Spy to the Rescue

by Jonathan Bernstein

We both stop.

  “You go,” she says, her big dark eyes trained on me, waiting to hear what I’m going to say.

  My mind is blank. I don’t know what’s happening here.

  My phone rings. It’s probably not the best time for me to take a call, but I need a distraction.

  “Mom,” I say into the phone.

  “Yes,” says the woman.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  How I Met My Mother

  “Did you pack your scarf?” I hear my mom say. “It’s going to be cold over the weekend. Keep your neck covered up, I don’t want you coming home riddled with disease.”

  “I will,” I say, my eyes on the pale woman standing watching me as I hang by a hand from the ladder.

  “Make sure you buy Joanna’s aunt a present to say thank you for letting you stay,” says Mom. “Don’t spend a lot of money. Just something that says we did a good job raising a polite young citizen.”

  “I will,” I repeat.

  The woman in black retreats from me and busies herself inspecting the pile of moaning, twitching bodies she demolished during the few minutes she turned invisible.

  “How’s Joanna coping? Does she miss the sunshine? Tell her we’re all thinking about her.”

  “I will,” I say as I watch the woman remove phones, keys, and hidden weapons from the fallen mob.

  “The house is so quiet,” Mom says. “Natalie’s always up in her room sticking needles into voodoo dolls of the Bronze Canyon Valkyries because they beat the Cheerminators to the Cheer Classic final thing. Your father’s working his way through three seasons of that zombie show I can’t watch. I miss you and your brother. Do you really have to stay the whole weekend? Can’t you jump on the next plane and come home now?”

  “I will,” I say. The woman walks slowly away from her victims.

  “Okay, you’re just humoring me now. Go. Have fun. Don’t break anything.”

  “I will,” I say again as the call ends.

  The woman makes her way back toward me. I continue hanging off the ladder with one hand.

  “She must be worried,” says the woman. “Her little girl alone in a big, strange city. I’d be worried. You’re too young. I’d make you stay home.”

  “Luckily, it’s not up to you,” I say.

  “We should go,” she says, and holds out a hand to me. I remain hanging on the rung.

  “You can ask me anything you want,” she says. “I’ll tell you everything. But not here. It’s not safe.”

  “I can take care of myself,” I say. I’m aware I’m being cold and unpleasant but it’s the only way I can cope with this situation. I don’t know this woman, I don’t trust her, and I don’t like the way she’s acting caring and protective around me. For a young person, I have amassed a wealth of experience in being lied to and manipulated. What if this woman with the Eastern European accent is another Xan, sent to sweet-talk me into blind obedience?

  “I’m well aware,” says the woman. “I saw you at work in the library.”

  She launches into a ridiculous and inaccurate impression of my reading table pirouette of triumph. “I danced, too, as a child,” she says, and gives me this big meaningful panda-eyed gaze like I’m going to throw myself into her arms.

  “And I heard about Section 23, and what you did with Spool’s Mercedes,” she says, her bright smile revealing uneven teeth.

  “How long have you been watching me?” I say, as icily as I can manage.

  She tucks her hands under her elbows and looks down. Her hair falls over her face so I can’t see her eyes. “Not long,” she mumbles. “There were years I tried not to think about you at all. I told myself it was better if I forgot you, but then . . .” Her voice cracks on the last word. All I see is this curtain of inky black hair covering her face. Is she making a play for my sympathy or is this what’s been hiding in the back of my head since the second I heard her voice?

  “Who do you work for?” I snap.

  The woman sweeps her hair away from her face. “The Forties,” she says.

  “What’s the Forties?”

  “The floors of the Dominion Brothers Building from forty to forty-nine.”

  “The ones that were too expensive to rent out,” I say, remembering the painstaking research I undertook before Blabby caused a tsunami of soda to engulf my laptop.

  The woman nods. “Edward Dominion, the grandson of the brother who didn’t jump out the window, found a use for them. He filled them with professionals and hired them out to the highest bidder.”

  “What sorts of professionals?” I ask.

  The woman starts counting on her fingers. “Hackers, gangsters, leakers, con artists, kidnappers, bank robbers, blackmailers, home invaders, hired muscle, and assassins.”

  “Which one are you?” I ask.

  The woman raises a hand for silence. I hear the elevator, the dark silent one, and start to climb.

  “You want to meet my colleagues or you want to live to see your fourteenth birthday?”

  “What was my birth date?” I ask.

  “Twenty-fourth of August, 2002,” she says. “The worst storm in twenty years. Hailstones the size of human heads.”

  That’s easy information to access. Anyone could find that out. But just like I instinctively knew the man with Carter Strike’s face was a liar, I instinctively know this woman with the pale face is not. And that means . . .

  I jump down from the ladder.

  The woman is unzipping her leather jacket. She reaches up behind her back and pulls a gun from a shoulder holster and a metal rod from inside her jacket pocket. She unfolds the rod. It’s an arrow. A steel arrow. She inserts the bottom of the arrow into her gun and adjusts it until there’s a loud metallic click.

  She holds out an arm to me, and I move closer to the woman in black. She puts an arm around my waist.

  “You trust me?” she says.

  I trust a handful of people. I don’t know this woman. Even if she’s who I think she is, I don’t know her.

  “Yes,” I breathe.

  “Then hold on.”

  I wrap my arms around her. She fires the gun at the ceiling. The arrow shoots upward, dragging a steel wire after it. The arrow hits its target. The woman is lifted off the ground. I gasp in shock as I go with her. Her arm is tight around my waist. I cling to the soft leather of her jacket.

  “Don’t look down,” she says.

  “I could have done this myself,” I say. “I’ve got marbles.”

  “Marbles are fun,” she says. “But there are times when a girl needs her mother.”

  The woman lands on a wooden beam. She reaches out to steady me and then she pushes upward. Above us, a skylight at the top of the gym opens. I see the gray Manhattan sky. It’s not even dark yet. I feel like I’ve been in this nightmarish building for a week but I doubt it’s been much more than an hour.

  The woman climbs up through the skylight, turns, and reaches out a hand. I take it and allow myself to be yanked out of the gym.

  Suddenly, I’m freezing. I see my breath in front of me. The late fall wind hits my face like an angry hand slapping me. I can also see office workers in cubicles in the building next to this one. That’s because I’m standing on the ledge of the Dominion Brothers Building. The ledge of the forty-eighth floor.

  “Remember I said don’t look down?” the woman says. “Same thing applies here.”

  Up to this point in my life, I would have said I was not scared of heights. I would have said that because I have never before been this high. The stone ledge is maybe three feet wide. I plaster myself face-first against the cold concrete of the building.

  “You can’t stay here,” says the woman. “You’re a target for pigeon poop.”

  No sooner does she say those terrifying words than a white splotch hits the concrete wall mere inches from my face. I recoil in disgust.

  The woman touches my hand.

  “Come with me,” she urges.

  “Where are we going?” I moan.
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  “Somewhere safe,” she says.

  Her fingers circle my wrist. She leads me slowly around a corner.

  “We just have to climb a little bit higher,” she says. She lets go of my hand and starts up a metal ladder. My heart sinks. I remember how unsafe I felt climbing the rusty ladder to the roof of Reindeer Crescent Middle School a matter of months ago. Now I have to make it up to the forty-ninth floor of a huge concrete tower where gargoyles grin down at me as if they’re anticipating the bloody mess I’ll leave on the sidewalk when I tumble to my death.

  “I get scared, too,” the woman shouts back at me.

  “Absolute wrong time to tell me that,” I bawl up at her.

  “But you know what I do to take my mind off it? I sing.”

  The wind is howling in my ears. The sounds of sirens screaming and car horns honking rise up from the streets below us. I hear the percussive sound of my teeth chattering. All that noise is swirling around my head, but as I climb the ladder, I hear the woman’s soft voice. She sings, “If I could only win your love . . .”

  Are you kidding me? I travel thousands of miles. I defeat a library filled with bad guys. I go face-to-face with a blond monster and now I’m trapped forty-eight-and-a-half stories up in the air with the Strangled Geese? How can this be the song she sings to banish her fear? This is no one’s favorite song. Except for one person, and if it’s his favorite song, it must be because it reminds him of her.

  I look up at the short black skirt and the black boots and the black leather jacket of the woman making her way up the ladder. I watch her inky black hair whip around her shoulders. I know who she is.

  I have a thousand things to say to her. I have another thousand things to ask her. But I can’t do it right now because I have to follow her to the top of this endless ladder. So I start singing.

  “If I could only win your love . . .”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Irina O

  I’m forty-eight-and-a-half stories high and hanging onto a small metal ladder. The woman in black leans down and pushes her hand into the mouth of one of the gargoyles. The hideous stone creature swings away from the side of the building like it’s about to take flight. But it doesn’t take flight. It opens up to reveal a steel door.

  “Not far now,” the woman calls down to me. She unlocks the door and motions to me to clamber up the last few metal rungs and go inside.

  Suddenly, I’m inside a spacious walk-in closet surrounded by shelves and drawers containing rows of clothes, shoes, and bags. The closet is big enough to contain two bamboo chairs and a large round mirror. The walls and ceiling are decorated in an orangey beige, or maybe it’s a beigey orange. A few framed photographs are scattered around and there’s a baby picture attached to the side of the mirror. The woman reaches down and opens a small white cabinet that turns out to be a minifridge. She takes out two cans of Sprite and hands me one.

  “Bad for you,” she says. “Rots your teeth. But just this once . . .”

  The woman sinks into one of the bamboo chairs and gestures to me to do the same.

  “Ahhh,” she sighs as she relaxes into the chair.

  I open the can and take a drink. It tastes amazing.

  “What is this place?” I ask.

  “My changing room,” she says. “For when I need to grab a few things and go.”

  “It’s nice.” I smile. “I like the color.”

  “Butternut orange,” she murmurs. “But that’s not what you want to talk about.”

  “No.” Now that I’m alone with her, now that I can ask her anything, I don’t know where to start.

  “My name is Irina Ouspenskaya,” she says. “I was born in the Chechen Republic.”

  “Commonly known as Chechnya,” I break in, eager to display my global knowledge. “Situated in the southernmost part of Eastern Europe, within a hundred kilometers of the Caspian Sea.”

  “Good Googling.” She smiles. “Bad place. My family sought asylum in America in 1997. We moved to New Jersey. I went to high school and worked part-time for the King of Shish Kebab. Not the real king, the takeout one.”

  “But that was your cover, right?” I say. “You were a Chechen secret service agent?”

  Irina grins and takes a gulp of Sprite. “Sometimes, a girl has to say things that aren’t a hundred percent true to make herself seem interesting to a guy. This is very bad advice, by the way.”

  “Thanks, but—wait, you weren’t an agent in high school?”

  “I didn’t fit in at John F. Kennedy High in Paterson. My English was not so good. The words made sense in my head but not when they came out my mouth. The other kids imitated me.”

  Like Brendan Chew! I seethe in silent sympathy for the young Irina.

  “At home, my mother looked more like my grandmother and my grandmother looked like a pile of old dirty laundry; sorry to say, but it’s the truth.” She takes a sip of Sprite and looks lost in the memory. After a moment, she returns to her theme. “At the King of Shish Kebab, all I heard was, Asylum Girl, get me baba ghanoush. Asylum Girl, thicker slices. Asylum Girl, don’t skimp on the hummus. Not the America I’d seen in the hip-hop videos. But one night, a boy comes into the King and he’s different. He doesn’t call me Asylum Girl, he doesn’t throw money in my face or try to rob the cash register.”

  I see the connections forming. I know the guy.

  “And he was thinner in those days,” I say.

  “No. Still fat. But funny and charming. And intriguing. Sometimes he’d come by two, three days in a row, then he’d be gone for weeks. One time, I ask him what he does for a living. He says, I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you.”

  “He’s corny,” I say, delighted at the image of Strike trying to act like he had any game.

  “Quick as a flash, I tell him I know a lot more ways to kill than you do and I’ve got a lot more secrets.” She gives me a shrug. “I have no idea where that came from.”

  I let out a Sprite-flavored burp, such is my shock. I see the connections forming and they’re insane.

  “Spies don’t trust anyone,” I yelp. “You made up something no one would believe, except the one guy who only believes the unbelievable. Why wouldn’t the Asylum Girl who worked for the King of Shish Kebab be undercover? Weirder things have happened.”

  Irina nods. “One minute I had the most boring, most miserable, smelly life; the next Carter Strike was trying to get me to defect to his side and tell him all the dirty secrets I knew.”

  “Which you didn’t,” I say.

  “Which I didn’t.” She agrees. “But he told me what an asset I could be to the CIA. He took me on missions. He taught me to fight, to shoot, to blend in, to observe, to vanish. And Irina Ouspenskaya, the asylum girl playing at being a spy, evolved into Irina O, real, actual spy.”

  She’s a bigger liar than I am! I feel a lump in my throat. Fighting the urge to cry, I say, “What happened then?”

  “There was a regime change in the CIA. The new team didn’t trust the old guard. Strike was sent to South America on a job. He got abducted and I stopped hearing from him, which was a problem because by that time I found out I was going to be a mommy. An even bigger problem was that the new CIA team trusted me even less than Strike. I had another life to think about. So I got out. I traveled a little and then I had my beautiful baby on a stormy day in August.”

  “But you didn’t keep her.”

  Irina closes her eyes. “I was a wild animal back then, Bridget,” she says. “I thought Strike had been killed by the company we worked for. I thought I was next. I had to keep moving. I had to become like steel. I couldn’t keep you. I wanted to but I couldn’t.”

  Those big smudgy eyes stare into me, begging me to understand. I turn away from her and find myself looking at the baby picture tucked into the side of the mirror.

  “It was like missing a limb,” she says. “It never stopped hurting, but after a while I just accepted hurting as the only way I was ever going to feel. So I went ba
ck to work.”

  “For the CIA?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “For anyone who paid. For anyone who wanted jobs done that no one else would do.”

  “Did you kill people?”

  “The world is not a less beautiful place without the presence of those I removed from it,” she says.

  “And that’s what you do for the Forties,” I say. “You’re an assassin?”

  “I was,” she says. “Past tense. I’d had this feeling for a while that killing couldn’t be the only thing I was awesome at. Maybe I could sing. . . .”

  “I heard you sing,” I say. “That’s probably not going to work out as a long-term career choice.”

  “I heard you sing, too,” she says, covering her ears and making an anguished face. “The point is, I needed to find something else to do. So I got out. But you don’t just walk out on the Forties, not when you’re their best, most in-demand hit woman. Edward Dominion begged me to come back. One more job, maybe two. Day and night: calls, texts, emails, gifts, cars, you name it.”

  “Did he buy you an ocelot?” I say.

  “In butternut orange,” she fires back. “But there’s only one way an assassin’s life ends.”

  “Someone better kills you,” I say.

  “Uh, there’s no one better than Irina O, let’s be clear about that,” she says, and she looks deadly serious. “But my decision was final. I was not coming back to the Forties.”

  “Until . . . ,” I prompt.

  “Until Edward Dominion started messing with the lives of the people that mattered to me. Until he showed me how easy it was for him to find you and Strike. He gave me an ultimatum: come back to work, do one last job, or I’ll keep tormenting them. I might even have done it. But that one last job . . .” She says nothing for a moment. “I don’t eliminate children.”

  “Who . . . ?” I start to ask, hungry for more details. Irina doesn’t reply. She springs up from the bamboo chair, goes over to the bottom drawer of the cabinet closest to her, and pulls out a black canvas messenger bag. Then she reaches out to the edge of a shelf lined with designer shoes. Irina gives the shelf a quick sharp pull. The entire shelving unit turns around. The clothes, bags, and shoes vanish into the wall. In their place are rows of weapons: guns, knives, arrows, grenades, small rubber things I don’t know the names of, big curved metal things with ridged edges, basically lots of stuff designed to cause maximum damage.