Ekaterina (13 page)

But he’d laughed at her question. “No, I couldn’t speak French to save my life. I speak Polish. And Russian. I helped the partisans in what you’d call the Eastern Bloc countries.”

“Is that where you met Magda?”

In the years hence, she never forgot his expression. He’d looked at her with passion simmering in his eyes, not angry, but alive, so alive it made her skin prickle.

Then, in a flash, it was gone. Doused. He returned to the sunset, now merely a whimper on the horizon.

Kat had tiptoed back into the house.

Fulfill the promise.

It was time for Grandfather to fulfill a few promises. Enough dodging the past and kicking her out of the family secrets. She wanted to know how he knew Timofea and why someone had ripped out a chunk of her hair to get a key that looked like it opened a crypt. She wanted to know who Magda was, and why Grandfather never talked about her. She wanted to know about the Medal of Honor, and the ancient yellow picture, still safe, thank the Lord, in her Bible. Most of all, she wanted a glimpse behind his secrets.

She checked her watch. Moscow, 3 a.m. Friday morning. It would be 6 p.m. Wednesday in Schenectady. He would just be finishing dinner. She sat down on the ancient squeaky bed and pulled the telephone on her lap.
Grandfather, please understand.

The operator gave her a line outside the country, and she dialed the number on the rotary phone, her finger nearly missing the holes from the tremor of her hand. He wasn’t going to like this.

But if anyone could get her out of this mess, Grandfather could. He had secrets tucked away. Powerful secrets. Such as a clandestine relationship with an organization that took him on trips outside Upstate New York for agonizingly long periods of time. Trips that never produced souvenirs or postcards. Trips where he simply vanished one day, then reappeared three weeks, or two months, later, whistling as he pitched hay on the Neumann family farm in Schenectady, New York. Mama always stayed behind, in the tender and watchful care of Grape-Granny Neumann, the family matriarch, and Kat’s great grandmother.

Kat had grown up thinking such disappearances were a part of Grandfather’s mystic. It wasn’t until she was eight that she realized perhaps, someday, he would never return.

She’d never forget Grape-Granny walking them down a long hallway, gripping Kat’s hand in a vice. Grape-Granny had a wide, farmer’s face, tanned and deeply lined, and serious brown eyes that rarely sparkled, unlike Grandfather’s. She wore a white headscarf—Kat had never seen it off her head, even in the casket, years later. But this day, Grape-Granny’s face jerked and twitched, emotion pulsing against her stoicism. The old woman patted Kat’s hand now and again, in unusual sentimentality as they clipped down the hall in their Sunday best. Kat saw metal hospital beds, white cotton sheets, heard the clink of carts as nurses rolled them down the halls. Even twenty-five years later, Kat’s nose pricked against the pungent mix of antiseptic, cotton and iodine, ripe in her memory.

Grape-Granny pushed open the door, and Kat stood paralyzed, transfixed in horror, at a hideously beaten patient with tubes in his mouth, his arms, his chest. His leg elevated, wired to an assembly of lines above the metal bed. Next to his head, a machine that looked like Kat’s slinky moved up and down, wheezing. And there was Mama, also, holding this stranger’s hand. “Come here, Kat. Your Grandfather needs to hear your voice.”

Her Grandfather? She pushed against that thought, knowing that a childish wail would follow her acceptance of the gruesome reality lying in the hospital bed.

So she’d spoken to the stranger. She’d talked to the frail person swallowed by bandages, his chest rising and falling with the hiss of the slinky machine. She told him about the farm, about the apple blossoms in the orchard turning to fruit, about the new litter of kittens in the barn. And when she returned to the farm, she’d prayed that Jesus would heal this broken man, who they said was her Grandfather.

And then, just as suddenly as he’d left, Grandfather reappeared. Thinner, perhaps. But looking nothing like the fractured person she’d seen at that New York hospital. And now, Grandfather smiled more. He threw her in the air. And when Kat’s parents died five years later, he took her home to the Schenectady farm, away from the cramped city apartment where she’d spent the dreary winters.

He never left again.

The secrets however, stayed. As Kat grew older they germinated, and blossomed into suspicion, even supposition. Grandfather had lived a life she hardly dared to guess, and he could help her now, by activating the power of some of those secrets.

The phone clicked, and she could almost hear the call travel on a giant cable under the ocean, into New York harbor, up the coast, inland, and north until it connected with the family farmhouse, sitting in the middle of a New York cornfield, some five thousand miles away. “Hello?”

“Grandfather?”

A gasp, then. “Kat?”

She started to sob. “Grandfather.”

“Oh Kat, my dear Kat. What have you discovered?”

Chapter 9

The jangle of keys sliced through the darkness. Vadeem instantly opened his eyes and glued his gaze on a hotel patron in the process of locking his room door. The man cruised by him in long strides, not sparing a glance at Vadeem—the rumpled FSB agent slouched on the floor. Vadeem sat up and smoothed his leather coat, forcing the cobwebs from his mind. The early morning sun, already high above the Moscow skyline, pushed through the haze of lace curtains from the window at the end of the hall and sent a streak of amber down the brown carpet. Dust and fuzz he hadn’t noticed the night before filmed Vadeem’s pant legs, and pricked his nose. The sound of traffic gathered on the street below.

And Kat’s door remained closed. Victory.

Vadeem felt as if he’d gone ten rounds with Ryslan. Muscles bunched in his neck. His calves screamed, tense and sore. His head wound burned when he brushed it against the wall. He grimaced at how out of shape he was. He checked his watch—eight a.m. He’d had forty minutes of shut-eye. That should be more than enough—had been enough a few years back. Vadeem pushed to his feet and stretched, feeling frowzy. Maybe he could get Ryslan down here to keep tabs on Kat while he dashed home for a shower.

He scrubbed his face with two hands. No, she was smart, and Ryslan didn’t know her like Vadeem did. Ryslan would probably cuff her to keep Kat from ditching him. . .and Vadeem couldn’t do that to her. He’d already felt like a snake. Being shackled to Ryslan until she got to the airport would mortify her.

His gaze traveled down to the desk clerk. New shift, obviously. He’d missed the shift change. A blonde sat at the desk. Pushing fifty, with ample presence, she looked about as friendly as the ward nurses at Orphanage Number Two-Thirteen. He watched her as two well-suited gentlemen approached the desk. She pinched her face, shook her head. They pulled out their passports.

No, not passports. Identification, judging by the way the woman’s eyes widened and her fake smile that appeared. Vadeem stiffened.

They turned and walked down the hall with the bearing of. . .Americans. Pressed black suits, dark ties, faces stern, confident. Two peas in a pod.
CIA.
Vadeem grimaced.
What now?
He sucked a breath and took a step toward Kat’s door. Certainly, they weren’t here for. . .

They were reading room numbers, but they paused when their gaze settled on him. Up close, Mr. Rough and Mr. Tough were cut from the same cloth. Tall, with wide shoulders and dark thorny eyes. He hadn’t forgotten the few times he’d trained with, or against, American military. They’d earned his respect, even if their arrogance ate at him. He offered a diplomatic smile.

“We’re looking for Ekaterina Moore.”

His smile dimmed. What had she done? He looked pointedly at her door, and as if by psychic energy, it opened.

She stood in the doorway, looking every bit like the dream he’d had only moments earlier. Her eyes glowed with anticipation. A smile played on her lips. Dressed crisp and clean in a pair of black jeans and an orange cotton sweater, she’d slicked her hair back in a ponytail and wore just enough make-up for his heart to hurt. She flicked a gaze toward him, and his heart sank.

“Good morning,” he said. “These men are here for you?” He said it like a question, hoping it was some sort of mistake.
Please Kat, don’t run to your embassy. Take my advice. Get out of Russia.

She nodded. He felt slapped. He backed away, resisting the urge to hold up his hands in surrender. Instead, he locked his jaw and held out his hand. “Good luck, Kat.”

She took it and held it a moment, saying nothing. But he felt in her grasp everything that had passed between them—from the moment he’d tackled her, protecting her from the bullets in Pskov, to his mortifying reaction in the chapel, to the compassion in her eyes as she held his bleeding head on the dark street. He tightened his grip, and couldn’t stop himself. “Please, don’t do this. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

She yanked her hand away. “My visa says I am here as a tourist. To my understanding, I haven’t broken any laws.” Her eyes glittered. Bold. Hard. She stepped away from him and turned to the black-suited soldiers. “Thank you for coming for me.”

Rough and Tough didn’t even glance at him as they turned and bracketed her with their protection. They walked down the hall, away from the FSB. Away from him.

Vadeem felt freshly punched when she didn’t even turn and look back.

-

Ilyitch stood on the street corner waiting for the Canadian Bagel Company to fill his order. Ah, capitalism. It brings out the best in a man, he thought as he dangled a key from his thick index finger.

Well, most men.
The key’s metal winked gold as it caught the morning sunlight. He swung the shoestring fast and it spiraled around his finger. “I got it.” Ilyitch muttered into the cell phone he held propped to his ear with his shoulder. “And, she’s got a secret.”

Grazovich coughed, his voice harsh and filled with gravel this morning, the after- effects of a full night. “I’ve always told you that your position would be an asset to our situation.”

Ilyitch fought the urge to throw the phone against the wall. Grazovich leapt on every chance to bury his face in the past. Ilyitch ground out his voice. “Her grandfather was a spook. Control agent.”

“CIA?” Now he’d gotten Grazovich’s attention.

“Ran a ring of operatives in the sixties. KGB burned him and his entire ring in 1968. He got away, but we unearthed his assets here. They were executed.”

He enjoyed the long pause on the other end. “The thing is. . .he came back. In 1970, he showed up in Pskov. KGB picked him up, had him against the ropes when a couple of sleepers, undercover agents, came to life and whisked him out of the country.”

“They get anything out of him?”

“Name and rank. The basics.”

“Hmm.” Grazovich’s antenna had gone up. Ilyitch pictured the general smoothing back his graying hair, pacing the floor as he held the cell phone to his ear.

“There’s more,”
and this is going to cost you
. “He was OSS. Ran a partisan op out of Pskov during the Patriotic War.”

“Well, isn’t that coincidental?” Grazovich paused long enough to light a cigarette on the other side. Ilyitch heard the scrape as the lighter flared to life. “What would bring an agent back to a country where his cover’s been blown?”

The answer buzzed in the silence between them as Ilyitch smiled. “I think your cousin is right on the money, General.” Big money. Four-million dollars of big money. Ilyitch’s finger began to turn purple from the pressure of the key’s string. “I should have taken the girl. She knows something. Maybe even went into the family business.”

“Find the book. It’s got our answers.”

Ilyitch spat on the ground, and earned a glare from a woman sashaying by in a short black leather skirt and skimpy vest. He ignored her. “What if there isn’t a book? Pumping the girl for her information would be faster.”

“And messier. The FSB is all over her, like a hound to a fox. The last thing we need to do is raise a few heads.”

“Tell your little monk that I’m starting to lose patience.”

“He says he doesn’t know.”

“I told you he was an idiot. Let’s get the girl, and pry it out of her.”

“Okay, calm down. Follow her. See if she’s got the book. If not, bring her to me.” The line clicked off.

Ilyitch snapped the cell phone shut. Morning rush hour in Moscow had traffic snarled, horns on high, motors spitting out exhaust. Pedestrians pushed past him on their trek to the subway. Ilyitch leaned against the building, suddenly feeling old. Five years of running this game his nerves were starting to raze. No, his nerves had been annihilated ten years ago in a renegade prison camp on the Georgian/Abkhazian border. He’d barely slept a night through since. If it weren’t for the filthy General Grazovich and his brother, he’d be rotting in a 3-meter community cell.

Two-million dollars was a good retirement sum for a man who had bartered his soul for a solid meal and a ratty cot. He turned and walked into the Bagel Company. Capitalism had its perks, in more ways than one.