Crooked by Austin Grossman Page A

Tatiana gave directions and we followed a narrow paved road that led straight off into the unlit void between Massachusetts towns. The forest was black around me and came up almost to the border of the asphalt. The lights of town were lost behind us.
    “Not so fast here, we are close,” she said. I slowed down but saw nothing other than trees on either side. But soon the road’s shoulders widened and a hurricane fence appeared, running parallel to the road and topped with barbed wire.
    “Stop.”
    I backed up to where the fence started and parked on the narrow shoulder. With the engine off, the night was silent, just wind and the creaking of the trees. The air smelled like pine sap and cold.
    “You’ll go in alone,” Tatiana said in a whisper.
    “What? You two aren’t going in?”
    “It is not permitted for me to be captured by a foreign state,” Arkady said flatly. “Nor Tatiana.”
    “But you guys are the spies.”
    “Think of yourself, Richard,” he said. “If you are caught with two Russian nationals, what lies will you tell them? You are best off alone.”
    I shone my flashlight through the fencing and saw only more trees. The fence extended along the road for what might have been miles. Up ahead there was a padlocked gate.
    With the spies watching me, I thought for a moment what to do, shuddering in the wool coat and scarf Pat had bought me when we’d moved east. I’d told her I would be at a conference for a few days. What was she doing now? Being safe and warm and disliking me.
    I walked up to the gate and tested the padlock, and it was indeed locked. Maybe the metal was brittle in the cold? I didn’t know.
    “What you do now?” Arkady called.
    “I’m looking for a rock!” But there didn’t seem to be any rocks.
    “Just a moment.” Tatiana got out of the car, walked to the lock, and held it in her hand for a moment. She shifted her feet a little.
    “You do not see this,” Arkady said, coming up behind me.
    “See what?” I said just as Tatiana gave the lock a quick hard jerk. There was a snap and a ringing sound, and something metal flew off and hit the pavement. The gate swung open.
    “How did you do that?” I said.
    “Do what?” She slipped the lock into her coat pocket. “Go on, then. We circle back on the hour. Good luck.”
    I shrugged and stepped through. I could always turn back if it got any worse. I glanced behind me to see them silhouetted in the headlights, Tatiana shaking her hand as if it stung.
    The path leading from the gateway vanished almost immediately. I turned off the flashlight, but it was shockingly dark, and after almost plowing into a tree, I kept the flashlight on. The cold bit through the thin leather of my shoes. The snow was only an inch or two deep, but wet. After a hundred feet or so I reached a second fence, identical to the first. A sign was fixed to it with twists of wire, and I shone the light on it. U.S. ARMY PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. It was old, rusted through in places, and the wires looked like they’d crumble at a touch.
    I walked a few more minutes without finding a break. I stumbled over a raised stone and almost fell across what turned out to be a long rectangle of low stones. I traced out a foundation, no telling how old. I stopped when I heard an engine, faint and far off, and saw the dim glow of headlights inside the fence’s perimeter. Indistinct voices drifted across the wintry space. Tires on a gravel road. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw the silhouette of a building in the cleared space beyond the wire fence. It was a compound of some kind.
    I was cold and wet and was probably going to freeze to death at this rate. I had never been the kind of boy who climbed trees, even such as we had in dusty Yorba Linda, but I chose a tree, laid one hand on a low branch, and got a face full of snow. I heaved myself up and slowly, painfully, ascended, smearing sap across my expensive congressional-grade