“Yes. Completely sure.”
“But the baby—”
“The baby’s dead.”
He thought how he’d never told Marc that he had a half sibling on the way. He hadn’t told his ex-wife yet, either. He felt another of those ripples of pain in his back that caused him to grimace, and the Russian seemed to mistake the flinch for grief. “Be a man, Billy Stepanov,” he said. “You can have another baby when you get home.”
“It was my back,” Billy said defensively, but now he was sniffling back tears. He didn’t want to cry, but he could feel the tears rising up inside him as readily as the bubbles floated up from the bottom of Katie’s pool when he and Marc had played there just a couple of months ago and made faces at each other underwater.
“I see.”
“And David?” Billy asked, fighting hard not to choke when he voiced those three short syllables.
“We had to shoot him. He’s dead too.” The Russian spoke so casually that the awfulness of the revelation took a moment to register. He’d revealed the fact that they’d murdered David Hill—Billy’s brother-in-law and his oldest friend, a boy he’d grown up with in New York City—with the same offhand ease an airline gate agent might tell a passenger they’d be boarding the plane a few minutes late.
“Why?” Billy stammered, but now he was weeping. He could feel the wetness on his cheeks and his nose was a melting glacier, as his earlier conjecture came back to him: perhaps this whole thing hadn’t begun because Katie was a movie star. David’s father was CIA. So, perhaps, David himself was, too, the son joining the “family business” just as Katie had. And these Russians knew about David and that was really what mattered. Billy recalled that Russian defector. Nina Whatever. The painter. Maybe David or David’s father had orchestrated the defection, and this was some sort of payback.
Either way, now his friend was gone. Just…gone.
“Why?” the Russian repeated, his tone calm and Socratic. “Because he did something stupid. But, to be honest, he was always going to be an inconvenience. I have a feeling he didn’t know enough about the things that might have made him valuable alive and knew too much about things that made him too dangerous to live.”
Billy looked across the boma at his sister, and it was clear that she had absolutely no idea. Her hair was even brushed. But, still, he had to ask. He had to be sure. He sniffed back a runnel of mucus and gathered himself as best he could. “Does Katie—”
“No. Your sister doesn’t know. It didn’t make sense to tell her since she needed to look her best for a Polaroid picture. She needed to be happy to write a note for us.”
“A note saying—”
“Saying you would all like to go home, so please pay the fucking ransom.”
“And Terrance? Did you tell him?”
“Your Black actor friend? Yes, he does know. And he has been instructed—as I am instructing you—not to tell your sister. Are we clear, Billy Stepanov?”
He rubbed his eyes and wiped his face with his fingers. “Where does she think David is?”
The guy was exasperated, and for a moment Billy cowered like a dog that feared a beating, a mendicant about to be rebuffed. But the Russian just rolled his eyes. “With Margie Stepanov,” he said. “With your wife. This morning I told Katie that her husband had a fever and we wanted to take care of it before it became something serious. We told her that we sent him to the same safe house as your wife, where one of our doctors can look after both of them.”
“One of your doctors?” He was incredulous.
“Yes.”
“And she believed that?”
“She did.”
“And why are you telling me the…the truth.”
“Because your actor friend over there saw me shoot him.”
“Terrance looks—”
“Terrance Dutton managed to get a gun. We got it back.”
“But David? You killed David.”
“And, if you keep talking, we will kill you.”
The Russian stood up and put his hands on his knees. “When things are really bad—and things are really bad, Billy Stepanov, for all of you and for all of us—you start lying to yourself. You’re some kind of head doctor, right? You know that. So, don’t worry about your sister: she thinks her husband is alive. And it is in your interest to make sure that she continues to believe that fairy tale, too.”
He was still crying. Not sobbing, at least. But he was still snuffling back snot and wiping away tears. He had managed to still his shoulders. But these people. How many had they killed? There were the rangers and Juma back at the camp, and now David and the kid. Yes, the kid was their fault, too: Margie would not have had the miscarriage were it not for this kidnapping. And he had no idea where Reggie and Carmen and Felix and Peter were. For all he knew, this Russian bastard was lying to him, and his wife was—