August 20, 2011 · The Taiga, Eastern Siberia · 04:30 hrs
He left before dawn.
The village was still — the specific stillness of a settlement that operated on natural light and therefore went dark and went silent when the light went and did not resume until the light returned. Twelve cabins in the pre-dawn dark, smoke rising from their chimneys in the windless cold, the smell of wood fire and the taiga's specific resinous quality and the river somewhere below in the dark, running its own business.
Baba Anya was on her doorstep. He had not told her he was leaving before dawn. She was there anyway.
She was wearing her coat and a headscarf and holding nothing. She watched him come down the cabin's steps with the expression of a woman who had been expecting this and had gotten up to see it rather than sleeping through it.
He stopped in front of her.
"I have nothing to give you," he said. "What you spent on this—" He paused. He did not have an adequate vocabulary for what eleven days of her attention and her fire and her broth had cost, not in rubles, not in any currency. "I owe you something I can't repay."
She reached up and put her hand on his cheek. The hand of a woman who had been working in cold and heat for seventy-four years — calloused and specific and entirely certain of its gesture, the way hands are when they have spent a lifetime making contact with things that mattered and had learned to distinguish between things that mattered and things that didn't.
"Live, synok," she said. "That is payment."
He looked at her for a moment. He thought about Jessica — about the specific quality of women who saw people rather than functions, who offered their attention and their care without the transactional framework that every other relationship in his professional life operated inside. He thought about the garden in Cambridge and the wet grass and the dragonfly and a woman who had sat beside a two-year-old she had just met because the two-year-old was interesting and the wet grass didn't matter.
He placed his hand briefly over hers on his cheek. Then he turned and walked into the taiga.
He walked half a kilometre into the trees before he stopped.
The ground under the largest spruce was frozen to a depth of thirty centimetres — he assessed this from the surface texture and the sound of his boot on the ground, adjusted his estimate upward by ten centimetres for the cold snap of the past two days, and used the camp tool from the chest to break through the frost layer and dig. The work was physical and took twenty minutes and he did it with the methodical patience of someone performing a necessary task rather than a symbolic one, because it was both.
In the hole, he placed:
The MP7. The magazine pouches. The tactical harness. The sub-vocal comms unit. The CIA-issue operational credential — the laminated card that said VALKYRIE in the classification architecture that linked to Simmons' section of the SAC, the card that was the physical proof of a contract he had signed in black ink in January and that was now void in every sense that mattered. He placed these things in the hole with the same attention he had given to the dead in the Kill House in 2006 — not indifference, not ceremony, but the specific acknowledgment of things that had served their purpose and were being released from it.
He kept the P226. He kept the combat knife. He kept the currency and the passport.
And the locket. The locket was not a question. The locket had been at his chest since the night Sister Agnes found a basket at the gate of St. Agnes's Home for Children in Cambridge in February 1984, and it had been at his chest through Catterick and the Nursery and the Kill House and Harvardville and Dveri and the Siberian train and the Amur River at night in a blizzard, and it was at his chest now, and it would be there when whatever came next came next. Some things were not subject to the categories of kept and discarded. Some things simply were, in the way that the things that had always been there simply were.
He shoveled the dirt back into the hole and packed the surface with the frozen ground material he had cleared and scattered the spruce needles back across the disturbed earth. In six hours it would be invisible. In six days it would be gone entirely under fresh snow.
Alen Richard had died in the river.
Valkyrie had died in the taiga.
He turned west and walked.
The rail line was six kilometres from Vostok's western edge — a freight corridor that did not appear on the standard maps because the standard maps were not built for people moving through this terrain, but that appeared in the KGB infrastructure files that Section Q had handed Alen three years ago as operational reference material, and that he had committed to memory with the same completeness he committed everything he might someday need to memory. He reached the line in ninety minutes, moving through the taiga at the pace of someone who knew the terrain well enough to trust it and was not carrying more weight than he needed.
He waited at the curve where the gradient forced the freight trains to reduce speed. He waited for forty minutes in the cold, without discomfort, in the specific patient stillness of someone who had been taught to wait correctly and had been practicing for nine years. The lumber transport came at 07:15, moving at the reduced speed of a train managing the gradient — not slow enough to board without effort, but slow enough that a man who had been doing this calculation could do it.
He ran. He matched the train's speed in eight strides. He caught the boxcar's exterior mounting with both hands and pulled himself up and in with the economy of someone for whom this was a practised motion and whose biology was, after eleven days of repair, running at full capacity.
He landed in the open boxcar on a bed of sawdust and lumber offcuts, rolling to a sitting position against the car's interior wall, and pulled the oversized coat around him.
The taiga moved past the boxcar's open door. Trees and more trees — the specific, inexhaustible repetition of a landscape that did not make accommodations for the human need for variety. He watched it and breathed the cold air of it and let the rhythm of the rails do what the rhythm of rails does, which is create the illusion of progress.
By noon he had reached the outskirts of a city large enough to have a bus terminal. He left the train at a junction slow-down and walked to the terminal and took a coach to Moscow, sitting in the back with the posture of a tired man and a fur hat pulled low, watching the geography transition from taiga to the incremental sprawl of a civilization that had been expanding into this terrain for centuries and had never quite finished the job.
In Moscow, he did not go to the center. He went to the Sokol district, to a specific address on a specific street that a Section Q briefing document had mentioned once in three years, in a context that suggested it was the kind of address that provided the kind of services that people in Alen's current situation required. A broker. Clean travel. Cash transactions, no documentation trail.
The broker was a man in his sixties who had been doing this since the late Soviet period and who looked at John Kane's passport with the professional scrutiny of someone whose reputation depended on the quality of his assessment and whose continued operation depended on the discretion of his clients. He found nothing wrong with the passport because there was nothing wrong with the passport. He sold Alen a London Heathrow flight departing the following morning for eight hundred American dollars in cash.
In the broker's bathroom, Alen shaved eleven days of beard with a cheap disposable razor and cut his own hair with the broker's scissors, producing a result that was functional rather than elegant and that changed his facial presentation enough to matter. He put on the wire-rimmed glasses that had been in the waterproof pouch since 2008.
In the bathroom mirror: not Alen Richard. Not Valkyrie. A tired Canadian architect with a failing business venture and a Heathrow flight, going home because there was no longer anything to stay for.
He moved through Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport with the specific quality of someone who had been doing this for nine years and who knew that the difference between a man who moved through airports invisibly and a man who did not was not the quality of his documents but the quality of his presence — the ability to occupy public space with the behavioral signature of someone who had every right to be there and no particular reason to be noticed being there. He did not look at the cameras. He did not tense at the security screening. He waited in the boarding queue with the mild, faintly resigned expression of a man who had been waiting in boarding queues for years and had developed a philosophical relationship with the experience.
He boarded. He found his seat. He put his bag in the overhead and sat down and looked at the headrest in front of him.
He was going home.
∗ ∗ ∗