“I am. Actually”-Kyle looked at the clock on the wall-“they’ve probably been and gone by now. I read all about it on District 17’s Web site yesterday. Wanna see?”

“No time.” But for the first time that morning Hugh couldn’t stop a grin. “That’s my Sara.”

“Ride ‘em, cowgirl,” Kyle said, and sobered. “Seriously, Hugh, what are you going to do now?”

“I can’t get my boss off the dime,” Hugh said, his smile fading, too. “I’ve got to find that damn freighter before I take another run at him. When I do-”

“If you do. There’s the hell of a lot of water to look in, Hugh, and boats don’t exactly leave tracks.”

“It was scheduled to leave Petropavlovsk on the seventh-what day is it again?”

“The ninth. Was your source on the departure date reliable?”

Hugh thought of Noortman curled into a fetal position on his living room floor, his knee swollen up to the size of a basketball. “I don’t know. He would have said anything to make us stop.”

“Stop what? Hugh?”

“Can you check to see if Sara’s ship is in Dutch Harbor yet, and if not, where it is?”

Kyle gave Hugh a long look. “Sure. I can do that.”

“And then could you call your buddy at Kulis, see if they’ve got anything going in that direction, and ask if I can bum a ride?”

Kyle shook his head and reached for the phone. “Sure. I can do that, too.” He began to punch in a number and paused. “You know, Hugh, when I suggested you figure out a way to spend more time with Sara, I wasn’t suggesting professional suicide as a means of making that happen.”

Hugh looked back without smiling. “Where are Lilah and the kids?”

“At home. Lilah’ll just be getting them ready for-” Kyle stopped. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

He hunched over the phone with a will. Hugh slid down to rest his head against the back of his chair and enjoyed the first slackening of tension in what felt like days.

KYLE WAITED UNTIL THE Hercules C-130 was in the air before he drove back to his office. He hung up his parka and stewed around a while before calling his wife.

“Where’s Hugh?” she said when she heard his voice.

“Back on the road,” Kyle said. “Listen, Lilah, I want you to take Eli and Gloria down to Seldovia for the weekend.”

There was a brief silence. “Kyle. It’s Monday.”

“Oh. Yeah. Of course. Well, then take the week.”

“I’ve got work, Kyle, as you well know.”

Lilah worked for the FBI, too. “Take some leave,” he said. “If I have to I’ll pull strings.”

“The kids have school.”

“I’ll call their teachers and tell them they’ll be back in a bit.”

Another silence. “Kyle. What’s going on?”

“I want you to take the kids to Seldovia, Lilah. Stay with the folks. You know they’d love to have them.”

“Kyle. We were there for a week over Christmas, if you recall, and I got the distinct impression that that was about six days too long for your father. Why this sudden urge to get me out of town? You got a girlfriend or something?” She paused. “Has this got anything to do with Hugh showing up in the middle of the night?”

“No,” he said, “nothing at all. Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“That response is so totally feeble I’m not even going to comment on it.

“Lilah.” Kyle rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “Just take the kids to Seldovia. Rent a bed-and-breakfast, I don’t care. Just go. Today.”

When she spoke again her voice was softer. “You’re scaring me, Kyle.”

“Good,” he said.

The seconds ticked off while she made up her mind. “I’ll take them to Seward,” she said finally. “Is that far enough away?”

Seward was a hundred miles down the road, with the Kenai Mountains between it and Anchorage. “Yes. That should be far enough.”

“I’ll call the Edgewater. At this time of year we could probably rent the whole hotel for fifty bucks a night.”

“That sounds good,” he said, trying not to show his relief.

“Kyle?”

“What?”

“Come with us.”

“I’ve got something I’ve got to do here first.”

He hung up and swiveled to look out the window. It was a pity he wasn’t really seeing anything, because the window had a spectacular view of Denali and Foraker on the northern horizon. The day was clear and cold and icily bright for the measly five or so hours the sun was willing to poke its head up over the horizon. They’d actually had snow this year before December and it was piled in four-foot berms between which traffic negotiated streets that had gone overnight from four lanes to two. If the weather didn’t suffer a meltdown in the interim, there ought to be plenty of snow for the dogsled races.

He loved this time of year, that fleeting time before the tourists came back and you could get a table at Simon’s without an hour’s wait. He was happy to be back in Alaska, too, a duty assignment he’d been hoping for since he’d joined the Bureau. Unlike the traitorous Hugh and Sara, Kyle had stuck loyally to the West Coast, graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in criminal justice and then going to work for the Internal Revenue Service. Truth to tell, in spite of the grief he received from pretty much everyone when he admitted to his employer’s identity, he’d gotten kind of a bang out of the work. He loved catching righteous citizens-and they were always righteous-who insisted indignantly that the law didn’t apply to them. In his own small way, he felt he was contributing to the reduction of the deficit, although the current administration in Washington was doing its enthusiastic best to keep that goal well out of his or anybody else’s reach.

He’d signed up to take Russian at a community college, because by then the Wall was long down and he’d been headed for home from the moment he graduated from college. The borders were opening up between Alaska and Siberia and there was a future there for a Russian-speaking FBI agent.

In Russian 101 he met Lilah, fresh out of school with a degree in accounting-large, dark eyes, hair a downpour of heavy black, a body by Venus. He was sunk at first glance. After class he followed her into the parking lot and wouldn’t let her leave until she gave him her phone number. When he walked her to her door at the end of their first date he knew she had a brain and a sense of humor to go with the looks. By Russian 201 they were engaged, and by Russian 301 they were married, and before starting on children they applied together to the FBI. Both had been accepted immediately. The Russian had helped, and it had also helped when they both requested assignment to Anchorage, as Kyle had known it would. Lilah was from Snoqualmie in Washington State and no stranger to snow and ice, although she didn’t much care for the four and a half hours of daylight Anchorage was reduced to in winter. But then who did?

Her picture smiled up at him from his desk, with Eli in her lap and Gloria leaning against her shoulder. Yes, he had one beautiful family.

His thoughts turned naturally to Hugh and Sara, also part of his family. Not, at present, quite so beautiful. Odd, he thought now, how they’d all wound up in law enforcement. But perhaps not so odd, when he remembered the first time an Alaska state trooper had come to Seldovia, a tall man with a deep voice and an unshakable sense of authority. There had been a stabbing death in a community where if you weren’t related by blood you were related by marriage to everyone there. The town had been in a turmoil, which might very well have escalated into a lynching if the trooper hadn’t flown in from Ninilchik to investigate. It took his calming presence half a day to bring people to their senses, and at the end of it he removed the perpetrator to Homer to be bound over for trial. There was chaos, and then the trooper came, and there was order. It had been a powerful example to three awestruck little ten-year-olds.