Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1 (18 page)

“You think this is all connected with Marbury
Books going bad?” I had a vested interest in the answer, because I
was the one who got royally screwed on that one. It’s what brought
me to the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast after the FBI insisted on
taking over the bookstore.

“The end of Bea’s days at Marbury meant that
Ben also came home to roost here, too.”

“Meaning Ben was forced to retire?” I asked.
I looked at my husband. “You would have stayed at the CIA
otherwise?”

“Sure, why not?” he admitted. “I got burned,
my mission was cut short, and Uncle Edward needed help. I left the
agency to protect other intelligence officers.”

“There was a security breach somewhere along
the line,” Mavis told us. “The CIA wasn’t happy when Ben’s mission
went belly up, so maybe it wasn’t a CIA screw-up.”

“Maybe that FBI counterintelligence effort at
Marbury Books got messed up,” Ben suggested. “Especially if Yuri
and his friends had a source in the Washington field office. The
source could have been keeping the Iranians and the Russians
apprised of the situation.”

“Other possibilities,” Uncle Edward demanded.
“Think, people.”

“Maybe Yuri’s decided to get out of the
game,” Mavis suggested, “and he’s just playing all sides in order
to get paid before he disappears. Everyone will have egg on their
faces.”

“Or maybe he’s dangling himself in front of
the CIA, hoping someone will try to recruit him,” Ben countered.
Always the skeptic.

“I still say Yuri made a decision at the last
minute,” I told the group. “I don’t think he was planning to use
Wardah as a pawn. If he had such a plan, he would have taken her
initially. He left that little girl in the Subaru and walked away.
He came back to get Wardah.”

“Let’s consider what we know about Yuri. He
was surely listening to my conversation the other night with Bea,”
Uncle Edward explained. “He heard everything we said, including the
stuff about all the attempted rescues of him when he was a child. I
suspect that your genuine empathy for his plight somehow helped him
connect to you. I checked my safe this morning, by the way. The box
is still there, but the contents were disturbed. I assume Yuri got
his hands on it and copied it all.”

“He probably needed Philippe to gain access
to the Bard’s Bed and Breakfast,” I suggested. “We would blame him
for everything that went wrong because he was
Johnny-on-the-Scene.”

“That would suggest that Yuri never intended
to get caught in the act. If Bea hadn’t found that dead girl’s
body, it would have been there for ‘Mr. Williams’,” Ben decided.
“But because Bea did find it, we moved it, forcing them to steal
it. What we don’t know is what would have happened if Bea hadn’t
interfered.”

“I beg your pardon!”

“It’s not a criticism of you, dearest. We
just don’t actually know what they planned to do with the tattooed
corpse. Was Mavis supposed to find it or not? Maybe Mavis was
supposed to panic and contact her people in Damascus for intel. Or
it was supposed to ruin our efforts to assist the Syrian
rebels.”

“I still think you people are overthinking
this,” I insisted, my hands holding my coffee cup. “Sometimes a
black crayon is just a black crayon. Maybe this is personal for
Yuri. Bad blood and a family feud. Very Shakespearean.”

Mavis poured herself another cup of coffee.
“We have an informant who says that Yuri believed his mother
deserted him, that she never cared.”

“He probably never dared to hope. His father
punished him every time he spoke her name,” Uncle Edward pointed
out.

“Aversion therapy, if ever I saw it,” Mavis
decided. “I assume Yuri checked out the vehicle before forcing you
to drive to the train tracks, Bea. That’s what I would have done in
his shoes. He probably even wanted to make sure the back door of
the car was unlocked. Are you certain you lost that knife in the
woods?”

“Positive. It fell into the bushes after I
punctured the rear tires on their SUV.”

“It would be most unusual for Yuri to do what
he did out of the goodness of his heart.” Ben was adamant.

“Planting that knife in the car suggests
advanced planning,” Uncle Edward replied. “Maybe the Russians
decided to strap Bea to the train tracks, reprising the specter of
the old operation in Hungary. Maybe they’re worried Yuri is going
soft on them, and they deliberately forced his hand to prevent
it.”

“To send him a message that they own his
ass?” Ben asked.

“If he had orders to kill Bea, this might
have been a Russian power play,” Mavis decided, “to pay the CIA
back for rolling up Petra and the boys in the woods.”

“Could be,” Ben agreed. “He wouldn’t have
dared to refuse the kill order, but he might have deliberately
slipped up, to give Bea a fighting chance, hence the knife in the
cup holder.”

“Maybe they thought Ben and Yuri have a
relationship, and that’s why Petra and the boys got caught, because
they’re in cahoots.” Uncle Edward, Mavis, and I all turned to Ben
as the reality of that possibility sunk in.

“Oh, come on! I was on the train with Mavis,
for God’s sake! You saw me get the call,” he reminded her. “I let
you read the text!”

“Yes, you did.” Her big brown eyes lit on Ben
and didn’t let go. “But the Russians don’t necessarily know that.
They might believe you and Yuri conspired to stage the scene.”

“Those plastic straps were pretty tight,” I
reminded the crowd. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get that knife
out of my bra and use it in time. And you only turned up as I got
one hand free. I still say that Yuri didn’t decide to help me until
after he walked away. Coming back to collect Wardah and lead her
away from the tracks was an afterthought. He had the decency to
take her far enough away that she wouldn’t, couldn’t see the train
hit my car. And when he knew I was rescued....”

“Ha, you heard her. ‘Rescued.’” My husband
gloated over my slip of the tongue.

“May I continue?” I glared at him across the
table. “As I was saying, when he knew I was free and the train
hadn’t hit me, he let her go. Why would he conceal a motorcycle in
the vicinity for his escape if he was going to snatch her? It would
have been better to have an accomplice or to use an SUV. Kidnapping
Wardah was never in the cards.”

“She has a point,” Mavis nodded.

“It could be all about Marina and Colonel
Demitrov. Yuri’s father was obsessed with revenge. That can cause
severe emotional and mental anguish for the son who is forced to
pay for his mother’s sins.” Uncle Edward tapped on the dining table
as he pondered the possibility. I took advantage of the moment to
explain my version of events.

“The guy found out his mama really did love
him. Uncle Edward had the evidence in his safe and now Yuri has
seen it for himself. Somewhere inside Yuri, the killer, is
Grigoriy, the little boy who got the crap kicked out of him by a
real bastard. I think he saw Wardah as a child and connected with
her. I begged him,
begged him
, to take her away from the
scene, so she wouldn’t have to live with the memory of seeing me
killed.”

“What if Yuri is trying to decide whether or
not he wants to accept the truth that Marina loved him?” Mavis
asked. “What if he’s beginning to wonder what his life would have
been like if Demitrov had been stopped sooner? What if he blames
the Russians for what happened to him. No one protected him from
that monster. Someone should have.”

We all sat in silence, thinking that through.
The truth was we had no way of knowing what was going on inside
Yuri’s head. Maybe he was just messing with us. Maybe he was trying
to fool us. Maybe he was killing us with a moment of kindness,
lulling us into a false peace. How could we truly be sure we
understood the man?

“Maybe Yuri wants to meet his mother before
it’s too late,” Mavis wondered.

“Who also happens to be your mother,” I said,
turning to Ben. “Maybe Yuri has been watching you for a long time.
What if the Russians have been pressing your half-brother to get
more involved because of you? What if the Russians have assigned
him the task of getting close to you because they want to get at
you and he’s balking? He spent a lifetime being indoctrinated in
hate, bitterness, and rage. What if Yuri is experiencing an
awakening, a realization that he’s been manipulated as a human
being because of who his parents were? Maybe this is the one last
finale from the old timers and Yuri is deliberately gumming up the
works.”

“You want me to believe my half-brother wants
to save me, out of the goodness of his heart? And maybe pigs fly,”
Ben sneered.

“Maybe blood really is thicker than water,” I
shot back.

“It’s a risk to trust Yuri, Bea. He was
trained to take advantage of opportunities. He could be pretending
to change in order to exploit this for the Russians, so I’ll let my
guard down. He’s a predator.”

“There’s the pot calling the kettle black.
What makes you more noble than your half-brother?”

“I choose to be a decent human being. I
choose to act for the greater good.”

“Exactly!” I cried. “You know there is an
intrinsic reward for your sacrifice. For someone like Yuri, who has
never really been challenged to engage his conscience, who’s been
punished for loving his mother, who’s always been driven by rage,
it’s a new experience.”

“Every man has his breaking point, Bea, even
Yuri. You can never completely trust an animal who has been
brutalized. It can turn on you at any time. Fear can override
reason in the blink of an eye. A simple trigger can cause a deadly
reaction and you won’t always recognize the trigger. Once the
humanity has been forced out of a man, he rarely ever completely
recovers.” Ben’s eyes met mine across the table, and I could see
his very real concern. His half-brother had been made a killer and
one act of kindness did not a reformed man make.

“True,” I agreed with my overly-cautious
husband, “but sometimes love really does conquer all. And sometimes
the bad guys can do so much harm that a man is finally forced to
choose his own course in life. Isn’t that what sometimes happened
with the Nazis?”

I turned to Uncle Edward for his opinion. He
pursed his lips, gently letting out a deep breath, almost hesitant
to answer.

“It was my experience on a handful of
occasions to see the most brutal of men experience a change of
heart and switch sides. I did, in fact, flip one man to our cause.
It came after he was forced to take the life of a friend by his
superiors. But it was a very rare event, Beatrice.”

“Even so,” I shrugged, turning back to Ben,
“maybe Yuri wants what you have, what you grew up having. Maybe
that opportunity to save another child from the kind of torment he
suffered allowed him to see himself as a better man than his father
and, in that moment, it mattered,
he
mattered. He rose above
the brutality of his father. No one forced him to help Wardah. He
didn’t have to do that. Every man has the opportunity to embrace
redemption, Benedick. We are all born creatures with free choice,
even when we don’t realize it, even when we deliberately reject it.
When we recognize that we are more than just individuals, when we
come to recognize the humanity in our fellow man, we rise above and
reach for something that is eternal and greater than the sum of our
parts.”

“In the trenches, with war raging all around
you, Bea, it’s easier said than done. When your life teeters on the
decisions you make, it’s sometimes easier to just act without
thinking. We’re all human, love. None of us is perfect.”

“But the more practice you have in engaging
your conscience, the better the decisions.”

“Maybe,” Ben conceded. I could tell he was
mulling over the possibility that his half-brother wasn’t the
epitome of evil, even if he was a dangerous man. I wondered what it
was like, growing up with the mother Yuri had been denied. Perhaps
there was regret somewhere inside Ben, that his mother was never
able to have both of her sons, that she had been forced to leave
one behind. And yet, I saw Ben’s point. Yuri was like a grizzly
bear, and trusting him could prove deadly, as much as I might want
to believe. You never wanted to turn your back on him.

“Time will tell,” decided Uncle Edward. “At
some moment in the future, Yuri will show his hand and we will
know. Love is a potent thing, so powerful that it can motivate a
man to change. It happened with the Dukes in
‘As You Like
It’
. It may yet happen with Jamil and Hashim in Syria,
especially now that Hashim has lost his own daughter to the war. I
know that Marina has never stopped believing her sons would someday
come together. Who knows? She may live to see it happen, even if it
is merely a temporary truce.”

“Indeed. Wouldn’t that be nice?” I asked,
looking across the room at the doubting Mavis and my disbeliever of
a husband. They were too immersed in world of deception, where
smoke, mirrors, and shadows concealed the truth, and it was hard to
know who to trust. I understood that because I knew how often they
had been deceived by the very people they trusted and I knew they
had lost colleagues and friends as the result of such mistakes. But
I still was convinced that I had seen something in Yuri when he
returned to collect Wardah. My eyes moved across the room to the
open French doors of the dining room and the night beyond. There
were crickets chirping outside, and their rhythmic symphony was
soothing. For a brief moment, I thought I saw a furtive shadow rise
up behind one of Uncle Edward’s rose bushes and disappear into the
darkness beyond. A light breeze moved through the open doors and I
caught the fragrance of his prized “4th of July” blossoms. How
appropriate, I smiled to myself. Maybe there was hope yet.

Coming Soon! Enjoy an Excerpt from Another
Bard’s Bed & Breakfast Mystery: