Page 8 of The Oligarch's Daughter

He instantly recognized the face.

It was Berzin.

The realization filled him with terror.

Now the three men were speaking more quietly. Grant turned up the volume on his phone, watched the video, listening hard.

“I talked to you before,” Alec Wood was saying. “You said you were FBI. Well, I called the FBI’s Boston office, and they never heard of you. Let me see your ID.”

“We’re not FBI,” the younger man said. “We’re government intelligence.”

“What are we talking about, CIA? NSA?”

Berzin said something Grant couldn’t make out. He heard only “need-to-know.”

“I want to see your credentials, or you’re going to have to leave my town.”

“Right here,” the driver said, his hand out, holding some kind of paper.

In the video feed, Grant watched Alec approach the driver. He looked visibly suspicious, a hand on his weapon. “Your vehicle is a rental. I can see the barcode sticker on the windshield.” Alec said something about running the license plate, then pulled out his weapon and aimed it at the two men.

There was a sudden loudpock. Grant watched on his phone as Alec jerked sideways and then crumpled to the driveway, blood seeping from a wound in his chest into the gravel around him.

Grant gasped, his heart racing. His fingers suddenly shaking, he fumbled with his phone, accidentally dropped it. Picked it up again, increased the volume on the video feed. He watched as Berzin looked down at Alec’s body for a moment and then ran back to his own vehicle, followed by his colleague.

Grant heard the two men’s voices indistinctly. He dropped his phone onto the truck’s front passenger seat, shifted out of Park into Drive, and hit the gas.

5

Grant pulled the truck back onto the narrow, barely two-lane country road, taking care not to accelerate too loudly so the Russians wouldn’t hear him passing.

He headed for Route 16, a north-south state highway running from New Hampshire’s seacoast to the White Mountains. He chose north for no reason other than because the farther north you went, the more small or unmarked roads there were, and the easier it was to lose someone.

As he drove, he hit Sarah’s number on his phone. It rang five times before she answered.

“What’s up?” she said abruptly. She knew that if he called her at school, it would have to be something important.

“Where are you?” Grant asked.

“At school. Classes are over. I’m using the photocopier. Everything okay?”

“Don’t go home,” he said. He needed to project a tone of calm, suppress the fear in his voice. He had to keep her on board, get her to do what he asked, to understand the urgency. “I want you to call your aunt Tilda and ask if you can visit her for a while. Okay? Don’t go home. Everything you need you can get later. Just donotgo home, you hear me? Or to my house.” Her apartment was on the second floor of a wooden triple-decker a few blocks from the Starlite Diner.

“What?Why—?” Her voice sounded frantic.

“Remember I told you one day I might have to leave suddenly? Well, this is that day. You—”

“If you don’t tell me why—” She sounded panicked now.

He interrupted her, speaking as calmly as he could. “Some bad people are after me, and I don’t want them going after you. If you go home, they’re going to take you hostage, or worse.”

“Hostage?What are you talking about?”

“Sarah, these are—I know this is freaking you out, but I just need you to trust me.”

“Grant—”

“I know you have a bunch of questions, but this isn’t the time.” He found himself short of breath.

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