play with hookers, it’ll be his dick that does him in. Tough luck, bro. But he wouldn’t be the first to follow his dick into trouble, Reilly knew. He probably wouldn’t be the last, either.
So, did it all work?" Ming asked.
“Hmph?” Nomuri responded. This was strange. She was supposed to be in the afterglow period, his arm still around her, while they both smoked the usual after-sex cigarette.
“I did what you wished with my computer. Did it work?”
“I’m not sure,” Nomuri tried as a reply. “I haven’t checked.”
“I do not believe that!” Ming responded, laughing. “I have thought about this. You have made me a spy!” she said, followed by a giggle.
“I did what?”
“You want me to make my computer accessible to you, so you can read all my notes, yes?”
“Do you care?” He’d asked her that once before, and gotten the right answer. Would it be true now? She’d sure as hell seen through his cover story. Well, that was no particular surprise, was it? If she weren’t smart, she’d be useless as a penetration agent. But knowing what she was ... how patriotic was she? Had he read her character right? He didn’t let his body tense next to hers, remarkably enough. Nomuri congratulated himself for mastering another lesson in the duplicity business.
A moment’s contemplation, then: “No.”
Nomuri tried not to let his breath out in too obvious an expression of relief.
“Well, then you need not concern yourself. From now on, you will do nothing at all.”
“Except this?” she asked with yet another giggle.
“As long as I continue to please you, I suppose!”
“Master Sausage!”
“Huh?”
“Your sausage pleases me greatly,” Ming explained, resting her head on his chest.
And that, Chester Nomuri thought, was sufficient to the moment.
CHAPTER 16
The Smelting of Gold
Pavel Petrovich Gogol could believe his eyes, but only because he’d seen the whole Red Army armored corps on the move in the Western Ukraine and Poland, when he was a younger man. The tracked vehicles he saw now were even bigger and knocked down most of the trees, those that weren’t blown down by engineers with explosives. The short season didn’t allow the niceties of tree-felling and road-laying they used in the effete West. The survey team had found the source of the gold dust with surprising ease, and now a team of civil and military engineers was pushing a road to the site, slashing a path across the tundra and through the trees, dropping tons of gravel on the path which might someday be properly paved, though such roads were a problem in these weather conditions. Over the roads would come heavy mining equipment, and building materials for the workers who would soon make their homes in what had been “his” woods. They told him that the mine would be named in his honor. That hadn’t been worth much more than a spit. And they’d taken most of his golden wolf pelts—after paying for them and probably paying most generously, he allowed. The one thing they’d given him that he liked was a new rifle, an Austrian Steyr with a Zeiss scope in the American .338 Winchester Magnum caliber, more than ample for local game. The rifle was brand-new—he’d fired only fifteen rounds through it to make sure it was properly sighted in. The blued steel was immaculate, and the walnut stock was positively sensuous in its honeyed purity. How many Germans might he have killed with this! Gogol thought. And how many wolves and bear might he take now.
They wanted him to leave his river and his woods. They promised him weeks on the beaches at Sochi, comfortable apartments anywhere in the country. Gogol snorted. Was he some city pansy? No, he was a man of the woods, a man of the mountains, a man feared by the wolves and the bear, and even the tigers to the south had probably heard of him. This land was his land. And truth be told, he knew no other way to live, and was too old to learn one in any case. What other men called comforts he would call annoyances, and when his time came to die, he would be content to die in the woods and let a wolf or a bear pick over his corpse. It was only fair. He’d killed and skinned enough of them, after all, and good sport was good sport.
Well, the food they’d brought in—flown in, they’d told him—was pretty good, especially the beef, which was richer than his usual reindeer, and he