Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The hot springs seemed the best option. This being the off-season, there was less chance of meeting up with anyone else. Plus, he didn’t want to risk trundling through all those villages at night. Not only could the van’s clatter raise the dead, he had no way of knowing which village had been Parviz’s own. The last thing he needed was to be stopped by an angry relative.

For the better part of an hour, the road he’d chosen—one that climbed and bypassed all those villages—had been relatively good. Which was to say there were no more landslides and he’d not met another soul. Then, all of a sudden, he’d felt the van’s wheels suddenly spin as the engine coughed and tried to die.

Black ice. Taking his foot off the accelerator, he downshifted and let the engine slow him down before applying the emergency brake. Although there weren’t as many potholes on this stretch, the road still consisted mostly of packed earth interrupted here and there with black slashes of asphalt, like the dots and dashes of Morse code. These were now glittery in the van’s headlights, as if dusted with sparkling sugar. Beautiful in their way but potentially deadly. Hit a bad patch at speed and he’d be doing that Thelma and Louisa swan dive off the mountain before he knew what hit him.

“ Tuda. ” When he flicked a glance to his right, the boy jerked his head several times to John’s left. “ Tuda, Chawn, tuda, ” Matvey repeated.

Left, John, left. “Okay, kid,” he said. “If you say so.”

The boy must have heard the doubt in John’s tone because he sighed, thought for a second then said, “Voda . ” Grabbing a plastic bottle from the center console, the kid gave the bottle a shake. “Voda.”

Water. “Water’s that way, huh?” He couldn’t see a blessed thing and certainly nothing that looked like another road. “Are you sure?”

“Voda.” This time, the boy leaned over until he was practically in John’s lap and pumped both fists the left. “Tuda, Chawn . Voda!”

He stared so hard his eyes watered and was about to turn away and simply keep going when he spotted what the kid had seen: a dull glimmer to his left. After another few seconds, he realized he was looking at a small sign on two metal poles jutting up from the road’s edge. The sign had once been white with black Cyrillic lettering but was now crusted with rust and pockmarked with bullet holes. Shooting the Russians after the fact seemed to be a national pastime around here. Still, the arrow leading up was clear enough. Scanning the slope, he picked out a thin slit of a cutoff winding up-mountain that he followed with his eyes until the cutoff plunged into the darkness above and he lost it. From this vantage point, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought the road leveled out.

Matvey said something else in Russian he didn’t understand and then raised his eyebrows . From the tone and the boy’s expression, he figured the kid was saying, So, nu?

“Yeah, yeah.” Feathering the clutch and accelerator until he felt the engine bite, he released the emergency brake. “Everyone’s a critic.”