The Spy Who Came for Christmas Read online

“THANK YOU for inviting me to your home, Andrei. It’s an honor to have dinner with your wife and daughters.”

  “The honor is mine, Pyotyr. I owe you my life.”

  “But you’d have done the same for me. That’s what friends are for—to watch each other’s back.”

  “Yes. To watch each other’s back. The Pakhan’s other men ran. You’re the only one who helped me out of that trap. And the bastard actually gave you hell for taking the risk. He gladly would have let me die to keep the rest of his men from being killed.”

  “Quite a life we chose.”

  “Chose, Pyotyr? Do you honestly believe we made a choice?”

  “We stay here, don’t we?”

  “Where else would you go and not attract attention? With your fake identity card, do you think you could be an accountant or a real-estate agent in some place like Omaha? How long do you think it would take for government agents to show up at your door? But not before the Pakhan sent men to slit your throat to keep you from telling the government what you know about him.”

  “Believe me, Andrei, I wasn’t complaining.”

  “Of course you weren’t. Feel how cold it is. Look at the ice on the beach. The TV weatherman says we’ll get another six inches of snow. Even then, I don’t know why anybody grumbles. Brighton Beach is nothing compared to spending a winter in the Russian army.”

  “Or in a prison in Siberia. Perhaps we should go back inside and have dessert. Your wife’ll think we don’t like the oladi she made.”

  “In a moment. First we have business to discuss. That’s why I asked you to come out to the porch.”

  “Why are you scowling, Andrei? Is something wrong? I swear I wasn’t complaining.”

  “Hah—got you. I just wanted to make you worry so your surprise would be all the greater. I have very good news, my friend. You’re being promoted.”

  “Promoted?”

  “The Pakhan likes what I say about you, and what he’s seen. He likes the intensity you bring to your work. He likes the results. Don’t make plans for Christmas. You and I and some others, including the Pakhan, are going to Santa Fe.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “New Mexico.”

  “The desert? Good. I wouldn’t mind a warm Christmas, drinking rum and Coke next to a swimming pool.”

  “It’s not the kind of desert you’re thinking of, Pyotyr. This is high desert. Pine trees. Cold and probably snow. It’s near a ski area in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.”

  “Sangre de Cristo?”

  “I Googled the name. It’s Spanish. It means ‘Blood of Christ.’ Apparently, that’s what the explorers thought the sunset on the snow looked like.”

  “Andrei, I don’t understand why the Pakhan wants to go on a holiday where it’s cold.”

  “We’re not going there for a holiday. We’re going for a baby.”

  * * * * *

  “A SPY?” Meredith’s voice rose. “I should never have brought you into the house. Leave. Get out.”

  “The baby. It’s the baby you wanted to help.”

  “I made a terrible mistake. Go. If my husband finds you here when he comes back—”

  “Is your husband the man who beat you?”

  The question caught Meredith off guard.

  Kagan turned toward Cole. “Is your father the man you wanted to hit with the baseball bat?”

  In the glow of the night-light, Cole pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t going to let him inside so he could hurt my mom again. The snow landed on my glasses. You were blurred. I didn’t think anyone else would be coming.”

  “But you stopped when you realized I was a stranger.”

  “If you’d been him, I’d have used the baseball bat. I swear I’d have used the bat.”

  “I believe you would have.” Kagan put his hand reassuringly on the boy’s thin shoulder.

  The baby started crying, rooting its mouth against Meredith’s chest.

  “Please,” Kagan told Meredith, “do something. If the men outside hear him—”

  “How do I know you’re not the one who’s dangerous?” she demanded. Even though her attention was directed toward Kagan, she instinctively rocked the baby. Her raised voice made its tiny hands jerk with agitation.

  “Do I look like I want to hurt you?” Kagan felt blood dripping from his arm onto the brick floor. He needed to take care of it soon before he lost so much blood that his strength was gone. “Do I look like I’m even capable of hurting you?”

  “So much is happening. My husband . . . ”

  “Won’t hit you again,” Kagan said. “I promise.”

  That made an impression. Meredith became very still. Fixing her gaze on him, she no longer averted her face. Even in the dim light, it was obvious that her cheek was more purple, her eye more swollen than when Kagan had first seen her. The split at the side of her lip was larger than it had first appeared. But despite everything, he had a sense that she’d once been an attractive woman.

  She’s that thin because she’s nervous, he realized.

  “Won’t hit me again?” Meredith’s voice dropped. “I wish I could believe that.”

  “Hey, it’s Christmas. Wishing will make it come true.”

  “If you do something to Ted, he’ll only take it out on me later.”

  “That’s his name? Ted? Don’t worry. I won’t do anything that would make him want to hurt you.”

  “Then how would you get him to stop?”

  “Hey, don’t you like surprise presents? Help the baby, and I promise Ted won’t hit you again.”

  Kagan couldn’t remember anyone staring at him harder.

  “Somehow,” she said, “you make me believe you.”

  The baby cried, kicking against Meredith’s arms.

  She reached under its blanket. “The diaper’s soaked. But I don’t have anything to . . . A dish towel,” she realized. She held the baby with one hand and pulled two towels from a drawer. “Let’s see if I remember how to do this.”

  She spread one of the towels on a counter and folded the other. Then she set the baby down on the first towel and eased its head onto the makeshift pillow of the second.

  As she unzipped the baby’s blue sleeper, Kagan saw that Cole still hadn’t done what he’d asked. Again he urged the boy, “Go into your bedroom. Turn on the television. Go to the window in the living room. See if anybody’s watching the house. If they are, fool them the way I told you.”

  “But what if somebody is watching the house?” Cole wondered. His eyes looked large behind his glasses.

  “They won’t try to get in right away. For one thing, they won’t know for sure that I’m here.”

  “You think somebody’s going to break in?” Cole’s voice wavered.

  Movement made Kagan turn toward Meredith. As she pulled the baby from its sleeper, the infant’s legs curled toward its chest, emphasizing its vulnerability. Immediately, it jerked its arms and whimpered.

  “They won’t try to break in unless they hear crying,” Kagan said.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Meredith snapped. “With only this night-light, it’s hard to see.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said in a hurry. “Please, I apologize.”

  “What?” Meredith looked at him in surprise.

  “I guess I sounded disapproving. I didn’t intend to. You probably get plenty of disapproval as it is. The baby can’t ask for more than your best.”

  She studied him as if seeing him for the first time. Then the baby’s squirming required her attention, and she tugged open the adhesive strips on the diaper.

  Cole remained in the kitchen.

  I’ve got to engage him, Kagan thought.

  He unclipped the tiny microphone hidden under the ski-lift tickets on his parka. He put it deeply in one of his pants pockets, where the scratch of the smothering fabric would prevent it from transmitting voices. Then he removed his transmitter from under his coat and gave it to the boy.


  “What’s this?” Cole asked, curiosity mixing with suspicion.

  Kagan took out his earbud, cleaned it on his pants, and handed it to him. “They’re part of a two-way radio setup. That’s the transmitter, and this is the earpiece. The on-off switch is at the top of the transmitter. The volume dial is on one side. The channel dial is on the other. Do you play video games?”

  “Of course.” Cole seemed puzzled by the question, as if he took it for granted that everyone played video games.

  “Then you ought to be good at multitasking. While you watch for movement out the window, I want you to hold the receiver to your ear and listen while you keep changing the frequency on the transmitter. Maybe you’ll find the channel the men outside are using. Maybe we can hear what they’re planning.”

  Cole studied the objects in his hands.

  “Make it seem like you’re listening to an iPod,” Kagan told him.

  “Right. An iPod.” The boy examined the equipment and nodded. “I can do that.” He mustered his courage and limped into the living room.

  Throughout their conversation, Kagan sensed that Meredith was watching him.

  Then the baby squirmed, and she removed the diaper.

  “A boy,” she murmured. “He doesn’t look more than four or five weeks old.”

  “Five weeks. Good guess,” Kagan said. “If he’d waited a little longer, he’d have been a Christmas present.”

  Meredith dropped the diaper in a trash can under the sink.

  “I forgot how tiny a baby is. Look. He has a birthmark on his left heel. It sort of reminds me of a rose.”

  “The child of peace.”

  “What?”

  Kagan realized he’d said too much. “Isn’t that what babies mean this time of year? Like the Christmas carol says, ‘Peace on Earth, goodwill to men.’ It’s sexist, I suppose, but the sentiment still works.”

  Again Meredith studied him. Then she returned her attention to the baby.

  “He isn’t Anglo.”

  “Anglo?” Kagan asked.

  “What the locals call ‘white.’ But he doesn’t look Hispanic or Native American, either. His skin is like cinnamon. He looks—”

  “Middle Eastern.” Kagan stood and wavered. Managing to steady himself, he went to the kitchen sink and peered cautiously past the curtain on the window.

  “I don’t have any safety pins big enough to close this dish towel and make it work as a diaper,” Meredith said.

  Wincing, Kagan eased off his parka, freeing himself of the weight of the gun in his right pocket. When Meredith had opened the coat and taken out the baby, she hadn’t pushed the flaps to each side and thus hadn’t felt what was there. He set the parka on the kitchen table, taking care to cushion the impact of the gun against the wood and avoid a sound that might attract questions.

  “Do you have any duct tape?” he asked.

  “Duct tape? Yes, that would work instead of safety pins. But what made you think of that?”

  “Duct tape has all kinds of uses. Where is it?”

  “The bottom drawer, to the left of the sink. We had a leak under the drain.”

  Kagan opened the drawer and pulled out the roll of duct tape. He tore off two pieces and pressed them where Meredith held the folded dish towel around the baby’s hips. Then he tore off several more strips—longer ones—and stuck them to the edge of the counter.

  “For now, I won’t need those,” Meredith told him.

  “They’re for something else,” Kagan said.

  He turned his back, then unbuttoned his shirt and gently pulled it free. He didn’t want Meredith to be alarmed by the Russian prison tattoos on his chest.

  Despite the sweat that slicked his skin, he shivered. In the glow from the night-light, he managed to confirm that the bullet had passed through the flesh of his upper left arm. The wound was swollen, but as far as he could tell, neither bone nor the artery had been hit.

  Well, that’s the good news about the bad news, he thought.

  He braced himself for what he needed to do. You can manage this, he told himself, fighting the pain.

  Behind him, Meredith evidently got a look at the injury to his arm. “What happened to you?”

  Kagan didn’t answer.

  “Is . . . ? My God, is that a bullet wound? Were you shot?”

  When I rescued the baby.”

  Repressing his dizziness, Kagan leaned over the sink and soaped the wound. “Do you have a first-aid kit?” He tried not to grimace when he rinsed blood away with warm water.

  Meredith’s mind seemed paralyzed. “A first-aid kit?” She was so overwhelmed that she appeared to have trouble understanding the concept. “First-aid . . . ? The next drawer up.”

  Kagan pulled it from the drawer and opened it, pleased to find antibiotic cream. While he gingerly rubbed it over his wound, he looked through a crack in the curtains above the sink. The snow kept falling. He stared past the two trees toward the coyote fence and the lane. No one was in sight.

  Maybe we’ll get lucky, he thought.

  Sure we will.

  He noticed a dry cloth next to the sink. Biting his lip, he pressed it to his wound and used the strips of duct tape to stick it to his skin. Sweat beaded his face while he wrapped several layers of tape tightly around his arm, making a pressure bandage. He waited, hoping that he wouldn’t see any blood leak out.

  The baby whimpered. When Kagan looked over his shoulder, he saw it trying to suck one of its fists.

  “What are we going to feed him?” Meredith said.

  “Do you have any milk?”

  “Babies aren’t supposed to be fed regular milk.”

  “The World Health Organization has an emergency recipe for diluting it with water and adding sugar.”

  “We don’t have any milk. Cole can’t digest it. We had rice milk, but we used the last of it earlier.”

  “Then put a half teaspoon of salt into a quart of water.”

  “Salt?”

  “Add a half teaspoon of baking soda and three tablespoons of sugar.”

  “Are you making this up?”

  “It’s something the Mayo Clinic developed.”

  Kagan shoved a finger into the bullet hole in his shirt. He tugged at the hole, ripping the sleeve open to make room for the added bulk of the pressure bandage. As he put on the shirt, he told Meredith, “Warm the water until the salt, baking soda, and sugar dissolve.”

  “World Health Organization? Mayo Clinic? Since when do spies know about feeding babies?”

  “I once escorted a medical team in Somalia.”

  That was close enough to the truth to be believable, Kagan decided. The country had actually been Afghanistan, and he hadn’t been an escort. Instead, his assignment had been to pretend to be part of the medical team while he tried to get information from Afghan villagers about the location of terrorist training camps. Knowing how to save a baby’s life could buy a lot of cooperation.

  “The babies were starving,” Kagan explained. “The doctors told me what to do. It felt good to be able to help.”

  Reinforcing Kagan’s point, Meredith held the baby against her chest.

  “The mixture isn’t a substitute for food. All it’ll do is give him electrolytes and keep him from dehydrating,” Kagan went on. “He needs twelve ounces in the next twelve hours. But after that, he’s got to have formula.”

  Twelve hours, Kagan thought. If we’re not out of danger by then, it won’t matter if the baby gets fed or not.

  “Someone’s coming,” Cole said from the living room.

  * * * * *

  WARY OF the shadows on either side, Andrei followed the tracks.

  The falling snow had accumulated until it was above the ankles of his boots. The footprints ahead were rapidly becoming faint impressions.

  Two sets veered toward a house on the right. Farther on, two other sets angled toward a house on the left. The pairs of prints were next to each other and showed no sign of scuffling. But Andrei suspected that if Py
otyr had used his gun to force someone to take him into a house, he would probably have done so with the gun pointed toward the person’s back. In that case, one set of prints would be in front of the other. Also, the prints in front would be unevenly spaced, evidence that the person in front was being shoved.

  As Andrei kept walking, faint light reflecting off the snow now revealed only one remaining set of fresh tracks. He noted that they paralleled some almost-filled prints that came in Andrei’s direction, apparently from a house farther down the lane.

  Do these fresh prints belong to you, Pyotyr? he hoped. Have I almost caught you?

  Or maybe you’re leading me into a trap.

  Andrei slowed, scanning the snowy haze before him. The cold made his cheeks numb, but that only took his mind back again. While in the Russian army, he had once marched twenty-four hours in a blizzard. In that period, he hadn’t been able to drink or eat anything, the weather having frozen his water and rations. We do this to make you tougher, his officers had told him.

  Well, those bastards accomplished their goal, Andrei thought bitterly. No one can be tougher or harder. Pyotyr, you’re about to learn what that means.

  Ahead, the remaining footprints turned to the left toward the upright cedar limbs of a coyote fence. The prints reached a gate. Andrei carefully observed that the other tracks, the ones that were almost obliterated by the snow, came from that same gate.

  They belong to someone who went to see the Christmas lights and then returned, Andrei concluded. The excitement of the hunt dimmed in his chest. I’ve been following someone who lives in the neighborhood. I wasted valuable time. I should have stayed with Mikhail and Yakov and continued searching the area near Canyon Road.

  Wait. Don’t jump to conclusions, he warned himself.

  Continuing along the lane, he concentrated harder on the two sets of tracks. The old ones came from the left side of the house. The new ones went in that direction, disappearing into an area of darkness that Andrei assumed concealed a side door. Peering intently, he managed to see a shed and a garage over to the left. Switching his gaze toward the house itself, he noted that it had the distinctive architecture—flat roof rounded corners, earth-colored stucco—that he’d seen almost everywhere in Santa Fe.