Legends

“He was waving a red flag in front of my face, Martin. He was drawing my attention to something that was compatible with a lethal injection using a very thin needle. Kastner used to tell me about things like that—he said lethal injections were the KGB’s favorite method of assassination. In his day the KGB’s hit men favored a tasteless rat poison that thinned out the blood so much your pulse disappeared and you eventually stopped breathing. Kastner had heard they were working on more sophisticated substances that couldn’t be easily traced—he told me they had developed a clotting agent that could block a coronary artery and trigger myocardial infarction. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice Kiick’s reference to the insect bite.”

“I noticed.”

“And?”

“Kiick’s the guy who suggested your father hire me to find Samat. Kiick spent the better part of his FBI career in counterterrorism. He crossed paths with the Company’s Deputy Director of Operations, Crystal Quest—”

“The one you called Fred when you first spoke to Kastner.”

“You have a good memory for things beside KGB jokes. Kiick must have known Fred didn’t want Samat found. And now Kiick’s waving the insect bite in front of our faces.”

Stella seemed relieved. “So you don’t think I’m raving mad?”

“You’re a lot of things. Raving mad is not one of them.”

“If I didn’t know better, I might take that for a compliment.”

“Someone else was killed around the time your father was being stung by an insect. Her name was Minh.”

Stella remembered the Israeli Shabak officer telling Martin about the Chinese girl who’d been stung to death by his bees on the roof over the pool parlor. “What does one death have to do with the other?” she asked.

“If your father was murdered, it means someone was trying to close down the search for Samat. Minh was killed tending my hives, which means she was wearing my white overalls and the pith helmet with mosquito netting hanging from it when something made the bees explode out of one of the hives.”

“From a distance she would have looked like you.” Something else occurred to her. “What about those shots when we were walking from Kiryat Arba to that sacred cave—you told me two bullets from a high-powered rifle came pretty close to you.”

“Could have been Palestinians shooting at Jews,” Martin said. He didn’t sound very convincing.

“Maybe the same people who killed Kastner and your Chinese friend Minh were shooting at you.”

“Uh-huh. The Oligarkh has a long reach. But we’ll never know for sure.

“Oh, Martin, I think I’m frightened …”

“Join the world. I’m never not frightened.”

The long shadows that materialize immediately before sunset were beginning to stretch their tentacles across the fields. Martin, following his own thoughts, said, “You’ve changed the way I look at things, Stella. I used to think I wanted to spend the rest of my life boring myself to death.”

“For someone who wanted to bore himself to death, you sure gave a good imitation of living an exhilarating life.”

“Did I?”

“Kiryat Arba, London, Prague, that Soviet island in the Aral Sea, that Lithuanian town rioting over who gets to keep the bones of some obscure saint. And then there’s the whole story of Prigorodnaia and the seven-kilometer spur that leads to it. Some boring life.”

“You left out the most exhilarating part.”

“Which is?”

“You.”

Stella pushed herself away from the tree to crouch next to him and bury her face in his neck. “Fools rush in,” she murmured, “where angels fear to tread.”

The sun had vanished behind the hills to the west and a rose-gray blush had infused the sky overhead when they spotted the headlights coming down McGuffin Ridge Road from the direction of White Creek. Martin stood up and tugged Stella to her feet. The car appeared to slow as it neared the two farm houses. It swung away from them to climb the dirt ramp leading to the barn. The figure of a man could be seen pulling open the barn doors, and closing them after he’d parked the car inside. Moments later a porch light flicked on across the road in the nearest of the two houses. The man let himself into the house. Lights appeared in the ground floor windows. Martin and Stella exchanged looks.

“I don’t want you to take any risks,” Stella said flatly. “If he’s armed, the hell with my sister’s divorce, shoot him.”

Martin smiled for the first time that day. “You sure you told jokes for the KGB? You sure you weren’t one of their wetwork specialists?”

“Wetwork?”

“Hit men. Or in your case, hit women.”

“I told killer jokes, Martin. Hey, I’m more nervous now than I was last night. Let’s get this over with.”