Boris reached for her, pulled her into him, and so sweetly said, “You think you can go crying to Mommy and Daddy? Wrong. They’ll never believe you. You breathe one bad word about me to your parents, and I’ll tell them you’ve run off. I’ll ensure they cut off your allowance and take away your housing, and make sure they learn in very sordid detail what an ungrateful little bitch you’ve been. I own you. What I want is mine, and you’ll give it to me.”
She shoved him back. “I won’t.”
He reached for her again, and she kneed him, grabbed her boots and coat, pushed out the door, and ran, tripping in her socks down the stairs, skidding into the foyer door.
She fumbled, shoving her trembling limbs into her boots, trying to get her hat and scarf on and to get the coat wrapped around her, all the while the heavy thud-thud-thud of his clogged feet tromped slowly after her.
“You can’t hide from me,” he sang. “You can’t run. No matter where you go, no matter how long it takes, I’ll find you.”
Hat askew, boots finally on, she rushed out the door with laces untied.
Her lungs iced up. Breathing hurt.
The cold bit into every part of her body.
She fought the wind to get her arms into the coat, to get the coat wrapped tight around her, and to pull the gloves onto her shaking fingers. She found a modicum of warmth, and head down, body racked by shivering, she walked-ran toward the bus stop, took a look, and kept on walking. She didn’t expect Boris to chase her on foot—he’d first have to return to his apartment and change shoes and bundle up, and an actual chase would be too conspicuous and would draw unwanted attention—but she wasn’t about to wait at the bus stop and give him the chance to stroll up and say hello.
She fought the urge to look behind her and instead searched the hardened faces of those who walked toward her for any glimpse at or reaction to unusual movement at her back. And she continued on, utilizing window reflections across the street, and when she was confident that he hadn’t followed, she turned off the sidewalk to enter the metro and followed the stairs down into a lesser cold where she traded frozen gray mush and diesel-fumed air for stale piss and burned metal and oil.
On the platform she leaned into a pillar and caught her breath, then loosened her coat, reached her hand up under her shirt, pulled down the micro recorder, and de-threaded the mic that had been pinned to the inside of her collar. Heart beating hard again, she hid the electronics in her fist and then shoved them deep down into her pocket.
Boris had come so painfully close to brushing against the wires.
Worse was that she still wasn’t sure if she would have been better off if he had discovered them and thus saved her from the predicament she faced now.
There were no easy solutions.
Desperation had driven her here.
She could live with Boris’s unwanted sexual advances, unprofessional and irritating as they were, but not with enduring day after day along a razor-blade edge of guessing and double guessing, wary of how every word and every movement might be misinterpreted by those who watched and listened, while also running scared from the one man into whose hands her life and safety had been placed. It’d been six months—six long, silent months—since she’d had contact with anyone from her team.
Packages from Ecuador continued to arrive every few weeks, filled with treats and basic necessities and handwritten letters, which were inevitably copied and read before she received them, but there was nothing in those boxes beyond the routine of maintaining her legend. Boris was the conduit through which everything flowed, and Boris wasn’t playing straight, had possibly already sold her out.
She had no proof, nothing but a rising tension and small coincidental incidents as evidence to suspect him, much less outright accuse him. He knew that as well as she did, just as they both knew his warning that no one would believe her wasn’t about his groping.
Without a way to substantiate her concerns, he’d easily charm his way out of the finger-pointing, and she’d still be forced to rely on faith that the details she received from him were true and that what he reported back was accurate, and she’d be more dangerously trapped than she was now, but he wouldn’t be able to charm his way out of what she’d just recorded.
She needed him investigated, and while evidence of moral turpitude wasn’t anywhere close to proving he was double-dealing, it’d be enough for someone to give him a closer look, and hopefully, that push would be enough.
The train rolled in. She scanned the platform and then stepped on.
Eyes were on her again, they were always on her, just as all mail she sent was opened, and every call she made listened in on.
Her travel was monitored, and everyone she spoke to, questioned.
Catching Boris on tape had been the easy part.
A weapon served no purpose if she had no way to use it.
CHAPTER 27
HOLDEN
AGE: 32
LOCATION: DALLAS, TEXAS
PASSPORT COUNTRY: CANADA
NAMES: TROY MARTIN HOLDEN
HE DROVE THREE HOURS BEFORE MAKING THE CALL, UP FROM Austin, into downtown Dallas, far enough away from Baxter and the kid to blur the line of connection, and would lose a day to a never ending suburban landscape because the poison of mutiny had taken hold.
He needed to know.
Needed to know he was right before choosing the highway of no return.
A soaring skyline rose with the horizon. Two lanes widened to three, four, five, rose up into layers that divided, entwined, and circled the glass and steel towers.
He’d traipsed the globe, had traveled through the world’s largest cities, and hadn’t come across a road system yet that touched the size and scope of Texas’s high-rise interstate interchanges—and they still weren’t enough to contain the traffic.
He followed the curves, bumper to bumper, between merging eighteen-wheelers and texting drivers, down from dizzying heights and across multiple lanes to reach an exit that led into the downtown matrix.
GPS guided him through one-way streets and eventually to parking.
Flying would have made for a quicker, safer trip, just as a pay phone would have made for a simpler call—a two-for-one opportunity since about the only place he could find a pay phone that didn’t draw attention these days was in an airport—but he’d already been in too many of them over the past weeks and couldn’t afford to burn another ID. A disposable phone in a hotel lobby, one number among thousands, would work as a close second best.
He pulled a blazer and fedora off the backseat and slipped them on. They were details, like the baseball cap and the Beats headphones had been details.
He walked mostly empty sidewalks to the Westin and pushed through glass doors into a din of bodies and matching lanyards and the giddy rush that inevitably followed a room of hundreds just let out for lunch. Phone in hand, he hit SEND on a pre-dialed number and wove through the crowd, counting rings. He made it halfway before Frank answered with the same authoritative hello he used no matter who called.
Holden, voice light, as if picking up from where they’d left off on a shared joke, said, “Hey, Pops. Been to Bogotá lately?”
Frank said, “Gawd no. What’s going on, kid?”
“Not much. You busy?”
“Little bit. Let me call you back in twenty.”
The air went dead. Holden pushed on to the back of the thinning crowd.
The problem, always, with calling Frank was the number of listeners. The precautions weren’t to keep Frank protected from Holden’s line of work, although that was a legitimate concern, they were to avoid drawing attention to Holden from those listening in on Frank’s side.
Frank needed to find a hotel of his own.
Holden checked his watch and set the timer.
Twenty minutes meant twenty minutes exactly.
He found the stairwell, followed the stairs down to where the cell signal was spotty at best. He tore off the blazer as he went, folded the
arms, tucked the collar down, and turned the whole thing inside out and in on itself. Blazer transformed to leather backpack, hat went into it, strap went over his shoulder, and he pushed out of the stairwell into a well-lit concourse.
The pedestrian underground connected a swath of downtown office towers, hotels, shops, and restaurants and made it possible for him to avoid more than one pass in front of the same camera—made it possible to get lost and disappear. He wandered, browsing, eating time in a roundabout path toward the Crowne Plaza, then headed up and into the lobby and waited on the sofa, newspaper in hand, eyes passing over words at a legitimate pace while his mind stayed stuck on Jen and the empty lot in El Paso.
His best efforts to derail the thoughts inevitably took him back, back to what he knew of her life, back to wanting to fill in the blanks, back and back, just as they had the entire drive up. He wanted to find her, wanted to find her bad.
Want was a problem.
He’d seen what want, the passion of need, could do. Want had killed his mother. Want had forced him to watch her die before the gunmen stuffed a bag over his three-year-old head and tore him, clawing and screaming, away from her body.
Want had killed the biological father he’d never known.
His parents had wanted, and want had caused them to take what they shouldn’t have, and he in turn had structured his life around the absence of want, always in ambivalent motion, always going, never connecting, because want was a beguiling, dangerous animal.
His pocket vibrated, twenty minutes to the beat.
Frank said, “I’ve only got five.”
Holden said, “Remember that travel album I showed you?”
“Sure do.”
Holden folded the newspaper, left it on the coffee table, and made a slow path to the front door. “Found out that the lady I was interested in, she has kids.”
The line went quiet, which was good. Meant that Frank knew he was talking about McFadden and the ghosts and the pictures they’d discussed over lunch in Miami and that he was just as puzzled over the new perspective as Holden had been.
Frank said, “There always were those rumors.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Maybe the not-worth-repeating kind. What else?”
Holden stepped between thoughts and returned to what had pushed him through the three-hour drive for a five-minute call. “Been thinking about that lady,” he said. “Been thinking about how she connects to that pit of vipers you hate so much. She knows the guy who runs it, doesn’t she? There’s history between them.”
Frank’s voice, cautious, guarded, and very slow, said, “Those are bloody, chummy waters, kid. Really wouldn’t advise you to swim there unless you’re well prepared to get between a shark and his food.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Do I wanna know why you’re asking?”
“Probably not.”
Frank hesitated. Holden knew the pause, the delay of risk calculation, of Frank afraid of where the information would take him, of heartbreak, and of the parental wish to protect the child, followed by the conscious decision to let the boy be a man. He ran a hand over a couple days’ worth of stubble, thick enough that Holden could hear the gesture over the phone, and said, “You good to party?”
“Cleaned up and ready to go.”
“Burn the phone when we’re done.”
“Always.”
Frank said, “The two of them go way back to when she was working undercover in Moscow. He was her contact—handler, if you will—her one line to the outside. Official story is just one day to the next, bleep, both of them are gone. Unofficially? He was working both sides. He sold her out to the Russians, and she outed him to the agency. It’s an incestuous story full of bad blood and hatchets that never got buried.”
“You know who he is? Know anything more about him?”
“Not any more’n I know who she is, which means I know crap. Can’t help you find him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Wasn’t, but thanks.” Holden checked his watch, gauged the minutes left, and picked his battle. “Tell me what you know about her kids.”
“A few years after she disappeared, a guy walks into the Paris embassy claiming to be high-ranking GRU—Russian foreign military intelligence—says he wants to trade sides. Chief of Station sits him down for a chat, checking him out, wants to see if he’s legit. Somewhere in that conversation the guy drops her name, talking like he knows her and talking about a kid—singular—like it’s common knowledge she has one. Might not have gone anywhere, except the station chief knew exactly who McFadden was, and with her name, plus mention of a kid, his bullshit detector goes off. He starts pushing. The guy gets mad, stops talking, has a change of heart, like maybe Mother Russia ain’t so bad after all.”
“That’s it?”
“All I got.”
“But you said there’d always been rumors.”
“Sure, the way she up and left, no trail, no trace, no nothing. Turned her into some kinda Loch Ness Mothman Bigfoot alien. Then someone comes along, claiming they seen her since she disappeared, and the rumor machine cranks up to a whole new level. Watercooler whispers got louder, story grew. Was all bullshit, though.
“Apparently, not all of it.”
“You’re better off believing it was. This thing with him and the woman, it’s ugly and personal. Personal is what gets a man killed. Capiche?”
“Any way to track down the guy in Paris?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Any better odds on getting me access to NGI?”
Frank hesitated. “I’m, uh, still putting out feelers.”
Holden sighed on the inside. The lackluster noncommitment said that even if Frank did have the connections to get him what he wanted, the contents of this conversation had killed any chance he’d use them.
Frank said, “Look, I gotta go, but do me a favor, will ya, kid? I didn’t make all those trips, spend the years running from Calamar to Bogotá, trying to find you, dealing with the shit I dealt with in keeping a promise to your old man just so you could hit the grave before I do. Let me go out knowing that I upheld my end of the deal.”
The request was a guilt punch in the gut.
Holden reached into his pocket for a toothpick and fought the urge to chew. He forced levity into his voice. “I get it, Pops. You get to die first.”
The lie felt like poison, but Frank didn’t hear the lie.
“Good,” he said. “Good, good.”
If he’d been present, he’d have run his thick fingers through Holden’s hair and knocked an affectionate knuckle on the side of his head.
“Forget all this history,” Frank said. “It only leads to trouble. Find a sweet girl, settle down, and maybe make me some grandbabies.”
Holden smiled for real. “Oh yeah, grandbabies coming right up.”
The call dropped. Holden shoved the phone into a pocket.
Settling down might come, eventually. In the meantime, it’d take every resource he had, and every bit of smarts, to ensure Frank got his favor.
CHAPTER 28
CLARE
AGE: 26
LOCATION: BIÈRE, SWITZERLAND
PASSPORT COUNTRY: FRANCE
NAMES: CATHERINE LEFEVRE
SHE STOOD BEHIND OLD LEADED PANES HALF HIDDEN BY BRIGHT RED and green geraniums in wooden window boxes, stood looking out over forest and vibrant manicured pastures, which, for all she cared, might as well have been Moscow’s cold, bleak concrete.
This window in the second-floor hallway was the only one in the old farmhouse that provided a view of the front door, so it was here she waited, watching for the mail from noon until the postman drove by. It’d been two weeks—no, three—nestled in a hill above quaint charm not far from Lake Geneva, four weeks of fading hope, growing desperation, and a heightened sense of torment with each new sunrise.
She chewed her thumb and fought the urge to pace.
God, she needed a cigar
ette.
She’d never intended to turn smoking into a habit. Long winter evenings short on entertainment, nights of small friend-filled gatherings fueled by alcohol and black-market tobacco had seen that she had.
The putt-putt of a small engine carried over the hill.
Her heart rate picked up.
She pulled her thumb from between her teeth, steadied her shaking hands, and focused on the road, the winding road, afraid to breathe, waiting for the first flash of color to signal a vehicle headed for the farmhouse.
The postal car came into view.
The car pulled to a stop in the tiny parking niche, and the same little man she’d watched drive by day after day carried letters to the door.
Sick, wet dread uncoiled inside her chest, a living, waking thing that entwined her heart and squeezed to the point of tangible, physical pain.
She turned away from the window and paused, suspended between the compelling need to hurry down the stairs and the crushing anxiety begging her to stay, soul holding out in defiant resistance, refusing to accept what her mind understood weeks ago, because the truth hurt more than she could bear.
Dmitry wasn’t coming. He’d never planned to join her.
Or . . . or he’d been prevented from it.
The distance between those two possibilities split her in half.
She oscillated minute to hour to day between hating him and hating herself. No middle ground existed: either he’d abandoned her and was alive and well, in which case she wished him dead, or he’d truly loved her, but the worst had happened, and only a despicable human being would cling to that kind of hope.
“Wait for me,” he’d said.
At the time, making the trip out of Moscow had seemed the only sane choice.
The regular calls and frequent visits from Boris had stopped completely after her confrontation, and months had passed without a package from Ecuador. She had no way of knowing if her packet with the recording had reached its destination, no way of knowing if Boris had gotten to Headquarters first and, because of him, she’d been cut off.
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