The Throwaway

by Michael Moreci

  Mark turned to find one agent unconscious and on the floor and another caught in Ania’s grasp; she had him by his shoulders and was driving her knee into his torso, over and over. The agent tried to kick his leg out at Ania, but she was too fast. She blocked his leg with a kick of her own, driving the sole of her foot into his knee. Mark heard something crack, followed by the agent’s scream.

  Ania used the close quarters to her advantage. The agent nearest Ania tried to aim his gun for a clean shot at her, but she swung the agent in her grasp against his rifle, causing his shots to go wild. She then bashed her forehead against the nose of the agent she was holding, and Mark heard another crack. The agent went down on his knees, and Ania finished him with a roundhouse kick to the face.

  The agent who had pinned Mark took a step toward Ania, but Mark kicked him square in his back and sent him tumbling against the far wall. By the time he turned, Mark was on him; he delivered a series of short punches into his abdomen, and when the agent tried to drive his fist down on Mark’s head, Mark spun out of his way and used the agent’s forward momentum to trip him onto the ground. Mark heard his head thump against the floor, and as he tried to get up, woozily, Mark delivered a kick to the agent’s face, knocking him out cold. He looked up to see Ania holding the last remaining agent by his shirt, his body limp in her grasp. She delivered two fierce punches to his face, then dropped him to the floor.

  Ania grabbed two of the rifles, tossing one to Mark.

  “Now we have machine guns,” he said as he tightened his grasp on the weapon. “You know, Die Hard?”

  “I know,” Ania said. “I just don’t care. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  Mark studied the rifle, which was lighter than he’d expected something of such killing magnitude to weigh. He was undecided if that made him more or less comfortable.

  “We don’t want a gunfight,” Ania continued. “Not only are we outnumbered, but these guys are armored. They’ll pin us down and, if I had to guess, execute us on the spot. I think we should—”

  Her words were cut short by a tinny sound that carried into their room as something was thrown through the erupted door frame. For just the briefest moment, Mark saw a thin gray canister bounce across the floor, and in that moment, he was certain he was dead.

  The canister erupted in a flash of white light—so bright, so intense that Mark felt like he could taste it—that knocked Mark off his feet and burned out the pupils in his eyes. Accompanying the burst of light was a sharp explosive bang that not only felt like it had burst Mark’s eardrums, but it was so strong that it was like a punch buried into his guts. He was left blinded and deafened, writhing on the ground, nauseous, afraid he’d never see or hear the world around him again.

  Mark still had his sense of touch, though, and he certainly felt the pair of hands tear him off the ground and slam him onto the bed. Sound was starting to return, and he heard voices above the ringing in ears: men yelling in Russian, and a woman—Ania, he believed—yelling in return. Mark’s arms were twisted behind his back, and his wrists were squeezed together at his waist. Mark considered resisting, but just as he started to fight he felt a knee press hard against his spine. He screamed in pain, his voice sounding far away, and then he felt hard, cold metal slam over his left wrist. Handcuffs. Mark struggled, trying to pull his right arm free from the overpowering grasp that held him in place. Then he remembered: his pistol. The agent had been lazy, maybe arrogant, and didn’t think to frisk Mark. The gun was tucked into the back of his pants; he felt it there, pressing against his lower back. Mark didn’t need to pull his arm out, he just needed to push it down. And that’s what he did.

  His movement caught the agent off guard, and Mark was given the freedom he needed to reach his gun. He grasped it, wrapped his finger around the trigger, and fired. One shot, then another, then another. At the third shot, he felt the pressure on his body release, and he felt his attacker slump to the ground.

  Mark rolled off the bed and held the gun out in front of him, hoping it would at least make anyone hesitate to come near him. His vision was returning, but all he saw around him were blurry oblong shapes cast against a haze of white. Instinct told him to shoot the shapes, but he couldn’t risk one of them being Ania.

  Four figures remained, three tall and one short—but just as Mark assessed the situation, the shortest figure sprang up and knocked one of the others to the ground. Mark heard another body, followed by the sound of a voice calling out to him. It sounded like Ania, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. The shape he assumed was her melded with one of the others—attacking an agent, Mark figured—as the last remaining shape raced closer to Mark. The voice called out louder and louder. Mark strained to make out the words, was desperate to know what he was supposed to do.

  Just as the shape crowded his entire vision, the voice came through. Not crystal clear, but clear enough.

  “Shoot!” Ania was screaming. “SHOOT!”

  Mark did exactly as he was told, firing four bullets that riddled the shape in front of him, blasting what Mark now understood to be an FSB agent right off his feet.

  As he gasped for air—the intensity of these life-or-death situations never got easier—Mark felt a hand grasp at the handcuff dangling from his wrist. He jumped at the touch before realizing it was Ania, unlocking him. She pulled him toward the door, yelling for him to run.

  Mark followed, his vision and hearing returning incrementally as they darted out of the room, down the hall, and down the stairs. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Ania shoved Mark to the ground, pushing him down by his head, and fired off at least six bullets from her pistol.

  “Okay, let’s move!” she yelled, pulling Mark back up to his feet.

  “How…,” Mark fumbled, “how are you not blinded?”

  “Training,” Ania snapped, dragging Mark along. “Now come on.”

  Mark’s senses were nearly restored by the time they got back to the car. Ania threw it into drive and peeled away from the curb, leaving the hotel and the FSB behind.

  “What now?” Mark asked as Ania sped onto the expressway.

  “Now?” Ania replied, sucking in a deep breath. “There’s no choice what we do now. We go on the offensive.”

  19

  Sarah had never seen the Lincoln Memorial so quiet. Most days, the place was teeming with tourists, school buses loaded with children on field trips, and agitated locals trying to get to work through the daily throng of visitors. But at 10:00 P.M.—on a night where a brisk winter wind whipped off the reflecting pool and took ten degrees off the already below-average temperature—the memorial was a ghost town. Jenna had to know that, Sarah assumed, and that must have been why she chose this place, at this time, for their meeting.

  But she was late. Thirty-two minutes late, and Sarah was ready to leave. She dug her hands deeper into her pockets and buried more of her face into her coat, trying to escape the cold like a turtle crawling into its shell. Sarah had no idea what she was even hoping to achieve. Whatever this cloak-and-dagger game was, it was well out of her league. Bugged senator offices, clandestine messages, late-night meetings—she was a nurse, not a counterintelligence agent. Still, she’d have to fake it, or at least maneuver her way through well enough to get proof of Mark’s innocence. That’s all that mattered. And if getting it meant pursuing this unusual path, she’d take it to its very end and beyond.

  Sarah checked her phone again. It was almost quarter to eleven; Jenna wasn’t going to show. When Sarah spoke to her on the phone, Jenna didn’t give the impression that she was enthusiastic about helping. Or even talking about Mark at all. Which Sarah understood. The revelation of Mark’s treason—his wrongful accusation—left a blast radius that affected a lot of lives, and Sarah was certain things hadn’t been easy for Jenna since. She knew, though, that Jenna and Mark were close; they were similar in a lot of ways, and of all the assistants Mark went through—and they changed faster than socks, sometimes—he respected none mo
re than Jenna, and he had made that point very clear to her. Sarah hoped Jenna hadn’t lost sight of the person she once knew, and if she had even a sliver of doubt over what happened to Mark, she’d do what she could to help. But as more and more minutes ticked off the clock, she realized it wasn’t going to happen. She was back to square one.

  As she walked the length of the reflecting pool, her head covered by her down coat’s oversized hood, Sarah couldn’t help feeling like she was being followed. Through the padding of her down hood, she heard footsteps following at a fast pace behind her. Sarah sped up, and the footsteps hastened as well. Under normal circumstances, Sarah would be terrified. Here she was, being pursued by … who? A government agent? A Russian assassin? Someone else entirely? Regardless of who it was, Sarah was tired of the games. She was tired of feeling like danger lurked everywhere she went. If someone wanted to come after her, she wasn’t going to run.

  Sarah was ready to fight.

  With her right hand balled into a fist, she pivoted in midstep and turned; she cocked her arm all the way back, ready to put her free one-week trial of Krav Maga to use.

  “What the hell?!” Jenna yelped, nearly jumping out of her skin.

  “Jesus, Jenna!” Sarah said, clutching her chest. She felt like her insides had leapt into her throat, and now her heart was working double-time to shove them all back down. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  “I scared you? I’ve been calling your name. Maybe if your head wasn’t being smothered by your hood, you could hear a little better.”

  “Well, I heard you following me, so I caught that. Where have you been? We were supposed to meet an hour ago.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Jenna said. “I had to make sure no one else was following you.”

  “Following me? You mean you’ve been here, watching me, the entire time?”

  “I’ve been on you since you left that guy’s house you’re staying at. The good news is that you’re clean—no one, as far as I can tell, is tailing you.”

  “I’ve been freezing my ass off out here!” Sarah yelled.

  “I said I was sorry,” Jenna replied, and Sarah could hear Mark in her curtness. He didn’t like mincing words when he had something important to say, either.

  Sarah focused. Jenna must have found something worthwhile, otherwise she wouldn’t be taking such precautionary measures. What mattered to Sarah was what Jenna had found, and how deep she was willing to go down the rabbit hole. Sarah didn’t have an easy sell on her hands, but if she could get Jenna to come this far, maybe she could get her to go a little further. Depending on what Jenna had discovered, the pursuit of Mark’s innocence might ruffle a lot of feathers along the way.

  “You found something, right?” Sarah asked, not even trying to hide the eagerness in her voice.

  Jenna let out a long breath, a dramatic gesture. “I called in some big favors. I dug in places I shouldn’t have been digging. But, yeah—I think I found something.”

  Sarah eyed the manila file folder that Jenna pulled from her shoulder bag; she’d hoped for a chunky dossier detailing all the bastards behind Mark’s framing. Instead, just a plain manila folder.

  “That’s it?”

  “What were you expecting?” Jenna asked sardonically. “You think I’m going to pull out a wall map exposing a giant conspiracy?”

  “No,” Sarah responded. Though that would have been nice, she thought.

  “Just check this out,” Jenna said, opening the folder. The first sheet revealed what looked like a holdings report, as far as Sarah could tell. “Look, Mark’s most recent deal—the Pentagon cyber security? He was working on behalf of Verge. That’s something we all know. But Verge is a huge multinational company. It’s massive. So what do you do when you want to get to the bottom of something?”

  Sarah and Jenna’s eyes met, and they shared a smile. “Follow the money,” Sarah said.

  “Exactly.”

  Jenna flipped to the next sheet, which revealed a blurry photo of a plump middle-aged man in a V-neck shirt. His beard extended so far down his neck and his chest hair so far up that they joined as one. It looked like he was wearing a shag rug Snuggie.

  “Which brings us to this guy here,” Jenna continued. “Sergei Vishny, one of the wealthiest men in Russia. An oligarch, through and through. He thickens the plot,” Jenna said, flipping over to another holdings report.

  It didn’t take Sarah long to recognize the point of interest. There, highlighted in bright yellow marker, was Sergei Vishny’s name. The Russian oligarch was one of Verge’s money players.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sarah spat.

  “Now, let’s not make any leaps, not yet. Guys like Vishny, they have their hands in everything. He might not even know he has an investment in Verge. Not in detail, at least.”

  “But a Russian invested in an American security firm? Especially with how things are between Russia and the U.S.?”

  Jenna waved Sarah off. “You know how these guys are: Why worry about international security when there’s money to be made? Thinking that, I played devil’s advocate. Let’s just assume his investment is benign. It’s just another thing he’s making money off of, he doesn’t care what it is, and Verge is taking money where they can get it. Business as usual for everyone. This is where the line of inquiry gets interesting.”

  “Interesting good or interesting bad?” Sarah asked, anxious.

  Jenna pursed her lips and nodded her head from side to side. “A little bit of both. It’s bad because nothing I found supplies us with a clear-cut exoneration for Mark. There’s nothing for us to go public with. But it’s good because it gives us a whole lot of questions that need to be answered. And those questions will bring us closer, I think, to whatever the hell is going on here.”

  “Okay,” Sarah said, drawing a deep breath. “What are we looking at?”

  “First of all, this Vishny prick. If this information becomes public, it’s a smoking gun for Mark’s guilt. It looks like Mark is colluding with a Russian oligarch. Although, get this: Allegedly, no one has laid eyes on Vishny in, like, years. He’s agoraphobic or something. Which is weird, right? A twenty-eight-year-old billionaire who sits at home all day? That’s fishy, to say the least. Like, who is this guy?”

  Sarah shrugged, expressing her disinterest. “One mystery at a time.”

  “Okay, okay, here’s the thing: As Mark’s assistant, I have that man up my ass—figuratively—twenty-four/seven. I find it hard to believe—no, I find it impossible for him to carry on a clandestine relationship with this Vishny guy—who supposedly doesn’t talk to anyone—without me knowing it. Before all this happened, I could tell you where Mark was at any time of any day. Always. So if I didn’t know, and you didn’t know, Mark would need a clone running around to make this work. Unfortunately, our word means zilch.

  “Also, Verge isn’t Mark’s only account Vishny was invested in. He’s in on several, but it’s totally weird. Because he had his hands in stuff that didn’t make sense for him to be in. Remember that nutrition company Mark worked for, trying to get their healthy food into Virginia schools? Vishny was an investor there. And not only that, by cross-referencing dates, I found out he didn’t become an investor until after Mark was hired. A detail most people would miss.”

  “Damn,” Sarah said. “You’re good.”

  “No shit. Anyway, I take this to mean only one thing: Someone has been setting Mark up for a long time, and Vishny was a means to create a trail linking them together. If there had ever been a proper investigation into Mark, for whatever reason, this would have popped up. An easy link between Mark and Vishny, but it makes zero sense.”

  Sarah shook her head, trying to absorb all this information and, more importantly, figure out what to do with it. “Okay, okay … someone’s been working to tighten the case against Mark. After everything that’s happened, that’s not surprising. The question is, what do we do, knowing that?”

  “For starters, we find out how the informa
tion was leaked. If there’s one thing more valuable than money, it’s information. And it’s not like Mark’s clients were public knowledge. Whoever framed Mark has to be someone close enough to know what he was up to and then share that information.”

  “Yeah, but who?” Sarah asked. “It’s not me, not you. Who else is there?”

  “No clue. A friend? A rival? Someone at the firm? Someone we don’t even know? I mean, we could guess suspects all night long. But let’s put that aside for now. Because there’s one other thing: the software.”

  “The Verge software? Isn’t that just another company Vishny threw money at to help frame Mark?”

  Jenna started to talk, then she stopped. She scanned the area across the pool, where a trio of teenagers had gathered. “Let’s walk.”

  Sarah nodded and followed, even though she thought Jenna was being a little overcautious.

  They walked the length of the reflecting pool, toward the Washington Monument. Ground-level bulbs illuminated it in a shimmering gold that, in turn, cascaded off the water’s surface. Sarah remained quiet as they walked, waiting for Jenna to resume their talk whenever she felt comfortable.

  They reached the edge of the pool where just a few people lingered, all out of earshot.

  “I’m not sure if you know this,” Jenna said, “but Mark didn’t want to take the Verge contract. It was a little out of his league, and he knew it. But Verge? They would not take no for an answer. They persisted. They pestered. They offered a shit ton of money and kept raising it until Mark agreed to work for them. The question is: Why? Mark’s good, but he’s by no means the only persistent lobbyist in town. And getting to your question, was Verge just another company Vishny was invested in? No. No it was not.”