Fallback (The Adventures of Eric and Ursula Book 3)

by A. D. Winch

  Her bed felt warm and comfortable. There was no bed linen upon it, but she didn’t care. She lay down on the plain mattress, rested her head on the pillow and gradually fell asleep.

  When she awoke later, she felt well and rested - a feeling that she had not experienced for a long time. Her stomach was not rumbling, she did not feel cold and her body did not ache. She lay there and appreciated the feeling of contentment.

  Suddenly, her mind tuned in on some entirely different feelings, and her thoughts shifted far away from the bedroom. Eric was okay; he was excited by something but she didn’t know what, and her grandparents were fine too. It was warmer than Paris, the pentagonal surrounding wall was covered in barbed wire and outside it was a forest of sorts. As suddenly as it had come, the thoughts and feelings vanished.

  Ursula opened her eyes and sat up. The room was dark and, outside her window the snow was still falling heavily. Wherever Eric was, it was not Paris. If he knew about her grandparents then they must be together, and that meant they were in Morocco.

  Ursula stood and looked out of the window. Tyre tracks were visible on the snowy roads where a few people had braved the conditions. Opposite her was a billboard advertising a phone that people would feel compelled to upgrade to.

  “Where are they? How can I find them?” she asked herself and then the answer came to her.

  Ursula ran into the living room. Claude was sat up with his head drooped forward. In his hand, he had a glass of water with a fizzing tablet inside. Madame Colbert was standing above him with a disapproving look on her face. Ursula ran past them, took the laptop and sat down on the floor. As the computer powered on, she leaned backwards against the armchair and hoped that Andrea had installed what she needed.

  GoogleEarth appeared on the desktop. While Ursula waited for it to open, she clicked on a search engine and typed ‘US secret military bases Morocco.’ Two matches appeared – Ain Aouda and Temara Detention Facility - she typed the location of the first one into GoogleEarth. Nothing looked familiar. She typed in the second and watched as the North African country filled the screen.

  “What are you doing?” murmured Claude. He did not sound well.

  Ursula did not answer. She was moving the mouse slowly over the screen in front of her, looking closely at the satellite images that had appeared in front of her. It took her a while but then she found it.

  “Yes!”

  “What is it?” asked Madame Colbert, sitting down next to Claude.

  “I know where they are!”

  “Who?” Claude asked.

  “Eric and my grandparents. They are near a town called Temara in Morocco.”

  She showed them the image on the screen, but they both looked confused.

  “How do you know they are there?” asked Madame Colbert.

  Ursula thought about explaining how she could see things in her head from Eric or how she sensed what the Agent had been thinking. However, she could also sense the sceptical looks she would receive. Instead, she said that the Agents had told her before everyone had arrived in the apartment.

  “It looks like a military base,” Claude said, looking at the blurred image. “There is nothing we can do.”

  Ursula shrugged her shoulders. She was reluctant to agree with him. If she could break into a base in Poland with Alexander and Andrea, then they could do the same in Morocco.

  “If I can find Alexander, then that would help.”

  “But you don’t know where he is, do you?” asked Claude.

  Ursula closed her eyes and tried to remember the last conversation she had had with Alexander. They were on a snowy, country road in Poland. Andrea had just been shot, and Ursula had been so distracted by this event that she had paid little attention to Alexander. She remembered that he had spoken in rapid, rushed sentences as he tried to tell her all she needed to know. All she could recall was snippets and random words – ‘Belarus,’ ‘sister,’ ‘false name,’ ‘Gdansk,’ ‘rendez-vous,’ ‘return’ and ‘go!’

  ‘Gdansk’ and ‘rendez-vous’ must have referred to how she had to escape from Poland. ‘Go’ was telling her to leave and ‘return’ must have been him telling her to return home. This left ‘Belarus’ and ‘sister.'

  On the train to Amsterdam, while reading Professor Larsen's diary, Alexander had discovered that he had a sister. He must have been going to Belarus to find her.

  Ursula typed ‘Szymany, Poland’ into GoogleEarth and zoomed out. Due east, about two hundred fifty kilometres away, was the border with Belarus.

  “They were born in the USSR,” Ursula whispered to herself, trying to remember the world history her Granddad had taught her.

  “What was that?” asked Claude.

  “Was Belarus part of the USSR?”

  “Oh, yes,” he replied. “All those countries – Belarus, Latvia, Ukraine. They were all part of the Soviet Union.”

  “So, if someone were born in the USSR and never moved away from where they were born, they could now be living in any of those countries?”

  “Yes, and a few more.”

  Ursula searched on the internet for the population of the USSR. In July, nineteen ninety-one, it had been two hundred and ninety-three million. How was Alexander going to find one person out of this many?

  Back to Contents

  ***

  Chapter 7 – Sasha

  Compacted snow had been piled up high outside the coffee shop. Car exhaust had turned the heaps brown and pedestrians slalomed between them. The temperature was way below freezing and people moved hastily to their destinations. One person, however, was standing still.

  Alexander was dressed in a thick brown coat and wore a large fur hat, but he still felt the icy cold temperature. In his gloved hand, he held a piece of paper with Russian letters upon it. He looked up at the imposing buildings around him and tried to match the Cyrillic script to one of the signs. He breathed quickly, worried that he would miss the rendez-vous, and his breath was visible in the cold air. Just as he was about to give up, he found the place he was looking for and moved excitedly towards the door.

  The coffee shop was much warmer than outside. Alexander removed his hat and undid his coat. He slowly scanned the large room, to see if she was there, not that he knew what she looked like. He did another sweep to see if anyone was staring at him or trying to find him. Nobody looked his way; the customers were too busy chatting amongst themselves to be concerned by the stranger at the door.

  A blast of cold air blew sent shivers down his neck as someone entered behind him. Alexander moved away from the door and made his way towards a table for two. He sat down on a high-backed chair, took off his winter hat and coat, and put a baseball cap on. There was no one there to meet him, and he was convinced that he had arrived first

  Alexander relaxed a little and admired his surroundings. The room was vast and completely covered in off-white tiles. Three stories above his head was a leaded-glass ceiling that let in the blinding winter sun. Stained glass windows dominated one of the walls and marble pillars were evenly placed around him. Once upon a time, this had been an opulent place but now it looked as if it was desperately trying to cling onto the past.

  A waiter approached Alexander's table and spoke in Russian. Ingrid had occasionally spoken Russian to him as a young child, but he could remember very little. He smiled and asked if the man spoke English.

  “Nyet,” snapped the waiter and loitered impatiently while Alexander looked through the menu.

  Alexander thought that a coffee shop in Moscow, just around the corner from Red Square would have had some English on the menu, but he was wrong. It was all in Russian. Luckily, he recognised a few words, and pictures next to the script helped. He ordered an espresso and honey cake by pointing at the menu and smiling hopefully. The waiter said something in Russian that did not sound particularly polite and walked off.

  Alexander ignored him. He felt excited and didn’t care about a gruff waiter. He thought about how he had ended up here, in th
is coffee shop, and he smiled again.

  Six weeks previously, events in Poland had gone drastically wrong, and he had been forced to resort to Plan B. The roads had been empty and he had driven like a maniac until he neared the Polish-Belarus border. He drove the ambulance into a forest within walking distance of the border and decided what to do next. The Polish authorities would be looking for an American General, or a fake American General, so he chose to put the Father Christmas outfit back on.

  Before he left the ambulance, he opened the passenger door, pulled out his shoulder bag and looked at the murderous scene in front of him. Plan B had never involved dealing with Andrea’s lifeless body, but he refused to leave her. In the back of the ambulance, he found an army duffel bag which he thought would be big enough.

  After bending Andrea at the waist, so that her smashed head rested against her feet, he wrapped her in a white sheet and squeezed her into the bag. It was heavy and cumbersome, but he managed to get it onto his back and walked towards the border. As he walked he sang the rude version of the Polish Christmas song that he had learnt and stumbled along the path. The Polish border guards laughed and let the ‘drunk’ Santa through without questions. On the other side, the Belarussian guards refused to smile. They scrutinised his passport until they found Alexander’s visa and then pulled down his Santa beard to check for the scar on his right cheek.

  Belarus was always part of Plan B, if things had gone wrong in Poland, and he felt relieved that Andrea had made him get a visa. Once he was through, he managed to hitch a lift to the city of Brest. The driver spoke no English but kindly dropped Alexander at the main station after Alexander had mimed to be a train. Alexander boarded the Berlin-Moscow overnight train and relaxed as the distance between himself and Poland widened.

  Moscow was far bigger than he had imagined. The lady at the Tourist Information was helpful and booked him into a large, anonymous conference hotel. He placed the duffel bag, with Andrea’s body inside, up high on a wardrobe and kept a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door permanently. Andrea had given him a ‘Meyer’ credit card and, as long as it did not get blocked, Alexander knew he would not have to worry about money. This was a relief as he soon discovered that the Russian capital was very expensive.

  He felt safe in Moscow, sure that the OSS would not touch him here. The Cold War may have ended, but Russia liked America to know that the States did not wield any power within its borders. Even so, Alexander was careful as he moved around the city. He kept his eyes open in case he was being followed and changed hotels every few days. After three weeks in Moscow, he began to feel that he was not being watched nor had a tail.

  At first, he did not know what to do with his new freedom. His only aim in getting to Moscow was to get as far away from Poland as possible. He had been scared and confused; Moscow had not been part of Plan B. Andrea had told him that they should stay in Minsk but that was before a bullet smashed through the ambulance window and blew half her head off.

  At first, he could not help but look back, to analyse recent events. He questioned whether he had done the right thing, whether he could have done anything differently. He never found an answer and, in the end, decided it was pointless to keep asking himself, ‘what if?’

  Eric was gone. They had no way to find the boy. The OSS would have hidden him, once they had found the tracker in his shoe. Ursula, if all had gone according to plan, was back with her grandparents. This was the best place for her and probably always had been. The OSS had left Saint-Denis, and he hoped that she would be safe there. He doubted the OSS would have a need for Ursula as they still had Eric. Essentially, there was nothing he could do for either of the children.

  He wondered if that was it? If the time he had spent with them was over, and the adventures were all in the past? He would be lying if he said he would miss Eric. The boy was a spoilt, ungrateful brat who seemed incapable of sustaining any kind of friendship. Ursula, on the other hand, he would miss very much. She was a lovely girl who had been brought up well by the Benjamins. In some ways, he felt quite paternal towards her.

  He thought about Andrea. There was no way she would have reacted to the situation, in the same way as him. In his head, he could hear an imaginary discussion and he knew that eventually, his emotional arguments would crumble under the weight of Andrea’s unrelenting, logical responses.

  “I am his guardian,” she would say. “I will find him.”

  She would come up with workable scenarios or, at least, provide inspiration in how to find him. Since being alone again, Alexander had realised how much he needed Andrea. For the last few months, she had been his rock. Always providing solutions and staying calm when faced with a crisis.

  One night, in another anonymous hotel room, he had taken the duffel bag down from the wardrobe and placed it on the floor. He unzipped it and took out Andrea’s crumpled body. There was a slight acrid smell as he held her, but it was bearable. She was still wrapped in the sheet, and a black stain had spread around her head. Alexander carefully peeled the cloth away from her body until he revealed her petite frame.

  The black leather was tight around her body. He had made her wear it to arouse interest in the American soldiers. It had worked at the time but now it just looked wrong. She looked like a seedy, exotic dancer. She did not look like Andrea.

  Outside the hotel room, a police siren broke the silence and startled him. He regained his composure and placed his hands under her chest. As if moving a sleeping baby, he lifted her torso up in order to lie her down properly. Once she was in a sitting position, he tilted her head and something fell out of the bullet hole. It rolled over her chest, bounced off of her knee and rolled under the bed.

  Alexander cursed, carefully put Andrea back into her original position and lay down on the floor. Under the bed, it was dark and dusty. The cleaners had obviously never ventured here or pushed their vacuum cleaners more than few centimetres under the bed. Alexander brushed the dust bunnies, sweet wrappers and bits of tissue away until he reached the 'runaway' object. It had fallen so fast that he had no idea what it was and could only guess that it was possibly a bullet. Normally, he would have been the professional scientist and worn gloves but, with the amount of dirt under the bed, he felt that it wasn’t necessary.

  Alexander stretched his arm as far as he could. His shoulder was wedged against the bed frame and a cobweb stuck to his face. His fingertips hit a smooth object which knocked against the wall and bounced back into his palm. Alexander brushed the fine web off of his cheek and looked at the object. It was the shape of an egg and caked in black powder. Alexander placed a finger on it and gently stroked the surface. The black powder came away in places but left dirty skid marks. He stood up and walked into the bathroom.

  The light was dim, so he washed the object under a tap, wrapped it in a face towel and returned to his room. Alexander sat on the bed and turned on the reading light. He unfolded the face towel and looked at what he held in his hand. It was an artificial eye.

  The more spherical end was the front of the eye. The iris was grey and faded; the black pupil had shrunk to the size of a small child’s but otherwise it looked untouched. At the back of the eye, there was a hole in the pointed end where something had been attached. Underneath, Alexander could just make out that something was scratched on the surface. He held it up to the light and turned the eye in his hands until he could read what was written. It was just one word – Lepley.

  The moment he read the word he recalled the entry in his mother’s diary, ‘I am now a zek, a prisoner, at the Correction Colony for Foreign Citizens. From the guards, I have discovered that we are in a place called Lepley in the Republic of Mordovia and far south of Moscow.’

  Alexander placed the eye on the bed and returned to Andrea’s body. He lifted her torso again and lay her on the floor. The hole in her head was horrific, so he draped the sheet back over it until he had finished.

  First he removed her shoes, then her tight leather trousers. It was no
t easy to slide them off, but some stiff yanks managed to loosen them. The top had a shiny zip down the front and once that was undone he had no trouble in removing it. There were no more items under these and Andrea lay on the floor naked.

  Alexander examined every part of the front of her body and concluded that it was all in perfect condition. He knotted the sheet tight around her head and then turned her over. The back of her body was also perfect; her skin was smooth without a single blemish. Under her left arm was a small hole that looked like a large mole but it was clean and well maintained.

  Alexander removed the sheet and examined the rear of her head. Carefully, he placed his fingers under her short, blond bob and peeled the wig from her head. The bullet had exited where the spine meets the skull. Around the exit wound, rubbery skin protruded outwards like teeth and the skin surrounding it had torn back to her ears. Alexander put two fingers into the hole.

  At the base of the skull, he found what he was looking for – a thick circular shaft about the same size as his thumb. He gripped it in his fingers and slowly moved them upwards.

  “Ow!” Alexander exclaimed. His fingertips had brushed against something sharp which pierced his skin. Warm blood trickled down to his knuckles. He pulled his hand away and went to the bathroom.

  Both fingers had lacerations across them, and Alexander washed them under the tap until they stopped bleeding. At least now, he was pretty sure he knew what had happened. He just needed to do one more check to confirm his suspicions.

  Alexander turned Andrea onto her back and looked at her face. The left side was untouched and looked like a waxwork statue. The right side was far more gruesome. Andrea’s cheek had a hole the size of a ping pong ball and looked crushed. Dried, black liquid was caked around the opening, on her cheek and down her neck. Her mouth drooped to one side, as if she had had a stroke, and her eye was missing.