The Athena Protocol

by Shamim Sarif

  “It’s okay,” Peggy says. “Take a minute.”

  But I don’t feel there is a minute to waste. At a nod from Kit, Caitlin uses an iPad to dial Li into the conversation. Then, taking a breath, I explain about Katarina’s tip-off; what happened in the tower blocks, how I got caught and driven in with the other girls and the boys, and most important, what I found in the lab about the plans to take all the organs from all the captives and send them to Victory Clinic. As I finish, I hand over the papers I found, and the flash drive with the downloaded information.

  A moment of silence fills the kitchen while the horror of this sinks in.

  “Slaughtering innocent people to cut wait times for organs? Who’s buying them?” Peggy asks, appalled.

  “He must make at least a million a girl,” says Caitlin quietly.

  Kit just stares at me, reaching for my hand. She holds it so tightly that, for a moment, she scares me.

  “You could have been one of them.” Her voice is a whisper.

  “I’m not,” I remind her. I have to say it again, just to calm her down. “But those ‘donations’ are due to start tonight. We have to do something quickly.”

  “Can we break in?” Kit asks Caitlin.

  To her credit, Caitlin looks to me for clarification. It was me in there, not her.

  “There are a lot of armed guards. Fourteen, fifteen at least. They’ll be on high alert after I escaped.”

  “Security cameras?” Caitlin asks.

  “No. They probably don’t want any record of what goes on in there.”

  “Then, maybe . . . ,” Caitlin starts, but Peggy shakes her head.

  “It’s too dangerous. Three of you against Gregory’s whole army. And even if you found a way to pull it off, it won’t stop Gregory from starting over somewhere else, with a new headquarters and new victims.” Peggy turns this over in her mind. “I need to see Aleks this morning.” She picks up the flash drive and documents. “This should help him,” she says.

  “Can Aleks move that fast?” Kit asks.

  Peggy nods. “If he doesn’t, and it goes public or these girls die, it would be disastrous for the Serbian government. As justice minister, it would probably end his career.”

  A moment of quiet descends while we all think. Now I can smell that toast, and I realize how hungry I am. Helping myself to a piece, I slather it with some jam that’s sitting on the counter and wolf it down.

  “What about the SD card?” I ask while I chew.

  Caitlin nods. “You hit the jackpot. It has the info we need. Lots of dirt on lots of politicians, police, judges . . . I’ll show you.” She nods toward the living room, and I’m getting up to join her when Kit’s voice interrupts us.

  “Jess—where did you find it? The SD card?”

  “In Paulina Pavlic’s room.” I look away from my mother’s keen gaze as I explain. “Amber’s tip about the decoder working on picture files made me realize.”

  “But how did you know it would be there?”

  I hesitate. To be honest, I don’t know how to explain how I knew, or what I was ever doing in Paulina’s room. But I feel like Kit’s judging me anyway.

  “That SD card was a birthday present from Gregory, and—as far as Paulina knows—they’re just pictures of her mother.”

  Kit moves toward me. Into my space, in fact.

  “What?” I ask, defensive.

  “Paulina Pavlic?” she says. “How do you even know her? How did you get into the party? How reckless are you?”

  I’m guessing these are all rhetorical questions, so I keep my mouth shut. I see Peggy give Kit a look to ease off, and my mother takes a breath and drops her voice.

  “Jess, Paulina is Gregory’s daughter. You can’t trust her. You can’t get close to her.”

  That last bit feels like it carries a double meaning. Certainly, the way Kit says it makes both Caitlin and Peggy look down. And Hala moves away from the doorway, where she’s been standing, listening. All of which makes me furious with Kit.

  “It doesn’t matter if I trust her or not,” I say. “I managed to steal that card from her because she trusted me.”

  I look at my mother defiantly, but she only seems to be waiting for me to justify some more. But there’s no way to explain why my gut tells me that Paulina is not the same kind of person as Gregory. Why I like her—and yes, even trust her—enough to feel guilty about using her. So I don’t try.

  “Great concert,” I say instead. That throws her off.

  “Thanks. I sang ‘Baby Mine’ for you.”

  “Except you didn’t know I’d be there.”

  Awkward silence. But I don’t regret it. It bugs me, the way she pretends she sang it for me, and the way she’s so sure that Paulina is tainted by association with her father. I turn away and follow Caitlin into the living room.

  It’s a vast space, with very modern, white furniture everywhere. A step up from my own pest-infested quarters. Caitlin settles into a chair in front of a massive flat-screen, and Hala paces around in jeans, a shirt, and a scowl. Her biker jacket is thrown onto one of the white armchairs. Her eyes meet mine, and her face lightens a bit.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  We both look away from each other. Back in the kitchen, there’s an undertone of murmuring that must be Kit and Peggy (and Li, connected in by video) deciding what to do next.

  Meanwhile, on the screen, Amber and Thomas gaze at us from the Athena office in London. It’s 5:00 a.m. there. And he is still in a suit. They must have pulled an all-nighter decoding that SD chip.

  “It’s here,” Caitlin says, glancing across at me. “The information that Gregory has on all his blackmailed friends. Embedded in the corners of each photo.”

  “I’ve run a number of copies of the files here, remotely,” says Amber. In case we forget how efficient she is.

  Caitlin taps the screen where a distortion is clear on the lower edge of a photo. A small window opens off the distortion revealing the information, and more images attached to it. Dates, times, tiny thumbnails of a chubby older man, presumably some judge or politician, with a young woman. Both Hala and I lean in to look.

  But, for a moment, despite myself, my eyes are drawn to the main image. The color is faded, and it shows a little girl—a beautiful kid, maybe six years old—sitting on her mother’s lap, arms flung around her neck. Paulina as a child. She looks at the camera but peers over her mother’s arms shyly, clinging to her for dear life. The woman’s eyes are closed, enjoying the hug, and her mouth is curved in a gentle smile. I make myself look away, and my eyes catch on Caitlin. She’s watching me as I take in the photo. I turn aside, ignoring the next photo that Caitlin brings up. Instead, I look at Amber, and I decide to start off on the right note—by saying sorry for breaking into my lockbox.

  “Not interested in your fake apologies,” she says, crisply cutting me off.

  That opens up a gap in the conversation.

  Meanwhile, Thomas’s glance shifts to Hala. “Marhabah,” he says. Which is hello in Arabic. Very smooth.

  Hala looks surprised but returns the greeting. Thomas is smiling like an idiot.

  At the doorway, Peggy calls out to me and I trudge back to the kitchen. Peggy closes the door behind me and pours me a fresh cup of coffee. Kit is sitting by the counter. Li is on video, her face filling the screen on the tablet that Peggy has propped beside her.

  “We owe you a great debt,” Peggy says, which sounds good. “But at the same time,” she continues, “Athena can’t run like this.”

  That sounds bad. And Kit’s still not looking at me. I take a sip of scalding coffee and wait for Peggy to continue.

  “You could have gotten yourself killed earlier. Trapped in that place with armed men, ready to murder on a whim . . .”

  “The girls are too precious. They’re trained not to shoot them.”

  “That’s beside the point,” Peggy says sharply. “And getting into Gregory’s home under false pr
etenses? Did you think about what he would do to you if he figured it out?”

  “Peggy, everything we do could end badly,” I point out. “If we worry about every little detail, we’ll be paralyzed.”

  Now Kit pipes up. “We have to worry about details, Jessie. We have to agree on a plan. There has to be some consensus, some government of this organization. Can’t you see that?”

  “If I hadn’t ended up in that abandoned hospital last night, hundreds of girls would be dead by tonight.”

  Kit looks away. Because I’m right, and she can’t argue it. Peggy pours her coffee down the sink, carefully. Then she spends a minute putting the cup into a dishwasher. Calming down.

  “You should have come to us with the information, when you got it from Katarina,” Li says, from the screen.

  “I didn’t know if this lead was any good or if Katarina could be trusted. And you dismissed me when I came to you the first time with what I had on Victory Clinic and Lavit. You thought it was too thin.”

  Peggy sighs gently, a slight raising of her eyebrows serving as a small acknowledgment of my predicament.

  “Jessie, the issue is we’re trying to bring to justice people who get away with terrible things, like trafficking, that no one else does anything about. But nobody polices us,” Peggy continues. “We have to be sure we don’t abuse that power. And sticking together as a team—making group decisions—is one way to avoid that.”

  I take a turn at the dishwasher. Putting my plate and cup away; keeping my mouth shut. But not for long. Because I can see where this is going.

  “You needed me to finish this mission,” I said. “I got you Gregory’s blackmail files and I found out what he’s really up to. I’m part of this team, and I want to know I’m back permanently.”

  Peggy looks at me seriously, then her eyes move to Li on the screen.

  “I’m against it,” Li continues. “For the reasons Peggy just outlined. We’re already a rogue agency. We can’t have a rogue agent. It’s chaos.”

  That’s a blow. I turn to Peggy.

  “You agree?” I ask.

  Peggy shakes her head. “No. I want you back. With the caveat that you agree to stick to orders, or you’re out.”

  I nod. I get it; I can try harder, I’m not an idiot. And the truth is, I don’t like being that person, the one who could kill a handcuffed man. It’s not a place inside me that I ever want to go back to.

  But there’s still tension in the room. My gaze moves to Kit in the corner. The deciding vote.

  Her eyes flicker down, away from me, as she shakes her head.

  “I don’t think you’re ready, Jess. People don’t change overnight.”

  My shoulders slump and my eyes close for a moment. Behind the lids, they feel gritty and exhausted. My own mother—the woman who asked me to come and work with Athena—is the one pushing me out now. Talk about betrayal. The frustration that rises is strong and fills me with sudden energy. But I don’t want to prove them right; to show them that I’m out of control. And I definitely don’t want Kit to know how much she’s hurt me by turning against me. And after everything I’ve just done.

  In the silence, a text pings on Peggy’s phone. She glances at it.

  “Aleks will see me in an hour,” Peggy says. “Jessie, why don’t you take a few days’ rest? Goodness knows, you need it.”

  But her voice sounds distant. My head is throbbing from the effort of pushing back the anger, the exhaustion, the worry about Dasha and the others.

  I turn to go. Behind me, Kit says something, but I can’t hear it, and I don’t really want to. I’m dimly aware that Peggy is advising her, holding her back from following me. The front door lies across a double-height hallway that is an expanse of polished granite flooring, and it takes forever to cross it.

  Outside, I take a breath. The clouds are giving way to some morning sun that filters through onto my face. I close my eyes for a few minutes and just feel the warmth and softness on me.

  And then I hear Hala’s voice carrying out into the morning air from a window to my right. I wish she would’ve stood up for me just now, when Kit was hassling me about Paulina, instead of staying on the sidelines. She’s obviously on the phone, and she’s speaking too quietly for me to make out much of what she’s saying, but again, there’s that feeling of stress in her voice, like she had when I overheard her talking to her brother. I take a couple of steps toward the window; silent, silent steps.

  “I know, you have to be careful. . . .” Then something longer in Arabic. I’m sure Hala becomes aware of me moving out here, because she hangs up really quickly. Whatever is going on with her is a mystery. And with things the way they are between us, I can’t even talk to her about it.

  What could her brother want? Is she in trouble? Is he? I walk back to the driveway, toward my stolen blue car. As I open the door, I glance back and see Hala’s eyes watching me from her window. We look at each other for a long moment and, on an impulse, I raise my hand in a half wave. Hoping for a smile, a look, even just a nod. But she turns away and draws the curtains, blocking me out.

  17

  I DRIVE THE BLUE CAR back to where I parked the motorcycle last night. Even though it’s in the center of the most crime-ridden part of the city, it is still there, so I park the car on the side of the road and switch over to the motorcycle. I don’t want the local police tracking that stolen vehicle right to my door.

  I go back to my apartment. It’s funny how quickly you can adapt to a routine, to the same place, and get attached to it. Even though I’ve come from a magnificent house that’s clean and light and airy, it’s a relief to be back here in a room that’s crummy, but is just mine, where I don’t have to answer to anyone.

  In the apartment, I take a long, hot shower, then lie down. I’m asleep before my head touches the pillow, and it’s like being drugged. No dreams, no memories, only black, solid sleep.

  I wake up hard, with a gasp for air as I sit up, confused. My hand grasps for my phone to check the time. Only half an hour has passed. The first thing I remember is what happened at the house, just now; that Kit refused to let me back on the team. Then I remember Dasha and the hospital. And then Gregory’s party. And Paulina.

  While I dress, I look through the net curtains at my window. The gallery door is propped open, and someone’s moving inside. On the street, Paulina’s Mercedes is parked. It’s not quite 9:00 a.m. I would have expected her to be sleeping till noon after her father’s celebrations, which didn’t seem to be slowing down at all by the time I left. Just knowing there is someone around to talk to lifts my spirits. But first, I head to the pharmacy two blocks away and pick up some antiseptic cream and some big Band-Aids. Back in my room, I clean up that cut on my arm. Then I roll down the sleeves of my shirt, buttoning the cuffs so none of it can be seen.

  When I walk into the gallery, music is playing. There’s the aroma of fresh coffee, and a wash of sunlight over the walls. And Paulina is alone, sitting at a table, typing on an iPad. She’s more casually dressed than I’ve ever seen her—faded jeans, a slim white T-shirt—and it’s a relief. I can relate to her more like this than in her party gear, surrounded by her father’s fake friends.

  Of course, she sees me the moment I am at the door, and she doesn’t move at first, except to look up from the screen. She just sits there, watching me, with a slight smile, and her calm gaze makes me self-conscious. I glance away to the flat-screen TV on the wall, playing a muted loop of local news coverage.

  “Jessie,” she says at last. “I’m so happy to see you.”

  That feels pretty amazing. I can’t remember the last time anyone used my name except as a preface to telling me off or giving me advice. Such easy words to say—I’m happy to see you—but how often do we actually say them to each other? She walks up to me, pulls me toward her, and kisses my cheek, and it feels kind and welcoming and everything bad seems to fade away. For a moment, at least.

  Paulina motions me to sit down while she moves behin
d the counter and makes a coffee for me. I look around, at the photographs on the walls, at the morning light gleaming off the polished glass of the windows, at the smooth, clean, marble floor. All I can think about is how different it is to the abandoned hospital. And that her father’s “businesses” have paid for this place.

  “Your macchiato.”

  A cup of expertly foamed coffee is placed in front of me. I watch Paulina’s manicured fingers on the saucer; I look up to her perfect mouth and her eyes, eyes that shift easily between blue and green. She is so beautiful. And I wonder who she really is.

  “What is it?” she asks me.

  I shake my head. “Nothing.”

  “You look tired.”

  “I had nightmares,” I say.

  She doesn’t need to know I was awake through all of them.

  “I couldn’t sleep for a long time after you left,” she says.

  I wait for her to explain, and she smiles briefly and looks down, away from my gaze.

  “I kept looking at everyone at the party through your eyes. Like an outsider. Even my father and his friends. They were still playing cards this morning. I couldn’t stand the noise, the vulgar jokes. They’re so . . .” She doesn’t complete the sentence, but a flick of her head suggests her dissatisfaction.

  I don’t imagine it’s my job to join in the critique of Gregory or his guests, so I stay quiet and just watch Paulina, but her eyes are still cast down, and she’s frowning. Like she’s struggling for words. When she does speak, her voice is so quiet I have to lean in to catch the words.

  “I know we only just met,” she says. “But you feel like the most real thing in my life right now.”

  I smile; I can’t help it. There’s a touch of red at the tops of her cheekbones that makes me think she might actually mean what she says.

  “My life is so complicated, Jessie. I wish I could explain it to you.”

  Her hand is on the table, really close to mine, and her fingers move just slightly, enough to touch mine gently. At that touch, it’s like everything else in the world stops existing. Slowly, she leans in to me, a little nearer, and then her eyes are on my mouth, her lips moving closer, till she brushes my mouth with her own—