The Good Thief

by Judith Leon

  “Sam briefed me. I’ve talked it over with key insiders, including Christine. The connection to A is an astonishing and profoundly important discovery, Lindsey. Since the takedown of Lab 33, we’ve known about this woman who is called a number of names, but is mostly known as Arachne. Just as she did with Jeremy, if she identifies herself at all she uses the letter A, and all communications from her that we’ve been able to get our hands on concluded with the spiderweb Jeremy described.”

  “A is a woman?” She felt surprise at first, but then a strange, inexplicable sense of correctness.

  “Yes. She seems bent on bringing down the Academy. Most details about her are closely held, but I can tell you that even though we don’t know yet who she is, let alone how to stop her, what you’ve found out confirms that she has something to do with Lab 33 and that her influence continues to spread.”

  Exhaustion was hitting hard now. Lindsey said goodbye. Marko handed her the drink. She took one good slug, then said, “I’m going to shower and then I have to lie down. Stay…if you’d like.” The thought of Marko leaving evoked a panic that clutched her threat. “I want you here with me.”

  He gave her a gentle smile and plunked himself with a sigh onto the edge of her bed. Carrying the drink with her, she headed for the shower. When she finished and came out, smelling like a fresh apricot, Marko rose and headed for his own cleanup. She lay down on top of the bed, expecting that they would talk after he was clean and comfortable.

  Lindsey woke suddenly, totally disoriented. Was it day? Night? Where was she?

  “Cara mia, you are so damn beautiful.”

  Marko, who had apparently been watching her sleep, stroked a finger across her forehead.

  Prague. Warm room with a fire in her lovely ceramic stove. Teal still missing. Lindsey’s fault. She felt tears welling. They spilled warmly onto her cheeks.

  “Don’t cry, cara mia.”

  Marko kissed her. Softly at first, but then he gently inserted his tongue into her mouth, as if he might gently invade her body in another way, and began to explore. At first sadness held her back, but his passion, the tenderness of his hands as they caressed her neck and shoulders, proved irresistible. Life-affirming.

  She wrapped her arms around his naked torso and responded, wildly returning the kiss and groaning. She needed this release. Wanted it. Had craved melding with Marko for days.

  His hand slid over a breast and his lips soon kissed where his palm had caressed. She moaned again and sighed his name. “Marko.”

  He kissed her other breast that ached for the touch of his lips. “Oh, yes.”

  With one hand he spread her legs slightly and then he used the lightest of touches to stroke the inside of her thigh.

  The wonderful burning deep in her belly flared and she ran her fingers into his hair and pulled. “You want me?” Marko asked.

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Not too soon. You’ll like the waiting for it.”

  His kisses moved slowly down her belly, kissing, licking. Pushing slightly on his head, both hands now in his hair, she encouraged him to go lower.

  When he finally spread her legs even further, she felt any sense of him and herself slipping away. There was only the delicious, intimate licking. “Uuugh,” she moaned. “Ohhh.”

  She was on the verge of exploding right then but he sat up over her, opened and rolled on a condom that had been lying on the sheet beside them. For a moment the magic became reality again and she knew he’d planned this. And that was good, too.

  She helped him inside and the slow rhythm of lovemaking began until his body grew slick and the speed of their movements together increased. She was losing herself. Losing…

  The climax took her and she sensed he’d come, too.

  The next time Lindsey woke, Marko lay beside her, one arm resting across her belly. She moved, intending to slip away to the bathroom a moment before returning to him. She didn’t want to wake him. He surely needed rest.

  But at her first slight movement, he awoke immediately. He grinned at her. She grinned back, and they kissed.

  “Want to go again?” he asked.

  “You?”

  “I will if you will.”

  Her stomach growled. They laughed out loud. She said, “Don’t you want to sleep?”

  “No. I have never felt more alive.” He sat up in the bed beside her. “I’m totally awake.” He seemed to be glowing with happiness. She could tell—Marko was projecting into the future, thinking that maybe Lindsey could be the one.

  She turned her head away from him. “I keep going over things I might have done, should have done, to keep them from taking Teal. K-bar would have a thousand complaints.”

  He took her chin and made her look at him. “You know, I just thought you might be doing that. There wasn’t a thing you could have done differently, Linds.”

  “Maybe.”

  Again her stomach growled. He rolled over her and onto his feet. “We need food. You need to have your thoughts distracted. Let’s dress and go out.”

  “What time is it?”

  Marko bent over the small clock on the bedside stand. “7:30.”

  He was right. Getting out of the room would be distracting, and she was wide-awake. They dressed warmly and left the hotel.

  As they had done with their ice displays in OldTown, ice festival participants had set up brightly lit statues the entire length of the boulevard leading to the NationalMuseum. She and Marko crossed the street, dodging still-active traffic. “I bought a wurst that was damn good,” Marko said. “Maybe we can find the guy again.”

  They passed a beautiful and intriguing sculpture depicting “The Firebird and Ivan in the Garden of Golden Apples.” Spotlights of flickering gold and red tones made the gorgeous ice phoenix seem to be truly on fire. Marko especially liked the next sculpture depicting a “rusalka,” a pre-Christian lusty female forest spirit with abundant wild hair curlicuing around huge naked breasts. Her head was thrown back in laughter.

  When they passed a tender scene of “The Lady in White” teaching young Bethushka, a child who is supposed to be spinning flax, to dance, Marko said, “You would make a wonderful mother, Linds.”

  She let the comment pass.

  Her cell phone rang. They had found the vendor Marko was seeking. “Have him put lots of mustard on mine,” she said, and then answered the phone. The caller’s number she knew belonged to Christine Evans.

  “We want to keep you posted, Lindsey. Teal has sent images and feelings to Stefan. She seems strong and determined again. Images were of a man with a terribly ugly, scarred face, and then of the inside of a plane or helicopter—and on the control panel is a Kestonian flag. She knows we will be looking for her now. And this must be her way to ask for our help.”

  “Put me on follow-up. I’m ready to go after her. Right now.”

  Marko, holding wursts in both fists, said, “Tell her I’ll go with you.”

  “My colleague, Marko Savin, is with me. He’s also ready to roll.”

  “I’ll keep you, and Marko, in mind for backup. But getting into Kestonia is going to be extremely tricky, and I have a perfect Athena grad who should be able to do so without suspicion. But be assured, we are on it here, and either I or Allison will keep you posted.”

  After Lindsey snapped the phone shut, Marko handed her her wurst and grinning, said, “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  “Christine said they are sending someone else.” Lindsey couldn’t keep her despair out of her voice.

  “Linds. Cara mia. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She bit into the wurst, her mouth watering with the taste of mustard and spices. They moved away from the vendor, strolling slowly among the crowd past the sculptures. They passed a violin player and accordionist playing a sweet tune, entertaining to make a few euros from tips.

  “You sound…so sad.”

  “The Kestonians have Teal! And now Allison has refused to put me onto the trail. I failed. And I’m a…”
She couldn’t bear to say “coward” out loud. “I almost wasn’t able to pull myself together to figure out a way to help you.”

  “But you did. I heard you gagging with fear. I felt your shakes. But I don’t think it’s what you think it is. It’s just your body’s way of telling you that you’re forcing yourself.”

  “I shouldn’t have to force myself, goddamn it!”

  He stopped walking and captured her gaze. “But look at what you—we—have accomplished. Sixteen young girls are safe because of what you did. And Loschetter’s instructions for making these extraordinary girls was kept out of really bad hands.”

  “I’m a fraud, Marko. I was scared spitless in that hellacious underground place.”

  “Who wasn’t? You are human, not a robot. But you know what, Linds, I think you are a bit of a fraud.”

  She hadn’t expected him to agree, not really. She felt a prick of anger.

  After the briefest pause, Marko went on. “It’s not that you lack courage, though, which is what you seem to be thinking. You have plenty of courage. You saved me twice this morning. Those guys with the automatics would have nailed me if you hadn’t stopped the one by the chopper. You figured a way to pull me out of the ditch. You took on Foo Hai. You had a huge fear, and you beat it. But I think you fight your true nature.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’re an artist, Linds. I’ve been asking myself over and over, why does she do this stuff? You aren’t like me. A sort of adrenaline freak. All this crazy daredevil stuff isn’t your first choice. If you could be totally honest with yourself, you might quit it.”

  “What nonsense are you talking?”

  “I think the far-out risk-taking goes way back. To prove to K-bar that you are as tough as any son he could have had.”

  She started to spit out some kind of angry protest, but he smiled at her, a gentle smile. A smile that also seemed to be saying, I accept you as you really are.

  So instead of yelling at him, she thought a moment about her relationship to her father, to the tough K-bar she knew her father to be. There was truth in Marko’s comments. She could admit that. “When I saw all those spiders, for a few minutes I was four years old again,” Lindsey said. “We were camping at night and my parents told me not to move and set me down on a rock and went to get firewood. I was so scared I started shaking. A spider crawled onto me, and I screamed my lungs out. My father came racing back and looked disgusted. ‘No daughter of mine is afraid of such things,’ he said. I’ve just always had this terror of spiders.”

  “You sure pushed past that down in the third level of Hades.”

  “Yeah.” Lindsey smiled, suddenly self-conscious. “I did. I guess I’ve always felt that I was unlovable unless I was an all-out thrill freak.”

  “You don’t need to be a daredevil. You don’t need to prove anything to anybody. You proved that you could do whatever it takes long ago. And you sure as hell are no coward.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s not just that I get…scared. I love the thrills. I love the excitement. I’ve, well, it’s not like I haven’t thought about…I just don’t think I could give it up now. I’m hooked, too.”

  “I think I do understand. And who says you have to give up all thrills and excitement? We could still ski and skydive and scuba. Hell, we can go climb mountains together. Dozens of things for adventure. There are lots of thrills and excitement that don’t involve risking your life by confronting people who might try to kill you.”

  “Marko—”

  “How about taking the risk to be more honest about who you are? Dare to be you. The wonderful artist that you are is good enough for anyone—even K-bar.”

  The fiddler and the accordion player stopped close by, playing now for her and Marko. They were playing the French love song, “Plaisir d’Amour.” She thought of its first lines, “The joys of love are but a moment long.”

  Longing welled up, nearly choking her. She loved Marko. She’d known it beyond a doubt when she helped him out of that crevice. She suspected that he might love her. And it seemed that he understood her maybe better than she understood herself. She’d been on a very long daredevil journey. Maybe it was time, now, to step onto a different road. She knew that someday she wanted a deeper life of family and commitment. She wanted that joy of love that the songs all sang about, even if only for a short time. Was it really possible to have it both ways? Excitement and responsibility?

  “What do you think, Linds? Am I right?” Marko put a euro in the tin cup their serenaders held out.

  She took Marko’s arm and then another bite of the scrumptious wurst as they began to walk together again. “Yeah. You are.”

  Why not make some changes? She could follow her heart, fully and completely.

  She could start by eliminating the extreme, high-risk stuff she did just to prove she could. Just thinking about letting that part of her life go felt right. Felt easy. She did have commitments, though. She would take dangerous Athena assignments, but only when the stakes would justify risking her life—the life of someone who was loved and needed.

  They’d circled back around to the ice sculpture of the wild and lusty “rusalka,” her head thrown back in laughter.

  “So,” he said, “here’s something to think about risking. Admit that you love me. I dare you.”

  Even though K-bar admired Marko, he would protest—at least at first, but she’d outlast him, wear him down. Lindsey tilted her chin up, matching the same confident angle as the rusalka, smiled at Marko and drew him closer. Challenge accepted.