“What? Are you insane?” Karina snapped.
“And I will have him tell the media as well.”
“Christ, V, you have lost your mind!”
“No. Listen to me, Karina. If they believe you possess a recording, then you have a bargaining chip. Without it you are as good as dead. This way, they will want you alive. And if the tip comes from Richmond, they will believe you have fled the city. In the meantime, I will work on an extraction and get you the hell out of here.”
“The heat is too much for you to send one of your own to retrieve me,” Karina said. “I won’t have anyone compromised or killed because of me.”
“But you can’t do this alone, sestra.” Veronika was silent for a moment before adding, “I think I might know someone who can help.”
“FIS?” Karina asked.
“No. An American.”
“Veronika—”
“He is former CIA.”
That clinched it. Her sister had truly lost her mind, and Karina told her so.
“Do you trust me?” Veronika asked.
“A minute ago I would have said yes…”
“Trust me now, Karina. And trust this man. I will tell you where to go and when to be there.”
Karina sighed. What choice did she have? V was right. She could not elude the Secret Service, the Russians, and anyone else they sent by herself. She needed help. And she did trust her sister, even if this plan sounded ludicrous.
“All right. How will I know this man?”
“If he is still good at his job, you won’t,” Veronika said. “But he will know you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Sara inspected herself in the bathroom mirror as she adjusted her ponytail. She hated her hair. It was too long; she hadn’t had it cut in months. Her ends were split badly. About six weeks earlier she’d let Camilla dye it red with a box from the drugstore, and though she’d liked it at the time her bright blonde roots were showing through the first inch from her scalp. It wasn’t a good look.
She hated the dark blue polo she had to wear to work. It was a size too big for her slight frame, with the words “Swift Thrift” screen-printed on the left breast. The letters were faded, the edges chipped from repeat washings.
She hated going to the thrift shop, with its constant odor of mothballs and stale sweat, pretending to be nice to rude people. She hated that nine bucks an hour was the best she could do at sixteen without a high school diploma.
But she had made a decision. She was independent.Mostly.
The bathroom door swung open suddenly, forced from the other side. Tommy slid to a halt when he saw her standing in front of the mirror.
“What the hell, Tommy!” Sara shouted. “I’m in here!”
“Why didn’t you lock the door?” he shot back.
“It was closed, wasn’t it?”
“Well, hurry up! I have to take a piss!”
“Just get out!” She shoved the door closed and left the older boy cursing on the other side of it. Life in the co-op was anything but glamorous, but she’d gotten used to it in the year that she’d been living there. Or had it been more now? Thirteen months or so, she reasoned.
She brushed some mascara on her eyelashes and inspected herself once more. Good enough, she thought. She didn’t like to wear a lot of makeup, despite Camilla’s best efforts. And besides, she was still growing into her looks.
She exited the bathroom, which opened onto the kitchen, just in time to see Tommy leaning away from the sink and zipping up his fly.
“Oh my god.” She winced. “Tell me you did not just pee in the sink.”
“You were taking too long.”
“God, you’re disgusting.” She crossed to the old beige refrigerator and took out a bottle of water—no way she was drinking tap water now, that was for sure—and as she closed it again, the whiteboard caught her eye.
She winced again.
On the refrigerator door was a magnetic dry-erase board with six names in black marker, each of the tenants of the co-op. Written beneath each name was a number. The six of them were responsible for a share of the rent and equal part of the bills each month. If they couldn’t pay their share, they had a three-month grace period to wipe out their debt, or else they would have to leave. And the number under Sara’s name was the largest.
The co-op was far from the worst place to live in Jacksonville. The old house needed some repairs, but it wasn’t a disaster. There were four bedrooms, three of them occupied by two people each and the fourth used as storage and workspace.
Their landlord, Mr. Nedelmeyer, was a German guy in his early forties who had a bunch of properties like this one in the Jacksonville metro area. He was pretty laid back, all things considered; in fact, he insisted that they simply call him “Needle,” which to Sara sounded like something you’d call a drug dealer. But Needle was an easy man to deal with. He didn’t care if they had friends over, or threw the occasional party. He didn’t even care about the drugs. He had only three major rules: If you get arrested, you’re out. If you can’t pay after three months, you’re out. If you assault another tenant, you’re out.
At the moment, staring at the whiteboard on the fridge, Sara was worried about the second rule. But then she heard a voice right in her ear that made her worry about the third rule.
“What’s the matter, little girl? Worried about that big scary number under your name?” Tommy laughed like he’d told a great joke. He was nineteen, lanky and bony, with tattoos up both arms. He and his girlfriend Jo shared one of the co-op’s bedrooms. Neither of them worked; Tommy’s parents wired him money every month, more than enough to cover their co-op expenses. The rest they spent on coke.
Tommy thought he was some kind of badass. But he was just a suburban kid on vacation.
Sara turned slowly. The older boy was nearly a whole foot taller, and standing only a few inches away he towered over her. “I think,” she said slowly, “you should take a couple of steps back and get out of my face.”
“Or what?” He grinned maliciously. “You gonna hit me?”
“Of course not. That would be against the rules.” She smiled innocently. “But you know, the other night I took a little video. You and Jo, doing a line off the coffee table.”
A flash of fear crossed Tommy’s face, but he stood his ground. “So? Needle doesn’t care about that.”
“No, you’re right. He doesn’t.” Sara lowered her voice to a whisper. “But Thomas Howell, Esquire, down at Binder & Associates? He might care about that.” She cocked her head to one side. “That’s your dad, isn’t it?”
“How do you…?” Tommy shook his head. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Maybe not. That’s up to you.” She walked past him, bumping her shoulder roughly against his as she did. “Stop pissing in the sink. That’s gross.” And she headed upstairs.
Sara had left Virginia more than a year earlier as a frightened and naïve fifteen-year-old girl. It was hardly more than a year later, but she’d changed. On the bus between Alexandria and Jacksonville, she’d made two rules for herself. The first was that she was not going to ask anyone for anything, least of all her dad. And she stuck by it. Maya helped her out a bit from time to time, and Sara was grateful—but she never asked for it.
The second rule was that she was not going to take shit from anyone, period. She’d been through too much. She had seen things that she could never talk about. Things that still kept her awake at night. Things that a guy like Tommy could never imagine. She was beyond pettiness, past teenage angst. Past her own past.
Upstairs she pushed open the door to the bedroom that she and Camilla shared. It was set up like a dorm room, two twin beds sitting against opposite walls with a lane between them and a shared nightstand. They had a small vanity and a closet that they split. The roommate in question was still in bed, lying awake on her back and scrolling through social media on her phone.
“Hey,” she said with a yawn as Sara entered. Camilla was eighteen, and thankfully pleasant. She was the first friend Sara had made in Florida; it was her online ad for a roommate at the co-op that had brought Sara there in the first place. They’d gotten along well. In fact, Camilla was teaching her to drive. She’d taught her how to put on mascara and how to pick out clothes that flattered her narrow frame. Sara had picked up a lot of new terms and mannerisms from her. Kind of like a big sister.
Like the kind of big sister that doesn’t abandon you with a man you can’t stand.
“Hey yourself. Get out of bed, it’s almost ten.” Sara grabbed her purse from the nightstand and made sure she had everything she’d need.
“I had a late night.” Camilla worked as a waitress and bartender at a local seafood place. “But hey, look at this stack.” She flashed a thick wad of cash, tips from the night before.
“Great,” Sara muttered. “I got to get to work.”
“Cool. I’m off tonight. You want me to do your hair again? It’s looking a little haggard.”
“Yeah, I know, it looks like shit,” Sara snapped irritably.
“Whoa, hostile.” Camilla frowned. “What’s got your panties twisted?”
“I’m sorry. Just Tommy, being an ass.”
“Forget that guy. He’s a poser.”
“I know.” Sara sighed and rubbed her face. “Okay. I’m off to the mines.”
“Wait up. You seem pretty high strung. You want a bar?”
Sara shook her head. “No, I’m okay.” She took two steps to the door. “Screw it, yeah.”
Camilla grinned and sat up in bed. She reached over for her own purse and took out two items—an orange prescription bottle with no label and a small plastic cylinder with a red cap. She shook out a single oblong blue Xanax from the bottle, dropped it into the pill grinder, and screwed the red cap tightly, crushing the bar into powder. “Hand.”
Sara held her right hand out, palm down, and Camilla shook out the powder onto the fleshy bridge between her thumb and forefinger. Sara brought her hand to her face, plugged one nostril, and sniffed.
“Attagirl.” Camilla smacked her lightly on the butt. “Now get outta here before you’re late. See you tonight.”
Sara flashed a peace sign as she closed the door behind her. She could taste the bitter powder at the back of her throat. It wouldn’t take long for it to kick in, but she knew that one bar would barely get her through half the day, if that.
It was still hot out, even for October, like the Indian summers they sometimes experienced in Virginia. But she was getting used to the weather. She liked it, the almost year-round sunshine, being close to the beach. Life wasn’t always great, but it was a far sight better than it had been two summers ago.
Sara was barely out the door when her phone rang in her purse. She already knew who it would be, one of the only people who ever called her.
“Hey,” she answered as she walked.
“Hi.” Maya’s voice sounded quiet, strained. Sara could tell right away that she was upset about something. “Got a minute?”
“Uh, a few. I’m on my way to work.” Sara looked around. She didn’t live in a bad neighborhood, but it got a little rougher as she neared the thrift shop. She’d never had a problem herself, but she also stayed alert to her surroundings and kept her head up while she walked. A girl distracted by her phone was a potential target. “What’s up?”
“I, uh…” Maya hesitated. Being sullen and reluctant was unusual for her. “I saw Dad last night.”
Sara stopped in her tracks, but said nothing. Her stomach tightened instinctively as if she was preparing for a punch to the gut.
“It… didn’t go well.” Maya sighed. “I ended up shouting some things, storming out—”
“Why are you telling me this?” Sara demanded.
“What?”
“You know that I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to hear about him. I don’t even want to think about him. So why are you telling me this?”
“I just thought you might want to know.”
“No,” Sara said forcefully. “You had a bad experience, and you wanted to talk to someone that you think might understand. But I’m not interested. I’m done with him. Okay?”
“Yeah.” Maya sighed. “I think I am too.”
Sara hesitated a moment. She’d never heard her sister sound so defeated. But she stood by her position. “Good. Move on with your life. How’s school?”
“School’s great,” Maya said. “I’m top of my class.”
“Of course you are. You’re brilliant.” Sara smiled at that as she resumed her walk. But at the same time, she noticed movement on the sidewalk near her feet. A shadow, stretched long with the mid-morning sun, was keeping pace with her own. Someone walking not far behind her.
You’re being paranoid. It wouldn’t be the first time she mistook a pedestrian as a pursuer. It was part of the unfortunate fallout of her experiences. Even so, she slowed as she reached the next intersection to cross the street.
“But seriously,” Maya said through the phone. “You’re doing okay?”
“Oh, yeah.” Sara paused and waited for the light. So did the shadow. “I’m doing great.” She could have turned and looked at them, made them aware that she was aware, but she kept her eyes forward and waited for the signal to cross to see if they would follow.
“Good. I’m glad. I’ll try to send you a little something in a couple weeks.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Sara told her. The light changed. She strode briskly across the crosswalk.
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. Anyway, I’ll let you get to work.”
“I’m off tomorrow.” Sara reached the opposite corner and continued on her way. The shadow kept pace. “Call you then?”
“Definitely. Love you.”
“Love you too.” Sara ended the call and stuck her phone back in her purse. Then, without warning, she made an abrupt left turn and jogged a few paces, just to get out of his line of sight. She turned, folded her arms across her chest, and put on her very best stern expression as her pursuer rounded the corner after her.
He practically skidded to a stop when he saw her there waiting for him.
“For a supposedly covert operative, you’re shit at this,” she told him. “I smelled your cologne.”
Agent Todd Strickland smirked. “Nice to see you too, Sara.”
She did not return the smile. “Still keeping tabs on me, I see.”
“What? No. I was in the area, working an op.” He shrugged. “I saw you on the street, figured I’d come say hi.”
“Uh-huh,” she said flatly. “In that case, hi. Now I have to go to work. Bye.” She turned and walked away briskly.
“I’ll walk with you.” He trotted to catch up to her.
She scoffed. Strickland was young for a CIA agent, not yet thirty years old—and, she realized, irritatingly handsome—but he also reminded her too much of her father. The two were friends, going back nearly two years when Sara and her sister had been kidnapped by the Slovakian traffickers. Strickland had helped rescue them, and at that time he’d made a promise that no matter what happened, he would do whatever he could to keep the two girls safe.
Apparently that meant using CIA resources to keep abreast of Sara’s whereabouts.
“So things are good?” he asked her.
“Yup. Peachy. Now go away.”
But still he walked beside her. “That guy in your building still giving you grief?”
“Oh my god,” she groaned. “What, did you bug the place?”
“I just want to make sure you’re okay—”
She spun on him. “You’re not my dad. We’re not even friends. Once upon a time, maybe you were a… I don’t know. Glorified babysitter. But now you’re coming off like a fucking stalker.” She had known that he was tracking her for some time; this was not the first occasion in which he’d suddenly appeared in Florida. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want to be reminded of that life. So how about you tell me what you want from me, and we can go our separate ways?”
Strickland barely reacted to the outburst. “I want you to be safe,” he said plainly. “And, if I’m being honest, I want you to quit the drugs.”
Sara’s eyes narrowed and her mouth fell open a little. “Just who do you think you are?”
“Someone who cares. It would break your father’s heart if he knew.”
If he knew? “Oh, you mean you’re not hand-delivering him weekly reports?”
Strickland shook his head. “Haven’t seen him in months.”
“So you’re just following me out of some misguided sense of duty?”
The young agent smiled sadly and shook his head. “Whether you like it or not, there are still a lot of people out there that remember Agent Zero. I hope the day never comes that you have to thank me for keeping an eye on you. But until then, I’m going to keep doing it.”
“Yeah. I bet you will.” She looked straight up, squinting at the bright sky. “What is it, a satellite? Is that how you watch me?” Sara stuck one arm over her head and flashed a middle finger to the clouds. “There’s a photo for you. Send it to my dad as a Christmas card.” Then she turned and started away.
“Sara,” he called after her. “The drugs?”
Christ, why won’t he go away? She turned to face him. “So I smoked a little weed. Who cares? It’s practically legal here.”
“Uh-huh. And the Xanax?”
The Xanax. Her first question was, how did he know about that? The second that crossed her mind was, why hadn’t it kicked in yet? But she knew the answer to the latter already. Her body was getting too accustomed to a single bar. It wasn’t enough anymore.
“And the coke?”
She laughed at him then, a bitter and caustic laugh. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to make me feel like some kind of criminal deviant because I tried something once or twice at a party.”
“Once or twice, huh? You have these parties every night?”
Sara felt her face grow hot. It wasn’t just because he had offended her; it was because he was right. It had started out as once or twice at a party, but then quickly became a bump after work. A little something to take the edge off. But she wasn’t about to acknowledge that now.
“It must be so easy for you,” she said. “Standing there, clean cut, Boy Scout, Army Ranger. CIA agent. Must be so easy to judge someone like me. You say you know what I’ve been through. But you don’t understand it. You can’t.”
Strickland nodded slowly. He stared directly at her, with those eyes that she might have found charming if he was anyone other than who he was. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t know what it was like to be emancipated at seventeen—”
“I was fifteen,” Sara corrected.
“And I was seventeen. But you didn’t know that about me, did you?”
She didn’t. But she didn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.
“I joined the Army right away. A lot of states will let you do that. I had my first confirmed kill two days before my eighteenth birthday. Funny thing about the military. They don’t call it ‘murder’ when you kill someone.”
Sara bit her lip. She knew what it was like to kill someone. It had been a mercenary with the black ops team called The Division. He would have killed them, her and her sister, so Sara shot him in the neck. And though the nightmares still plagued her, she’d never once thought of it as murder.
“At one point I was on four different prescriptions,” Strickland told her. “For PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. I abused them all. It was so much easier to be numb, to pretend that everything I did happened to someone else.”
He smiled sadly. “And man, I was a good addict. No one knew. Or maybe no one cared as long as I was a good soldier. Eventually one of my Ranger pals found out. He started following me, keeping close tabs on me. It was so damned irritating. He even took me to see a therapist. It was really hard. It’s so much harder to quit and deal with all your shit than to just take something. I still see a therapist, twice a week when I’m able.”
Sara stared at a small stone on the sidewalk to avoid looking at his eyes. After everything her dad had put her through, Strickland could have been lying. This could have just been a story. But he told it with a lot of conviction. Just like he was trained.
“I know that you’ve experienced some awful things,” he continued. “I know how hard it is to commiserate with normal people and listen to them whine about money or jobs or relationships when you’ve seen real, genuine horrors in the world. But don’t stand there and lean on your crutch and tell me that I don’t understand it. Because you’re lying to yourself right now. You’re heading down a path that’s going to lead to addiction. Homelessness. Death. Is that what you want?”
“What I want…” Her voice cracked.
You will not cry. You don’t do that anymore.
She cleared her throat and said as clearly as she could, “What I want is for you to leave me alone. I want to make my own choices and live with the consequences. I want to be free of any and all reminders that any of those things ever happened. That includes you.”
He nodded, with a faraway look in his eyes that suggested defeat. “Okay, Sara. If that’s what you want, I’ll leave you alone. Be well.” Without another word, he turned and strode back the way he’d come.
She stood there for a long moment. She was already late for work; another minute or two wouldn’t matter much. She wished she’d hit Camilla up for a second bar. It was still morning and this day was already awful.
What else could possibly go wrong?