Broken Heart

by Mike Gomes

  "And that's why I called you in, sir." Victor watched as Makarov placed the flame that had been struck down into the bowl of the pipe, taking two quick puffs to get the tobacco going, letting the smoke roll out from the corner of his mouth, as the pipe stayed securely in the middle. "I always loved your pipe."

  "This is probably the same one from when you came in to us." Makarov held it up in front of them, "You were always the star pupil. I can remember you as a boy trying to emulate what I did, marching around and giving orders to the other children. One by one, all of them have washed out or been killed, but you are still here, my ultimate success.

  "Then you don't mind, sir, if I ask you, did you train the Mantis as well?" Victor held himself steady, not being used to having a standard conversation with the man that trained him. The positions of power had been cast in iron from his youth, and even though he held unmatched skills within the KGB, he felt nervous at the idea of asking the only man he ever saw as a role model in life to answer his questions.

  "Yes, I did," Makarov confirmed, taking a puff from his pipe, the smoke rolling out of his mouth as he looked into the bowl inspecting how much of the tobacco he had burned. "Really, the only two that I ever cared about was the Mantis and you. The Mantis, what a silly thing. Back then she was simply Gabriella. She did as she was told and nothing more. Very similar to you, but not exactly."

  "Not exactly, sir?" Victor asked with a quizzical look upon his face. "How did she and I differ?"

  "You were more of a regular child. People told me all over the place that you had no feelings, no desires, but what you did have is the ability to experiment and play. As I said before, you would march around taking control of things, engaging with other children that were with you in the program, but not the Mantis." Makarov closed his eyes for a moment, picturing the young girl and the stark look of blank-ness on her face and an unwillingness to engage. "You see, Gabriella was different. When we first brought her in, we could see the skills and the potential, she took all of the same tests as you physically and mentally, and scored outstandingly. But we noticed something happening over time that didn't happen with any of the other children, at least not to the same degree."

  "Was it different than how I reacted?" Victor asked, as if he was seeking approval from a man that he referred to as master for a number of years.

  "You had some of the similar behaviors, but not completely. You see, Gabriella, her emotions turned off. They completely and totally shut off in every way. We could ask her to do the most vile and hardest things that you've ever heard, and she wouldn't so much as blink during it. She caused grown men to shudder and feel discomfort just in her presence, because they felt she was more machine than human. I even had one such man asked me if I was part of a team developing a cyborg that could do the work of the KGB."

  "That does sound a bit like me," Victor said, feeling pride in his words and waiting for reassurance. "There are many times that I complete missions and I won't lose a wink of sleep. I just move on to the next thing and don't care."

  "And that is a great skill for an agent. You have the ability to separate one thing from another, you have the ability to succeed and not get a big head about it, all things we try to train every agent to do. All of the children we’ve trained have had that ability to shut things off at a young age, but most often, the emotions and feelings would come back. It led to the downfall of many of those agents. They had the post-traumatic stress disorder reaction when they got older."

  "I'm still here for you, sir, and with your help, I hope we can take down the Mantis together."

  "That would be a grand idea, son, but the problem is, that the Mantis, I don't want her dead, I want her alive." Makarov took another long puff off his pipe. "You see, son, the Mantis could be extremely valuable to us if we get her back alive. If we can bring her back to the training facility, I'm sure that I can trigger her mind back to the place where she was when she was a child. It was foolish failure that made us lose her in the first place."

  "Sir, I was never sure about what happened with that, what went on that had the Mantis leave the program anyways?" Victor feared that he had may have pushed too hard. The story of the Mantis had been one that had lived throughout the KGB for years and nobody knew of any official record of her existing, despite the fact that many say they had witnessed her and been around her. The admission of Makarov to him numerous years before about her existence, placed him in a small group that knew the reality of the situation, but he had gained no more.

  "She was on a training track that was even higher than yours." Makarov placed down the pipe on the table and leaned it against the ashtray. "She achieved all levels before you even achieved them, and she's the only one that ever did that. The more amazing thing about what she did, was she did it without a conscience. She just was blank inside, an open sheet of paper to be drawn on, or written on, or whatever we wanted to do on. But we knew there was a quiet rage inside her that was slowly building and burning."

  "Did she try to escape?" Victor asked. "Did she really try to run away from everything she knew as her family?"

  "Yes, yes she did." Makarov placed his arms on the chair and squeezed them gently at the question from his old protege. "You see, Victor, Gabriella had committed murder for us on more than one occasion as a child."

  "As a child?" Victor was stunned at the information. "I didn't get my first mission until I was twenty-four."

  "This is what I'm trying to tell you about her, Victor. She was soulless, there was nothing there, so the idea of sending her to assassinate someone, it held no risk, held no problem. The worst case scenario was that someone would find her out, remove the weapon from her and try to hold her for someone to pick her up. At that point, we would have used a few agents to go get her and claim that they were her parents. All the papers had been drawn up." Makarov allowed an expression of pride to fill his face. "But the issue here, my friend, with Gabriella going out on those missions, was she was perfect. She had done things that even our most hardened agents would have struggled with."

  "Do you care to give any examples, or is it all top secret?" Victor’s competitive streak came alive in him with the fact that the young girl had surpassed him at such an early age.

  "There was a time. It was a difficult time for us when the fall of the Soviet Union happened. Gorbachev and Reagan had gotten together in order to smooth things out and make them better. It was hostile and it was difficult for everybody involved. As those years passed, we saw cuts to our agency, and all the outlying states went on their own and raised their own flags for themselves."

  "It must have been quite a blow at that time," Victor said.

  "Sometimes I forget it, Victor, you're too young to remember it all. But once it all settled down, and when we started to move forward, we found out some of the allegiances we had and the KGB weren't what we once thought they were. People that came from the satellite areas of Georgia, the Ukraine, all had their allegiances to where they had come from, so staying with the KGB became a hassle and difficult for them. Their allegiance was suddenly torn,” Makarov explained.

  Shifting in his chair, Victor leaned forward on the table trying to gather as much information as he could about his potential target.

  "We had a gentleman who was from the Ukraine, who was one of our captains. His job was to work with me in identifying young people that could be of benefit to him and me in the research program. In reality, he picked some of our finest people, including you." Makarov’s eyes shifted around the room. "But he did not pick the Mantis. She was kept separate from him. She was my program to work with, and I only allowed a select few to have any contact with her. Some of whom broke the alliance and mistreated her."

  "Did they abuse her... Sexually?" Victor looked to his trainer who simply nodded in the affirmative. "Such a mistrust."

  "Needless to say, when I found out, I was furious. So I decided that there was no time like the present to do something about it. She was at the tender a
ge of ten when I first handed her a gun, and she committed her first murder right in front of me. No remorse, no negative feelings." Makarov looked off into the distance as if he could see the situation unfolding. “She never let on that she hated the men. She never let on that she wanted to kill them, but when I gave her the assignment to kill the two men that had abused her one week apart from each other, she did so without complaint and without any worry. She left the facility, walked to each man's home, and murdered them in their homes."

  "How was she in the debriefing?" Victor asked.

  "She was fine, regimented, orderly, doing as she was told and responding as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and that's when I sent her to another man's house. A man who had not harmed her on her own, but whom knew too much and needed to be eliminated before he went back to the Ukraine to be with the people of his birth."

  "It sounds like she completed the job and finished the man off without a problem," Victor said to the man whose chin now had fallen on his chest, as his mind raced, contemplating the events that had taken place long in the past.

  "It was the moment that she scared most of us. She'd gone to the address that I had selected for her, and knocked on the door. The man's daughter opened the door. Over her head, Gabriella saw her target and the man's wife." Makarov was nodding his head, but with his eyes looking into space. "She asked the girl if she wanted to play. As soon as she said yes and turned to ask her parents, Gabriella reached into her bag and held the gun without making it visible. When the two parents came to meet the new girl in the neighborhood, Gabriella asked if she could use the bathroom. As soon as the door was closed, she shot her target, his wife, and the child. At that point, she simply turned around and walked back out the door, and didn't stop walking until she got back to us. She walked for thirty-seven miles."

  "And do you feel like she still has that in her now? Is she so blank, so rigid? That's not the woman that I saw when I had my moment to get her," Victor said.

  "No, Victor, she's not the same. She changed, and she changed far more for the dangerous."

  "How could she be any more dangerous than someone with no feelings?" Victor asked.

  "Because she is somebody that has feelings, and she's ready to act on them."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "What does he think, I'm a moron?" Nikolai was exasperated, looking at his laptop that sat with him in the passenger seat of the car. "He’s used my name to grab a hotel room. Classic Victor."

  "You don't have to sound like it's a nod in your direction as a compliment," Gabriella replied, taking the corner, trying to keep their computer from being tracked by anybody that could be watching. After days and nights of being followed by the KGB, she knew that it wouldn't be long until Victor had notified his comrades and they would be coming to help him.

  "You know, I understand that he's there waiting for us, but I wonder if we join him there whether we can get the drop on him by moving in faster than he knows we're gonna come."

  Gabriella shifted her head to the side looking Nikolai with a raised eyebrow. "Don't do what he wants you to do. You know that he'll be out-thinking you three steps ahead. He's that good."

  "If we came through the door with guns blazing, we could get the drop on him, just kick the door open and be ready for him," Nikolai said with a little excitement in his voice. "We splash the room with bullets and we're out the window before you know it, he's only on the second floor at the Radisson."

  "Stop it, Nikolai, you were always like this, piss and vinegar and running around until the fight was at hand. Then you use your sheer skill and determination to get out of it, but you were never one for handling the front end of an operation."

  Letting out a small laugh, Nikolai looked out of the front window shaking his head.

  "What? What's that all about, you shaking your head and laughing?" Gabriella asked.

  "Victor used to say the same thing about me. He said I would jump in and run straight against a herd of wild cattle coming right at me in a stampede."

  "I feel honored that you compared me to that piece of shit." Gabriella still wasn’t giving in to Nikolai, not giving him any sense of affection or friendship. "Why don't you call him?"

  "What?"

  "I said why don't you call him?" Gabriella raised her voice and turned her head to look directly at him. "If you wanna catch him off-guard, do the last thing he'd think you'd do, which is give him a call on the phone. Let's draw him to an open place, maybe outside the palace. If he's got the guts to try to shoot you midday in front of the palace, then he's better than I thought."

  "You might be a little bit insane, Gabriella, but I actually like the way you're thinking." Nikolai pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed the hotel number.

  "Ah yes, I'm looking for a Mr. Nikolai Bortsky. I believe he's in room 252, could you connect me to the number?" Nikolai asked, getting an affirmative answer from the operator that was followed by a small pause and a clicking sound that resulted in a phone ringing.

  "Victor, my old friend, how are you?" Nikolai greeted, looking over to Gabriella and nodding his head. "I've been here thinking that you keep chasing me all over everywhere, and we might as well just meet and have this out now. Why don't we meet at the front of the Royal Gardens, and from there, we can work out some kind of an agreement that's fitting for both you and me."

  Nikolai held still as no sound came from the other end of the phone. He was sure that the wheels inside Victor's head were turning rapidly, trying to figure out all the angles that might be at play that his old partner would have for him.

  Gabriella could hear something on the other end of the line, Victor had clearly asked about her, which Nikolai confirmed when he next spoke.

  "The Mantis? What makes you think that I'd know the Mantis." Nikolai gave Gabriella a wink. "She's just a myth, nothing real."

  Hearing the shouting coming over the phone, Gabriella smiled as she took a left-hand turn pointing the car in the direction of the Royal Gardens to try to get to the location, if it would be needed. "Oh, so you say you met her? Are you sure that was the Mantis? It could have been anybody. I mean, you've been known to kill the wrong people before."

  "Tell him Antonio said hello," Gabriella said in a hushed tone.

  "Alright, you got me, you got me. I do have her with me. But I think we can reach an agreement that will keep us all happy, even if you did murder her husband and destroy her home. We just need to find a way that we can all exist on one planet together without being at each other's throats," Nikolai said, trying to ease the man into moving from a conflict with sure death to one of an agreement.

  "I can promise you one thing, neither one of us will attempt to kill you while we're there, unless of course, you try to do it to us first. We will come in side by side and will not separate and we have nobody else with us. But let me tell you this, old friend, if I get the sense that there are any agents there, if there's any more backup that you have, you and all the tourists around will quickly be involved in a mass shooting," Nikolai said with authority and sternness in his voice that was unrelenting and unforgiving. "And this is a one-time offer, friend. You and I went to hell and back together, I saved your life and you saved mine, and that should be worth something to the both of us. As long as we can move to a place where we trust in each other and we accept each other, then there's no reason we both can't live healthy, happy lives, and we'll just stay clear of each other."

  A rumbling came from the other end of the phone as Victor's voice was clearly trying to give orders rather than joining the conversation.

  "Victor, Victor, please stop," Nikolai urged. "You could spare me the theatrics. I went to the same classes as you and learned how to be a spy. I've learned about mind manipulation and I've learned about how to handle a conversation to push it in your favor. It's not going to work on this occasion. So, I'm offering this to you right now, be there in fifteen minutes. And if you have anybody that's with you, have them by your side, not
further away. And if nothing happens, then I'll assume you and I are at war."

  Nikolai's finger pressed the button to cancel the conversation. The determination that he felt was unwavering and he was ready for a battle that was to ensue.

  "We're only a few blocks away, right?" Nikolai asked.

  "Sure. Three minutes, tops. We can dump the car by the Barrington Hotel and people will think it's just double-parked." Gabriella looking at Nikolai and smiled. "You did a good job there. You forced him to come to a head quick. You know I can't be part of this little love fest you're talking about."

  "I thought you'd say that. If you think about it, with all the work that we've all done with negotiations and trying to figure out what's right and wrong in these kind of situations, there's always one thing that comes shining through, and that's that nobody wants to get shot, and usually nobody wants to shoot anybody else. If an agreement can be reached, everybody's happy, everybody gets along," Nikolai explained. "Though I know this time it's different. And if you want to take this guy’s life, you're gonna have to do it in broad daylight with dozens of cameras in the area. You'll become one of the most wanted people in the world, killing someone in broad daylight in Bangkok."

  "I'll do whatever I need to do," Gabriella said, turning onto the street that held the Royal Gardens.

  "Gabriella, you don't have to do this. I know I never met Antonio, but my guess is he'd want you to not have a situation where you could die. He seems like the kind of man that would have wanted only the best for you." Nikolai tried to appeal to Gabriella’s gentler side. "Wouldn't Antonio say you're better off creating some kind of an agreement with this man and then being out of each other's hair forever?"

  "You know nothing of him. And you shouldn't say anything about him either," Gabriella snapped, not taking her eyes from the street. "You forget it's your mission that landed us here."

  "I did not kill Antonio." Nikolai was frustrated with the accusations that, again, his mission had created an atmosphere that allowed the death of Gabriella's husband. "I offered you a mission, nothing more. You knew what was at stake and you knew who the target was. Don't blame me for simply giving you this mission when you called asked me for a job. You could've walked away and said no."