Zoya sipped her pinot noir. “Is this where you try to break through my tough exterior?”
“No… I tried that yesterday. This is where you see that I’m just making conversation, and you let your walls down just a little.”
She smiled, put her glass down, and gave a little shrug. “Military family. A lot of travel. Other kids in the same situation were always complaining about moving all the time, but I loved it. I got to reinvent myself every couple of years. My identity became tied to my ability to change my identity. I’m weird. This is the perfect job for me.” She looked off towards the dark ocean. “It was, anyway. I don’t know what I will do now.”
“Only child?”
She turned with a little smile, but the smile faded, and she looked at him for a long time. Court realized he’d said something wrong. To his surprise, though, she answered, and her answer seemed authentic.
“My older brother passed away when I was young. He was in college, studying to be a doctor.”
“How did he die?”
“Natural causes. Cancer. Twenty-three years old.”
“Christ,” Court said. “I’m sorry.”
She just sipped more wine with a little nod.
Court tried to get her thinking about anything else, so he asked another question. “You went into the military yourself?”
She shook her head. “No. Something about being eighteen and not wanting to give up my freedom.” Court wasn’t sure if it was true, but he caught himself believing her.
“But you found another way to serve Russia.”
Her eyes narrowed a bit now as she cut into her grilled fish, and Court realized he was asking too many questions. As expected, she turned it around on him. “Why do you do what you do?”
Court’s real story was more complicated than he was willing to share. The truth was he’d been the son of a police officer and an expert in weaponry who trained CIA officers in firearms tactics. He’d developed incredible skills with guns at a young age. Then, when Court was just eighteen, he’d had a falling-out with his father, and to rebel he’d slipped into the periphery of the criminal underworld as a bodyguard for a drug dealer in Miami. He’d gone to prison at nineteen for killing three of his employer’s would-be assassins, but the CIA gave him the option of freedom in exchange for working with them.
No… he wasn’t going to go into all that. Instead he just said, “It’s what I was born to do. I don’t always like it, sometimes I hate it, but I don’t really question it much anymore.”
“Remind me to use that answer next time someone like you asks me the same question,” Zoya said coolly.
“Relax, Whitney. You’re still one of the most defensive and unforthcoming people I’ve ever met.”
“Likewise, Chad.”
They ate in silence for a moment, and Court saw her relaxed mood slipping away quickly. He thought he should reveal something about himself now, if only to keep her from shutting down completely. “I was raised by my dad. A Marine and a cop. My mom died when I was a kid.”
Zoya looked him hard in the eyes. After a time it became clear that she believed him. “My mother died when I was six. My father died when I was a teenager.”
“Sorry. You suffered a tremendous amount of loss at a young age.”
“It made me stronger in some ways.”
Court regretted his attempt to refire the conversation. They sat quietly under the torchlights for a while, until they finished their second bottle of wine and Court called for the check.
CHAPTER
FORTY-NINE
They returned to their suite and sat together on their private patio by their private pool, the moonlight the only illumination. Zoya opened a bottle of Australian Shiraz left in the room for them by management, and Court fought a joke about having room service bring a bottle of vodka instead.
Court had planned on calling in to Brewer tonight; it was late morning at Langley, and he wanted her to know he was still in the process of determining if Fan was on the adjacent property. But he realized he didn’t want to step out of the room now, worried that the Russian woman might be asleep when he returned.
Suzanne Brewer would have to sit and stew till tomorrow.
They both reclined on deck loungers and sipped wine, and they looked out at the ocean to the southwest. A massive luxury yacht, easily 150 to 200 feet in length, had anchored a mile offshore. Court picked up the binoculars from the table next to him and looked it over. He saw a swimming pool, a helicopter on deck, and a name on the bow. It was the Medusa, with a port of registry in Genoa.
He put the binoculars down, then looked to the Russian woman. He could tell she wanted to say something, and he marveled at how comfortable she had become with him in the past day. He attributed it to their shared experiences, and he wondered if she could read him as well as he thought he could read her.
He didn’t press her to talk, but when she finally did speak, he found himself disappointed that she was thinking about work.
“There are things you aren’t telling me about this operation.”
Court looked out to the reflection of moonlight on the sea. “Yes.”
Zoya downed the last of her Shiraz. “Well… at least you are honest. Answer one more thing for me, then I will let it go.”
“Okay.”
“The things you aren’t telling me… if you were in my position, and you found out about them… would you run, or would you stay?”
Court reached for his glass. “I’d stay, unquestionably. I’m hiding from you how little I know about what’s going on here. It’s not as cut-and-dried as I’ve let on. My country’s motivations to get Fan might be muddier than I am comfortable with.”
Then he added, “But I’m not hiding anything about us.”
She turned to him. “There is an ‘us’?”
Court almost spit out his wine. “No… I mean… I am referring to what we are doing here. Everything I’ve told you is true.” He added, “I wouldn’t lie to you.” As soon as he said it he regretted it, not because it was a promise he didn’t feel he could keep, but he thought it came out sounding cheap, hollow, fake.
After a time, she said, “I think I believe you.”
“Good.”
Zoya said, “There is something I haven’t told you.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of things,” Court quipped. “I don’t even know your name.”
“No. You don’t.”
After a long pause, Court said, “This is where you tell me your name.”
“No, this is where I tell you what I did to make this all happen.” She sat up and put her glass down. “The only reason the Chamroon Syndicate has Fan in the first place is because I contacted them. In Cambodia. You’d escaped over the border, my task force had been taken away from me, and I needed to somehow get Fan away from you. I had no other options, so I contacted the first organization I could find who had men near that border. They picked Fan up and brought him to Thailand. I thought I was the one person who knew where he was, so I could go get him.
“Then somehow you found out, and my former task force found out.” She shook her head. “I have no idea how that happened.”
Court answered this. “Fan sent a message to Taiwanese intelligence. It was picked up by our side somehow. Maybe that’s how the Russians — I mean your guys — found out.”
Zoya said, “I didn’t account for that possibility.”
“Don’t feel bad. You had a solid plan.”
“That’s all you are going to say?”
He waved his glass in the air. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. I was willing to let Thai gangsters kill you to achieve my mission. You, on the other hand, cast your entire mission aside to rescue me and a bunch of prostitutes who meant nothing to you.”