And then the shots were hailing from all sides, piercing hole after hole in Nikolai’s fragile old body. His entire frame shook endlessly from the barrage of bullets cutting through every inch of him.
“No!” Gaia hollered, sprinting for him with all her speed, leaping straight into the heart of the gunfire, just as she had done all those years ago.
That Bag
“HOLD YOUR FIRE!” LOKI HOLLERED. He was barking his orders into a black walkie-talkie as he watched from the bushes near Riverside Drive. He hadn’t expected Gaia to leap straight into the line of fire, though he should have. After all, he’d seen her do the exact same thing years ago; why wouldn’t he expect it now?
“Hold your fire, damn it!” he screamed again. “She cannot be harmed, do you understand me? The subject does not get harmed. Under any circumstances!”
“Sir, yes, sir,” the voices came back in boxed tones over the walkie-talkie. “Holding fire, sir.”
Fine. Good. Loki could breathe a little easier now. Because the essential task had been completed. Nikolai was dead. Now he just needed that bag.
Three
STILL BREATHING. NIKOLAI WAS STILL breathing. But barely. Each breath was short and desperate. Like it might be his last.
“Hold on,” Gaia told him as she knelt down next to him and took his hand. She couldn’t even tell if her kindness was just a reflex or if it was some kind of heartfelt compassion.
She pulled his wrist closer to check for his pulse, and that’s when she saw it. There in the fleshy part of his hand between his thumb and forefinger… a small, perforated circular scar. A bite mark. The deep bite mark of a small child. Yes, it was just as he’d said in his note. They had in fact met before at the monument, she and Nikolai. And now she realized why she’d never remembered him. Because she’d never seen his face. He’d been nothing more than the hand that held her back from saving her father.
But somehow, now there was no resentment. Maybe there was always a chance to repent. Maybe that was why she didn’t despise him now as she thought back to the horrible thing he had tried to do that day. He was trying to make up for it now. And that was all Gaia cared about at the moment.
And as he looked up at her, his wrinkled face and his torso now covered in bloody bullet holes, her heart did go out to him. In spite of everything.
“I—I don’t…” she stammered, looking up and down at his riddled near corpse. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t…”
“Shhh.” He squeezed her hand tighter, coughing up bits of blood as he looked up at her with the strangest look of relief and satisfaction on his face. He had green eyes. She’d never known he had green eyes. “Shhh, it’s okay,” he whispered. And then he smiled at her. “It’s okay now.”
“But—”
“No, Gaia, please,” he choked out. “You don’t talk. You listen now, yes? You listen…”
Gaia nodded, staying as silent as possible. He barely had enough breath left in him to make audible words.
“Gaia… don’t feel any pity now. None. I knew, you see? I knew this would be my last mission.”
“No,” Gaia said. “You don’t have to do—”
“Gaia,” he snapped at her with whatever strength he had left. “You listen now, uh? Just listen.” Gaia nodded, holding tighter to his bloody trembling hands. “Now I know that mission is complete, you see?” He smiled faintly. His breaths were becoming shorter and more shallow every second. “Gaia… all the answers are in the bag. All of them. There are things in there no one knows yet. Not even Loki, Gaia. Not even your father. Plans. Plans that have been made for you, uh? Secrets about your future that Loki does not know. It is all in the bag.” Nikolai’s eyes were beginning to shut now.
“It’s okay,” Gaia told him. “It’s okay, I’ll stay here with you—”
“No,” he insisted between breaths. “No, you don’t stay here with me, Gaia. You take the bag and you go. Now, you understand? You go now. Don’t let history repeat itself. Put an end to this war, Gaia….”
All that was left to do was exactly what he had said. To take that bag of secrets and truths… and get the hell out of there.
Gaia reached for the bag, but a smattering of bullets began to rain down, obstructing her vision. Then a man in a gray SWAT uniform appeared before her eyes, snatched the precious bag right out of Gaia’s hands, and ran away.
The Concourse
“DAMN IT, I SAID HOLD YOUR fire!” Loki howled, nearly crushing the walkie-talkie in his hand. “That was an order! Hold your fire!”
“Sir,” the voice squawked from the receiver. “Sir, we are not firing, sir. Repeat, our men are standing down, sir.”
“What?” Loki barked. “Well, then, who the hell is firing those guns?”
“Sir, that is unknown, sir,” the voice replied. “Repeat. The origin of gunfire is unknown at this point, sir.”
Loki’s eyes widened as he slapped down the antenna and darted his eyes through the bushes out at the concourse. Unknown? What the hell does he mean, “unknown”? If my people aren’t shooting… then who the hell is?
Well-Trained Fighting Machine
GAIA DIDN’T HESITATE. THERE WAS no more time for hesitation. She dove for SWAT guy’s feet like she was taking down a wild pit bull. The moment she’d made contact, she leaned hard into his knees and dragged him down to the ground, snatching the black bag from his hands.
But he countered. His first punch snapped Gaia’s head back like a practice punching bag. And then his follow-up kick punctured her gut like a steel girder had just struck her. But that only made Gaia mad.
She relaxed her limbs and waited for his next kick. And when she sensed the foot about to collide with her chin, she ducked right, letting him fall flat on the ground before jabbing her elbow straight down into the center of his spine.
“Ugh!” he cried out as she leapt back to her feet. She reached again for the bag, but he surprised her with a sweep kick that knocked her back to the ground. He wasn’t giving up easy. She was going to have put him out of commission just for the time being. The bag was the priority now. Not a good clean fight.
Gaia dropped back a few steps, relaxing her hands in a defensive stance as the SWAT boy jumped off the ground and stepped slowly toward her, trying to keep his guard up. Finally he stepped right where Gaia wanted him. Her entire body swirled left as she leapt in the air and kicked out her leg, pummeling the side of his face with a perfect roundhouse kick that sent his entire body into the air and back two feet. She took one last look at his body lying in a heap on the white asphalt, just to be sure he was finished. And then she turned back for the bag.
But the bag was now in another gray-suited man’s hands, and he was running. Running too quickly. Running for Riverside Drive, where he surely had a car waiting, if not a series of them.
“No!” She groaned, gasping with utter exhaustion from the last battle. But she tried. She wasn’t done trying. One more leap for anything—the man’s legs, his arms, a wrist, an ankle, anything…
But it wouldn’t have mattered. Suddenly the phantom gunfire was pushing Gaia farther and farther back from that goddamn thief in the gray suit who was stealing Gaia’s entire life from her. And there was nothing she could do to stop him.
Uptown
“WHO IS FIRING?” LOKI SHOUTED pointlessly into the walkie-talkie. “All teams report now. I want to know who is firing. I want to know who took that bag. I want details now!”
He stared momentarily at the device, giving his men half a chance to come up with something. He was looking to be impressed here. Surprised. And then the muddied voice came through.
“Sir, I’m sorry, sir, we have no sightings, sir, repeat, no intelligence on this matter, sir.”
Loki breathed out a long frustrated sigh as he dropped the walkie-talkie down to his side and stood in silence. He already knew what had to be done. He just needed to give the order. He brought the walkie-talkie back to his mouth and did what was necessary. “All right, ret
reat,” he announced. “Do you read me? I want a full-scale retreat.”
“Sir, yes, sir, packing it up, sir.”
“Follow the man with the bag, is that clear? Those are your orders, to follow the man with the bag.”
Loki smacked the antenna closed again and launched into a run for Riverside Drive. He could still spot something if he got there quickly enough, even if his incompetent men couldn’t. He could still nab some kind of clue.
He landed on the paved street of Riverside Drive just in time to see the man in gray running with the bag, headed uptown.
“You!” Loki bellowed, pointing his finger at the man up ahead. “You! Stop!” But what had he thought that would do? Even he didn’t have that kind of universal authority. A black limo drove up next to the man and opened its door as it continued to drive. The car rolled alongside him until he could throw the bag in and then leap in. Next thing Loki knew, the door had slammed shut and the car had doubled its speed with a nasty screech of tires. Loki took one last look. No license number, of course. Whoever they were, they were absolute pros.
Someone had outplayed him. The question was, who? He signaled for his own car to pick him up and ordered his driver to head back downtown, where he could lick his wounds and contemplate this most unexpected defeat.
2002
Who would possibly think that they had the brains or the skill to outsmart Loki?
GAIA
Deranged acts of love. That’s really what it all comes down to. Generation after generation of deranged lovers, and fathers, and daughters. And standing alone in the center of the empty monument—my least-favorite place in all of New York—I can’t help notice the irony of it all. All of us, past and present, searching for some kind of lover, some kind of family. And every one of us ending up either alone or dead.
But maybe I did find someone. I think maybe I found my father again. And I found my mother. So I know that this massive cathartic journey was not for nothing.
Yes, I think if Nikolai were still alive, I would be aching to tell him that he didn’t die for nothing. That in fact he gave me everything I’d hoped for, whether it hurt or not. I wanted to know my mother. I wanted to know who had betrayed whom in that horrible love triangle. I’d wanted to know who the real Loki was.
And Nikolai provided me with the answers to all these questions, didn’t he? I know about all the ways my mother was just like me and all the ways she wasn’t. I know that my uncle is a sick, twisted son of a bitch who would betray anyone he could if it would serve his cause. I know that he is Loki and that I despise him with every ounce of my being. And I know now that everything he ever told me was a lie. All his stories about my fearlessness being some kind of chemical injection, part of some huge government conspiracy or something. Absolute and complete lies. My fearlessness was just as exactly as my father always told me. Just a freak occurrence that no one ever would or could understand, no matter how many tests they run.
And I even have one bonus. I know now how much I love my father.
I understand now, Dad. I understand how Loki has made it all so impossible. How it has been his one and only goal in life to turn me against you. I won’t let that happen again. I promise you that. Even if Loki is my real…
Ugh. That’s the one thing I truly, truly need to know. Is he or not? Is that what that strange look of concern in my mother’s eyes was in the old picture of us hanging up by the stairs at George Niven’s house? Did she know by then? Did she know the answer? Because I’m pretty damn sure that I’ll never know it. I wonder if the answer to that question is somewhere in that black duffel bag?
I mean, what on earth was Nikolai talking about when he mentioned these “future plans for me?” What future plans? It was all in the bag. All those answers. I’m pretty damn sure I just missed my one and only chance to know those answers.
But maybe not… Maybe I’ll have another chance.
They say that history repeats itself.
Try to Understand
LOKI’S CAR SPED DOWN THE WEST Side Highway, heading back to his loft in Chelsea, where he could gather all the facts he had, collect all the reports from his various operatives, and try to understand what the hell had gone wrong today at the monument.
Who could possibly have taken that bag? Who would know about that bag or even want it other than Gaia or himself? It couldn’t have been Tom; he was in the Caymans at the moment.
Who would possibly think that they had the brains or the skill to outsmart Loki?
Cemetery Before Nightfall
HE ROLLED THE WINDOW DOWN JUST a few inches, hoping to let a little more air inside the rather stuffy limousine, and sifted through the top layer of materials in the bag, taking mental note of exactly what would be useful to him right now and what would not. There would be plenty of time to go through every single page later, but for now, he had accomplished the necessary task.
I am sorry, Nikolai. But there was simply no way I was going to let you give Gaia everything in this bag.
And there was no way he was going to let Loki see everything in it, either. There were still many things about Gaia that Loki knew nothing about. Things that would all present themselves in due time. And of course, there were the things that Loki still did not even know about himself. But why not let him suffer through that all on his own? He really shouldn’t have dubbed himself Loki. He should have called himself Narcissus.
Let him drown in his own hubris, he thought, sifting through the bag a little further until he could find the envelope he wanted to be sure was still safely tucked away in it.
“Aha,” he whispered quietly to himself, finding just that very envelope. He brought it up to his nose, breathing in that gorgeous scent of spicy lilacs. Unforgettable, that smell. Even after all these years.
“How are you feeling, Yuri?” his good friend Vladimir asked from the front seat of the limousine.
“Good,” Yuri replied. “I’m feeling very good today, Vlad.”
“Excellent, my friend,” Vladimir replied. “That’s excellent. So where to next?”
“To the cemetery,” Yuri replied quickly. He had known that was his plan from the start of this day. First the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument and then the cemetery before nightfall. “I want to visit my daughter’s grave. And then we can go home.”
“Of course,” Vladimir replied. “To the cemetery, then.”
Yuri looked again at the front of the envelope, running his finger across her elegant handwriting:
10/18/90
For my dearest Gaia—
(Do not open until you are thirteen)
He pulled the letter out of the envelope and read through it once more. Just to feel Katia’s presence that much closer to him. And then he folded it back up, placed it back in its aging envelope, and set it inside the duffel bag, along with all the other materials that Gaia would never be permitted to see.
“I’m sorry, Katia, my dear,” he said quietly as he peered out the window at the trees flying by. “But Gaia cannot know everything. Not yet.”
10/18/90
My dearest Gaia,
It has been two days now since we’ve had you down in the underground lab—God, it is so strange down here. I don’t know how they can go this long without sunlight.
They are still conducting their tests, and we are still waiting to hear just what exactly is so different about you. But Gaia, I have learned some other things in the last two days since that horrific nightmare at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and I want to share them with you. That’s why I am writing you this letter.
I think, maybe, that I will not give you this letter until you are much older and more able to deal with such horrible things as this. I want that day at the monument to be the last ever day like that in your life. I think perhaps when you are thirteen or fourteen, I will give you this letter.
Gaia, your father and I will try so hard to make our family’s life safe in the Berkshires, but we know that we may not be think
ing realistically. Because the very plain truth is that something quite horrible might happen to your father or me.
Just know this. Know that your father loves you more than anything else in the world. More, even, than he loves me. Which is as it should be, I think.
But most importantly, the main reason I write you this letter is so that when you turn thirteen, if, God forbid, both Tom and I are not there to warn you, you will know these things for yourself. Because otherwise the consequences could be quite disastrous.
Gaia, you need to know that at some point in your life, maybe when you are still in elementary school, maybe not until you are a teenager, but at some point, a man will approach you, and he will look exactly like your father. Exactly. This is your uncle Oliver. And understand this: Everything he will say will be lies. Everything. And he may even try to convince you that he is your real father, but this is not true. We know this now, Gaia, as of just yesterday.
You see, while we have been here in this “safety zone” in the underground CIA headquarters, a superior of your father’s, an Agent Rodriguez, gave us some confidential information from Oliver’s CIA files. Yes, this is illegal, but these were very, very special circumstances.
This is what you must know and understand:
Your uncle’s medical reports indicate that he is sterile. He is one hundred percent infertile. Most likely the result of an experimental medical treatment he received in 1973.
You see, as Agent Rodriguez explained to us, this information had always been available to Oliver on request, but he never requested it. So he does not even know. He has no idea that he is sterile.
The point I’m trying to make to you, Gaia, is that your father is in fact your father. And he loves you so very much.
So, for now, we will try to live the happiest lives we can, but of course, we will always be living in fear somehow. I suppose I am used to this. Always running from my father and now from Oliver… My God, that’s not the life I want for you, Gaia. A life lived in fear.
Before Gaia Page 19
