by Drew Chapman
Sure enough, ten minutes later, the young man with the goatee got up and asked Ilya if he’d return the favor. Ilya said sure and even offered to keep the young man’s backpack under his chair for safekeeping. The young man hurried off to the bathroom. Ilya made sure no one was watching, then rifled through the man’s backpack. He found a Florida driver’s license, a Bank of America debit card, a loyalty card from Winn-Dixie, a community college ID, and an overdue utility bill. From those, he had everything he needed: a name, date of birth, address, college ID number, and even the beginnings of a bank account number. He didn’t steal any of those cards—that would alert the young man and defeat Ilya’s purpose. Instead, he took cell phone pictures of each piece of ID, then put everything back in the wallet exactly as he had found it.
When the young man returned—his name was Robert Jacob Mullins—he thanked Ilya, retrieved his backpack, and went back to working on his laptop. Ilya sent all of Mullins’s information to a storage folder on the darknet. His associate in Moscow would download the information from the folder, then overnight the finished product to an agreed-upon address in Atlanta. Ilya packed up and left without saying another word.
Plenty of IDs were to be had on the black market, but Ilya didn’t trust them. Every city in the United States had backroom counterfeiters ready to print out driver’s licenses and passports by the dozen, with varying degrees of quality, for the right amount of money, and Ilya knew that in the next ten days he might need to avail himself of the services of one of those back-alley print shops. But for the time being, he preferred to capture the necessary information himself, and to have known craftsmen transform that information into high-quality, usable pieces of identification.
He had $700 cash left in his wallet, which was plenty for the next twenty-four hours. He paid $20 for a cab that took him to Valencia College, a sprawling campus west of downtown that looked more like a business park than a school; then he sauntered into the student union, logged on to the online bulletin board, and hunted for anyone needing passengers to Atlanta.
Within five minutes he’d found a pair of women leaving in half an hour. Eliza and Sarah agreed to carry him if he paid for half of the gas, probably around twenty bucks, and if they retained veto power over the music choices. No rap, no Phish. He agreed instantly. For the first part of the trip north, Eliza and Sarah chatted happily in the front of the car, and Ilya sat mutely in back. By the Florida-Georgia border, however, Ilya sensed that his silence was making the women nervous—Eliza kept flashing him looks in the rearview mirror—so he started a conversation about college football, then fast food, then dating, all things he cared not a whit about.
By Macon, Georgia, they were best friends. By nine that evening, he was lying on a bed in a dim motel room in East Point, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. Two hours later, she knocked on the door.
• • •
She was a true believer, or at least she claimed to be, but that was not enough for Ilya. She had to come recommended by people he trusted, and she did: three separate sources, one in Europe, two in California. They said she was smart, discreet, and good at her job. She stood about five foot five, with shoulder-length brown hair that curled in tight ringlets.
“Can you make it blond?” Ilya asked, pointing to her hair.
“I can make it any color you want.”
She had a thin face, more sexy than pretty. You looked at her lips before you looked at anything else; they were rounded and full, and she highlighted them with bright red lipstick.
“The lipstick is too red,” Ilya said. “Too obvious. You’re not looking for attention.”
“The lipstick is too red,” she repeated, as if taking notes.
She was curvy, and she wore a gauzy white top, with denim shorts and sandals. The clothes clung to her body in the heat, accentuating her breasts and hips. She seemed to glide more than walk, and slink more than move. While they talked, her eyes never left Ilya’s.
“You’re good in bed?”
She started to undo the buttons on her blouse. “Pull down your pants and I’ll show you.”
“I don’t want to have sex with you.”
“Why not? Are you gay?” she asked, seemingly without an opinion on the matter.
“What difference would it make? No sex.”
“Okay.” She pulled the blouse back over her shoulders. “But the answer is—I’ve never had anyone complain afterward.”
Ilya guessed her age at about twenty-five. “You will be reluctant at first. You’re not accustomed to casual encounters. But once things get under way, you become a tiger. You lose yourself in the moment.”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
“Rachel Brown? You’re Jewish?”
“I can be Jewish. Or half. Or not at all.”
Ilya realized he could ask about Rachel Brown’s ethnicity and her real name all he wanted, but he would never get an answer that he believed. Or at least fully believed. She lived—as he did—in that gray netherworld where the truth was what you made it. Whatever they decided was real, was real, just for tonight, in a motel room in an Atlanta suburb.
“You are Christian,” he said. “Born-again. There’s a Bible in the bedside drawer. Memorize a few useful verses. We’ll find you a suitable church. We’ll drive by it tomorrow, so you know what it looks like. The clothes will have to change too. More modest. But not too modest. We’ll go to the mall and buy you some new things.”
“I should have a crucifix. Born-agains wear them. And they draw the eye here.” She ran her index finger down her cleavage. “That always works.”
Ilya watched her finger plunge slowly down her neckline and then back up again, and he had to agree—that would work well.
“You’ve been to college?”
“Two years,” Rachel Brown said. “Didn’t love it.”
“What did you study?”
“Communications. A little business. Mostly English lit. Chaucer and Melville and is Moby-Dick a metaphor for the discontents of capitalism. I didn’t think it was. I just thought it was about a big fish. My professor disagreed.”
Ilya blinked and took another look at Rachel Brown, or the woman who called herself that. Perhaps he had underestimated her. Perhaps she was considerably brighter than he had imagined. She had a sense of humor, and that spoke to psychological flexibility, and psychological flexibility was key for Ilya’s plans.
“You’ve done this before?” Ilya asked.
“Well, you haven’t told me what this is yet, so I can’t be entirely sure.” She spread herself out on the twin bed that was closest to the motel window. She kicked off her sandals and stretched her arms over her head like a cat about to curl up into a ball and sleep. “But if you’re asking me if I’ve ever made someone believe something that wasn’t true, I’d say—every single day of my life.”
Ilya watched her and felt an involuntary stirring. She was extraordinarily sexy, so at ease in her body, so comfortable with its secret places. To Ilya’s thinking, she could hook a man and reel him in before he even knew he was on the line.
Yes, Ilya thought, but did not say, Rachel Brown will work out quite well.
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 17, 9:55 P.M.
As her plane hurtled eastward across the country and into the night, Celeste Chen felt a deep sense of foreboding. Foreboding mixed with a toxic whiff of fury. To make matters worse, Bingo, sitting next to her in the back of the plane, let his own anxiety out in sporadic, disjointed comments about Garrett or Ascendant or his mother. Celeste had managed to keep things mostly in check, by drinking white wine and watching reruns of Parks & Rec on the seat-back televisions, but as they descended into Newark’s Liberty Airport, floating over black countryside spotted with highways and factories, she could feel her rage overtaking her.
Why the hell had she agreed to come? She was not ready to be back in the game. Nowhere near r
eady. She wanted out. Immediately.
She’d never been to Newark before, but once on the ground, she didn’t like what she saw: limo drivers hustling for fares at the airport; bus drivers smoking cigarettes while their passengers waited on the sidewalk. From the SuperShuttle window, the city looked dark, gloomy, broken-down, and it smelled bad as well, like a muddy low tide mixed with old garbage. They took the shuttle to a Hilton downtown, then caught a cab back out to the Valley Mall Plaza, which was pretty much empty. From the mall they hired an Uber driver back toward downtown—all on Garrett’s instructions.
“Make sure no one is following you,” he had said. “Travel until you are completely alone. You cannot be too safe.”
Safe? She laughed at that idea. As if Garrett had any idea of what it was like to be hunted—truly hunted.
She obsessed over what she would say to him when they met. Her anger at him lay just below the surface, blistering and ragged. She had lived six months on the run in China, on his say-so, surviving by crawling from one hiding place to another, begging rotting bowls of rice, terrified every hour of every day that the Chinese government would find her, jail her, and have her executed. The memory of her experience haunted her, flashing into her thoughts again and again: in cries of surprise when a Palo Alto police siren blared or a neighbor’s dog barked; in crying jags that came on her while she stood alone, naked, in her own bathroom; in sleepless nights, when visions of Hu Mei, the woman she had gone to China to help, tormented her if she dared close her eyes. An army VA psychiatrist had told her it was PTSD, and that she needed to treat it, but Celeste had told him to go to hell. She would deal with her psychic pain the way she dealt with all her setbacks: gin, death metal, and online porn.
When the Uber driver dropped them at the half-finished office tower in downtown Newark, she and Bingo scanned the empty plaza, then dragged their carry-on bags around back to the loading dock, where Alexis Truffant rolled open a steel door and met them. Amid all Celeste’s gloom, she was glad to see Alexis. She liked Alexis; Alexis wouldn’t lie or lead her down the garden path, and she was pretty sure Alexis was the person who coordinated her extraction from southern China, so she guessed she owed the woman her life—as much as she owed it to anyone associated with Ascendant.
But Alexis was efficient and all business, hugging Celeste and Bingo briefly, then hustling them inside and to the elevators with hardly a word. Bingo ambled along behind them, eyes wide with suspicion, and with what Celeste suspected was plain old fear. She knew Bingo was not the world’s most courageous human, and that coming here, to rejoin the Ascendant team, was stretching the heroic part of his personality almost to the breaking point. As the service elevator shot upward, she took Bingo by the hand and squeezed hard, as much to reassure herself as to put him at ease.
“Is this a working office building?” Celeste asked Alexis. She hadn’t seen a soul in the place yet. But then again, it was almost eleven at night.
“Half-occupied. The owners are in bankruptcy. If security stops you or asks what you are doing, just say you’re part of the tech start-up on seven. Our name is AltaTech Partners. That should give us cover for a while.”
Celeste thought that sounded makeshift, at best, but makeshift seemed to be part of Ascendant’s DNA, so she said nothing more. But it didn’t fill her with confidence. None of this filled her with confidence.
She shut her eyes and pictured the Chinese countryside: the lush, tropical hills outside Guangzhou, the squalls that blew in off the South China Sea, the children splashing in the muddy Xi River. She didn’t hate China, as hard as her time there had been, and visions of its green forests still calmed her nerves. In moments she would be facing Garrett Reilly again, and she needed all the composure she could muster.
The elevator stopped, Alexis checked the hallway, then hurried Bingo and Celeste to the last office before the stairs. She knocked twice, and the door opened.
“Hey.” Mitty Rodriguez smiled briefly at Celeste. “Mitty. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah.” Celeste shook Mitty’s hand. “Sure.” Celeste had never actually met Mitty in person, but she’d heard a lot about her from the rest of the team.
Mitty turned from Celeste and stared long and hard at Bingo. “Hey, Bingo. Long time. Really long time.”
Bingo hung his head determinedly toward the floor. Celeste figured the two of them must have had some kind of relationship in the past, although if that was true then they would go down in the odd-couple hall of fame. From Mitty’s glare, Celeste guessed that Mitty held a grudge against Bingo, and he seemed terrified of her. Not that Celeste blamed him: from what she’d gathered, Mitty was a piece of work. Still, Celeste was glad to see her; she seemed eccentric and full of life. Celeste needed people who were full of life.
Alexis showed them into the offices. They were large—five separate executive offices, a meeting area, a kitchen, and a conference room—and mostly barren, with the walls freshly painted white and Sheetrock showing in one section of the reception area. A few pieces of random furniture were strewn around the large central room—some chairs, couches, desks, and a few computers—and little else. A bank of windows looked out onto what Celeste assumed was the New Jersey Turnpike; the glittering towers of Manhattan lay far in the distance, thick blocks of yellow light in the night air. Celeste let out a short, mirthless laugh; she had traveled across the country, and instead of settling in Manhattan, and hopping from fabulous restaurants to exclusive nightclubs, she was stuck in Newark, New Jersey, in a half-empty office tower, surrounded by a cohort of semiautistic geeks.
Story of her life.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a marine, tall and handsome, but with a hint of wildness in his eyes. He was wearing green-and-brown fatigues, and his hair was buzz-cut short. He grinned broadly at Celeste and saluted her. “Private John Patmore, ma’am. We met briefly in DC last year. You might not remember me.”
“Sure.” Celeste nodded. But she didn’t remember him. All military guys looked the same to her, and Patmore certainly fit the mold: he looked more like a G.I. Joe doll than a human being. But a slightly crazy G.I. Joe doll—one you wouldn’t let your kids play with. Not by themselves, at least. “Good to see you again.”
“Hey, Celeste.”
She turned to the sound of that voice, her pulse quickening. Garrett Reilly stood in the doorway of the main room. He looked different: older, for sure, and a little beat-up, as if life had not been kind to him in the intervening twelve months. He was thinner than he had been when they’d been together in DC, and not as swaggering either; that sheen of arrogance was missing. He didn’t seem like a shark hunting for his next meal anymore. No, Celeste got the distinct impression that sharks were out there hunting for him. Still, she was furious at him. She balled up her hands into fists and felt herself, involuntarily, start across the room toward him, to beat him on his head and chest, to make him feel her pain. But Garrett stepped forward as well, meeting her halfway.
“So glad you came,” Garrett said quickly, putting his hands gently on her shoulders. “I really need you here.”
That set Celeste back a step. She started to respond, to tell him not to count on her staying for long, that he was a sorry-ass son of a bitch.
But he wrapped his arms around her in a firm hug, pulling her close, and whispered in her ear, “I’m so sorry about China. What happened. How hard it must have been for you. I thought about you every day. I tried to track you down. I was so worried.” He released her and stared into her eyes. “I was heartsick with guilt. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
Celeste stood there, stunned. That had not gone according to plan. She grunted a nonresponse, her head swimming, then staggered to a dusty desk in the corner of the room and planted herself on its edge. Rage rushed from her body like infected puss leaving a wound. She wanted to gag from the power of it.
Was that really all it took to heal her? A few words of
contrition? The knowledge that Garrett cared and felt guilty about what had transpired? Am I that fucking fragile? No. She was still pissed—it would take more than a hug and some sweet nothings to make up for six months underground in mainland China—but she had to admit that those few sentences hadn’t hurt.
Maybe Bingo was right. Maybe she did need to get back in the game.
• • •
Garrett had planned an entire speech, rehearsed it over and over, but when he saw Celeste standing in the office, looking exhausted and scared, his brain went blank and he told her how he really felt: he was happy she was there, plain and simple. If she was still angry at him, so be it; if she wanted to berate him for his past transgressions, that was fine as well. He had sent her to China, where she had almost lost her life. He would keep his mouth shut, take any abuse she wanted to spew at him, and not lose his temper. That was the new Garrett Reilly, or at least the Garrett Reilly to which he aspired.
He moved to the middle of the large central room and told the reassembled team everything he knew about Ilya Markov, which he admitted from the start wasn’t much. He told them about Markov’s multiple passports and aliases, his background in tech, his employment in the United States, his fluency in English. He projected a picture of Markov on a white wall, and the young Russian stared at the team with flat-faced indifference.
“Kinda cute. But my standards aren’t very high.” Mitty looked directly at Bingo when she said this, and Bingo turned away quickly to look out the window.
Garrett made a mental note to himself: tell Mitty to cut the lovesick bullshit. Enough is enough.
