She stands there and stares up into the camera.
Enough with the pretense.
Trace is either here or not. The answers are either going to come or they are not.
Whatever is going on, this is it. The end of the journey.
So Maggie stands there and stares up at the camera and waits.
It doesn’t take long.
She hears the crunch of footsteps before she sees the hulking form of Ivan Brovski come into view. He walks to the gate. Porkchop eases himself a little closer to Maggie. Ivan doesn’t so much as glance at him. His eyes are locked on her eyes and only hers.
“Come with me,” Ivan Brovski tells her. “He’s been waiting for you.”
Ivan Brovski finally shifts his gaze toward Porkchop and then brings it back to Maggie.
“Just you,” he says to her. “No one else.”
Three armed men come out from the brush. They keep their weapons at their sides, but the meaning is clear. Maggie looks back at Porkchop. She gives him a nod that she’s fine with this and he should stand down. Porkchop doesn’t nod back.
The gate slides open. Maggie steps through. Porkchop stays where he is.
Brovski greets her with a handshake and a smile. “It’s good to see you again, Doctor McCabe.”
She says nothing. Brovski leads her down a path of unruly grapevines, leaving Porkchop and the fence in her rearview. Ivan starts off by her side but as the path narrows from the overgrowth, they’re forced to move single file. Up ahead, half hidden by the heavy foliage, is a building Maggie assumes was once a wine cellar. The exterior is scarred and worn limestone. Moss clings to the walls for dear life. The stones look weak, wet, spongy, as though you could push your fist right on through them.
There is a heavy iron-banded wooden door with rusted hinges. Brovski opens it to let them in. The interior is musty, dingy, lit dully by a string of yellow lights tied to the ceiling beams. Two-tone oak wine barrels are stacked on their sides along the right-hand wall. Brovski heads to the back and pushes a stack of barrels away, revealing a blue door. He puts his hand on a control panel, and the blue door slides open with a Star Trek whoosh.
They head down a set of stairs to a matching blue door. When Brovski opens this one, Maggie is greeted by a sudden cold gust. The air has a stale, metallic tang to it. They step into a strange bunker or tunnel — a sterile underground artery of white tile and polished chrome. Humming LED lights form a stripe down the ceiling’s center. Brovski leads the way. His shoes clack and echo. Maggie looks down at the shiny floor and sees her own distorted reflection staring back.
As they make their way down the artery, Maggie begins to see faceless people dressed in white lab coats — faceless because they all wear oversize surgical masks and caps and opaque goggles, and Maggie wonders whether the getup is to protect or disguise. She keeps walking. Walls become windows to laboratories of some sort. Various faceless lab-coated people perform various experiments.
At least, that’s what it looks like. Maggie doesn’t really know. She also doesn’t really care.
She wants to see him.
This bunker is trying very hard to look — time to say it again — “cutting edge” and “state of the art.” And yet it doesn’t. The “hidden lair” has something of a faux vibe to it, the feeling of an overwrought reproduction, as if this is a Hollywood version of what a secret medical science lab should look like. She, Marc, and Trace were all involved in cardiology — and right now, this place may be well-kept and clean and sterile and sleek and even beautiful, but there is no beating heart. That’s how it feels to her.
The people in lab coats — doctors? scientists? — startle when she walks past. They look up furtively, not wanting to make eye contact, even through the opaque goggles.
Maggie wonders about that.
Ivan Brovski stops at a metal door. No windows. No door handle — handles carry germs. Yet another faceless individual approaches her with a blue isolation gown, disposable gloves, and face shield.
“Put them on over your clothes,” Brovski orders.
“What about you?” she asks.
“This is as far as I go. Put them on.”
Maggie does as he asks. When she’s done, Brovski waves his hand in front of a screen. Everything is touchless. The door opens with a sucking hiss. Maggie tentatively steps inside, and the door reseals behind her.
A deep voice says, “Hello, Doctor McCabe.”
A big man sits in some makeshift throne on a riser in the middle of the room. A nasal cannula — the kind of mask you always see on television shows — delivers oxygen. There’s an IV in his arm. A medical monitoring device displays his vitals — heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation. He wears what is either a smoking jacket or a velvet robe — hard to know which — like something from a Playboy Mansion documentary. His is appropriately enough bloodred.
There is a Mona Lisa on the wall behind his head.
Oleg Ragoravich.
He smiles and spreads his thick, soft arms. “Surprised?”
Maggie takes a step toward him. “Would it hurt your feelings if I told you I’m not?”
“It would indeed.” Ragoravich’s breathing is labored, his chest rising and falling with a little too much drama. “Tell me how you knew.”
“Lots of little things — why you threw the ball, the timing of the surgery — but the big thing is, I found an old photograph of you online.”
“They’re supposed to have all been deleted.”
“Yeah, but you know there are always ways.”
Ragoravich nods. “I do. Which photo?”
“Your military portrait.”
“That has to be forty years old.”
“I was given two photos to replicate before the surgery — Photo A and Photo B. Both were grainy black-and-whites. Photo A was the chin. Photo B was, well, your prominent nose. Both, I know now, were blowups of that military portrait. You wanted me to think the surgery was to change your identity. But in reality—”
“It was the opposite,” he finishes for her. “You were making him look more like me, not less. Fattening him up for the kill.”
Awful way of putting it, Maggie thinks, but not untrue. “The Oleg I knew — the one I did surgery on and got murdered in Dubai — he was some kind of imposter or body double.”
“Body double,” he says. “Or decoy. Not an imposter. His real name was Aleksander, by the way. He was my cousin. We look alike, no?”
Maggie nods. “Similar enough. From a distance.”
“Aleksander has been my double for the past twenty-three years. Can you believe that? He played the part well.”
“He did,” Maggie agrees.
“Lots of powerful men have had doubles. Stalin. Noriega. Saddam Hussein. Some say Putin, but I think he’s too paranoid to allow someone who looks like him that close. I had two others over the years, but Aleksander, he was the best. I loved him, really.”
“And yet,” Maggie says.
“And yet he had to die, yes. I need the world to think I’m dead — too many people are after me.”
“So you sacrificed your cousin?”
He grins and steeples his hands. “Let me ask you something, Doctor McCabe. Is life about quality or quantity? It’s a question you physicians ask every day, no? Do we measure life by the years — or the quality of those years? Aleksander grew up in poverty. Without me, he would have spent his life in drudgery, as a low-level factory worker, barely scraping by. Instead, Aleksander lived a life of luxury even kings couldn’t dare have imagined — big mansions, private planes, fancy cars, the finest cuisine, and of course, beautiful women. So you tell me. Was I a curse in his life — or a blessing?”
“I guess we would have to ask him.”