectors she hadn’t seen.
When she reached the corner of the wall she put on the balaclava and thin leather gloves, hoisted herself up and over, then took two steps to crouch behind some thick rose bushes and became motionless.
She listened and watched the house for any sign that her presence had been detected.
The lights were still on, and she could see a man who looked like the pictures of Pavel Obolonsky sitting at a dining room table across from Maxim smoking a cigarette and talking.
If he had been aware that an enemy was in his side yard, he would have been worried about a rifle shot.
If he had been aware that the woman he had been planning to kidnap and torment was in his side yard, he would have been making arrangements to have men come and surround the property, then move in and capture her.
That thought made Jane look in every direction to be sure that was not happening.
She leaned her back against the wall, and returned her attention to watching the two men in the dining room.
She could see that they were drinking. There was a bottle on the table that contained a clear liquid, and as they talked, they kept refilling glasses that were wider and deeper than shot glasses.
She was delighted. Alcohol would dull their senses, make them slow to make decisions, and if they kept it up, make them likely to sleep deeply for the first hours of the night.
Jane waited. It took only about ten minutes for a drink to start to affect a person, and about an hour to reach its full effect.
She would see when that happened if they stayed in front of the window.
After a few minutes it crossed her mind that if she had come to murder them, she could probably have simply walked along the house to the window and shot them both with her pistol. Her plan was different.
She waited and watched. Finally, a few minutes after 1:00 A.M., Obolonsky stood up, screwed the cap onto the bottle, set it on a sideboard with others, and walked out of the room. Maxim stood up and carried the glasses into an area near the back of the house that had to be the kitchen.
She saw the lights turn on in a series of windows that traced Obolonsky’s progress up the stairs to the second floor.
Then there was a light on in an upstairs bedroom, and a light in a window that was translucent rather than clear and so was a bathroom.
After a time, that one went out, and then the bedroom light.
She checked the time on her watch: 1:37 A.M.
After that she saw the light on the staircase go out, and then a light go on in a window on the first floor, and go out a few minutes later. Apparently Obolonsky had Maxim sleeping on the first floor to be his watchdog.
She gave them time to get settled and fall asleep.
One hour later, at 2:37, she walked toward the house.
She went around it to the kitchen door and looked in the windows for alarm keypads, but saw none.
She used one of the switchblade knives to cut away the dried and hardened putty around the glass pane closest to the doorknob and then to pry it out of place.
She set it down beside the steps, reached inside, felt for the deadbolt and disengaged it, turned the knob lock and then the knob, and entered.
She could hear the faint whisper of a central air-conditioning unit, and then she separated that sound from the quieter sound of the refrigerator.
Jane made her way deeper into the house, keeping her steps small and tentative. This was a practically new house, but sometimes a new house would settle in the first years, so she walked slowly and with care to make her progress silent.
She identified the room where Maxim was sleeping by the sound of his snoring.
It was the first door in a hallway near the front of the house, probably so he could control the entrance and stairs.
She was worried about getting up the stairs without waking him, but she had no other way, so she kept moving to the staircase.
In a moment she was climbing the stairs with her eyes on the hallway where Maxim would appear if she woke him. She would take a few stairs and then stop and wait for long enough so a sleeper’s mind would not connect two faint sounds into a pattern and wake.
She reached the top of the staircase and stood still.
The second floor was silent except for the slightly closer hum of the air-conditioning system.
She remained motionless while she looked back at the bottom of the stairs and the mouth of the first-floor hallway.
There was still no sign that Maxim was awake.
Jane concentrated on the second floor. There was a big window at the far end of the hall, and it admitted the dim light of the moon.
The hallway consisted of a row of doors on either side of the long hardwood floor.
It was very good news to Jane that down the center of the hall floor was a long, narrow rug that would absorb sound.
There seemed to be eight bedrooms along the hall to the left side of the staircase, and a single set of double doors to the right.
Those doors would be the master bedroom.
She moved toward the doors, taking small steps.
When she reached the double doors, she found they were locked.
She had a few cards in her pocket in the name of Denise Hutchens so she could return her rental car and pay for it.
She selected one by feel. It had to be thin enough to slide between a pair of well-fitted doors, bendable enough to get into the depression behind the strike plate, but thick enough to push the latch bolt aside.
She picked one, slid it in, bent it with her thumb and forefinger while she pushed, and opened the door on the right, crouched low, and stepped in.
She closed the door with extreme care, knelt and listened, letting her eyes adjust to the deep darkness.
After a few seconds she heard the slow, heavy breathing of the sleeping man.
She counted to two hundred, then began to crawl toward the sound.
As she crawled, she got a sense of the size and shape of the space she was in.
This was the bedroom proper, just a large bed, a table and chairs, and a chaise longue that felt like part of the same set.
To her left was an open walk-in closet the size of a second bedroom.
Beyond that was the open door to the bathroom.
To her right was another big open space, but she could not see well enough to determine anything else about it.
When Jane reached the bed, she could hear that the man was breathing with a slight snore. She pulled the pistol out of her jacket, pointed it toward the bed, and reached up to the lamp beside the bed and switched on the light.
The man in the bed was Pavel Obolonsky. His eyes opened in alarm and he raised his head, squinting and blinking. “Maxim? Is something—”
“Put your hands on the bedspread where I can see them,” Jane said. “Do not reach for anything, or raise your voice, or you are going to die.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the one you sent the woman and her crew to kidnap,” Jane said. “I came to tell you that she and the others are dead.”
“I guessed that,” Obolonsky said. “You wasted your trip. Or maybe not. If you’re ready to make an agreement with me, I can pay you a percentage of the money I get for each of the people that you’ve hidden.
We’ll take them one at a time, so it’s easy, quiet, and efficient.
If anything goes wrong when we take one of them, we can wait for a while before we go out to get the next one. ”
“I came for a different kind of deal.”
“Tell me.”
“I came here to show you that I can find you and get to you any time I want to. I want you to think about that. I want you to understand that you are not to bother me again. Don’t send any more people, don’t do anything else.
If you do, make sure that you have your funeral planned and paid for in advance.
The last man I said that to was a big boss too, but he was wise enough to do what I asked.
He lived for years and died of old age.” She saw his eyes shift slightly away from her eyes and back.
Had he focused on something behind her for a second?
His face changed and looked cold and angry. “Don’t you have any idea who you’re talking to?” He used one hand to brush back his hair in a gesture of frustration, but Jane saw the movement was a distraction from the other hand sliding under the covers.
“Don’t!” she said, but he was committed and moving quickly.
She saw a section of the bedcovers rising, and fired her pistol at his chest. The gun he held under the covers went off and puffed the covers toward her as a hole appeared in the bedspread where he’d fired through it. She placed her second shot through his forehead, ducked, and spun around.
She saw Maxim in mid-charge and she fired three rapid shots into his torso as he dived toward her.
He flopped on the floor five feet short and lay still.
She fired once more into the back of his head and stepped past him through the double doors into the hallway.
She closed the double doors and went down the stairs and out the kitchen door.
She drove back to her hotel, showered, put on fresh clothes, stuffed everything she had worn or used into a plastic bag inside her suitcase, left a large cash tip for the hotel maid, and used the automatic service on the television set to check out of the hotel.
She went out, walked down the street to the side street where she’d left her rental car, and began the long night drive toward Springfield.
She was sure that the rental car lot would be open by the time she got there, and she would clean the prints and DNA from this one and turn it in, and then pick up her own car and head for Lowery, Pennsylvania.
Jane got out of the Volvo, opened the gate, pulled in, and closed it again, and then drove up the long farm road to the barn and parked inside. As she came out and headed for the house, the back door opened and her family poured out and met her. Carey hugged her. “Why didn’t you call us?”
Jane said, “This time I thought I’d surprise you.”
They walked to the back porch of the house, where Katie was standing holding May. Jane stepped up and put her arms around both of them and kissed them both. Katie handed May to Jane. Jane spoke a couple of sentences to her in Nundawaono.
Carey said, “Have you got luggage to bring in?”
“One suitcase, and it’s practically empty. Might as well bring it in, though, because we’ll need to start packing again tomorrow.”
Carey looked at her. “Where are we going?”
“Home.”