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Azarov had given his situation a great deal of thought on the flight to Panama and the long overland drive that followed. He was reasonably confident that Krupin wouldn’t attempt to have him killed in the near term. Not certain enough that he didn’t have a loaded pistol resting in his lap, though.
At thirty-five, he was probably at the peak of his abilities and on the verge of his inevitable decline. He assumed that Krupin recognized this and would be looking for a replacement. Perhaps he’d even found one and was now in the lengthy training and grooming process that Azarov himself had endured. Would this new recruit one day be sent for him? Would that be the boy’s test to prove his worth?
Perhaps. But for now, he suspected the benefits of his continued existence outweighed the drawbacks. Still, he had never known Krupin to completely ignore a failure by one of his people. The Russian president felt it set a bad example.
Azarov came to the top of a rise and reached for his cell phone, knowing that he would have a signal until he started dropping down the other side. He dialed and tossed the phone on the dash.
“Hola, Grisha.”
“Hola, Juan. Are you well?”
“My back went out again last week,” the man responded in Spanish.
Azarov smiled. Juan Fernandez had been running a fruit stand outside the small town of Dominical since he was a child. He knew everyone in the area and was the clearinghouse for local gossip. If anyone suspicious was hanging around the area or asking questions, Juan would know.
For the very reasonable price of three million colones per year, they had an ongoing agreement that Azarov would call him when he was approaching the area. If Juan’s answer to the inquiry about his health was bueno, then there was a problem. Conversely, if it was an honest recitation of the Costa Rican’s many real and imagined infirmities, he had noticed nothing unusual.
“Sorry to hear it. Have you gone to see the doctor?”
“Doctors,” he spat. “What do they know? They tell me I’m healthy. But I’m eighty years old. I ask you: How can I be healthy at my age?”
“Clean living,” Azarov suggested. “Does Olga need me to pick anything up?”
“No, she was in town shopping just yesterday. But I hear a rumor that there’s a problem with your refrigerator.”
Azarov was feeling better and better about his situation. If only Russian intelligence had people as thorough as Juan Fernandez.
“Thank you, my friend. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll have a drink.”
He disconnected the call and dialed Olga, the woman he lived with. She didn’t pick up, but that wasn’t unusual. She wasn’t terribly reliable and had been angry at him when he last left. If Olga had any gift beyond her startling beauty, it was her ability to hold a grudge.
He accelerated to fifty kilometers per hour and passed by a partially hidden right turn. After a few hundred meters, he saw another, but decided at the last moment to pass it by, too. Finally, he drifted onto the third.
The locals had thought he was crazy when he’d had five separate roads built to his mountaintop home. The land itself had cost less than half a million U.S. dollars. Another million had built the house. The kilometers-long driveways, though, had cost more than the land and buildings combined.
They were yet another insurance policy. Anyone hired to come after him would be hesitant to try to take him at his house—the home field advantage was difficult to overcome. Much better to do it during his approach. The five different routes created a situation where one would need a fairly large team to cover every possibility. Just the kind of team that Juan Fernandez would be likely to notice.
The quality of road was bad enough to make it impassable for cars available from standard rental agencies. Again, this was accomplished with significant forethought. As obvious as Russian assassins would be in this quiet surf haven, ones piloting unusual four-wheel drives might as well simply announce their presence personally to Juan.
He pressed the accelerator a bit harder, increasing his speed to over a hundred kilometers an hour. The sound of the engine became deafening—something the people who built the truck had refused to correct, insisting that they worked tirelessly to give it just the right growl. When he approached a small bridge, he slammed on the oversize brakes and diverted right, plummeting down the bank and hitting the stream below hard enough to send water arcing over the roof.
The massive shock absorbers barely cycled through half their travel and the snorkel kept the motor running smoothly during the crossing. When he came to the top of the opposite bank, the truck lofted a good meter in the air. He hated bridges. Too exposed. But Olga insisted on them and he had to admit they could be quite useful during the rainy season.
Azarov accelerated further, reaching a speed that would make it difficult for even a topnotch sniper to track him from the jungle. Difficult, but not impossible. He wondered sometimes if it would have been safer to live in a city. He owned high-rise flats in both New York and London, cities with countless security cameras, twenty-four-hour crowds, and sophisticated police forces. But he hadn’t set foot in either for years. He needed this place. The remoteness. The silence. The distance from the reality he’d become trapped in.
When the house came into view, he began to slow. It was a massive stucco-and-glass structure, open in a way that, if he skidded to a stop, the dust would drift through the living area. In light of that, he continued to ease back on the throttle. What he didn’t need was for his reunion with Olga to begin with her screaming at him for an hour in Russian.
Her car was parked in the driveway but she didn’t come out to greet him. Normally, he would have slipped his weapon in his waistband instead of keeping it in hand, but the depth of the silence bothered him. Even the insects that sang in the surrounding jungle seemed unusually subdued.
“Olga?”
No answer. It was possible that she was up at the gym, but unlikely. She tended to maintain her spectacular figure through youth and starvation more than exercise.
Azarov had designed the house to allow him to efficiently clear the rooms while making it impractical for anyone to get behind him. He worked his way through it quickly, finding nothing unusual until he reached the master bedroom.
Olga was sitting on the bed wearing a yellow bikini he remembered her paying over a thousand euros for in Paris. She was held upright by her arms, spread wide and secured to the headboard with wire. Her chin was resting on her chest, causing her blond hair to hang down enough to hide her face, but not e
nough to hide the long gash across her throat.
