But Swagger had pedal to metal and the Chevy, surprisingly fast, jetted ahead. He turned right at the first big road, left at the next one. Then he pulled to the side of the road, across from what appeared to be a restaurant with a couple of cabs outside. “Okay,” he said. “Out. There’s a cab. Maybe he’ll take you all the way to Ivano. Do you need cash?”
She seemed dazed but shook her head to clear it. “I’m fine.”
He reached into the money belt under his polo shirt, pulled out a wad of American hundreds. “Here. Okay, wait for my call. Stay low, don’t go out. Tomorrow, maybe longer, don’t know.”
“I think I should stay with you.”
“I saw rifle muzzle. AK-74, very powerful. If he gets one burst into this car, we’re both dead. This is very real and very tough. I can’t lose you to something stupid like this, and I can’t worry about you. Get out, get out of town, hole up, and wait for my call.”
He left her on the road, churned ahead, driving into the strange city. Ha ha, there was the Easter-egg musuem with the giant Ukrainian egg in front of it. At least he got to see that.
He came to a large road, seemingly leading out of town, and without the faintest idea, pushed on, sailing along, as fast as he could—traffic was thin—but he tried to find the maximum speed at which he could avoid the various excavations in the road surface, the continual presence of repair zones, the occasional big truck hustling along.
He drove, he drove, he drove. He thought, he thought, he thought.
But not about who was trying to kill him. He wanted to, but his mind kept returning to something troubling about shooting at Groedl on the bridge. He had to face it: she missed.
The issue was range. If she was on that bridge, the best vantage point—seemingly the only vantage point—was that high bluff to the southwest, the one with the somehow “lighter” tone to half its leaves. That put her between one and, say, five hundred yards out. Now, if she had all day, with any rifle she could estimate, fire, record her hit, and walk the rounds into the target. She’d eventually get it. But not in the middle of a war. She must have made what’s called a cold-bore first shot. The only rifles available, and he didn’t even know for sure she got one of them, would have been a Mauser K98k and a Mosin 91, without scope, and a five-hundred-yard shot, say, with one of those without a scope—cold bore first shot hit—is pretty damned hard.
He realized what had happened. They’d lured her, knowing she’d take a long, impossible shot, knowing she’d give up her life for just a chance, a one-in-a-million long shot, of bringing it off. That was Groedl’s plan, that was his game.
They used the sniper’s honor against the sniper.
No sense getting upset about it now, was there? What the hell, it was seventy years ago. Then why did he feel so much old Bob at this moment? He had the killing fever.
* * *
Reilly sat alone in the backseat of the cab that was hauling her to Ivano. She, too, thought and thought and only came up with more questions. But then the phone in her purse rang. She snatched it up and answered. “Swagger?”
“Swagger? Who the hell is Swagger?” asked Marty, the foreign editor of The Washington Post, from his office at Fifteenth and K.
“Sorry, Marty, I was expecting a call from a friend.”
“What time is it there?”
“Near three A.M.”
“You keep long hours. It’s eight here. But I’m glad I didn’t wake you. We need a backgrounder for the website, maybe tomorrow’s late editions.”
“What?” said Reilly, thinking what every reporter thinks in such a situation, which is: Oh, shit.
“Remember Strelnikov? You interviewed him, remember? He’s just been appointed minister of trade by Putin.”
She knew that was big because this Strelnikov was hard right, very nationalist, much feared and hated by so-called liberal factions in Moscow. He was one of those billionaires who decided to get into politics, maybe the Michael Bloomberg of Russia. But this was a surprisingly meaningless position for him to take, so nobody was getting it.
“Can you give us a thousand off the top on Strelnikov? Who he is, where he comes from, what he does, all that suff you already know?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “I’m in transit right now, but I’ll be in shortly, and I’ll file in a couple of hours.”
She was secretly pleased. The best anodyne to anxiety, she knew, was work. She could bury herself in the arcana of the hopelessly preposterous Strelnikov, billionaire, poseur, fraud, and phony, one of those bizarre rich guys all reporters hated because they were allowed to turn narcissism into reality by virtue of their bucks. It took her mind off of Bob on the run.