“So, this is all pretty crazy. Do you want to talk about it?” Aaron asked after a silent lull.
“No,” Sarah replied. “Yes. I mean … I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start by telling me if Putin’s cool or what,” Aaron said, and he cracked a kind smile, really selling his humor. Sarah furrowed her brow, but she couldn’t stop a laugh from escaping her mouth.
“This is so insane!” she said, pulling at the frayed strands of her hair. “I mean, I don’t even know how to feel. Sometimes I feel like it’s a hoax or a mistake or … who knows. It’s so crazy I can’t even understand it.”
“Look, Mark and I might not be buds, but I know him enough to know this whole thing is bullshit. So, tell me about it. Maybe a fresh set of eyes can make sense of this whole … whatever it is.”
Sarah took a long, deep breath and started at the beginning: Mark’s abduction, then her interrogation, the bullshit news she saw on TV, all the while weaving a twisting and turning path through every theory she’d mentally catalogued. Aaron listened without interruption, letting Sarah get it all out of her system.
“That…,” Aaron said once Sarah had exhausted herself talking. “That’s horrifying, what happened. I’m sorry you had to go through it.”
Sarah sighed. “Don’t be sorry for me. Be sorry for Mark—he’s the one who’s been falsely accused of spying and is being shipped to Moscow. He doesn’t even speak a word of Russian.”
“Well, ‘vodka.’ And ‘nyet,’ I’m sure he knows.”
Sarah shot Aaron a cold look.
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
Sarah shot up from her seat and started to pace. She wanted to climb the walls; while she couldn’t even begin to understand what Mark was enduring, she couldn’t stop herself from feeling like a prisoner. She was trapped where she was, afraid to go anywhere or do anything. Before Aaron arrived, she had glimpsed at the news headlines on her phone, one of which mentioned that the president was going to address the press on Mark’s arrest and what he was apparently calling “the enemy within.” That quote alone made Sarah shiver, and it gave her little doubt that the president was going to do what he typically did—spout a bunch of nonsense and stir people into a frenzy through wild declarations and no shortage of reminders that they should be in a state of constant fear. Would she become a target for some fanatic looking to boast of their patriotism? Would she be picked up off the street by a nameless, faceless intelligence agency and detained over a vague concern that she, too, was a spy?
“I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “Where do I go? How do I keep myself safe?”
“You and the baby,” Aaron said.
Sarah stopped dead in her tracks. She screwed her head toward Aaron, and she could feel him recoil at her glare.
“Oh, shiiiiiit,” he said in slow motion. “You don’t know.”
“Know what?” Sarah growled through gritted teeth. Though she’d only been a mother, and an expectant one at that, for a few days, she already felt her primal protection instinct kicking in. A threshold had been crossed from threatening Sarah to threatening her unborn child, and she felt all the fear that’d been bottling up inside of her transform into rage. No one would hurt her baby, not before it was born, not after, not when it was a thirty-year-old with children of his or her own. No one.
“You should probably see for yourself,” Aaron said as he took hold of the remote control and turned the TV on. He flipped to Fox News. A panel of guests were tiled on the screen, like the opening credits to The Brady Bunch, engaged in a heated debate. Sarah couldn’t discern the topic based on the brief snippets each panelist allowed one another before shouting over whoever was trying to get their voice heard. But then it became clear—words like “legitimacy,” “forfeited citizenship,” and “rightful place,” clued her into the conversation.
They were talking about shipping her baby to Russia.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” she bellowed, then she marched to where the TV was hanging on the wall and slapped its side control panel four times, until it finally turned off.
“Mark is not a traitor,” Sarah said, spinning on her heels to face Aaron. “He doesn’t belong in Russia, and my baby sure as hell doesn’t belong in that damn country.”
“I know, I know,” Aaron said, holding out his arm to urge Sarah to calm down. “Let’s think this through, okay? Mark had to be set up—by who? Who has he made enemies with?”
Sarah huffed. “Get comfortable,” she said.
“No, I mean real enemies. People who not only had the nerve to orchestrate something as crazy as this, but also the power.”
“There’s that senator,” Sarah said, trying to slow her racing mind so she could remember the things Mark had said about him. “Dudek was his name.”
Aaron whistled. “Yeah, that’s a scary dude to have on your bad side. But, I don’t know. For as rotten and crooked as he can be, he’s had a long career free of any real wrongdoing. Doing something as risky as this seems out of character.”
“I—I don’t know. I mean, there’s plenty of people Mark has rubbed the wrong way. It’s the competitive nature of his job. But we’ll see these same guys at a bar or something, and we’ll all have a drink and everything’s fine. They get over their losses, same as Mark gets over it when he loses.”
“Somebody has to be behind this, we know that,” Aaron said, stroking his chin. “Someone had to tip the Feds, someone has to be feeding this information, the lies and the truth, to the media. I guess the other question, other than who is doing this, is why. Why Russia? Maybe if we can figure out why that became Mark’s destination, we can understand who put him there—they’d have to have ties to the Kremlin, right? I mean, this has to be a two-way street. Did Mark ever mention anyone who had that kind of association?”
Sarah jabbed her palms into her forehead. She loved listening to Mark talk—he had the gift of gab, and there was hardly any other quality so quintessential to who he was. But that meant he told her a lot of things. A lot of names, a lot of stories, a lot of details about whatever deal he was in the middle of. And that made it difficult to shuffle through the Rolodex of her memory and pull out such a specific detail. She groaned at her own shortcoming, because if she couldn’t save Mark, who could? Suddenly, Sarah was choked by the realization that she might never see her husband again.
And that premise, she refused to abide.
“I’ll go to Russia,” she said, almost simultaneously to the thought being born in her mind.
“What?” Aaron asked, an expression of utter horror on his face.
“I won’t do it, Aaron. I won’t live without my husband; I won’t raise my baby—our baby—without him. And, judging by what the news said, the U.S. doesn’t want me and my baby here anyway.”
“Okay, okay,” Aaron said, his patronizing tone digging beneath Sarah’s skin. “You’re in shock right now. I know this all … it’s crazy, but, Sarah, if you leave this country now, you’ll never get back in.”
“I’d rather be with my husband in the worst place on Earth than alone in the best place.”
Aaron shrugged his shoulders. “Fine. But what if you can’t get to Mark? What then? What happens to you, and the baby, if you’re marooned in Russia?”
Sarah stopped pacing and released a deep breath; it felt like all the air drained from her as her body sagged like a falling accordion. That hope, however fleeting, had given her strength; it had given her something to do other than feeling helpless and wondering what terrible things were being done to the man she loved.
“What’s going to happen to him, Aaron?” she asked, on the brink of tears. “The Russians, they know he’s not one of theirs. What will they do to him?”
Aaron swallowed hard and averted his eyes from Sarah’s. “I don’t know,” he said, quietly. “I really don’t.”
Sarah collapsed on the couch. She couldn’t feel anything. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even blink.
>
Slowly, Aaron knelt in front of her and tilted his head to catch her gaze. “Come stay with me,” he said.
Sarah grimaced, disgusted, and immediately felt guilty for doing so. This wasn’t a ploy for him to get close to her, something he’d done plenty of times. This was different. “I can’t. I—And do what?”
“What will you do here?” Aaron asked. “It’s not good for you to stay here alone and, quite frankly, I don’t think it’s safe, either.”
The words sunk in, and Sarah knew he was right. Someone coming for her—maybe they’d be from the government, maybe it’d just be some raging psycho—was a real possibility, and Sarah would need a lot more than a softball bat to defend herself. Granted, Aaron was nowhere close to being bodyguard material, but at least he could offer her sanctuary until she figured out what she was going to do.
“Okay,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sarah packed a suitcase in record time, and when she came out of her bedroom, Aaron was at the door, texting someone. He looked up and, seeing Sarah approaching, fumbled to shove his phone back into his jacket pocket. Aaron’s nervous reaction wasn’t lost on Sarah.
“Who are you texting?” she asked.
“Huh?” Aaron blurted. “Just my folks. I was supposed to see them today, and they were wondering where I was.”
Sarah nodded and tried to subdue what she assumed was paranoia.
Aaron took her suitcase, and they stood at the front door, shoulder to shoulder, bracing themselves for the assault that was awaiting them.
“You ready?” Aaron asked.
“No,” Sarah replied.
“Well, can’t turn back now,” Aaron said as he shoved the front door open and placed his hand on Sarah’s back to move her along. Maybe it was to keep them pushing through the sea of reporters they were about to face.
Or maybe, Sarah questioned, it was his way of getting her where he wanted her to be.
11
The plane touched down, and Mark awoke with a gasp. In the moment between waking and his eyes capturing the reality around him—a bitter moment—Mark thought he was waking up at home, in his bed. But then he remembered, and the feverish sequence of memories that came rushing back to his mind made him wince. He felt sick to his stomach, but the moment passed. He forced the moment to pass. Wallowing in his own misery wouldn’t get him anywhere. It certainly wouldn’t get him back home.
As far as the world was concerned, he was no longer Mark Strain, D.C. lobbyist, son of Joe and Lorraine Strain, husband to Sarah Conte, and expectant father. He was now Pyotr … whoever. And he was returning home to a place he’d never in his life even visited.
Mark was in Moscow.
After being whisked off the plane and forced into a photo op on the tarmac with his “fellow spies,” Gregori, Mark’s handler, shuffled him into a sedan—a vintage model that, intentionally or not, looked like it was straight out of a Sean Connery–era Bond movie—and had the driver whisk them away from the airport. Ania and Viktor stayed behind to take their places on a dais and meet the press and their adoring countrymen. They were heroes; Mark was something else.
“We’ve informed the press you were feeling sick and, regrettably, cannot participate in the warm welcome that’s been arranged for you all,” Gregori said as the sedan cruised slowly through Moscow. “I figure your inability to speak Russian might raise some eyebrows.”
“You think?”
“How are you feeling?” Gregori asked. He sat across from Mark—the sedan’s back seat had two benches that faced each other—and was leaning in to examine the bruises, bumps, and lacerations that traced a road map from where Mark was now and where this had all begun, back in D.C.
“As if you care,” Mark said.
“Oh, but I do. We’ve sold you to the Russian people as a hero. A man who sacrificed much of his life to serve his country. It is in all of our interests to maintain your health and wellness and assure the people that sacrifice and dedication are indeed rewarded.”
Mark shook his head at Gregori’s assessment of his usefulness. He wasn’t an idiot. Sure, they were protective of Mark now. Would they still be in three months? Six? When the press had turned their attention away from the returning spy heroes and Mark was no longer at the top of the public’s mind, would it matter what happened to him? He could be disposed of at will, dumped in a shallow grave, and no one, not a single person in all of Russia, would realize he was gone.
Even with that knowledge racing through Mark’s mind, he didn’t have it in him to engage in another fight, even a verbal one. The adrenaline that had kept him going the past day and a half, along with the drugs Gregori had slipped him, had worn off. All that remained was a profound exhaustion that Mark honestly thought he’d never recover from. Every inch of his body felt sore to the touch and painful to move; even the act of shaking his head at Gregori’s false assurances made him ache. He could only focus his attention on the strange world outside his window and take it all in. This would be his home until he either escaped or outlived his purpose—which would be the same day he was murdered and discarded.
Prior to this day, Mark’s knowledge of Moscow’s architecture began and ended with buildings like Saint Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin. He thought the city would be a sprawling skyline of colorful onion domes and fortified complexes. And while those styles existed, Moscow proved to be a mishmash of several aesthetics, encompassing the glass-and-steel edifices that represented Russia’s modernity as well the stout, utilitarian buildings that hinted at its oppressive past. Mark couldn’t help but recognize how foreign it all felt to him. True, he’d traveled abroad numerous times, but he was an outsider—a tourist—in every trip he took; he was a visitor who, by definition, wasn’t supposed to fit in. But now, he was being asked to look at everything around him with knowing eyes. This was, according to the narrative built around his identity, a place he knew and loved even though nothing could be further from the truth. Mark didn’t know the look and feel of this place, didn’t know the customs, he didn’t even know more than five words of the language. Never in his life did he feel more disconnected from a place, and it worried him that, when the time came—if it came—he was going to need to navigate his way through it to get back home.
Roughly an hour after leaving the airport, the sedan stopped outside a skyscraper that shone with golden light against the darkening sky. The building itself looked like a giant throne with its central piece rising stories above its accompanying wings, which shot out like arms of the regal seat. The sedan pulled into the half-circle valet area just outside the lobby, and Mark’s door was opened for him. He peered outside, noticing the immaculate glass doors that led into the building, and wondered what he and Gregori were doing there.
“Well?” Gregori prodded. “Are you just going to sit around?”
Mark took the hint and exited the car, figuring it was safe enough to do so. If they had stopped in the middle of an abandoned industrial lot, that would be one thing; Mark would know what to expect. But they were, as far as Mark could tell, in the heart of downtown Moscow, in front of a crowded hotel. He was safe—for the moment.
“Triumph Palace,” Gregori said as he followed Mark out of the car. “One of our finest buildings, and the place you will call home.”
Mark arched an eyebrow at Gregori. “You’re really going all in with this returning hero bit, aren’t you?”
Gregori shot Mark a disapproving frown. “Come,” he said, leading Mark into the building. “Your unit is prepared.”
* * *
The gold-plated elevator lifted Mark and Gregori to the Palace’s twenty-third floor. With a muffled ding, the elevator slid open and Mark cautiously exited into a lobby. Mark was taken aback; in his mind, every floor of a hotel had doors lining both sides of the hallway, from one end to the next. But this was more like a penthouse. There was only one door—not including the emergency exits on the far sides of both ends of the lobby—and Greg
ori had already walked ahead of Mark and was using a key card to open it. Still concerned about what to expect, Mark followed Gregori, unable to disguise the exhaustion and soreness that hobbled his gait.
“Welcome to your quarters,” Gregori said as Mark entered the lavish room.
Mark looked around, trying to stifle his awe but failing. He knew all about Russian excess—it was no different from the American brand, and in his work as a steward of the rich and powerful, Mark had encountered his share of excess—but he still couldn’t help but be impressed by the riches on display. While the massive room did incorporate a modicum of modern simplicity, the flourishes felt like they were meant to provoke with their garishness. The wide-open design gave a clear view to much of the unit, and even with the most perfunctory glance as he strolled through the place, Mark could identify the top-of-the-line appliances in the kitchen, a priceless Pollock painting that hung on the wall opposite the dining room table, and an entertainment system in the living room that probably cost half of Mark’s annual salary.
“Nice and homey,” Gregori said, stating it as fact, not asking.
“Yeah,” Mark said, “it totally mirrors the modest lifestyle I’m used to.”
“We wish for you to be comfortable, that is all.”
“What happens then?” Mark asked, unable to mask the bitterness in his voice. “You make me look like one of yours, then everyone forgets about me and … what? Suicide? I’m disappeared?”
Gregori smiled. “You seem tired. Maybe it’s time you rested—on your own accord.”
Without so much of a hint of feeling in his eyes—knowing what had been done to Mark’s life, knowing what his future held—Gregori walked to Mark and handed him the room key. “Good luck, Mark Strain.”
Mark accepted the key and, strangely, felt sad to see Gregori go; Gregori was his enemy, there was no doubt about it, but he was the only person in Russia that he knew.
The Throwaway Page 9
