Rules of Vengeance

“Who is calling?”

“My name is Jonathan Ransom. Mr. Simenon knows who I am.”

“Please hold the line.” The accent betrayed the soft t and jagged s of Central Europe. But where? Germany? Poland? Hungary? Still peering through the binoculars, Jonathan watched as the man put him on hold and called another number. He spoke a few words, then his voice was back. “Mr. Simenon says he does not know you.”

“Tell him that I’ve just come from Rome and that I know he paid Emma Ransom’s hospital bill.”

Silence.

“And tell him that I know exactly what Emma is pla

Another click as Jonathan was put on hold. More conversation as the man on the terrace began to pace, his posture stiffer than it had been a minute before. Then the voice: “May I ask where you are, Dr. Ransom?”

“I’m in Monaco. Meet me at the Café de Paris in fifteen minutes.

Place du Casino. I’ll be sitting at a table outside. I’m wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt.”

“No need. We know who you are.”

“Wait,” said Jonathan. “Who are you?”

“I am Alex.”

The call was terminated. Jonathan looked on as the pale, dark-haired man named Alex continued his conversation with Simenon. The exchange was brief, but even at this distance eventful. Several times Alex nodded his head with Pavlovian obedience. A man receiving his orders. He completed his call and put the phone away.

Transfixed, Jonathan observed him draw a pistol from the folds of his jacket, rack a round, then replace it. The man bent to pet the cat, then rose and disappeared inside.

A minute later, the door to a garage bay half hidden among the boulders and scrub 50 meters down the road from the villa opened. A white Peugeot coupe backed onto the road and roared down the hill.

Jonathan waited until the car was out of sight, then he waited two more minutes after that. Convinced that “Alex” intended to keep their appointment, he scrambled up the hillside and stuffed the rucksack and its contents into the motorcycle’s saddlebags, straddled the bike, and navigated the winding road to the villa. He parked up the road, just beyond a bend. He did not bother with the stairs. Instead he jogged to the wall fronting the terrace and nimbly climbed the protruding stones. Five minutes after he’d hung up the phone, he was standing on the villa’s terrace.

Oblivious to the intricate system of motion sensors installed throughout the villa, Jonathan entered the house. His presence activated a silent alarm. The signal did not go to the French police. Instead it directed a message to Alex’s phone, and to another location more than a thousand kilometers away.

The villa was larger than it had appeared from across the hill. At first glance, it was a man’s home. The furniture was sparse and modest. A high-end sound system held pride of place in the living room. There was a plasma-screen television and a leather recliner, and a framed poster for the 2010 World Cup. The kitchen was so immaculate as to appear unused.

Jonathan advanced from room to room, methodically pulling out drawers, sca

It was a study decorated in a proletarian style. Metal file cabinets lined a wall. There was a map of Europe above the desk and an old Revox shortwave radio on a side table. The MacBook Pro on the desk, however, was decidedly more modern. The laptop was open, the screen-saver showing a photograph of Earth floating serenely in space.

Jonathan sat down and hit a key. The screen flashed to life, flagged with dozens of icons. He noticed immediately that the letters weren’t Latin but Cyrillic. Alex’s accent wasn’t Hungarian or Polish. It was Russian.

At first the symbols were incomprehensible. Jonathan spoke only a tourist’s rudimentary Russian, picked up during a six-week teaching stint in Kabul, Afghanistan, shortly after the American invasion in the winter of 2003. As many Afghani doctors had been trained during the Russian occupation twenty-five years earlier, he’d been given the choice of Russian or Pashto. He chose the former.

Jonathan was more conversant with the Mac’s OS X operating system. Moving the cursor to the Spotlight bar, which searched the hard disk’s contents for designated keywords, he typed in “Lara,” “Emma,” and “Ransom.”

A window opened and filled with the names of all files containing one or more of the keywords. Several had obscure titles, like “Report 15” or “Communication-February 12.” But the fifth that appeared displayed the name Larissa Alexandrovna Antonova in capital letters.

Jonathan double-clicked on the file.

The screen lit up with a sca

It was Emma.

Jonathan felt nothing, which was worse even than disappointment.

A stylized header was emblazoned across the top of the paper. The words looked familiar. All the same, it took him nearly a minute to sound it out for himself.

Federalnoya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti.

Federal Security Service.

The FSB.

Jonathan continued reading, losing himself in the dense, monotonous text. He was unable to decipher many of the words, but those he understood were enough. He read while the clock chimed a quarter past the hour. He read as the Peugeot pulled into the garage bay carved out of hillside below and footsteps climbed an interior stairwell. He heard nothing. He noted nothing. The present had ceased to exist. He was lost in the horror of discovery. He had disappeared into the past.

Page after page he read, as every artifice was stripped bare, every lie exposed, every falsehood revealed. It was Emma’s secret history, and in a way his own. The sheer accretion of detail was numbing. Dates, places, names, schools, principals, classes, examinations, recommendations. And then a shift from academic to military. More schools, courses, units, fitness reports, political reliability, surveillance reports, promotions, and finally, and most interesting of all, operations.

There were photographs, too.

Emma as a schoolgirl, rail thin, with the worst eczema Jonathan had ever seen and a cast on one arm. Emma in uniform, an induction picture. But how old? Fifteen? Sixteen? Too young to serve, to be sure. Emma in uniform again, now with a rank at her neck, her skin cleared up, a proud jut to her chin. Older now, maybe eighteen, her face fuller, the eyes more confident.

Emma in civilian dress receiving a diploma, shaking hands with her superior, a portly gray-haired man twenty years her senior with terrible circles beneath his eyes. On the wall was a plaque bearing a sword and a shield, the symbol of the FSB. And on the photo, a stamped date. June 1, 1994.

And then other photographs, taken when Emma was unawares.

Emma on a parade ground, passing for inspection with a corps of female cadets, rifle at her shoulder.

Emma and a girlfriend shopping on a busy urban street.

Emma in her apartment, a glass of wine to her lips.