Patriot Acts by Greg Rucka Page B

someone coming if a visitor wanted to drop by unannounced. The house had been a summer cottage for some minor Party official once upon a time, then sold as a rental property, and subsequently had seen more than its share of abuse.
    The first thing we did when we moved in was to make it secure. We installed an alarm system with motion detectors and two cameras, covering the immediate approaches from the front and the back. We hooked up external lights to complement the cameras, and to give us visibility if anyone wanted to pay us a visit during the night. We replaced all of the locks, and a couple of the doors.
    Then we discovered that the roof leaked, and instead of paying for someone to come up from Batumi to fix it, we decided we would do it ourselves. Then we found mold in the walls and carpet, and set about tearing out the old and installing the new. When we pulled up the carpet, we found there were hardwood floors in almost every room, and we decided we liked those better, so we had to finish them. Everything needed a fresh coat of paint. Cracked windowpanes had to be replaced. The pipes were lead in many places, and had to go.
    The house became our project, how we spent our hours when we weren’t training in the woods or the makeshift gym we’d built in the garage. We read books on home repair and carpentry and renovation. We bought tools. We drove all over the country in search of building supplies and fixtures. Partly, we did it as a way to keep busy, but partly we did it because, without our ever saying so to the other, we’d both decided that this house outside of Kobuleti was going to be our home.
    It wasn’t that we’d forgotten. I could still conjure the memory of Natalie effortlessly, the picture of her as she lay in death as clear as today in my mind. But after two years of lurking apprehension and no sign of Illya Tyagachev, with word from Dan coming less and less often, it had become impossible to simply mark time. Since it was impossible for me to do what I truly wanted to do—what I had come to feel I
needed
to do—it became necessary to do something else.
             
    A little over seven months after we’d bought the house, Rezo Raminisshvilli, who ran one of the two cafés in town where we went for Internet access, mentioned to Alena that another of the summer cottages about a mile and a half from ours was going to be demolished. Whoever now owned the property wanted to put up a more modern abode, and felt that starting from square one was the best way to do it. We headed out the same afternoon to see if there was anything we could salvage, and were delighted to find that not only were most of the windows intact, but they were the original fixtures, and in reasonably good condition.
    We salvaged five of them, brought them back home, and set to work repairing and installing them. They’d been painted multiple times, and the paints used had been lead-based, so I had them out on sawhorses in the back, and was working on stripping the third of the five. It was hot—it could get quite hot in the summer, even along the coast—and I stopped to drink some water and catch my breath. Miata was lying on the threshold of the open back door, in the shade, half asleep, and Alena was fitting one of the finished boxes into place, alternately shimming and hammering. She was wearing a white tank and blue bootleg Levi’s she’d bought the last time we’d been in Batumi. I could see the scar, thin and white, that curled along the inside of her left bicep, from a man in Afghanistan who hadn’t liked her politics, or lack thereof. She hadn’t cut her hair since we’d left the States, and it was down to her shoulders now when she wore it loose, but at the moment she’d tied it up and back in a hasty ponytail.
    I drank my water and I looked at Miata, and I looked at her, and I looked at myself, and then I burst out laughing.
    “What?” Alena asked. She spoke in Georgian. Mostly, we spoke in Georgian or