The First Billion

Moving closer to the body, he leaned over the Russian's chest. There was surprisingly little blood and the coat was not as dirty as he'd expected. With iron discipline he commanded his fingers to move. His left index and middle fingers carefully spread the eyelet wide. With his right index finger, he maneuvered the drab gray button through it. A smile creased his face. "Gotcha!"

"Nyet!" screamed the Russian, sitting up, wrapping his hands around Byrnes's neck, squeezing with all his might, sharp uncut nails digging into his flesh. "Nyet, Amerikanski."

In a moment, the jailer was on top of him, straddling his chest, the man's weight full on his neck, strangling him. Byrnes fought at the hands, but could not grip them. The gun. Where was the gun? Byrnes groped around in the dirt. He was oblivious to the pain, to the daggers flaying his arms. Then he had it. Grasping the barrel, he bought the handle in a wide arc and struck the Russian across the bridge of the nose. Once. Twice. Blood gushed from both nostrils, but still the hands kept their grip, still those mad, leering eyes bored into him.

Byrnes felt the life ebbing from him, his vision dimming. Lowering the gun to the dirt, he turned it quickly and took hold of it by the grip. With a single fluid motion, he brought it up, laid the barrel against the jailer's temple, and pulled the trigger. Gunpowder exploded and a spigot of blood blew out the opposite side of the jailer's head. The death grip on Byrnes's neck lessened. The light went out in the Russian's eyes. Slumping, he collapsed on top of Byrnes, stone dead.

***

The engine rumbled roughly while the heater blasted him like a wind from hell. Behind the wheel of the pickup, Grafton Byrnes sat staring at the fence. The sliding ten-foot gates granting one entry and exit to Konstantin Kirov's "dacha" were closed. Next to him on the seat was a remote-control device with a nine-digit keypad. He picked it up, held it in his right hand, using the fingers of his left to peck out a couple of tries. It was hopeless. He didn't even know how many digits the code required. Three? Four? Five?

"Fuckin' useless," he muttered, dropping it on the seat.

Byrnes was wearing his jailer's jacket, as well as his socks and boots. The gun was back in the shed with the dead Russian. It turned out it was loaded with five bullets, not six, and between them, they'd fired them all. He had drunk his soup and found a chunk of bread in the pickup. He was alive and relatively well and had a few hundred rubles, a pocketknife, and a pack of cigarettes to get him to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

If, that is, he could get through the double fences.

He stared at them awhile longer, wondering what twenty thousand volts would do to a car. If he drove over the metal, would it short out? Would the rubber tires ground the charge? Or would the touch of the fender conduct the electricity through the chassis and fry him like an egg on a griddle?

There was only one way to find out.

Byrnes put the truck into reverse and backed up about a hundred feet. Finding neutral, he gunned the engine a few times. He was a hot rod driver on a Saturday night. "Big Daddy" Don Garlits waiting for the green light. He imagined the Christmas tree counting down. The lights blinking red, red, red, and finally green.

Ramming the gearshift into first, Byrnes floored the truck. He passed the main cabin, the radio shack, the crematorium. And as he hit the fence, he loosed a savage howl.

Metal buckled, wire bent and moaned, the engine roared, and then he was clear, hurtling down the rutted dirt road at sixty kilometers an hour.

It was only then that Byrnes looked at the fuel gauge.

The needle hovered on empty.

46

Gavallan watched the lake slide by, a moss green mirror shattered into myriad shards by the sun's piercing rays. It was eight o'clock in the evening. After twenty-seven hours in custody, he'd been released with hardly a word, escorted from the rear of the police station, and ordered into the backseat of an unmarked Audi. Every time he asked a question the plainclothes officer next to him would mutter "Ça va," and give him a smile like he was the dumbest fuck on the planet Earth.

"Where are you taking me?"

"Ça va."

"Where is Miss Magnus?"

"Ça va."

"Is Mr. Pillonel in jail?" Or was the rat ever taken there in the first place?

"Ça va."

They played stop and go through a succession of traffic signals, turning left on the Guisan Bridge and crossing over the lake. Angry gray clouds spilled over the mountains on the French side a few miles up, gathering low above the surface and advancing toward them. A flash of lightning exploded from the sky. They were in a for a gully washer.