black and as thin as dental floss, made from a polyethylene fiber called Spectra. You could get fishing line made from the same thing. It was low-stretch and had high tensile strength. And you wouldn’t spot it in the dark unless you had a flashlight and knew where to look. He’d probably strung the filament around at least part of the perimeter, from tree trunk to tree trunk, rigged up to a microswitch to set off the beams. A low-tech motion detector.
So was he here, or not? Was he waiting for me to get up so he could take aim?
I listened for footsteps, for the scuff of shoes on dirt or gravel.
Nothing.
After two minutes, the spotlights went off and everything was black.
No shot was fired. No crack of twigs. Just the ambient noise of the forest: the rustle of leaves in the wind, the distant chirruping of a nocturnal bird, the skittering of a ground squirrel or a chipmunk.
The vent pipe was roughly a hundred feet from me. Would she hear me if I spoke into it?
Then I realized what a mistake that would be. If Zhukov was hiding in the house, monitoring Alexa over a remote connection, then whatever she heard he’d hear too.
Of course, if he was in the house, it was only a matter of time before he saw me.
So I had to take him out first.
Holster the weapon? Or keep it handy? I needed both hands. Jamming it into the holster, I rolled and spun into a crouch. Sprang to my feet.
And started toward the house.
97.
But I didn’t run.
I didn’t want to trip another wire. As I walked, I looked around for fence posts, stakes, anything a wire might be strung around.
Maybe I was walking right into a trap. Maybe he was waiting for me in the dark with a high-powered rifle.
Around to the side, past a set of wooden bulkhead doors, the wooden frame rotting, the paint blistering and peeling. No padlock.
Enter the basement? No. Maybe it wasn’t a basement but a root cellar: dirt floor, accessible only from the outside, no internal door to the upstairs.
On this side of the house was a door, behind a screen with a large hole in it. But I kept going around to the front. Past an oval of bare earth where cars probably parked and turned around. No vehicles there, though. None in the front of the house either.
He couldn’t be inside, or I’d be dead by now.
But what if Zhukov had simply abandoned the farmhouse? After all, he knew from Navrozov’s cutout that he was being actively hunted. Why stay here? Leave his victim in the ground, let her die.
A path had been worn across a scrubby lawn to the front door, though how recently it was impossible to say. I detected no movement in any of the windows, so I pulled open the screen door and tried the front door.
It came right open.
Someone had been here very recently.
98.
The smell of food that had been cooked not long ago: maybe sausage or eggs, something fried in grease.
A small entryway, low ceilings, a musty odor under the cooking grease. Cigarettes too, though fainter here, as if he smoked in another part of the house. I moved stealthily, the SIG in a two-handed grip, pivoted abruptly to my left, weapon pointed, ready to fire. Then to my right.
Nothing. The floorboards creaked.
Now I faced a choice. There were three ways to go. A doorway on my right led to a small front room. On my left was a steep staircase, the wooden treads worn and bowed. Straight ahead was another doorway, which I guessed led to a kitchen and the back of the house.
The stairwell was a potential hiding place. I listened closely, heard nothing.
I pivoted again, tracing an arc right to left. Then I lunged toward the dark stairwell.
I said, “Freeze.”
No response.
And then I heard a voice.
Not from upstairs, though. From the back of the house. A woman’s voice, muffled, indistinct, its cadence irregular, the tone rising and falling.
A TV had been left on.
I stepped through the threshold, searching the dim corners, my body a coiled spring. My finger caressed the trigger. I scanned the room, slicing with the pistol left to right, then toward the corners.
The kitchen was windowless, carved out of an interior space, an afterthought. The floor was dark red linoleum, a swirly white pattern running through it, the tiles chipped and cracked. An old white GE stove, vintage 1940 or so. A Formica counter