by Derek Haas
She was lying about the last part. He could tell by the way her eyes darted down and to the left—a giveaway so common it was referred to as the Liar’s Look at Langley. So she did remember something Benidrov had told her, but Clay knew better than to press right now. She was frightened and vulnerable and defensive, and if he played this poorly, she might retreat.
“I said it before. It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.”
“Yes. You said it. And I wish to believe it. But if I hadn’t run to David, if I had just vanished, then he would still be alive.”
“And you’d be dead and they still would have targeted your family because they would want to be sure you hadn’t told them anything.” He could see on her face that she hadn’t thought of that. “You did the right thing under extraordinary pressure.”
She nodded and then, as if to reassure herself, nodded again. “Thank you.”
“Thank me when you’re at Disneyland.”
“I will.”
She grinned and turned again to the window. A few minutes later, he heard her breathing grow steady as she drifted to sleep.
What does she know? he thought. What’s important enough that they sent an army to kill her?
The sun dropped behind them, and only the hum of the van’s engine kept his thoughts company.
Chapter Eight
IT WAS dumb and it was dangerous and it was so unlike Clay’s modus operandi as to have no precedent. There would be no ledger for this side excursion; he couldn’t think in those terms, because he knew it would bankrupt the mission ten times over.
They would be watching her, he was sure of it, and that made the stop ridiculous. Still, Marika had asked him if a visit would be possible, had said that the woman had offered them a chance for a meal and a bath before they ventured into Moscow, and it was the urgency of the way she asked that pierced his defenses. The woman was named Natasha Chkeidze and had been a maid in Benidrov’s house at the same time that Marika had worked as a nanny. Natasha had selflessly harbored Marika in those first twenty-four hours when the young woman fled—she had given Marika money and food and bought her some clothes, and if she was alive and unharmed, she had most certainly withstood FSB interrogation in the aftermath of Benidrov’s suicide. Marika owed her life to this woman and wanted to thank her. Clay and she understood it would be Marika’s last chance to do so, though they expected it to be for different reasons.
Natasha lived in a twenty-story apartment building in a southeastern suburb of Moscow near the Promzona metro station. This section of the city was mostly industrial, and the citizens who lived here weren’t quite as prosperous as the ones in the southwest, near the university.
Clay parked in a garage two blocks away.
“Wait here. Don’t leave the car. Keep your head down. I’ll be back in two hours.”
“And if you don’t return?”
“Then get yourself to the US embassy any way you can, understand?”
She nodded.
He took the full two hours. She looked as relieved to see him as if he had just saved her from drowning.
“The building looks clear. If FSB visited your friend, it was a while ago and they didn’t leave a permanent surveillance team to watch the building. They didn’t know we’d come to Moscow. They have to believe we’re out of the country, so we have surprise on our side, too. On top of all that, it’s a dumb move for us to make, and I don’t think they’re expecting me to make a dumb move.”
“So dumb is good?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Come…let’s make this quick.”
“She’s there? My friend?”
“Yeah. I saw her check her mail and return to her apartment.”
Clay helped Marika out of the van and they crossed a congested street to enter an alley. The smog was as thick as fog here. No wonder so many people living in this city had bronchial asthma.
“We go in the back and up the service elevator. If I catch wind of anything odd, I yank you out of there and you follow as fast as those legs will carry you, yes? No good-byes, no hugs, no tears…we run for the car and don’t look back.”
“I understand. And thank you. I promise not to burden you for much longer.”
“What makes you think stopping at your friend’s apartment in the middle of a national manhunt is a burden?”
She punched Clay in the shoulder playfully, and he feigned a wince. It was good to see her act like a teenager instead of a woman who had seen and heard too much over the last month. They approached the building, and Clay swept the alley with practiced eyes. Nothing. If someone was watching, then they were better at this than him.
The pair of fugitives popped inside a brown steel door that led to the building’s furnace room. Six old-fashioned boilers with Cyrillic lettering made a hissing sound as they passed.
They forwent the elevator for the stairs and soon stood outside Natasha’s seventh-floor apartment door. Marika balled a fist, but Clay stayed her hand, then easily picked the lock, allowing them both to slip inside. They could hear chopping in the kitchen; it sounded like someone dicing a vegetable on a cutting board.
“Natasha?” Marika called softly, and the dicing immediately stopped.
Clay’s antennae went up and he tensed but didn’t pull out his weapon. The last thing he needed was a hysterical woman screaming her head off in a cramped apartment.
Natasha appeared in the kitchen entrance, her hair covered in a scarf, her cheeks red and her eyes already wet.
“Marika? Is it really you, solnyshko?” She looked back and forth between them as if she thought she might be having a hallucination.
“Yes, it’s me.” The large woman opened her arms and Marika bounded across the distance between them, burying herself in the woman’s ample bosom.
“Shhh. Shhh, solnyshko. Shhh, little sun. It’s all right,” the woman cooed, and Clay realized Marika was sobbing. He excused himself and headed to the bathroom, leaving Marika to explain who he was. He’d seen more emotion over the last few weeks than he had in the previous few years. He didn’t need to see any more.
They sipped black tea in glass mugs while Marika laid out the events that had led her back to Moscow. Natasha patted her knee and refilled her mug when the level of the tea neared the bottom. The woman could make damn good tea, Clay had to admit.
When Marika concluded her tale, Natasha clucked and said, “When masters are fighting, the servants’ forelocks are creaking.” Marika nodded, but Clay could tell she didn’t quite understand the expression.
“It’s an old Russian proverb…it means when powerful people fight, it is the commoners who suffer.”
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Marika offered to her friend.
“You must stay the night,” Natasha insisted.
Clay began to protest, but the big woman would not be dissuaded. “Look at you two. You both look like you haven’t slept in months. Your eyes are as red as the devil. And you smell like a barn. Bathe, then sleep, then be on your way.”
“Please,” Marika importuned softly, afraid of his answer.
Clay shook his head but was surprised to hear himself say, “Okay.”
He grew older and the beatings worsened. His uncle was like a lion that worries about a cub growing strong enough to challenge him so wounds it while he can.
He hectored Clay constantly, the criticisms and jabs becoming so commonplace as to fail to even register. The boy didn’t respond, didn’t give his uncle further provocation.
At first, he started swimming just to get away. An hour in the water meant an hour alone, no voices, no complaints, no pain. He waited until Uncle Bobby had drunk himself absent, then stripped down, lowered the ladder, looped a line to his ankle, and dove in, no matter where they were or what the ocean was like. It was dark and dangerous and lonely and empty and he could easily have been swept away from the boat, but the truth was, he didn’t care. If he died, he died. If the ocean took him, then so be it. There were times when he felt l
ike pulling free the tether, spreading his arms and just fading to the bottom. His uncle would wake from his stupor and call out and there would be no one to answer, and he would shout more loudly, more angrily, and only then would he realize the kid was gone, baby, gone. Or maybe Clay should cut himself and dangle from the line like chum and wait for something large and massive to strike him. What would he feel in that last moment? Pain? Or relief? Instead, he just drifted, weightless, and opened his mind, cleared his mind, and found what all humans seek, even young men: peace. He grew more empowered as his body grew stronger, and his stays in the water lasted longer and longer, until he was swimming twenty minutes, thirty, an hour. Once, he did dive in without the rope linking him back to the boat, and he was shocked at how quickly the distance widened between them. He’d been in the water for less than a minute and the boat seemed a mile away. His heart raced and panic filled his head. A new feeling spread over him, one he didn’t know he possessed: strength. He kicked and dug his hands into the ocean and ignored the current, ignored the salt spray licking his face, ignored the wall of blackness that seemed to cover the ocean surface like a blanket each time a wave rolled between him and the boat. He was tired, he was out of oxygen, but he found that strength growing deep inside him, and before he knew it, he was at the ladder again, standing in the vastness with no one to acknowledge his accomplishment. His uncle hadn’t stirred.
And that was when his idea metastasized.
It didn’t happen often in open water, but occasionally they would pass another boat. Not a tanker or an enormous cruise ship, but a trawler or a sailboat or a touring yacht like theirs. The boats would pass in the night and sometimes the other vessel would flash a floodlight, but Clay’s uncle was always too far in his cups to respond. Clay didn’t know when the next opportunity would present itself, so he waited and watched the horizon.
Four months later, four months of nothing but emptiness and his uncle’s fists and swimming in the darkness with the taste of salt on his lips, in his nostrils, and he saw it. He was nearly asleep, just about to head below deck to his cabin, when he saw a light on the horizon. His pulse quickened and he was suddenly as alert as if he’d stuck his finger in a socket. He kept watching—maybe the ship was going to veer in the wrong direction; maybe its trajectory would take it too far away. The wind was picking up, too; perhaps the sea would grow too choppy. As he watched, though, the light steadily grew larger. He found a pair of binoculars and could just make out the vague outline of a yacht, bow pointed his way.
He looked over at his uncle, snoring steadily in a hammock he’d stretched out on the deck, an empty bottle of whiskey curled under his elbow. Clay’s breath quickened, like a sprinter psyching himself up before the starter’s pistol fires. Could he do this?
The light kept coming. It was do it now or wait for another opportunity, and who knew when that would present itself? He had to act; he had to do this now.
He stole one more look at the yacht’s light, and yes, it would pass within a couple of miles of their position, he was sure of it, and before his doubts could paralyze him, he sprang for the hatch and practically fell down the steps.
He passed his cabin without looking inside; the room held no fuzzy feelings for him. Instead, he put his shoulder into the door of his uncle’s cabin, and on the second thrust, it gave. Breathing hard, eyes raking the bed, the desk, the shelves, he stepped inside and moved toward a jar. The top wouldn’t open without popping a couple of latches, but he was too worked up, too pressed for time, so he smashed the jar on the floor, then snatched up the cash lying among the shards. There must’ve been five hundred dollars there in various denominations. He didn’t know if he’d need money, but he was thinking clearly enough to know that it might help him in a bind.
As he was reaching for the last twenty-dollar bill, he heard a rustling at the door.
“Whatchoo—whatchoo doin’?” His uncle blinked at him in a stupor, like a man waking in a front yard he doesn’t recognize. Clay had panic written all over his face, and it seemed to knock some sobriety into his uncle’s eyes.
The boy put his head down and decided to charge past, hoping Uncle Bobby’s reflexes would be too diminished to stop him, and he had almost made it, had almost sidestepped his uncle cleanly, when he felt cold fingers close around his elbow.
“Whattiz this?”
Clay tried to wrestle his arm free, but Uncle Bobby held him in an iron grip. “Y’anssser me!” he slurred. Then his eyes lighted on the money in Clay’s hands….
“Let go.”
“You wuz robbing me.”
“Let go!”
But Bobby’s nostrils flared and his eyes disappeared into slits and he shoved Clay back hard across the galley, slamming the boy into the unyielding cabinet.
The boat, Clay thought. The boat.
He tried to get up, but Uncle Bobby stumbled toward him, crossing the distance in two steps. Clay kicked out with his foot, and if Bobby hadn’t been drunk the kick might not have made a dent, but it caught Bobby’s foot just as the heel was coming down and Bobby slipped and fell back against the oven, banging his head.
Clay stood up. Bobby didn’t move. He had to step over his uncle to get to the hatch, but as he crossed, Bobby grabbed his leg, and he was still strong enough to heave the boy across the galley floor. Clay slid headfirst into the bilge room door, which smashed open from the momentum.
Clay’s head felt as if someone had stuck pins in it, and he blinked blood out of his eye to see Bobby trying to rise to his feet, moving as slowly and gracelessly as a walrus. The smell of gas from the bilge hit Clay’s nostrils and gave him an idea. A ludicrous idea, but he couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t think of consequences, as those two words echoed like a mantra in his ears…the boat, the boat, the boat.
He reached over and pulled the feed line out of the engine so that fuel flowed from the stripped black hose. It splattered over him, but he didn’t care. He lurched up quickly and dashed back to the counter, bumping into Uncle Bobby as he did, which sent Bobby flopping onto his face. Clay flipped open the first cabinet drawer and rummaged quickly until his hands found what he was looking for, a weathered box of kitchen matches.
He backed up until his feet were near the ladder leading up to the deck. The yacht would be passing soon. He shook out a matchstick. When he struck the match, it flared, and for just a moment, he saw his uncle turn his head to look up at him from his hands and knees. What is it about fire on the tip of a match that gives us pause?
Clay returned his uncle’s hard-eyed stare, threw the match toward the bilge room, and flew up the ladder. He heard the sound of the engine blowing, felt heat on the back of his neck, but he was too focused on the horizon to flinch. The yellow light was still there, glowing ever closer. Clay stripped off his shirt and his shorts, hurried quickly to the rail near the bow, snatched up a life jacket, and prepared to dive into the black water. As his legs crouched to jump, he was thrown off-balance by a hand once again seizing his arm.
Bobby’s face was black, the skin on one side melted, stringy. The flames rose out of the cabin behind him and shone a bright orange in the darkness.
“You were going to kill me.” He said it almost to himself, as if he were having trouble believing such a thing. Then his face twisted into an evil so stark naked that, for the first time in a long time, it truly terrified the boy. Clay reacted instinctively, throwing a punch with his free hand right into the throat of his tormentor. It was the first time he’d ever fought back, and the blow startled Uncle Bobby more than it stung him, but it was enough that he spilled backward, letting go of Clay’s arm—but not before jerking him back onto the deck. Even untrained in close-quarters fighting, Clay knew he had Uncle Bobby off-balance, so he kicked him in the side and sent him flopping ass-over-teakettle onto his back like a bluegill pulled into the boat. The fire hit the reserve tank and it blew. The boat lurched up and then back down again as its stern started to take on water. Clay pirouetted and ran for the bow.
Uncle Bobby flipped out a hand and caught him in the ankle, a lucky lurch, which caused Clay’s two feet to bang together, and he stumbled, lost his footing, and knocked his knee into the step leading to the rail. Bobby tried to rise to his feet, the flames whipping behind him, the boat capsizing. He looked like a devil, the devil, his mouth twisted, his teeth bared, his hands clenched, his eyes red. Clay snuck a quick glance over his shoulder and saw that yellow light, now less than a mile away and coming closer. He looked back at his uncle and knew he couldn’t just jump off, leave him to drown. No, that wouldn’t be enough.
Clay launched himself through the air and met Uncle Bobby with a kick to the chest. His heel popped Bobby squarely in the breastbone, and his uncle went over backward into the hatch, right into the mouth of the fire like a pig pushed into the oven, the devil stuffed back into hell. Clay heard screams as loud as a klaxon and then took two paces, sprang to the step, and leapt over the bow, ignoring the pain in his knee. The sea rose to meet him, and only then did he realize he’d forgotten the life jacket in the fight. He hit the water and brought his head to the surface, kicking, treading, bobbing like a cork. It took only a moment for the firelight to flicker and die as the ocean overtook the boat and pulled it under.
That was it. Nine years on that boat, nine years of misery and oppression and boredom and fatigue, and it was all gone in a flash of fire and a flood of water as if it had never existed.
