Hunting The Kobra

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  “Sixteen,” Leander murmured. “2002.”

  “The year after 9/11,” Scott said. “Yeah, a lot of domestic stuff slid through the cracks, even then. Homeland Security wasn’t founded until November of that year, although everyone was looking for enemies with brown skin. A sixteen-year-old girl with no history but authentic IDs and white skin…no one would have dug deep.”

  Dima considered it. “There is another possibility for a complete lack of documentation.”

  Leander’s smile was knowing. “You see Russians everywhere, boss.”

  “They planted sleeper agents all over the country. They trained children. Sixteen is the height of impressionability…” Dima didn’t have to finish the thought. She recalled the angst-filled years of her own children. Sixteen had been hell on wheels for both her children—and for her.

  “The woman lives the life of a church mouse,” Scott said.

  “Sleepers do,” Dima replied. “Until they’re activated.”

  Scott shook his head. “She lived in Boston. Boston! There’s nothing there but beans and baseball. It’s a shitty place to park an asset, even one in hibernation.”

  Even Dima had to admit it looked unlikely. Nothing of what they did know about Quinn’s life fit the typical pattern of sleeper agents—not the agents they had learned about, at least.

  “Witness protection or sleeper agent…or something else,” Leander said. “No matter what the explanation ends up being, the fact remains she’s not who she says she is. It changes things.”

  Scott sat up and rubbed at his face with both hands. His dirty blond hair stood on end, skewed at odd angles. “We have to know what lies behind the blank screen,” he muttered. He got to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” Dima asked.

  “I’m going to head out, think on my feet.” Scott picked up the heavy overcoat at the foot of the sofa and pushed his feet into the boots beside it. “Lochan can come in, get some shut eye, get warm for a while.”

  Dima sat back. “Keep digging, Leander. We need to step behind the screen.”

  Leander picked up the tablet. “Is there anyone you know in the Marshall’s service?” he asked. “That’s the quickest way to eliminate one possibility.”

  Dima picked up the cellphone from the coffee table. It was just past seven p.m. in Washington. She would interrupt his dinner, although he was an old bear—better to catch him at home, where his defenses were not so considerable.

  “She knows someone,” Leander said softly.

  “Of course she does,” Scott said, as he zipped up the coat.

  Dima glanced at Leander and noticed the narrow slit of his eyes. “While we’re waiting for an answer, you get some sleep, Lea.”

  “I’m fine,” Leander said.

  “That wasn’t a suggestion.”

  He drew in a breath. Let it out. Then he nodded and moved with slow, tired movements over to the sofa.

  Before the phone in the big house in the exclusive McLean district in Virginia was picked up, Leander was already breathing heavily, his eyes closed.

  Quinn slept late the next morning, which was normal for her, so she wasn’t surprised to find that when she got downstairs, no one was around.

  She had learned to knock on the kitchen door when she made it downstairs, to ask for breakfast, which they usually had ready to go.

  She ate the meal in absorbed silence. If someone had been at the table with her they would have been disappointed in her conversational skills that morning. She had too much on her mind to chat.

  Long after the text exchange with Dima last night, Quinn had tossed about, sweaty and nervous. How was she supposed to gain the trust of a man who had reason to trust no one?

  And why should she bother? If she continued to behave as herself, she would still get the answers she craved. She didn’t doubt Aslan was doing everything in his power to find the real reasons behind the bombing. When he learned what they were, he would tell her. Why wouldn’t he?

  Around four a.m., Quinn had blinked up at the dark angles of the ceiling as a new thought occurred to her. What if those reasons had something to do with Aslan’s shadowy business dealings? Would Aslan tell her the truth behind Denis’ death if the truth revealed more about him and his affairs than he was comfortable with?

  Of course…of course! This had to be about Aslan! Only, how could it be? Denis had left Aslan years ago. He had started a new, safe and ordinary life in America. He was a music professor and harmless. So why kill him?

  Her thoughts brought her back to the aching bewilderment which had driven her for weeks now. She needed to know why someone had killed Denis and wanted her dead, too. She had to know.

  It meant she must make Aslan trust her, so when he learned the truth, he would tell her without reservations.

  Quinn didn’t care about Dima’s mission to find the Kobra. It wasn’t Dima who had taken a sniper round in the belly. If Aslan spontaneously blurted out his connection to the Kobra, that would make Dima happy. No way was Quinn digging for it, though. In the movies, people always got caught snooping and their bodies washed up on some beach two days later.

  Only Dima was right about Quinn needing to make Aslan trust her. It was easier said than done, though. How the hell could she convince Aslan he could tell her anything and she would not run to the police, or Interpol, or whoever it was around here who would care about his crooked ways?

  If he even was crooked—for Dima had offered no proof in that regard, either. Everything was hearsay. Aslan didn’t seem like a criminal.

  Quinn massaged her temples as she drank the last of her tea. She would make a shitty spy, she decided. A tiny thing like making someone trust her had screwed her up so much she had a headache and her belly was wound in knots, working up to a good, big ulcer.

  She pushed the breakfast plate away and went out to the recreation room. The big fireplace was burning as usual. Aslan was already sitting on the upright chair he usually used. The silver coffeepot was on the table.

  Quinn hesitated, as her heart bounced about in her chest. He can’t read your mind, remember! She moved forward again. “You’re here already. I didn’t know, sorry.”

  “You’re up late this morning,” Aslan said. He tilted his head. “I got the impression you would go to bed as soon as Noah brought you home, last night. You fell asleep in the car.”

  Tell the truth as much as you can.

  “I did go to bed, and I did go to sleep straight away. I barely remember lying down,” Quinn admitted. “Only a few hours later, something woke me. God knows what, but suddenly, I was awake. I couldn’t get my mind to shut down after that.”

  “Toni mentioned that she thought someone was walking around in the small hours last night,” Aslan said, as he lifted the coffeepot.

  Quinn’s heart squeezed even harder. What would have happened if she’d lied and said she had slept like a baby? He would have looked at her sideways, wondering if she was lying and why. Truth-telling—as much of it as she could manage—was better.

  Aslan pushed a filled mug to her side of the table. “Something on your mind?”

  “Denis,” Quinn said truthfully. “I keep coming back to the basic question.”

  “Why,” Aslan said.

  “Yes, why? It makes no sense at all. None. Then there’s me. I’m just the follow up, I think. The loose end. Who would want either of us dead?”

  “And yesterday and last night you were out in the world, where someone could have freely taken another shot, if they had known you were here,” Aslan added.

  Quinn stared at him, horror building. “I didn’t even think of that!” she said, her voice high and tight.

  Aslan laughed. It was a rich, rumbling sound. He sat back, coffee in hand. “I would be surprised if you had thought of it. It requires practice in unusual fields of expertise to acquire the mindset.”

  “You have the mindset,” Quinn pointed out. She hesitated. “Do you…are you that type of expert, Aslan? I mean…” She loo
ked around the house. “I thought you were a businessman of some sort.”

  “I am a businessman of some sort,” he said. “I’ve been around for a few years more than you. My early life handed me the training I needed to think that way.” He grimaced. “More’s the pity.” He drank his coffee.

  “Was that in England?” she asked curiously.

  His smile was genuine. “One doesn’t learn defense strategies among the hedgerows of Britain.”

  Something drew Quinn’s gaze to the smaller windows on the west side of the recreation room. A shadow had dropped over the middle one.

  Her mouth fell open. Noah was hanging off the side of the house, out there. His arm was stretched above his head, while he flexed the fingers of the other hand and placed them around the narrow window frame, searching for a good grip.

  “What is it?” Aslan said, turning to look over his shoulder. He chuckled, turning back to her. “He likes to climb anything vertical.”

  “He isn’t wearing any ropes! No lifelines!” she said, awed. “The ground slopes away on that side…it must be thirty feet from the cellar to the window!”

  “Forty-two, actually.”

  “What, is he addicted to adrenaline?” Quinn said. “He jumps off mountains and bridges and now he climbs housing where he can find it?”

  “Not that I’ve ever asked him, but I am sure Noah would tell you he is merely keeping himself in good condition. No one who works for me has addictions.”

  Quinn looked at him, startled. The hard note in Aslan’s voice told her Aslan was speaking a more profound truth than normal.

  “Is that a condition of employment?” she asked.

  Aslan didn’t answer at once. He drank his coffee, his gaze on the floor. “Addictions are a vulnerability.”

  “Vulnerabilities are a bad thing?”

  “Vulnerabilities are a weakness. They leave a man open to leverage.” Aslan shook his head as if he was irritated at himself for speaking to freely. “Everyone has a weakness. We count on that.”

  Quinn flinched. Had Aslan discovered a weakness about her he could use?

  Aslan smiled. “Your weakness is Denis,” he told her softly. “So is mine.”

  Quinn didn’t speak the thought which rose. Maybe I have more than one weakness.

  She glanced at the window again. Noah had moved across the window, so that his toes were balanced on the outside still. There could only be an inch of space on the sill. The tips his soft shoes pressed against the glass. He stretched up, searching for the next handhold.

  “He is crazy,” Quinn declared.

  “He has a high tolerance for risk,” Aslan said. “That is why I hired him.”

  A soft sound of metal clicking came to Quinn from the far side of the room where, beneath the stairs, more doors led to utility rooms and work rooms at the back of the house on this level. She turned and leaned around the back of the armchair to see what the noise was.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Aslan lower his coffee cup to the table, his gaze fixed on the other side of the room to.

  Toni had emerged from a door, there. As she strode toward the fireplace, she raised her hand. There was a gun in it. The metallic clicking sound had been her cocking the gun.

  Worse, she was pointing the gun at Quinn. Quinn sucked in a breath. It felt as if she had inhaled the entire room. Shock slithered through her, making her feel hot and cold at once.

  “There had better be a damn good explanation for this,” Aslan said. He didn’t sound upset, or even shocked.

  “She isn’t who she said she is.” Toni’s voice was just as calm as Aslan’s. The gun pointing at Quinn did not move an inch. The opening of the barrel looked like a great dark eye, sitting in the center of her vision. It looked huge. “Quinn Sawyer didn’t exist seventeen years ago. So who is she?”

  Quinn scrambled to her feet, her heart running too fast for her to track individual beats. It was just a hard lump in her chest, vibrating out of control.

  Toni bought her other hand to the grip of the gun, her fingers tightening. “Stay exactly where you are!”

  “You’re pointing a gun at me! You expect me to just sit in an armchair while you’re doing it?”

  Aslan got to his feet, too. He moved more slowly than Quinn did and remained still once he was upon them. Quinn couldn’t stop shifting from foot to foot, as adrenaline tore through her body, giving her the shakes.

  She had never had a gun aimed at her before. It shocked her how terrifying it was. How on earth did the heroes in movies think up all the smart come-backs when facing down a gun-toting enemy?

  Aslan, she realized, was looking at her. “Is this true?” He spoke with an absence of emotion. Nevertheless, the hairs on the back of Quinn’s neck tried to stand up. There was no threat in his words or his voice, yet she felt afraid.

  “Is what true?” Quinn’s voice shook. “Of course I am Quinn Sawyer. If you have resources which let you look into the bombing, then you must’ve looked into me, too. You know I am who I say I am. Denis wasn’t a fool.”

  She invoked Denis’s name deliberately. It would remind Aslan of their common weakness.

  Aslan looked at Toni and lifted his brow.

  The gun had not wavered by an inch. Toni’s gaze did not shift from Quinn, either. Quinn’s denial didn’t faze her. “Of course Aslan looked into you,” she said. “He told me to do it. And now I have discovered that all your personal records stop sixteen years ago. You didn’t exist before 2002. So who the fuck are you?”

  Quinn swallowed. She was aware of Aslan staring at her, his eyes narrowed. Suspicion was rising in him. That was bad. This was the scenario she had worried about, late last night.

  She squeezed her chest with one hand and pressed the other against her belly. “I feel sick…” She staggered a little, reaching out blindly for the arm of the armchair, or something to hold her up.

  She found instead, Aslan’s arm. His other hand came under her. He put her back on her feet with a powerful lift.

  “Sit down,” he said, his voice deep and controlled. He pushed her into the armchair, not roughly. It was impossible to resist the strength of his arms and hands, especially with the nausea and fear running through her.

  Quinn let herself fall back onto the soft cushions. She wrapped her arms around her and held her elbows, as the shaking intensified.

  Aslan and Toni stood over her. The gun had not moved.

  “Is that all you found?” Aslan asked Toni. “An absence of records?”

  “No one moves through life without leaving records,” Toni said. “It isn’t that they’re hard to find. There are none at all. She had no life before sixteen.” Her smile was grim. “It is as if someone set up a legend which ran deep, because they expected an investigation into the identity to run deep, too. Only they didn’t build it deep enough. Not deep enough for me, anyway.”

  Aslan looked at Quinn. “I am afraid I must insist upon an explanation, Quinn. Should I even call you Quinn?”

  Quinn licked her lips.

  “Holy shit!” Mitchell eased his way across the room, his gaze on Toni’s gun. “What the hell did I miss?”

  “Quinn was just about to explain that to us,” Aslan said. His voice was calmer than it had been before. The fine hairs on her neck prickled hard. Quinn knew she was facing a dangerous man. She didn’t know why. She couldn’t explain it. Yet she knew. Her gut knew.

  “Who the hell are you people?” she demanded. She couldn’t take her attention away from Toni’s gun.

  Mitchell crossed his arms and spread his legs.

  “You need to talk, Quinn,” Aslan said. “If this is all a misunderstanding, then we will apologize later. For now, though, you must put up with bad manners. Tell me. Is it true? Why does your personal history halt sixteen years ago?”

  Mitchell whistled. He sounded impressed. “Wouldn’t have called that one.”

  Quinn bought her hand to her forehead. Her fingers trembled against her flesh, which didn’t he
lp her wipe the dampness there. “I am Quinn Sawyer,” she said. “My documents are genuine. They were issued by the American government, the same as everyone else. Only, I wasn’t born Quinn Sawyer.”

  No one moved. Their stares hardened, now she had confirmed she had not always been Quinn Sawyer. Quinn pressed her fingers against her chest once more. Everything inside her chest hurt. “I’ve never told anyone this before,” she said. “Not even Denis. It is…difficult.”

  Light steps sounded on the back staircase and the steps creaked as someone climbed down them. Noah strolled into the room. He glanced around, taking in the three tense people ranged in front of Quinn.

  He showed no reaction. His steps slowed. He moved up beside the group of three. Unlike Mitchell, he didn’t demand an explanation for what was going on. He just watched. His expression remained impassive, as it always did.

  It was just one more person on Aslan’s side, facing Quinn, who sat alone.

  Ren tore off the headphones and looked at Dima accusingly.

  Everyone else was staring at Dima, too. She stared calmly back.

  Leander shook his head. “You told them?”

  “I don’t even want to get into how you manage to get word to them,” Scott said softly. “Let’s just stick with what on earth you were thinking.” His voice rose at the end.

  “If she is in witness protection,” Lochan said, “then you have put her in a position where she must reveal her true identity. I know you were looking for a way for Aslan to trust her, but this isn’t it. There is a reason witness protection works. There is a reason it is needed in the first place.”

  Dima calmed her face to neutral. Caution flooded her. She chose her words with care. “This operation is covert until the first shot is fired. Once that first shot is fired, we lose all chance of learning anything. So does Quinn. She is a smart woman. Keep listening. Let’s see how it plays out. Agata and Leela are still in place, yes?”

  Ren nodded, as she was coordinating them for today.

  Scott got to his feet and unclipped his handgun from the back of his jeans. He checked the load and clipped the gun in place again. “I will help Agata and Leela. It sounds as if they will need to move on the house. They shouldn’t do it alone.”