The Woman From Prague

by Rob Hart

  I pat Sam on the shoulder. “Could really use your help on this.”

  She doesn’t move.

  I get to my feet, too.

  “99 Luftballoons” ends and starts up again.

  I pull the weaponized umbrella off my belt.

  The one Fenomenal so graciously gave me for free. I click the button on the side and the shaft extends to its full length, just under three feet.

  It’s not the umbrella I used to carry. This one is heavier, and it’s completely black, whereas on mine, the canopy was blue. It reminds me of a time in my life when I may not have made the best decisions, but damn could I hit.

  No hesitating this time. Before Chernya Dyra has her bearings, I charge and swing. She gets the shovel up to block and is a little surprised at the force with which the blow lands. I pull up to swing again and she jabs the handle of the shovel into my stomach and I stumble back, swing the umbrella up and catch one of her hands. I hear a crack and I’m sure I broke a finger or two.

  She rears back and grimaces but doesn’t yell out. She grips the shovel in her good hand and swings the flat of the blade. I drop to the floor but it’s a feint and she kicks me hard in the stomach. I flip over and try to crawl away as she advances.

  I swing the umbrella out at her feet and she kicks it away. I crawl a little and knock over the rolling cart next to Sam. Metal tools clatter to the floor. I pick up a wrench and a hammer and throw them at her. She deflects them. Then I pick up a scalpel and heave it. She’s not quick enough for this one, which embeds itself in her stomach, the handle sticking out.

  Not that it stops her.

  She plucks the scalpel from her stomach and tosses it aside.

  I pick up the tray and throw it at her face. She puts up her arm to block and I push myself up and run at her fast and hard. She may be strong and she may be a better fighter, but I outweigh her by at least fifty pounds. I need to use that to my advantage.

  We collide and I drive her back. She trips over something on the floor and I fall forward, first landing on her, and then scrambling to straddle her so I can hit her in the face enough that maybe she stops trying to kill me.

  Before I’m even all the way up, she jabs me in the stomach. I reach down to protect myself and she uses her fist like a hammer, bringing it down hard on my thigh. Pain blooms through the muscle and I roll off her and back against the wall.

  I stand up and she grabs me, pushing me into a sheetrock wall that splits under my weight.

  My head cracks into a beam and it’s enough to make me see stars. I hit the floor and get lost in a wave of dizziness. Try to climb to my feet. She picks up the shovel and comes at me. Pointing the sharp end of the blade at me, preparing to drive it into something soft.

  Bad move. The umbrella is within reach. I grab it and swing it at the same knee I kicked on the bridge. She’s favoring it. When I connect, something crunches. She screams and falls onto her good knee, her bad leg now stretched out in front of her. I get up and throw my fist across her jaw, make contact so good a pulse travels up my arm.

  Then another.

  And one more.

  Her nose breaks, red welts that’ll grow into bruises framing her eye sockets.

  The shovel is lying on the ground. I go to pick it up.

  Again, with the killing. I can’t risk this falling back on my mom. That someone else will use her as leverage to get to me. It doesn’t make me feel good, but it’s got to get done.

  But I’ve made a major mistake.

  One stupid mistake in the heat of the moment.

  I looked away.

  When I turn, Chernya Dyra slams into me, hurling us into a darkened room where the floor feels loose and uneven. It crackles and buckles under us and gives way.

  My stomach twists from the sudden change in gravity. I put my arms up to protect my head and we tumble through space.

  We land in another room, this one empty, and darker, since there are no lights on this floor. Just what’s floating in through the windows. I mostly land on the Dyra, which saves me from splitting my head open. But my ribs absorb enough of the blow that it suddenly hurts to breath.

  The two of us roll away from each other to regroup, tripping and falling over the debris of the collapsed ceiling. I try to climb to my feet but find I’m unable. My body has decided to pack it in. I can barely breathe, choking on the dust we kicked up.

  Chernya Dyra coughs and spits blood on the floor.

  But then I hear it. Scrambling above us.

  My salvation. The thing I was waiting for.

  She stands up at full height, keeping the weight off her bad knee, takes a deep breath, and looks at me like we haven’t been beating each other to death. Like she’s caught her second wind.

  “You cannot win,” she says, her voice heavy and flat, but labored.

  “I didn’t need to win,” I tell her. “I needed to keep you occupied.”

  She pauses, confused.

  She figures out what I mean when Sam leaps from the floor above us onto her back, reaches around and plunges a knife into her chest.

  Everything pauses in that moment.

  Sam holding onto Chernya Dyra, whose face is twisted in surprise and pain and fear. Sam digs the knife in, yanks it hard to the side. Chernya Drya bucks like a wild horse, throwing Sam to the floor, and pulls the knife out of her chest, holding it in her hands, her eyes on fire, staring at me.

  Even though blood is pumping out of her chest in time with her heart, it looks like she’s prepared to stab me with it.

  Then she drops the knife, gasps, and falls facedown on the floor.

  After that, it gets real quiet.

  My body is an echo chamber of pain. It bounces around, getting louder as it rings off various surfaces. I drag myself over to Sam, who’s vacantly staring at the ceiling. For a moment, I think she’s dead. As I’m reaching for her neck to search for a pulse, she turns to me.

  “You came back,” she says.

  “You saved my mom. Least I could do.”

  She laughs and then winces, pulling her legs up and curling into a fetal position.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I’ll live,” she says, attempting to climb to her feet, not doing a great job of it. She falls back to the floor and lies there. “Where’s the drive?”

  I take it out of my pocket and hold it.

  “Give it here,” she says.

  I remember the way she hesitated before.

  “I’m going to hold on to it,” I tell her.

  “Why?”

  “Until I can be sure it’ll get into the right hands.”

  “Ash, give it to me.”

  “No.”

  “I can take it from you.”

  “I don’t think you’re in any shape to do that.”

  “You’re not in any shape to defend yourself,” she says.

  “Who do you work for?”

  “What does it matter?” she asks.

  “What happens to the information on the drive?”

  “Ash,” she says, her voice soft, almost pleading. “Please. Give it to me. This is the job. The one I was hired to do. Fuller died. He was my mentor. I loved that man like a father. I would not compromise the integrity of the mission.”

  I think about it. And then I shake my head.

  “No,” I tell her. “Just to be safe.”

  “Fine,” she says.

  She rolls toward me and holds her knife to my throat.

  That flat lizard look back on her face.

  Everything that’s happened in the past few days is erased. She’ll kill me. I know it. I drop the drive on the floor.

  She picks it up, looks at it, and puts it back down. Picks up a chunk of rock that broke off when I crashed through the ceiling and brings it down hard on the drive, shattering it.

  “Are you serious?” I ask. “After all that?”

  “Sorry Ash,” she says, her voice cold and distant. “That was the mission.”

  “People deserve
to know the truth.”

  “People aren’t smart enough to process the intricacies. Deal with it.”

  I crawl a little closer, so that I can look her full in the face. “Who do you work for?”

  “A government agency,” she says. “You wouldn’t recognize the name if I told you.”

  “You told me agencies like those don’t exist.”

  “I told you a lot of things.”

  “Who did Roman work for?”

  “Hemera Global.”

  “And the Dyra?”

  “Probably the Russian government. They would have had a field day with this. Oh, and Roman told me about the baby terrorists who came after us. They wanted to stop us because they wanted to protect their payday. Which makes sense.”

  “If Roman was working with the bank, why did he have the Ansar Al-Islam jackoffs killed?”

  “He’s an outside contractor. And they were sloppy.”

  “What about the guy who came after you at the Crash Hop office?”

  “Oh my god, shut up,” she says, rolling onto her back. “It doesn’t even matter. It’s over. We have more important things to worry about. Like not bleeding to death.”

  I lie back, look up at the exposed guts of the ceiling. Hope the spinning stops soon, and that I don’t have another concussion.

  “You’re no better than Roman,” I tell her. “You’re a coward, just like him.”

  “I’ll live with your disappointment,” she says.

  But there’s a crack in her voice. It makes me not believe her.

  She tries to get up again, but still can’t.

  “You stay here,” I tell her, climbing to my feet. It feels like my body is held together by old rubber bands. Most of the pain is in my left side. Every time I breath it feels like I’m getting punched. “Kaz is downstairs. I’ll have him get help.”

  “No hospitals.”

  “He has a guy. A doctor. Patched me up. He can do the same for you.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why would you help me?”

  Her voice is suddenly sad. Vulnerable. It sounds the way it did in the bathroom, after I stapled her arm shut. I turn back and she’s propped herself up on her elbow, looking at me with wide, expectant eyes.

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” I tell her.

  I want that to sting, and from the look on her face, I think it does.

  She rolls onto her back and closes her eyes.

  I backtrack through the space, going slow. Feel like I’m on the verge of shattering. I head upstairs to check on the guys I tied up.

  All dead. Mottled red holes in their foreheads.

  Chernya Dyra executed helpless, unarmed men.

  Another reason I’m glad she’s dead.

  I stop at Vilém’s body. He’s lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. I press my fingers to his eyelids, close his eyes. His skin is still warm. I make sure he has his wallet on him, so the police can identify his body.

  Out in the hallway, I hear footsteps. Kaz comes up the stairs.

  “I’m sorry, my friend,” he says. “I killed the main line but they must have a backup generator somewhere in the building. I thought I heard gunshots. I stayed out of the way…” He stops, gets a good look at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Surprisingly, yes,” I tell him. “C’mon. Sam is hurt pretty bad. We need to get her help.”

  We head back to the room where I left her, but when we get there, we find only the body of Chernya Dyra and a small pool of blood on the floor where Sam was lying.

  The waitress, a gray-haired woman with bright blue eyes, wearing what I can best describe as a froc”, takes my order. Roast boar and gingerbread dumplings and a Pilsner. Her English isn’t great so my order involves a lot of pointing at things on the menu. Still, I am very happy about how all this is working out.

  The place is nearly empty, just a few locals huddling around drinks. I pick a spot where there’s sunlight streaming in through the window, barely illuminating the space, which looks stuck in time somewhere around the Middle Ages. A mysticism that’s broken by the Wi-Fi password written on a dry-erase board above the bar.

  I pop open the laptop and look up Pete Fernandez. A reporter I met in Jersey years back, when I was on a job. Nice guy. Figure he might want to break the story. After a little searching, though, I find that he’s left the reporting business and he’s become a private investigator.

  Well. I should call him once I’m settled. See if he can give me some tips.

  Next, I look for Molly Rivers, who, lucky for me, is still a working reporter.

  Her Twitter account has her job listed at a newspaper in Los Angeles, so I ring them up and get a receptionist who directs me to her desk. The phone rings until her voicemail picks up, which offers Molly’s cell phone number, so I call that.

  She answers the phone with a curt: “What?”

  “Molly Rivers.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Ash. Remember me? We met in Portland. I gave you the Mike Fletcher story.”

  The tone of her voice shifts substantially. She almost sounds like she’s happy to be talking to me. “I do remember you. Thanks for the tip. Got me away from that paper in Kansas and onto a sinking ship with slightly fewer holes. I owe you a drink. Or at the very least a sad handjob.”

  “I’ve never thought a handjob could sound unsexy. I think I’d prefer the drink. But listen, I have something else for you. What’s the top prize in journalism?”

  Pause. “A Pulitzer.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “Don’t be cute.”

  “What if I told you a U.S. bank conspired with terrorists to push into oil fields in the Middle East to destabilize the market and push up the price of the barrel so they could recoup on drilling investments?”

  There’s a pause on the other end.

  So long I wonder if maybe we got cut off. But then she comes back: “What you said is literally better than the best sex I ever had… if it’s true.”

  “My name goes nowhere near this. You got it from an anonymous source and you can’t reveal that source under any circumstances.”

  “Oh my god, for this? I will Judith Miller this shit.”

  “Good, then. I’m not going to e-mail this to you. I saved the link in a draft folder in a dummy account. I’m going to read you the login information now. Got a pen?”

  “Shoot.”

  I rattle off the details. When I’m done, she asks, “Why me?”

  “You’re the only reporter I know. And you did right by me on the thing with Fletcher. A lot of people died to keep this story from getting out. Which means it needs to get out.”

  “Well… thanks.”

  “Good luck. Don’t fuck this up. I almost got killed over this.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Click.

  I put the phone down next to the laptop. I look up the town on Google Maps and find that there’s a river nearby. The Vrchlice. Another river in need of a vowel. It’s right by the train station. I’ll drop the laptop and phone in the drink before I catch my train back to Prague.

  When I dragged the folder off Jeremiah’s flash drive onto the desktop to create a copy, I didn’t know why I was doing it. It felt like a moderately clever thing to do.

  Turns out it was more than moderate.

  After Kaz and I got to safety, I tried to read through the information and couldn’t really make sense of it, but I suspect someone with actual resources and time and a decent education will be able to figure it out.

  A small part of me wonders if this thing hits, whether Sam will be forced to come after me. Not that it’ll change anything, but I did completely derail her mission.

  Maybe. If so, it won’t be pretty. For as weird as it sounds, it would be nice to see her again. Even though I’m mad at her for following orders rather than doing what was right. Even though she treated me like a stupid child and there were a couple of moments where I thought
she might kill me.

  Until it happens, I’ll keep an eye on people’s shoes.

  Specifically, for gray Nikes.

  The food arrives, and it is so good I want to cry. I’m going to miss the food in the Czech Republic. I’m going to miss a lot of things about it, but mostly I’m going to miss the food.

  Once I’m done, I leave a generous pile of money on the table—I’m not going to need much, since my flight leaves tonight. Stand up, and the plastic wrap around my midsection shifts. I go to the bathroom to re-wrap it. Turns out I did crack a rib crashing through the ceiling, and Étienne offered this as a way to keep things in place while I healed up.

  After that’s all set, I walk in the direction I think I need to be going, through quiet streets covered in a heavy blanket of snow. Around buildings that went up before my native country was even a concept.

  I cut through a square and find a holiday market. I browse a bit and find a booth selling hand-carved Christmas ornaments. I find a skull about the size of my fist, carved from a piece of oak, to replace the dragon that got all smashed when I wasn’t smart enough to take it out of my coat pocket before storming a heavily guarded warehouse.

  My mom will get a kick out of this.

  I stop at another booth and even though I’m not terribly hungry, I get a trdelník.

  One for the road.

  As I’m leaving the market, I pass a booth selling hats. They’ve got newsboy caps. I’ve always wanted one of those, but was never able to find one that fit right. I pull a few off the rack and try them on. I’m about to give up when I find a brown one that fits perfectly, and doesn’t look too bad either. I’ve got some money to burn, so I pull off the tag, hand some crown over to the old woman working the booth, and head out.

  Off in the distance, up on a hill, three spires of a massive cathedral poke at the sky, and I wonder if I have enough time to stop inside.

  Kutná Hora is a beautiful town. I wish I had come here sooner.

  As I make my way through the quiet streets to the Sedlec Ossuary, I run through the checklist in my head. Try to figure out if there’s anything I still need to do. I had my dinner with Stanislav, and lucky for me, I heard nothing about the Kraków apartment. Chernya Dyra must have covered her tracks. He made his offer to hire me any time I want, but I told him this isn’t the work I want to do. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but I’m ready to make a change. He understood. Even seemed happy for me.