The Double

by Newbury, Helena

  I had no idea what time it was. The sun wasn’t up yet and Konstantin was still asleep. In my post-sex fog of cuddle hormones, all I wanted to do was stay snuggled into his chest, sleepy and warm. But my throat was like a desert. I really, really needed a glass of water.

  I slipped out of bed and padded to the bathroom, not bothering to turn the light on. There was just enough moonlight to see by as I filled the glass. As I lifted it and drank, I was smiling, already looking forward to sliding back into his arms.

  “What’s going on?” asked Carrie’s voice in my ear.

  The water turned to acid in my mouth. I couldn’t swallow. I had to open my mouth and let the water spill into the sink, like being sick. I’d completely forgotten they were listening.

  They’d heard everything. They’d heard I love you. Somehow, that was more of a violation than them hearing the sex.

  “We need to pull you out,” said Calahan. I’d never heard him so shaken.

  I thought of being taken away from Konstantin and ice closed around my heart and crushed it, jagged and cruel. “No,” I whispered quickly. “No. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

  Silence for a moment. Then Carrie’s voice, worried but with a cautious note of hope. “You were just playing along?”

  I reached forward and turned on the light on the bathroom mirror. My hair was tangled and stuck to my forehead. My lips were still tender from all the kissing. They silently formed the words we’d said to each other. I love you.

  “Yes,” I lied. “Just playing along.”

  They went silent for a moment. I imagined them looking at each other. Then, “We’ll talk in the morning,” said Carrie.

  I reached out and touched hands with my reflection. What the hell do I do now?

  41

  Konstantin

  I WOKE UP and frowned. Something was different.

  I was on my back, spread out across the bed, but it wasn’t that.

  Christina lay half on top of me, her head on my chest. I had one arm protectively around her waist and one of her legs was tangled with mine. Her hair trailed across me and the sweet smell of it was in my nostrils. Instead of being on opposite sides, we were as closely together as it’s possible for two people to be. But it wasn’t that.

  It was a lack of something. I searched through my half-awake mind, feeling for the black water, the ice in my chest...and I didn’t find it.

  I hadn’t had the dream. And yet there wasn’t the gray void and the aching head I was used to, either. There was something else there. A good dream.

  The concept was alien to me. It had been so long, I’d forgotten what they were like. I had to tentatively probe my memories, and then I suddenly hit an image of her—us—somewhere away from the city, somewhere green and clear. And it made me frown and keep probing, trying to draw back more of the dream because…it felt good.

  I looked down at her. She was still asleep, her lips pursed and a tiny frown on her face. I wondered what was troubling her. It must be wonderful, to not have a care in the world….

  I thought about what I’d said. I love you. And it was true. I loved her and somehow, when I was fucking her—no, making love to her—it hadn’t felt like it was Christina. It had felt like she was a whole different woman.

  Somehow, she’d changed. I’d never have allowed myself to get close to someone like her, so innocent and good. But because she was Christina, because I knew she was cold, and evil...she was safe. So she’d slipped straight past my radar.

  And being with her had changed me. I’d become more like the man I would have been if that day twenty years ago hadn’t happened. That’s why I’d bought her the dress and given her the necklace: it just felt right, as if she was the woman my mother and grandmother always told me I’d meet. And then I’d seen her in the dress and my heart just…. And then, when I realized she was in pain, I’d felt this overpowering, protective urge and swept her into my arms….

  And then it was too late. I’d fallen for her.

  Now, though, as I lay there watching her, the memories rose up, falling across my mind like cold shadows. How could you do this? Loving someone made me weak. Vulnerable. You remember what happened!

  I leaned down and gently kissed the top of her head, the unease growing in my chest.

  I couldn’t be weak. I had to carry on. For the family.

  But I loved her.

  42

  Hailey

  I SLEPT FITFULLY and the final few hours lay there awake, eyes open, staring at the window as the dawn filtered through the drapes. I wasn’t sure which had shaken me most: the realization that I was in love with Konstantin, or the reminder that I was going to have to betray him.

  Calahan must have been listening because, as soon as I got up and went to the shower, he came on my earpiece. Had he been on shift all night? I wondered how much sleep he was getting. “We’ve got a plan,” he told me. “We need to get something to you. Walk to the coffee stand at the end of the street. The barista is one of our agents. Tell him your name and he’ll put what you need in a coffee cup.”

  By the time I was dressed, Konstantin was up and dressed, too. I was worried that things might snap back to how they were, that he’d act like last night hadn’t happened. But as soon as he saw me, he drew me to him, leaned down, and kissed me. It was tender but solemn and I could see the worry on his face. He’s still figuring it all out. I’d try to give him some space. “I’m going to go down the street and get a coffee,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “Not with Ralavich around. I’ll send a guard.”

  Ralavich. Just the memory of him made me shudder. It brought home to me how wrong Carrie had been, when she’d said these men were all the same.

  I forced myself to focus on the mission. Sending a guard to get my coffee wouldn’t work: what if he looked inside the cup? “Maybe you could come with me,” I said. “It’s a lovely morning. A quick stroll down the street….”

  Konstantin’s forehead crumpled. “I have things to attend to. And we have coffee here. Why would you want to—”?

  God, he’d lived in a purely practical world for so long. ‘Because it’s romantic!” I insisted.

  He blinked at me... and then softened and nodded. My heart lit up. This was all new to him, but he was trying….

  And then icy reality crushed my heart again. He was trying... and I was being romantic to deceive him, to betray him.

  We walked outside and down the long driveway. Konstantin looked around suspiciously as we reached the street: he made me think of a huge, protective wolf, sniffing the air. I wondered how long it had been since he left the grounds on foot.

  But at last he nodded to himself and turned towards the coffee stand. And then he reached down awkwardly and—

  My heart lifted as his hand closed around mine. He really is trying. And it was romantic. The freezing wind of the last few days had stripped most of the fall leaves from the trees but now it had dropped away and it was calm and peaceful, the street silent except for the scrunch of red and orange leaves under our feet.

  We reached the coffee stand and I asked for a vanilla latte, giving my name as Christina. Konstantin went for a black Americano and we sipped them on the walk back, still hand in hand. We could have been any happy couple out for a stroll. Why can’t it just be like this? Ever since Rufus was killed, I’d fought against criminals. I’d thought it was simple: they were bad guys, I was one of the good guys. But when I saw how Konstantin kept order on the streets, how he protected people...when I compared him to the real evil, people like Ralavich….

  But of course it wasn’t that simple. The FBI wasn’t desperate to bring him down because he’d built an empire. There’s always been organized crime in this city. We needed to stop him because his aggressive expansion was going to spin the city into a gang war.

  “Why can’t you stop?” I blurted, just as we reached the doors of the mansion.

  He turned to look at me. “What?”

  I pointed at
the New York skyline. “You keep taking more territory, getting bigger and bigger. You already control over a third of the city. You’re already the biggest. Why can’t you stop there?”

  He frowned, not angry, but concerned. “It never bothered you before.”

  “It bothers me now. When are you going to stop? When is it enough?”

  His face fell and the pain flooded his eyes, chasing away any trace of blue. God, what happened to him?

  “Never,” he said at last. “There is no enough.”

  Then he bent down and kissed me. I grabbed onto his shoulders and clung on, wanting to extend the moment. But at last, he pulled away. “I’m sorry, I have to work,” he told me, and walked inside.

  I was left standing there with my coffee, the rising wind tugging at my coat. He was trying. He’d shown me a side of him that he’d never shown to anyone else. But he was still Konstantin.

  I loved him. But I had to stop him.

  I took my coffee up to our bedroom. As I sipped it, I was starting to feel something bumping up against the inside of the lid, blocking the flow. I pulled off the lid and fished the thing out, washing it off and then ripping off the protective plastic bag. I sat down cross-legged on the floor by the window to examine it.

  It was a thin, pen-like thing made of white plastic, a bit longer than my finger. It had some sort of sensor at the “nib” end and a little LCD display about halfway along. It had a faintly medical feel, like a thermometer or...there was some other gadget it reminded me of, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “I have it,” I told Calahan. “What is it?”

  “It’ll get you into his safe,” said Calahan.

  It felt like my heart clenched tight in my chest and refused to pump. I snapped my head around to check the bedroom door was still shut and dropped my voice to a whisper, even though Konstantin was down on the second floor. “I can’t go in his safe!”

  The fear sluiced through me like ice water, numbing my limbs until they refused to move. I remembered the look in his eyes, when he’d caught me outside his office. If he caught me trying to get into his safe….

  And his anger, and what he might do to me, wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was knowing I’d destroy everything between us.

  Carrie came on the line. “We don’t have a choice. Whatever he’s involved in, whatever he paid that guy a quarter of a million dollars to do, it’s happening the day after tomorrow. We have to find out what it is.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said miserably. I tried to tell myself that our happiness was only an illusion. It was all based on a lie. So why did risking it scare me so much?

  Konstantin stayed in his office all day while I paced and worried. He even ate lunch in there. Finally, just as the sun was going down, he walked off downstairs. I rushed to the door...and then stood there on the threshold, gripping the door handle. “I can’t do this,” I said.

  “Yes you can,” said Calahan calmly. “I’ll be with you every step of the way. I have a guy watching Konstantin through binoculars. He’s downstairs talking to Grigory. If he so much as moves in your direction, I’ll let you know and you’ll have plenty of time to get out of there. Okay?”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay.” And I slipped into the study and closed the door behind me.

  Everything about being in the room felt wrong. His huge, imposing desk and chair, the scent of his cologne in the air. This was his place, his private sanctum, the one place he’d made me promise never to go….

  I hurried over to the safe. The quicker I did this, the better. “What do I do?” I asked, falling to my knees in front of it.

  Calahan must have been scared too, but his voice was calm and comforting, exactly what I needed. “You know those movies where the guy opens the safe using a stethoscope, listening for the tumblers? Well, that’s what this thing does. Just put the tip against the safe and start turning the dial. When a bar lights up on the screen, you’ve hit a number right.”

  I did as he said and started twisting the dial. I could feel the sweat forming between my shoulder blades. “Nothing yet…” A bar lit up. “Got it!”

  “Now back the other way until you hit the next number.”

  I twisted the dial the other way. I kept glancing towards the door. Another bar lit up and I reversed direction again. “Where’s Konstantin?” I asked, my voice tight.

  “Still downstairs. Don’t worry.” But I could hear the tension creeping into his voice. It hit me that this was just like the hotel in Boston, except now he was the one helplessly observing and I was the one in danger. How did everything get so backwards?

  The sweat was trickling down my spine in icy beads. A third bar lit up. I changed direction, my hand shaking. Come on, come on! A fourth bar—

  There was a metal clunk. I looked up at the safe in disbelief, then tried the handle. The door swung open. Piles of cash, documents, passports—

  A confusion of voices on my earpiece. Calahan’s voice but quiet, as if he was turned away from his mic, and someone else, arguing with him. “What?” I heard Calahan say. “Where is he?!”

  I jumped to my feet, sucking in a huge, panicked breath. I slammed the safe shut and locked the handle.

  Calahan’s voice, deafening in my ear as he shouted in panic. “Hailey, get out! We don’t have Konsta—”

  I raced towards the door. But just as I got there, it swung open and I was face-to-face with Konstantin.

  43

  Hailey

  HIS EYES went from my face to the safe to the gadget in my hand. I saw the shock turn to disbelief and then to fury.

  He grabbed for me.

  The panic was total. It felt like being a child, caught by my parents. I wasn’t thinking rationally, I just bolted, away from him and across the room, into the bathroom. All I could think of was to get rid of the evidence, as if I could somehow deny the whole thing as long as it wasn’t there. I hurled the gadget into the toilet bowl and slammed the flush, holding it down. Konstantin arrived a second later and shouldered me aside. He shoved his hand into the whirlpool in the bowl but the thing slipped through his fingers. And then it was gone.

  But it was too late. He’d seen it. He’d caught me in his office.

  He slammed me up against the wall. The only thing worse than the fury in his eyes was the hurt. Oh, God, the hurt. I never meant to hurt him.

  “Who are you working for?” he yelled, his voice shaking the walls of the tiny room. “Did the FBI get to you in the hospital? Did they offer you a deal?”

  I opened and closed my mouth helplessly. There was no explanation I could come up with, no way to talk myself out of it. But when I thought about telling him the truth, my throat closed up with fear.

  He growled, took hold of my wrist and—

  He dragged me. The shift was terrifying: that morning, we’d been a happy couple. Now I was a prisoner, not worth speaking to or even looking at. He marched all the way downstairs like that with me stumbling and begging behind him, desperate to stay on my feet because I knew he’d just pull me along the carpet if I fell.

  Grigory stared at us as we came into view. Konstantin snapped orders to him in Russian. Grigory looked horrified and asked a question of his own, something short and desperate like are you sure? But Konstantin just nodded grimly.

  Grigory went pale with fear. Fear for me...or fear that our affair was about to be discovered? Oh God, what are they going to do to me?

  Together, they pushed me into the back of the car and we set off. No one talked. Even Calahan had gone silent in my ear, unsure if it was safe. Darkness had fallen and a storm was building, the dark clouds blocking out the moon. As we whipped through the city streets, Konstantin was just a motionless silhouette beside me. I couldn’t see his expression until a passing car’s headlights lit him up for a second. Then I wanted to throw up in fear. His face was back to that cold, emotionless mask, as if none of this, none of us, had ever happened. How did it go so wrong, so fast?

  The car slow
ed. We were outside a nightclub that had some sort of horror theme: the front was lit up with flaming pentagrams and the line of people waiting to get in were mostly goths. Pounding industrial music, mixed together with recorded screams, shook the car’s windows. I didn’t understand. Why would they bring me here?

  But we didn’t pull up outside. We turned into an alley alongside the club and then around the back. Konstantin pulled me out and hauled me down a set of steps to a metal door, and then down a featureless concrete hallway lit by flickering fluorescent lights. He opened another, heavier door and pushed me through.

  At one point, it might have been a cold storage room, where meat was hung and butchered. That would explain the drain in the floor. Someone had added a long mirror on one wall and there was what looked like a dentist’s chair in the center. My stomach twisted as I saw the leather restraints dangling from it. We were directly below the nightclub: the music and screams shook the ceiling.

  I knew what this was. An interrogation room. One where screams wouldn’t be heard.

  Konstantin left and slammed the door behind him. My legs had gone shaky and I fell to my knees beside the drain, unsure if I was going to be sick...

  As I knelt there, I remembered the earpiece. If there was any hope of lying my way out of this, I had to get rid of it. But I assumed I was being watched through what had to be a one-way mirror, just like I’d watched Christina in our interrogation room. I put my face in my hands and managed to claw the tiny earpiece out of my ear and drop it down the drain, making it look like I was crying. And I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream at myself for volunteering, for falling for him, for trying to do something instead of staying safely behind the camera where I belonged.