Was he Russian. "Niet," he said. It might have been meant as a grim joke, but he wasn't Russian, though there had been a time when he had assumed he must have been, assumed he had been born somewhere cold and rural and been taken, just as the woman in his scope had done to so many, so many.
"Yes." He had helped them. He didn't remember very much about it. Weeping. Exhortations in Russian as a man stood between them and his pregnant wife, or a mother over her child's cradle. There were orphans enough, of course, but sometimes, for the elite programs, a certain level of sourcing from known quantities was deemed necessary, or performed as a warning to the friends and family of the missing child. When the state could take a babe from its mother's arms, there was little reason to oppose it when it asked for something less than a life.
He remembered files full of photographs, handing off squirming bundles of blankets to handlers without an ounce of anything, a weight and then gone, a warm, heavy presence that disappeared like smoke, and forgetting.
And there were other things. Bad things. The twins and their penchant for taking errant women under their wing, their skill in long undercover work that led the target to an open square with good vantage points. He had never seen the old woman in his scope with a knife between her teeth, dripping blood. She would never abase herself in such a way. He had no doubt she and her brother had fought for the cause, not for gain. By stealing children like the Baba Yaga, feeding the armies of the state with stolen bodies, they thought they were making the world better.
He had thought so. Some of the time, when it seemed important to them for him to know it.
The question didn't make him lift his eye from the scope. His hands didn't shake, but he knew that question. He felt its impact. Now Matt was in his shot. Four seconds, three. He could take it, and he could risk striking him in the leg. The shot would be true, but it would be messier after passing through him.
Two seconds, one.
His finger slid down the length of the trigger, a long, slow slide, and then off, and he slid back, sat up. He didn't need to look to know she was walking away from the window. The paranoid didn't linger by vulnerable points for long.
He looked at Matt in that silence. He knew Matt would know he was looking, without seeing.
"I can't forgive the things they did," he said, and there was the rare utilization of a first person pronoun from the disembodied - I, I, I. "I hate them."
A word worth tasting. It lacked venom, but that did not make it any less immediate. "I hate what they did."