"Take a break," Edwards said. He sat down next to a three-foot rock so that he'd have something to lean against, and was surprised when Vigdis came over. She sat down three feet away, facing him.
"How are you today?" he asked. There was life in her eyes now, Mike saw. Perhaps the demons that had awakened her the previous day were now gone? No, he thought, they'd never be completely gone-but you had to be alive to have nightmares, and they would probably fade in time. With time you could recover from anything, except murder.
"I have not thanked you for my life."
"We could not stand by and let them kill you," he said, wondering if it was a lie. If the Russians had simply killed all three people in the house, would he have attacked them or would he have waited and simply looted the house after they'd left? It was a time for the truth.
"I didn't do it for you, not only for you."
"I do not understand."
Edwards took his wallet from a back pocket and opened it to a five-year-old photograph. "That's Sandy, Sandra Miller. We grew up on the same block, all the way through school. Maybe we would have gotten married someday," he said quietly. And maybe not, he admitted to himself. People change. "I went to the Air Force Academy, she went to the University of Connecticut in Hartford. October of her second year, she disappeared. She was raped and murdered. They found her a week later in a ditch. The guy who did it-they never proved he killed Sandy, but he raped two other girls at the school-well, he's in a mental hospital now. They said he was crazy, wasn't really responsible. So someday the docs'll say he's cured, and they'll let him out, and Sandy'll still be dead." Edwards looked down at the rocks.
"I couldn't do anything about that. I'm not a cop, I was two thousand miles away. But not this time." His voice showed no emotion at all. "This time was different."
"You love Sandy?" Vigdis asked.
How to answer that one? Mike wondered. It sure did seem like that, five years ago, didn't it? But would it have worked out? You haven't exactly been celibate these last few years, have you? But it hasn't been the same, either, has it? He looked at the photograph taken three days before Sandy had been killed. It had arrived in his box at Colorado Springs after her death, though he hadn't known it at the time. Her dark, shoulder length hair, the tilt of the head, the impish smile that went with an infectious laugh... all gone.
"Yes." There was emotion in his voice now.
"You do for her then, yes?"
"Yes," Edwards lied. I did it for me.
"I do not know your name."
"Mike, Michael. Edwards."
"You do this for me, Michael. Thank you for my life." There were the first beginnings of a smile. She placed her hand on his. It was soft and warm.
"At First we thought that they simply drove off the cliff road. We found this in the vehicle." The major of field police held up the top of a broken bottle of vodka. "But the medical corpsman who collected their personal effects found this."
The major pulled the rubberized sheet off the one body that had been thrown clear when the vehicle hit the rocks. The stab wound in the chest was unmistakable.
"And you said that the Icelanders were as peaceful as sheep, Comrade General," the KGB colonel observed sardonically.
The major continued, "It is difficult to reconstruct exactly what happened. There was a farm a short distance away whose house was burned to the ground. We found two bodies in the wreckage. Both had been shot."
"Who were they?" General Andreyev asked.
"Impossible to identify the bodies. The only way we knew they were shot was the bullet hole in the sternum, so that was likely done at very close range. I had one of our surgeons look at them. A man and a woman, probably in their middle years. According to a local government official, the farm was occupied by a married couple with one daughter, age"-the major checked his notes-"twenty. The daughter has not been found."
"What of the patrol?"
"They were southbound on the coast road when they disappeared-"
"No one spotted the fires?" the KGB colonel asked sharply.
"There was heavy rain that night. Both the burning vehicle and the farmhouse were below the horizon for the neighboring observation patrols. As you know, the road conditions here have upset our patrol schedules, and the mountains interfere with radio performance. So when the patrol was late getting in, no particular note was made of it. You can't see the vehicle from the road, and as a result they were not spotted until the helicopter flew over it."
"The other bodies, how did they die?" the General wanted to know.
