Silence engulfed the room for several seconds, interrupted only by chirps and trills coming from the birds in her eucalyptus tree. The world outside was alive, was filled with sunshine, life, and happiness, while she was buried here, with her ghosts. Maybe he was right.
“It didn’t,” she finally spoke.
“Huh?”
“It didn’t go anywhere. I still love doing all that; I wouldn’t change it for the world. But my case isn’t over, that’s why I can’t let go.”
“Do you trust me professionally?” Steve asked.
“Sure I do, with my life.”
“Then trust me when I say you delivered your case successfully. The client was happy. You saved the day. You made us all proud: me, Tom, Brian, Richard, Claire, and Louie. Louie would follow you into a burning building; did you know that? And you made Sam proud too, and he’s hard to impress.”
“But somehow I can’t let go. I’m still twisting my mind looking for clues, and there are none. Did we overlook something? Who knows what he’s up to next, our Mr. X? Will we even see it coming? He is scary brilliant!”
“Yes, he is. But if you can’t take any of our advice for it, take Sam’s. We’re all corporate investigators, I agree, but Sam’s ex-CIA. He knows the spy-and-terrorist business better than we’ll ever know it, and he said the same thing. Keep your eyes open, but move on with your life. We might never get to him; he might never resurface again. He might be busy doing time in Siberia for failing his mission, for all we know. Who the hell knows?”
“We’re definitely never gonna find him if we stop looking, that’s how I feel. Someone’s gotta keep on looking. No one knows we’ve worked this case. Sam’s retired CIA. He’s not active anymore, so he’s not looking either. So, who is? Or who should be?”
She knew she had a point, and he didn’t argue.
“All right,” he said, “what if you continue to search for him, but with a time limit?
Say… two hours per week, not more?”
“I tend to not trust you when it’s about me. You’ve always been overprotective. Will two hours per week keep me sane?”
“Yes, it will teach you to control this urge you have to obsess about the puzzle piece you’re missing.”
“Can I do four?”
“Huh?”
“Hours. Since you tend to be overprotective and all that,” she said, tilting her head to the side in a flirting gesture.
“No. Not more than two hours per week. Please promise me. Go back to doing what you loved to do, put your heart in each client you’re working. If your mind is elsewhere, your work will suffer.”
“This client’s fine, it’s Brian’s client anyway, not mine. I can afford to do it. I’m just support, not that important or essential anyway.”
“Would you be comfortable repeating that statement to Brian?”
She blushed and pursed her lips. Damn.
“Umm… No.”
“Why do you let yourself think that? We’re all risking our lives when we go undercover. Our support is critical, and you know that. You should know that better than anyone. We’re all counting on one another, and we’re all counting on you. When you’re primary on a case, we don’t cut corners on your support, or allow ourselves to become preoccupied by something else.”
“All right,” she admitted. “I’ll give you that. But if I limit this to only two hours, the only question is what would I do for fun?”
He let out a long, pained sigh.
“That’s your choice too. I could be here with you every day, if you’d only let me. We could spend our lives together.”
“No. We’ve discussed this. As long as we work together, we can’t have that type of relationship. Weekends and vacations, and only if we go out of town. That’s it, and I’m not budging.”
His blue eyes didn’t hide his sadness very well.
“You know we talked about it,” she continued in a softer voice, “you know why I can’t. It would be risky for us both, for the entire team. We can’t, and you know that. Even if Tom doesn’t mind, I do.”
“Then let’s get going,” he said, trying to put some cheer in his voice and mostly failing.
She took a quick shower, changed, and got ready for their weekend trip at his cabin up in the mountains near Alpine. He grabbed her bag, opened the door for her, and loaded the bag in the trunk of his black Mercedes G-Class.
Alex turned on her heels and headed back into the house.
“Be right there, I forgot something,” she said, as she closed the door behind her.
She went straight for the blue bedroom. She pulled the window curtains shut, turned on the powerful track lights, and took several pictures of her crazy wall with her phone. Satisfied, she turned off the lights, pulled the curtain that concealed the corkboard shut, and locked the main door on her way out. Two hours, four hours, whatever, but who’s counting?
“I’m ready,” she said, smiling, and hopped in the car. “Let’s go.”
…4
President Piotr Abramovich, the most powerful man in Russia, felt nothing, if not powerless, that morning, irritated by his prime minister’s continued inability to name a new defense minister.
Arkady Dolinski, the chair of his government, just couldn’t get it right. He had suggested a few names, but none of those generals had what it took to drive Abramovich’s military vision. They were weak, comfortable with their set ways and their overflowing vodka guts. None of them was the crusader Abramovich was looking for.
He missed Dimitrov, his former minister of defense, his old friend Mishka. Abramovich paced his Kremlin office slowly, remembering the last time he’d seen him. Hearing that a critical intelligence operation had failed, Dimitrov had collapsed of a heart attack right there, on that rug, breaking the Bohemian crystal coffee table on his way down. He didn’t die that day, though. He recovered, but Abramovich had no other choice but to announce his retirement to the entire world.
Almost five months later, the defense minister seat on Russia’s government was still empty. Dimitrov’s shoes were hard to fill. Abramovich still remembered the days when they had worked together in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, in Foreign Operations. It was the two of them and Myatlev, all three united by their ambition, their willingness to pay all costs only to win, advance, and lead, and their pledge to have one another’s backs, regardless of circumstances.
Unlike Myatlev, Abramovich’s early life hadn’t benefitted from having a father as a high-ranking KGB officer. His parents had been blue-collar workers in a system that squeezed them dry and spat them out, sick and forgotten. After a life-long struggle, working twelve-hour days in noisy, toxic manufacturing plants, followed by standing in long lines to buy the bare necessities of food and supplies, his parents didn’t even live long enough to make it to retirement. His mother had died of bone cancer, her screams of pain waking up their entire neighborhood for weeks. His father had a stroke before he reached age fifty, leaving young Piotr to figure out how to survive on his own.
He had sworn to himself he’d never follow in their footsteps. Not him. Let the rest of the Russians sweat their lives away in god-forsaken factories. That life was not good enough for him. He was going to be different. He was going to have it all.
He had to claw his way into the system and hadn’t hesitated in doing so. He’d started at the ground level, at eighteen, fresh out of high school with no other place to go that would have been in alignment with his ambitions. He joined the KGB’s Seventh Directorate as an entry-level surveillance agent, locked in windowless rooms and listening all day to the conversations that key party leaders had in their secretly bugged homes.