by K. T. Tomb
Did he just say something to her? Or was it her imagination, a trick of her mind?
“Do it!” he yelled at the both of them. “Don’t make me sic my friend back there on you.”
“What the hell?” Mark was the first of the duo to break the silence. “One Eye works for you?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” The feigned innocence was starting to wear off. “Yes, he does. He is a Freemason, though. We’re supposed to be enemies, but who cares when you have mutual interests, right? Oh, and I sorta let them know that you were after the bow all this time, so...” Tony trailed off.
Betrayal: that was what this pain was—pure, hideous, unadulterated betrayal. Chyna’s heart felt like it had been constricted and then exploded without warning. The blood inside her surged and wept at the sight of the monster she had come so close to loving completely. It had all been a lie; everything had been a mirage, covering up the blackness and ugliness that was showing through now.
He had expected her to be crushed, yes, but she would prove him wrong. She felt as if her heart was expanding in her chest filling her up completely from the inside. She had only felt that way once before.
It had been in Israel, ten years before as she had undergone three months of intensive training with a female platoon of Mossad soldiers. Their specialty had been shooting; more specifically, sniper fire. Her platoon leader had lain on the ground right beside Chyna and whispered in her ear as she made the adjustments to her gun that the shot guide gave her.
“Make your adjustments and steady your rifle. When the target is in your crosshairs, take a deep breath and hold it. When it feels like the air has completely filled your body and all you can hear is the beating of your own heart… pull the trigger so you can breathe again.”
It was the woman’s words that resonated with her now, and the memory gave her a new strength. This time, the silence was broken by Chyna Stone.
“It was you. You killed Emilijus and Ethan. You set us up and told those thugs where to find us. You are the reason an entire city is burning right now and its citizens are ignited in the throes of a possible hate war. You are a murderer!” she screamed at the man she had once thought she loved. The thought left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth now.
“I am just a man who makes the most of his means.” Tony was unfazed. “Now, hand the bow over, and maybe I won’t kill you.”
“I’ll hurt you before I let that happen!” Mark suddenly said.
Chyna settled her chin into the muscle of her forearm and took aim. The breath filled her body and she stood there waiting. She knew immediately that Mark had spoken at the wrong time. Before he could blink, a shot rang out in the church and Mark was on the ground, howling. Blood oozed from his left arm.
Chyna slowly lowered her gun, keeping her eyes on Tony. He was sprawled on the floor clutching at his right knee. Chyna went over to him and picked up his gun before any of his red robed goons could get involved. Where was the cavalry when you needed them? She was so accustomed to the FBI and the CIA, even Interpol becoming involved in her recovery missions by this point in the process, that she couldn’t help but feel under prepared. Any minute now these men could decide to take things into their own hands.
“Mark!” Chyna cried out as she turned and ran to him, finding him writhing in agony, “Mark!”
She pulled her T-shirt from out of her jeans and ripped a four inch band from the bottom of it which she used to bandage his arm tightly.
“Don’t move,” she told him tenderly, then as she placed the bow across his lap and his gun in his right hand, she added, “Hold on to this and don’t let anyone get near you.”
“You already know that I just want the bow, Chyna.”
“Shut up Tony, or I’ll shoot you again.”
Tony smiled and shrugged, as if what he had just done and what had happened to him had still not quite computed.
“It’s Anthony, actually. I’ve always hated being called Tony. Seriously, would it kill people to just say it as it is and lend it the class it deserves?”
After hearing him say that, Chyna knew he was too far gone. In fact, it seemed true that he had never even been on the same page with her at all. The Tony she had known was a chimera from another world. He had been a thought that she had loved and lived for, and now that it had been dispelled, she wanted to lose all touch with it.
When Mark whimpered from the pain in her arms, it felt like a slap on the face. She had already let too many people die because she trusted the wrong man. She had promised herself never to compromise a mission when in turn, she was the one who had been compromised all along.
At that point, Chyna realized that if she died in the church that day, she would prove this monster right. All of the people who sacrificed their lives because of her misplaced trust would be wronged. Their lives would have been in vain, like footprints in beach sand, and she couldn’t let that happen.
“You’ll never have it,” Chyna shouted as she aimed her gun at him again. She thought her hands would go numb. “Tell your men to back up. One Eye’s guys too; everyone out of the church… NOW!”
Tony bellowed at them to get lost and they literally stampeded toward the large church doors and poured out into the street. When the door was closed behind the exiting men, Tony continued to taunt Chyna.
“Good girl!” his vile voice teased as he slowly clapped his hands in mock cheer. “You always did have a knack for trying to get me into compromising positions, pretty girl. Even though I never loved you, I always found it amusing how you did you very best to keep me interested with your abilities. At the very least, over the years I did enjoy our... carnal interludes, shall we say?”
She heard his words, etching each of them in her memory, jotting them down in her mind and memorizing them by heart. They were a reminder of her failure and his betrayal, stabbing at her heart like a thousand arrows piercing through it.
“Oh, and one more thing…” Tony said, but before he could finish, another shot rang out. The bullet flew smoothly from the barrel of the SIG Sauer and hit Tony in the shoulder. This time, he screamed.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” he reacted immediately.
“But I wasn’t aiming for your shoulder, Babe! I missed that black hole you call a heart!” She heard him whine at the acid in her words. “Oh, well, it was fun regardless.”
Then, there were footsteps. Chyna couldn’t tell who they belonged to, because all of her attention was still on Tony. Her brain was fuzzy and whirling: the weakness was back. It wasn’t until she heard Sirita’s soft, familiar voice whispering into her ear that Chyna finally let go of the gun and collapsed to the floor beside Mark.
The robed men outside the church had been unceremoniously herded into several police vehicles while Sirita held Chyna cradled in her arms. Emergency responders milled busily around them as they tended to Mark and Tony’s wounds and strapped them down onto gurneys, wheeling them quickly out to the waiting ambulances. She could hear Oscar’s voice shouting directives to the media as they tried their best to muscle their way inside the church for the chance to take that million dollar photograph.
The church was empty now, except for Chyna and Sirita, and amidst all the hysteria brewing inside her, Chyna knew that now there was no one who could help her. She lay on the cold stone floor of the cathedral, clutching Christina’s ivory bow in her hands and looking at the altar.
“Take your aim. God protects it,” she repeated, over and over again as she lay there and wondered how strikingly similar the statue of Jesus praying to God in his agony in Gethsemane was to the picture of her own soul.
Epilogue
Three Weeks Later
“Did she eat anything?” Sirita asked Oscar expectedly, and the latter sighed.
He knew it was not Sirita’s fault. She was just looking out for her friend, but he really wished she would stop bothering him with questions that he had no answers to. He would answer them if he knew how, but the truth was, he was as afr
aid and worried as she was.
Chyna Stone was gone. Not literally, of course. She had just... disappeared to God knew where. No one, not even Oscar could tell where she was and except for a random phone call here and there which told them she was still alive, there was no proof that Chyna Stone even existed. That was what troubled Oscar the most.
The flight back to Istanbul had been a haze for her. After the debacle in the Dresden cathedral, Lithuanian authorities had swarmed the place and gotten Chyna and her team out of there. Mark had been badly injured, but the doctors said he would eventually regain full use of his arm. However, they recommended as little work as possible during his recovery. Chyna on the other hand, wasn’t doing nearly as well. She was holed up in the suite at the Ottoman Imperial with strict instructions to the management that they intercept all calls and visitors; she had gone off the grid.
News about the virtual shut down at Found History had traveled fast to every corner of the world. Oscar and Sirita had wanted to evacuate the entire team to New York, but Thyri had beaten them to it. She was the one who had taken control, as soon as it was clear that Chyna didn’t seem like she would be coming around from her ordeal any time soon. In a flurry, they had all been packed off to the United States. Chyna had been left behind. That was just about all anybody knew.
Apparently, Chyna Stone had not been too out of it. It seemed she only waited six hours after Thyri’s jet had taken off with her entire team safely ensconced inside before she ordered a rental car for herself and drove out of Istanbul. Oscar had found out too late. By the time he had landed in New York and tried to initiate the personal tracker in her staple leather jacket, it had long been deactivated. That was the point when the hunting had begun.
It was certainly the first time Oscar had found himself hating Chyna’s incredible abilities and her depth for espionage. All trails around her had either vanished or repeatedly led them to dead ends. She was more than a boss to them, she was their friend and she was hurting and they were all clueless. Soon, other friends and colleagues had joined the party, since Chyna had failed to make contact with any of them.
Then, out of the blue; a telephone call.
“Oscar?”
He had gone over what he would say to her if she ever called him so many times by then that he could have that conversation in his sleep.
“Where the hell are you, Chyna? What in the world? Do you know how worried we have been? You exile yourself in Turkey, wait for us to be removed from the city and then you just disappear without a trace? What, are you crazy? What the hell is wrong with you? Where are you?”
She waited patiently until the end of his rant and then simply answered, “I’m okay. I’m safe. I can’t tell you where I am. I just need... some time off. Tell Lana and the others that I love them and they’re not to worry. You’re all angry, I know. You’re angry because you’re worried and you’re worried because this isn’t the boss that you know. Just give me the time I need, Oscar. I’ll be fine, I promise. I’m really glad Thyri got you all to New York; it’s where you need to be… as a team. If you have to understand why I’ve done this, maybe Sandra and Lana can help explaining it. Tell Sandra to make sure the office in Turkey and everyone there is taken care of. I love you all.”
The line went dead. Oscar tried to have it traced, but of course, the call had been made from a disposable phone.
Since then, she’d called once a week, and at random times of day and night and from a disposable and untraceable cell. All her phones had been switched off, so had her laptop. The car she had rented had been returned to the company safe and sound.
A week after that, Oscar, Sirita and a wheelchair bound Mark attended the memorial of the thirty-six FBI agents who had died when the building had been torched.
Anthony Stewart was not mentioned.
Somewhere outside of Deadhorse, Alaska
Chyna woke up in a haze of sweat and tears.
Her room in the cabin was still dark, though she could see light barely starting to color the sky orange. Another night had passed, thankfully without those recurring dreams that consisted of a beautiful city with intimate courtyards and jasmine on the breeze and white, pristine ivory with intricate carving. Chyna could handle the seclusion she was living in right now, but the dreams... they haunted her like the ghosts of a past she desperately wanted to escape. They chased her around when she only wanted to curl up in a corner and cry. They focused a glaring limelight on her, when all she wanted was to disappear into darkness. They made her remember, when all she wanted to do was forget.
But how did one erase fifteen years from memory? All the good times… in the cafeteria at Quantico; her father’s library; silent, sensual nights spent on the banks of the Nile; the peace and calm being out in the middle of the ocean; Paris at sunset.
Chyna turned in her bed, shaking her head at the errant thoughts that had somehow found their way back in. If she wanted to get through today, she needed to get herself under control, however hard it might seem.
She kept things simple out there in the wilderness, sticking to the most mundane routine she could devise. She got up, brushed and bathed, dressed and ate and flopped in front of the TV, trying to pass the day. News was out of the question, as were romantic comedies. She resorted to watching reruns of the Simpsons and Family Guy. Other cartoons made their appearance once in a while. Eventually, she would have lunch and watch some more TV. By the time the sun set, her mind was effectively buzzing with chatter from Rocko’s Modern Life and Recess. She gladly fell into the bed at night with a thump, and that was all she needed to lull her into another fit of restless sleep.
For one more night, Chyna Stone was effectively away from—and dead to—the world.
Anchorage, Alaska.
He was determined to spend all of his time off the radar keeping a tab on how she was doing. The way everything had gone down in Europe had almost killed her…Hell, he had almost killed. No, he would never have been able to go that far. He had trusted that she would take control of the situation, despite the depth betrayal she was being faced with, and she had. She had handled herself like the indomitable woman he had loved for almost fifteen years. She hadn’t let him down.
She had abandoned everything, everyone and secluded herself in the wilderness of the Alaskan tundra. He knew Riva’s camp well. He also knew that she had gone to the best person for help. Riva knew what she was going through. She’d had a similar experience in Israel when her own army had abandoned her and left her in the hands of Hamas after the failed assassination attempt of Khaled Mashal. She had come out on the other side a different woman, a dead woman really, and had left the Middle East to live a free life in the snowy wilderness. She had lost a lot in captivity but the fact that Mossad thought she was dead had emancipated her from their ranks. Riva understood what Chyna was going through and she could help her.
He wanted so badly to leave a note on her window, step out from behind a tree and wave as she went past on the dogsled, but he couldn’t. The operation was nowhere close to completion and he couldn’t rick her life and the lives of so many others just so that he could save the two of them from broken hearts. He could only hope that Riva could deliver the message without having to be too obvious. She was a military woman, after all; he was sure that subtle connotations were a way of life for her.
He stood by the helipad watching the helicopter make its way in and thought deeply about the damage he had done to the woman he loved. He could have broken down and cried like a baby under the circumstances but the end game was what he would focus on instead. When it was all over and all the cards were on the table, Chyna would see what he had done and why he’d had to do it. Whether she accepted it, whether she forgave him, whether she could love him again…only time would tell.
Somewhere outside of Deadhorse, Alaska
She drifted in and out sleep until her alarm clock screeched in her ear. She hated the thing, but knew she would never get out of bed if not for its insistence an
d today was the day she would stop the mourning.
Today would be different…
She drank three cups of the hot, black coffee that sat brewing on the kitchen counter as she dressed in her snow camo and pulled on her hunting boots. An hour later, with a compound bow and arrows slung across her back and her AR rifle slung over her shoulder, she mounted the snow mobile parked outside the cabin and rode across the valley toward the base camp.
As she approached the cluster of log buildings, she could see Rivka Ibrahim bringing out her dogs one by one and hooking them up to the sled line. Chyna parked the snowmobile under the shelter of the utility shed and went to help her friend bring out the lead dogs.
“Are you sure you’re ready for this, mamele?” Rivka asked, taking a good look at Chyna’s face.
“Don’t give me any of your sentimental schmegegge!” Chyna retorted. “It’s time to get back to life and I’ve never felt more alive than I did in the moments that I’ve spent taking one.”
“That’s a little morbid for you, Chyna. You were always a conscientious hunter, no matter what, or who, you were hunting.”
“Maybe that was my mistake all along, Rivvi. Maybe, if I had learnt all those years ago in Israel to care as little as my platoon members did, I would have been as successful at the job as they were.”
“Now who’s talking schmegegge? It’s always been your heart that singled you out from the conformist soldier and it’s what lead you back to your real love, your true calling. Look what you did with Found History in those few short years. Don’t you want to get back there?”
“I do Rivvi; that’s why I got out of bed finally.”
“It's good.”
