Wally began to stand, but Claire held her back.
“No,” Claire insisted. “The other one is here somewhere.”
At that very moment, they spotted a blur of motion off to one side of the clearing. It was Tiger, flying out from the forest like a bolt of lightning, dark hair flowing behind him as he covered the distance to the cache and struck Johanna with his fist, freeing his father from her grasp. He grabbed the handgun from Johanna and tossed it aside.
Claire and Wally were poised to jump out when a chance presented itself, but even through the struggle Tiger seemed to sense the possibility of an ambush; his eyes darted into the surrounding woods and he never lowered his gun.
“Damn!”
Wally hissed.
Now Klesko, in a rage, stepped to the fallen Johanna—her head bleeding from Tiger’s blow—and held his gun to her head, ready to kill her. Before he could shoot, Tiger lunged at his father and knocked Klesko’s hand aside just as he squeezed the trigger. The shot plowed uselessly into the snow beside Johanna.
“Not yet!” Tiger yelled. He reached down into the hole and pulled out the cache box—a watertight plastic container the size of a coffee can. Tiger turned the box upside down to reveal that it was completely empty. He held the empty container up in front of Klesko. “We still need her, you see?”
Klesko howled with frustrated rage.
“
Bitch!
I will cut out her fucking heart. …”
“Not yet,” Tiger said again, and hauled Johanna back up to her feet. She wailed in pain.
“There are more places, yes?” Tiger growled into Johanna’s ear. Johanna nodded yes. Tiger shoved her forward, and she began stumbling through the woods again, headed in a northeast direction. They passed within twenty feet of Wally and Claire, who stayed hidden and silent as the men continued on, following Johanna as she struggled onward to the next cache.
Once Johanna
and the two Russians were out of sight, Wally and Claire hustled through the woods as quickly as they could.
“We’ll arc around from the south,” Claire said. “They’re moving slowly. We can still beat them to the second cache.”
“How will we stop them? Is there anything in the next one?”
“Yes,” Claire said. “I don’t know if it will work, but we need to be ready.”
Within a minute, they passed a small pile of mossy fieldstones, now covered with a thin layer of the falling snow.
“The cache,” Claire said. “It’s there, beneath the middle rock.”
At that moment they heard Klesko’s voice barking out behind them; he was not yet visible in the dense woods but not far away, growing closer.
“Keep moving,”
he commanded.
“Which way?”
Wally and Claire moved to a crumbling stone wall, fifty feet away from the second cache, and ducked down out of sight behind the rocks. They watched as Johanna appeared again; she slogged through the snow, unsteady on her feet and looking only half-conscious as Klesko prodded her on with his gun barrel. Tiger’s head was on a swivel and his gun raised, as if he sensed a threat nearby.
Soon they reached the cluster of fieldstones that Claire had pointed out as the second cache. Klesko shoved Johanna forward onto her knees and Johanna pulled three of the stones away from the cluster, exposing a patch of open ground. It took just a few sweeps of her hand to clear the thin layer of soil, revealing the top of a plastic container exactly like the first.
Tiger stayed vigilant, scanning the surrounding woods.
Johanna reached to pull away the top of the cache container, but Klesko grabbed her by the shoulder and heaved her aside. He stepped up and reached for the lip of the container to pull it back, but then suddenly stopped himself.
“What?” Tiger asked.
Klesko took a few steps back from the plastic container and prowled the area nearby until he found what he was looking for: a fallen branch, about eight feet long, barely visible under the layer of freshly fallen snow. Klesko picked up the branch and stripped away its smaller limbs.
“Step away,” Klesko commanded Tiger.
Tiger obeyed his father, pulling Johanna with him as he moved away from the cache. He continued to scan the surrounding woods like a well-trained soldier.
Fifty feet away, Wally and Claire huddled behind a ruined stone wall, watching in dismay as their plan unraveled.
“Damn it,”
Wally whispered.
Klesko crouched low and kept his distance from the cache. He reached the long stick toward the cache container, placing the tip of the branch under the lip of the plastic container’s lid and raising it. Nothing happened. Klesko took a cautious step forward, close enough to see that the cache was completely empty. Klesko stepped back and crouched low again, then reached the tip of the branch under the bottom part of the plastic container and lifted it, upsetting the cache container from its spot in the cold earth.
There were two old, rusted soup cans dug in underneath the container, each covered with a layer of aluminum foil and attached to a small wire. The cans were only visible for a second before they exploded, sending their double-powered pulse of light and sound in every direction as Klesko and Tiger shielded themselves from the force of the blast.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Bitch!”
Klesko howled into the frigid morning air. Klesko stepped up to Johanna and kicked her hard in the gut.
Behind the stone wall, Wally and Claire cringed at the brutal punishment.
“Shit,”
Wally whispered desperately. “We have to—”
“No,” Claire said, trying to keep it together. “Not yet.”
Klesko shouted at Johanna. “How many more?”
“One more,” Johanna said, her voice gone so weak that Wally and Claire could barely hear the answer.
“So we stop playing this game, yes?” Klesko said, trying to temper his voice to sound reasonable. “Any stones in the last?”
Johanna, obviously feeling hopeless, just shook her head no.
Klesko chuckled darkly and gave Johanna another merciless kick to the ribs. The woman was so weak and beaten that her body did not even flinch at the punishment.
“
Tigr
, your birthright is no more.”
Tiger didn’t want to believe it, but the reality of it seemed clear.
“Da,”
he agreed. “Gone.”
Klesko chambered a round into his gun, the sharp mechanical sound echoing out into the surrounding trees.
“You make games for us?” Klesko crowed into Johanna’s ear. “Here is how you pay. …”
Klesko raised his gun and pressed it to Johanna’s head.
“No!” Wally cried out, unable to stop herself. At the sound of her voice, Klesko and Tiger became hyperalert, anxiously scanning the forest around them to determine which direction the call had come from.
“Who is here!?” Klesko shouted, keeping his gun trained on Johanna. “Show yourself or this one dies!”
Wally made a move to stand up, but Claire held her back.
“I have to do this,” Wally said.
Claire looked into Wally’s eyes with an expression that seemed fearful and brave at the same time.
“It’s not you they want, Wally,” Claire said.
“What do you mean?”
“They want Yalena.”
“But they have her,” Wally pled. “And they’ll kill her.”
“Trust me this once,” Claire implored her daughter. “You said you could forgive her, your mother. Did you really mean that?”
“Yes. Of course,” Wally said, confused.
“For everything? For leaving you behind?”
“Yes.”
“For being too much of a coward to tell you the truth? You could forgive her for that?”
“Yes,” Wally insisted, tears of confusion and fear now welling in her eyes. “Why are you asking me this?”
Claire gave Wally a sad smile. “I never stopped loving you,” she said.
She lovingly caressing Wally’s face and hair, as if committing the feel of them to memory, then kissed Wally on the forehead.
“My beautiful Valentina,” Claire said, then repeated in flawless Russian,
“Moya prekraasnaya Valentina.”
Those few words, spoken fluently by Claire, stunned Wally silent. Claire reached back and hid her handgun under her belt at the small of her back, then stood straight up. Fifty feet away, Klesko and Tiger immediately focused on her, raising their guns in Claire’s direction. She held her hands up high, palms open, empty.
“I’m here, Alexei,” Claire said.
Claire stepped purposefully toward the two men.
Wally took all this in, paralyzed with confusion. She sat motionless on the frozen ground, watching as Claire—the only mother she had ever known—walked unflinchingly toward the Russian killers. In a flash Wally’s mind raced with all that Claire had told her about her Russian mother: her betrayal of Klesko, her abandonment of Valentina to the orphanage, her flight to America, and finally her determination to reunite herself with her child.
The story had been
her
story
.
“Oh my God,” Wally whispered. She could barely breathe.
As she struggled to process all this information at once, Wally was struck by the terrible realization that Claire was now willing to sacrifice herself yet again, all for Wally.
“Yalena?” Klesko said dubiously as he watched Claire approach. He wasn’t sure it was her at first, but then recognition came to him. “Yalena.” He spat her name, cold rage in his eyes at the sight of Claire.
“Yobanaya sooka …”
Fucking bitch
.
Klesko charged at her, drawing his gun up and pointing it at her face as they neared each other.
“Mom! No!” Wally’s voice shot out from the woods.
She rose from her hiding place and vaulted the stone wall. She raced up behind Claire, her own gun drawn and pointed at Klesko’s head.
“Don’t you touch her, you son of a bitch!” Wally barked at Klesko, who suddenly looked confused, the aim of his gun flashing back and forth between Claire and Wally. Tiger raised his gun as well, pointing it at the girl stomping quickly through the snow toward them.
“No, Wally!” Claire cried. “Go back!” But seeing her daughter’s resolution, Claire quickly reached behind her back and drew her own gun; all four of them—mother and daughter, father and son—converged at a point near the empty cache, four guns raised and shifting their aim from person to person. The confusion was undeniable in all their faces as they looked to each other, back and forth, trying to make sense of everything.
“M-Mom?”
Wally stammered, unable to give voice to all the questions swimming through her mind.
“It’s okay, Wally,” Claire said. She kept her gun trained on Klesko as she knelt down to Johanna—slumped on the ground near the cache—and checked her pulse. “Johanna’s still alive, barely.”
As Claire stood upright again, Klesko studied Claire’s face closely, squinting. He traced her features in the air, with the sight of his gun, trying to recognize the woman all over again.
“Yalena, but not Yalena,” he said. “The nose, the eyes. Doctors did this. And … this is ours?” Klesko indicated Wally with a nod, but did not wait for an answer from Claire. “I see it,” he said, studying Wally’s features as he had Claire’s. He laughed, almost giddy at the irony—he had been hunting his own daughter.
“Ochee chornya,”
he said. “Dark eyes, like me.”
“Never yours, Klesko,” Claire said, turning to give Wally a reassuring look. “You were never his, Wally. Do you understand?”
Her thoughts still reeling, Wally answered her mother with a quick, uncertain nod. Claire turned her focus to Tiger. She studied his features, lovingly but sadly.
And she never lowered her gun.
“So grown,” she said to her son, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. “
Tigr
. My boy. I’m so sorry.”
The young man glared at her. For once, his unassailable composure revealed some cracks, betraying a deep sense of rage as he looked upon Claire. When he spoke, however, there was unexpected vulnerability in his voice.
“Was it so easy to choose?” he asked Claire. “One child for the other?”
“It was impossible,” his mother answered, her words barely a whisper as her thoughts took her back to that terrible time. “His family had taken you away from me, would barely let me see you. All I wanted was to be a mother to you, but they never allowed it.”
“I was lost to you,” Tiger said with pain in his eyes.
“Not in my heart,” Claire said. “I never stopped thinking about you, never stopped loving you. I’m so sorry. …”
Claire regretted the inadequacy of the apology, even as she spoke it. She waited, hoping for some sort of response from Tiger, but he remained silent, his unforgiving stare hanging on her. Wally took all this in with both fear and wonder, the tangled mess now unraveling.
“Tigr.”
Wally said her brother’s name out loud, with a natural Russian inflection, just to hear it from her own lips. The siblings’ eyes met, as they had outside Dr. Rainer’s office, and that same sense of recognition was there again. Claire observed the exchange between brother and sister, her heart breaking over everything that had been lost.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said again, weakly.
“Prosti menya. …”
“Bitch!” Klesko howled as if in pain, the sentimentality of the moment an offense to his sensibilities. “
Prekratyi!
Where is my money? My stones! I will have them, Yalena, or you die today.”
“We’ll die anyway, won’t we, Alexei?” Claire said.
A malevolent smile crept onto Klesko’s face.
“Yes,” he said with a look of satisfaction. “Good. We all die today.”
A sudden barrage of gunfire erupted from the woods around them. One bullet ripped into Klesko’s back, spinning him around, while a shotgun blast peppered Tiger from the side, several pellets tearing into his face.
“Sookin syn!”
Klesko howled in pain and rage.
Claire dove for Wally and pulled her to the ground, covering her.
Under heavy fire from gunmen they could not see, Tiger and Klesko staggered into the woods, leaning against each other and seeking cover as they returned fire. Soon they had disappeared and the gunfire continued, with one man’s voice calling out.