Authors: Derek Haas
Clay launched himself through the air and met Uncle Bobby with a kick to the chest. His heel popped Bobby squarely in the breastbone, and his uncle went over backward into the hatch, right into the mouth of the fire like a pig pushed into the oven, the devil stuffed back into hell. Clay heard screams as loud as a klaxon and then took two paces, sprang to the step, and leapt over the bow, ignoring the pain in his knee. The sea rose to meet him, and only then did he realize he’d forgotten the life jacket in the fight. He hit the water and brought his head to the surface, kicking, treading, bobbing like a cork. It took only a moment for the firelight to flicker and die as the ocean overtook the boat and pulled it under.
That was it. Nine years on that boat, nine years of misery and oppression and boredom and fatigue, and it was all gone in a flash of fire and a flood of water as if it had never existed.
It hit him then—maybe it hadn’t. Maybe none of it had existed, because who could witness that it did? Not his uncle. Not the ocean. Not even the boat would give up its secrets. Could he start over? Come out of the water a new person?
A jagged piece of hull floated up next to him. He latched on to it and kicked toward the yellow light.
Clay had been hearing a muffled voice, but for how long? He opened his eyes without moving his body. The room was still. He was seated in a chair next to a bed in Natasha’s apartment. Marika slept silently; even her breathing was quiet. Clay had allowed himself a few hours of dreamless sleep, but even at rest, his body seemed to sense danger, the way a snake’s rattle twitches a warning.
He had heard that muffled voice and then the metallic clack of a phone returned to its cradle. Dammit, how long had it taken for his sluggish mind to catch up? Five minutes? Ten? He leapt to his feet.
Clay charged out of the dark bedroom and rounded the corner into the kitchen. Natasha stiffened even though her back was to him, pulling a pot of stew off a stove burner. She turned, but her face was colorless. The burner hissed as the blue flames curled, unattended.
“Who did you call?”
Natasha’s lip quivered.
Clay raised his voice, made it like stone. “Who did you call!”
The woman flung the pot at him, but he saw it coming a mile away and easily sidestepped the assault. It flew past him and crashed into the wall, and the smell of boiled stew filled the air. He was on her before the pot hit the floor, taking her throat into his thick fingers and pushing her down toward the open flame on the stove. He put his fingers to her ear and repeated, more quietly this time, full of condemnation, “Who did you call?”
Marika appeared in the kitchen, trying to understand what she was seeing. “What are you doing?” was all she could manage.
“Who did you call?” growled Clay for the fourth time, pushing Natasha’s head so close to the flames that her hair threatened to catch at any moment. It worked. Her eyes rolled from his face to Marika’s, looking for some sort of release.
“I…I—”
“Talk!”
“I called state police.”
The words hit Marika physically. Her knees sagged and she crouched over, holding her stomach.
Clay eased his grip, and the woman went to Marika, her arms outstretched like a sinner begging for forgiveness. “They threatened my family. They already took Oskar’s job. They told me I could make things easier for everyone if I let them know where you were. Oh,
solnyshko,
look at me, please.” Her voice was beseeching, grief-stricken. “Please, Marika. I hadn’t a choice. They’ll give Oskar his work.”
“We have to go.”
“Marika!”
But Marika pushed Natasha away, and she crumpled onto the floor, gasping. Clay held his hand out to Marika and she took it. They headed for the door without looking back.
Natasha remained facedown on the kitchen linoleum, her chest heaving, her sobs silent.
A navy van blasted to the curb in a shriek of brakes that sounded like an animal in its final throes. Clay had just rounded the corner from the stairwell to the building’s lobby when the commotion reached him. He’d thought they had more time, but the net was falling now.
“They’re here.” He backed Marika into the stairwell again and was surprised at the expression on her face. A ferocity there.
Good,
he thought.
She’ll need it
.
She started up the stairs again, and he grabbed her by the elbow. “You go up, you get trapped.” She nodded, a student ready to learn, and they plunged down a level just as four men in dark suits banged through the front door and hit the stairs. Clay pulled Marika against the wall and watched all four of the men disappear in a hailstorm of shoe soles pounding on the metal stairs, headed up to Natasha’s apartment. He pulled Marika’s arm and the two of them were moving again. Not down toward the boiler room, where they had entered the night before; rather, out the front door and right into that navy van with the engine still running.
Clay looked up to the seventh-floor hallway window just in time to see a Russian FSB agent’s face staring back at him, red as a furnace fire. Clay thought about giving him a salute but instead threw the van into drive, buried the accelerator under his foot, and rumbled from the apartment. The nearest train station was only a mile away.
She wanted to talk, and he let her. In the back of a restaurant, over Stolichnaya salad, lamb shish kebab, smoked sturgeon, and mugs of Zhigulevskoye beer, she opened her heart and her mind and the words came out sure and strong like a canyon wind. She spoke of a shared bed and of a doll made from a torn dress and of laundry tied to a line. Of policemen at her door, of her father’s funeral, of empty bottles in the sink. She spoke of blackboards and chalk and a new father and money and hope and her mother resting and a stepbrother who took up for her, and happiness, genuine happiness for the first time in her life. She spoke of the thin exhilaration of having money after never having had it before, of the fragility of hope and the reluctance to accept Fortune’s smile. She spoke of a better education, of a chance to be more than her birthright, stronger than her birthright. She spoke of setting out to earn enough of her own money to pay for her secondary education, of responsibility and courage and the optimism of honest work. She spoke of child care and a big house and her friendship with Natasha, and of the time when Benidrov came to her and started speaking in Russian. And at first it was nothing to feign ignorance, but she soon realized the danger, she likened it to dangling from a rope over a pit, and the only defense was to close her eyes and smile and hope he wouldn’t see comprehension in her eyes. It was a secret and it could kill her and she hadn’t asked for this, but it was her lie—her lie about the language, her lie about what she did know and didn’t know that had led to all these horrible things, and now David was dead and it was her lie, her lie, her lie….
He let her go on and get it out because it was the time for it, because only after she had drawn the poison from the snakebite would it heal. She might never be whole again, but he needed her on that road if he was going to do what he’d been thinking he might.
Clay left her in the restaurant, asking the bartender where he could buy cigarettes. The young man pointed out the window and said something about a smoke shop two blocks away.
Clay ducked out the door, and it took him only a few steps to find what he was looking for. Cell phones were as commonplace in Moscow as they were in every other part of the world these days, and he waited for one of the pedestrians on the sidewalk in front of him to prove incautious. The first guy kept his cell to his ear, the second was texting, his thumbs working like jackhammers, but the third—a woman—hung up and popped her phone into her coat pocket without a thought. Clay passed her, had the phone in his hand without the woman’s sensing a thing, and turned a hard right away from her, down a deserted block. Another right and a left and it was as if he had disappeared.
“Where the hell are you, Clay?” Stedding’s voice barked through the line as though he were standing next to him holding a bullhorn.
“I want to change the parameters.”
“Oh, good lord. Here we go.”
“They want to make an exchange, right? Marika Csontos for Blake Nelson?”
“Yes, and by God, we want the exchange as well. It’s already been cleared through State. The Director himself has turned his watchful gaze our way, and it’s a position I don’t much like. Nor should you. Now, drop the girl at the embassy and let’s return to obscurity, shall we?”
“We want the exchange because we want Nelson back, correct?”
“Why the hell else would we want it?”
“Good. Then I’ll change the parameters back to the original mission. I’ll get Nelson back and then there won’t need to be an exchange.”
The line fell silent. He could picture Stedding gaming it out the way a chess player tries to map out various moves on a board before picking up his next piece. Clay decided to keep pressing. He liked dirty street chess, the kind played in Washington Square Park in New York, the kind where half the game is guff, intimidation, and smack.
“What am I missing, Steddy?”
“Don’t call me that.” But Stedding’s voice was more resigned than upset.
“Then I’d have to find a new way to get under your skin. What am I missing?”
“What’s this damned girl to you?”
“Nothing. I just don’t want to sacrifice a pawn who didn’t know she was on the board.”
“When did you turn sentimental?”
“The first time you made love to me.”
“Chh-rist.”
“I deliver Nelson to the embassy, the girl can disappear.”
“How much time? The Russians are expecting an exchange by the end of the week.”
“Stall them. Tell them the girl is at the embassy.”
“They’ll want proof.”
“You can fake that.”
“Give me something to fake.”
“Fine. But I need more than three days.”
“You can have all the time you need, but after three days, when there’s no exchange to be made, things will get infinitely more difficult for you. We don’t want a dead spy back, Clay. The Russians aren’t fucking around here; that has been made clear.”
“I know they aren’t, believe me. They’re doing everything they can to take the bullet out of our gun before we line up across from each other. I’m going to take their bullet first.”
“Report back when Nelson is in hand.”
“I might need to call in some kind of military extraction. Seals.”
“For somebody who’s supposed to be a quiet asset, you sure are making a lot of noise.”
“Just so you won’t forget about me, Steddy.”
He thought he heard Stedding chuckle before the line went dead, but it was probably just a chirp of the security line disconnecting.
He needed to store Marika at least for a few days, and there was no one in either government he could trust, at least no one currently on Russian soil. There was someone else, though; someone in the service industry who understood, if nothing else, capitalism.
Kitai-Gorod was half a good neighborhood and half a nightclub scene that held everything from French-style bistros to raving dance discotheques to smaller, more intimate clubs. They used to call them whorehouses, but that name had fallen out of fashion around the time Pat Garrett betrayed Billy the Kid. Now they called it the red-light district, as though everything was softened under the gentle glow of colored bulbs. Maybe it was.
Marika sniffed as she ascended the stairwell from the street and entered the small foyer. A man propped himself against a wall, reading a book without a cover. He raised his eyes enough to assess Clay and Marika—Marika longer than Clay—and then said something about not being interested. Clay asked for Katya. The man stiffened and his eyes became circles. “What do you want with Katya?”
“That’s between Katya and me. Now go fetch her, and don’t waste any more of my time.” The man went through the back curtain without another word.
Marika was wary, but Clay knew she trusted him. She’d seen the men pursuing her; she’d witnessed what had happened when she’d chosen to contact a friend from her former life. She had only him.
It was an odd feeling for Clay—so often he was used to operating alone; if people were dependent on his actions, he didn’t know them, didn’t know their faces, didn’t know their expectations beyond completing his mission, which he’d always done. But this girl, this fragile young woman, was as reliant on him as a cub to a wolf. He liked the feeling for a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Back when Adromatov was alive, he’d introduced Clay to a particular club owner—Katya Zminsky. She was a tough woman in a man’s world, a natural beauty with a shrewd mind. In the decade since he’d first met her, she had somehow found the fountain of youth, or there was a painting of an older her in an attic somewhere, because she appeared to be growing younger. If she recognized him, she didn’t let on.
She sized the two of them up with a quick sweep of her eyes. “Yes?” she asked, her posture noncommittal.
“I’m not going to ask you any questions if you’ll afford me the same courtesy. Here is five thousand dollars US. You will get another ten thousand US in four days if I return and my charge here is delivered back to me unharmed, well rested, and well fed.”
Katya flicked her eyes from the money in Clay’s hand to Marika. “May I ask just one question?”
Clay nodded.
“Will anyone come looking for her?”
“No one knows she’s here.”
“Come with me, kitten,” Katya said, and took Marika by the hand. Before she moved behind the cloth, Marika broke free, crossed the six steps to where Clay stood, wrapped her arms around him, and buried her face in his chest.
He didn’t know what to do, so he patted her back, his face reddening. Finally, she stepped away.
“Come back for me.” Her body trembled.
“I will,” he told her. He meant it.
He stood there for a good five minutes after she’d disappeared with Katya behind the curtain. He could smell gasoline, fire, and the salty brine of the ocean. The only water nearby was the
drip, drip, drip
of an exposed pipe.