The other two dragged their feet as if they did not want to be there.
Mitchell tossed a football from hand to hand. God knows where he had got it from, unless he had bought it from the States. As he tossed the ball, he pointed with his other hand and gave instructions.
He was setting up a game.
The other four men moved sluggishly as Mitchell coaxed and directed.
Mitchell put the ball on the ground and one of them kicked it to the other. The ball wobbled because it was not round. They played soccer in Austria, which they called football.
Mitchell shook his head and spoke again.
One of them picked up the ball and laughed as Mitchell bent a man over at the waist and patted his back.
Quinn smiled. The rules and plays of American football would look odd to soccer-loving Europeans.
As Mitchell shepherded and cajoled the men into facing off, Toni spoke from behind Quinn. “Crazy fool. He takes America with him wherever he goes. He would turn this place into Manhattan, if he could.”
“Maybe he’s just homesick,” Quinn said.
“So am I homesick, but I don’t make everyone drink Belver Bears vodka just to make me feel better.”
Quinn didn’t know how to answer that, so she said nothing. She watched the reluctant football players for a while longer. When she looked around again, Toni was gone. Quinn had the balcony to herself once more.
She decided she liked it that way.
Where was Dima?
[9]
That Evening
By the time supper was announced, Quinn’s energy had drained and she was more than ready to go back to bed. Greta led her along the wide corridor toward the big double doors, and into a room off the corridor. It was a dining room, with a coffered ceiling, thick beams and a white ceramic stove in the corner. The room felt older than the big recreation room where Quinn had spent the afternoon. The wood had an ancient patina. The low ceiling and small windows were more traditional than the banks of windows and doors the rec room featured.
The big oak dining table looked just as old. It was laid with a white tablecloth at one end, with glittering silverware, flowers and candles. There were only five places set.
“You are not having supper with us?” Quinn asked Greta.
Greta shook her head. “You are a guest. I am a worker.”
Quinn had already figured out the three people she had met today were also in Aslan’s employ, so she didn’t understand the difference.
“I prefer to eat with people I trust,” Aslan said, from the door. His timing made it appear he had read her mind. He was dressed in a suit once more. He nodded at Greta, who stepped around him and disappeared.
“How can you trust me?” Quinn asked him. “You don’t know me.”
“Denis knew you. He trusted you. For that reason I extend you my trust.” Aslan moved to the head of the table and pulled out the chair. “Please, sit down.”
Quinn was more than ready to sit down again. She picked the place furthest from Aslan and settled in the chair with relief. As she unfolded the snowy white napkin, Toni and Mitchell arrived. Shortly after, the man called Noah also came into the room. He was scowling.
They all sat without speaking. A man in white served bowls of soup to everyone. A bread basket was placed in the middle of the table and the meal began. Everyone ate silently.
Quinn had little appetite even though the soup was superb. It was a vegetable soup, with lots of onions and dark beef stock. She ate more of it than she thought she would.
She had nearly finished her small bowl when Aslan spoke. His voice was quiet and his tone was even, as he said to Noah, “Did you defeat the Dragonwall?”
“Drachenwand?” Mitchell said, his accent strongly German. “Haven’t you done that one, like, fifty times before?”
Noah shrugged and reached for another hunk of bread from the basket. “It’s a good jump.”
“No jump which involves flinging yourself from the top of the mountain is good,” Mitchell replied.
Toni concentrated on her soup. She ate hugely, chewing mouthfuls of bread in between each spoonful. She didn’t seem interested in the conversation at all.
Quinn lowered her spoon, staring at Noah. “That is what you did this afternoon? You climbed an entire mountain, then jumped from it?”
Noah didn’t look at her. “I didn’t get to jump today,” he told Aslan. “Someone died before I got to the peak.”
“Another BASE jumper?” Aslan asked.
Noah nodded. He went back to eating his soup.
Quinn’s appetite, which had been dodgy to begin with, failed completely. She put down her spoon. People died doing this BASE jumping?
Noah didn’t seem upset. She wondered if he knew who the other jumper was. No one else in the room seemed to care, though. The silence fell once more.
The waiter came back in and collected the bowls. He returned with a tray carrying three dinner plates with covers. A second waiter carried two more plates with covers. They placed a plate in front of each of them, nodded and left.
Quinn mentally sighed. She couldn’t eat any more. She also couldn’t sit in front of a covered plate while the others ate. She lifted the lid aside.
The meal appeared to be a roast beef dinner. The meat was smothered with gravy, there were roast potatoes and carrots which glistened with glazing. A tiny pot of mint sauce sat to one side.
Quinn picked up her knife and fork, sliced a tiny corner beef and ate slowly. As with every meal she had eaten here, this one was perfectly made and might have been delicious, had she been hungry.
Everyone else tackled their meals with gusto.
“Eli,” Toni said. “I was going through the manifest—”
Aslan shook his head sharply.
Toni fell silent.
Aslan’s gaze flickered toward Quinn. His voice low, he said, “Not now.”
Toni scowled. She returned to her meal, stabbing the slices of meat with the tip of her knife as if she was trying to etch a carving into them.
The silence extended. Quinn was too tired to think of any conversational starters. Perhaps they always ate in this thick silence.
“Well, this is fun,” Mitchell said. His tone was light. “If we can’t talk about work, then let’s talk about—”
Toni groaned. “Please, no.”
“I obsessed about football scores. You obsess about sex. No offence, but I don’t want to talk about sex while I’m eating. Especially not your type of sex.”
Toni’s eyes narrowed. “That is because you’re too gutless to try it. A good night for you is humping the cheerleader on the back seat. I bet you don’t even take your pants off.”
“And a good time is had by all,” Mitchell shot back.
Toni leaned forward, which had the effect of making the front of her shirt fill with her breasts, displaying her cleavage. Her smile was heated. “I could show you a good time.”
Aslan shook his head, picked up his wineglass and drank. He didn’t seem amused. He wasn’t disgusted, either. Were squabbles like this common at his dining table?
Mitchell held his fork in his fist and stabbed a big slice of the beef. He picked it up. With gravy dripping, he pointed with his knife at Noah. “At least I get some, unlike ol’ silent one over there.”
Noah gave no reaction. He kept on eating.
Mitchell chewed hurriedly, so he could continue speaking. He swallowed. “You’ve been here about a year, now,” he said. “In all that time, I don’t think you’ve so much as sniffed at a girl.”
“Or a man,” Aslan murmured.
“Perhaps that is why he throws himself off mountains and bridges,” Toni said, her voice a purr. “He gets his excitement that way.”
“Pleasure,” Aslan said, “is unique to everyone. As you should know, Toni.”
Toni’s smile was small and private. Heat flickered in her eyes. Her gaze was steady upon Aslan’s face. Aslan met her gaze, his own unflinching.
&n
bsp; Quinn glanced from one to the other. Was it her imagination, or was there something between Aslan and Toni?
Noah didn’t seem to notice. He hadn’t contributed to the conversation and didn’t seem to be interested in what anyone was saying. Perhaps he was just in the room to eat, as she was.
Mitchell watched Toni and Aslan, a smile plucking at the corner of his mouth. He seemed to understand what was not spoken. He had implied he had been here longer than Noah, so perhaps he did.
Quinn cleared her throat, the silence pushing her into speaking. “I’m wondering…”
Everyone turned and looked at her. Toni looked irritated, as if she had been interrupted.
“I’m wondering if there is a laptop or a computer I can borrow? It’s just that…I haven’t been able to check email for days. I don’t even have my phone anymore. I don’t know where it went to.”
The silence this time was more profound than the earlier one when everyone had been eating their meal. Now they stared at Quinn as if she was a bug crawling across custard.
Quinn cleared her throat again. “I don’t know what day of the week it is.”
Noah put down his knife and fork with a clatter. “You can’t give her access to the Internet,” he growled at Aslan.
Toni and Mitchell looked at Aslan, waiting for him to respond.
Quinn gave a small laugh which emerged nervously. “I only want to catch up with the news. I don’t need the secret launch codes.”
The tension in the room wracked higher. Her small joke had backfired.
“There are newspapers for that,” Noah growled.
“I don’t speak German,” Quinn shot back.
“For the record,” Aslan said, putting down his wineglass, “it is Monday. November 25th, to be exact. Quinn has a point about being cut off. Noah, get the lady a laptop or a tablet, something which will keep her connected and caught up on news.”
Noah shook his head. “It’s too risky.”
“Use a VPN and make everything incognito. Give her access to the dark net, if that’s what it takes. Quinn understands she cannot contact anyone she knows—not until we know what happened in Boston and why a sniper wanted her dead.”
As Aslan spoke, his gaze met Quinn’s. His deep voice made her pay attention.
She shivered. “I hadn’t thought of that. Of course I won’t contact anyone.” She hesitated. “Only, how long do you think it will be until I can? How long will it take to find out why someone wants me dead?”
The question emerged with a wobble in her voice. She might be stuck in a house with criminals running an organization which spread across the world, yet the idea that someone wanted her dead bothered her even more. She didn’t know what she had done to deserve it.
Aslan glanced at Noah and raised a brow in question.
Noah shook his head. “Very well, I will give her a laptop. Only I will block everyone she knows and every channel she uses. No Facebook, no social network.” For the first time, he looked at her. “There will be a worm on the laptop, watching everything you do. If you lift a hand toward the United States, I will land on you from the top of Drachenwand, with both feet and a knife in my hand. Do you understand me?”
Quinn shuddered. She put her knife and fork down and sat back.
“I believe you have made yourself perfectly clear,” Aslan said.
Quinn gripped her elbows. “If you don’t mind, I am going to bed. I am exhausted.” It was the perfect truth.
She didn’t wait for anyone’s permission. She didn’t care if Aslan was okay with her deserting the room before the meal was finished. She got to her feet and moved to the door, anxious to leave. She had been going stir crazy in her bedroom for the last three days. Now all she wanted to do was get back there.
Noah had reminded her that these people were dangerous.
“Thank God she has gone,” Toni said. “We can’t have a proper conversation while the princess is around.” She looked at Aslan. “How long do you plan to keep her here?”
“My answer to you is the same as my answer to her. We need to figure out what happened in Boston and why.” Aslan refilled his wineglass from the bottle which sat in front of him. His bottle was the vintage one.
The others didn’t drink. He didn’t encourage it and they knew better than to show any evidence of bad habits and vulnerabilities, like a drinking problem.
“To that end,” Aslan said, “tomorrow I want you, Noah and Mitchell to dig into any surveillance tapes you can find around the yoga studio. While we were dealing with the shipment, I put it to one side. Now Quinn is on her feet again and functioning normally, we need to dig for answers.”
“I don’t trust her,” Noah said.
“And you have made that clear.” Aslan took a sip of his wine. “Don’t forget, she took a 25mm in the gut. Mitchell will explain how bad it was. She wasn’t faking it.”
“She came within an eighth of an inch of nicking the primary vein in the torso cavity,” Mitchell said. “Besides, there isn’t a single Western intelligence organization which would ask any of their members to take a bullet just to make themselves look trustworthy.”
“She is who she says she is,” Toni said. “We established she was legit before we let you go to America, Eli.”
Aslan nodded. “Thank you.”
“It doesn’t mean I trust her,” Toni added.
“You don’t trust anyone,” Mitchell pointed out.
“Including you, my blond jock,” Toni replied sweetly.
Aslan put down the wineglass. “You can all be as paranoid as you want to be. It will not interfere with me getting what I want from her. We keep her out of everything. She is not here for that.”
Toni leaned forward. “The longer you keep her here, the more she will be a part of everything. You infect people, Eli.”
“Like a disease?” Noah said.
Toni rolled her eyes. “Like a religion,” she replied.
Aslan reached for her hand, picked it up and kissed the back of it. It was a rare demonstration. “For now, she is a guest, and that is all. Understood?”
No one disputed him. They would not dare.
The next day, when Quinn came downstairs and moved to the big armchair in front of the fire, she found a laptop on the chair beside the small pile of books she was reading.
She opened the laptop and tried to boot the email program. No email apps were installed, not even the native program which came with the operating system. Every application which would let her reach out to other people had been uninstalled and deleted. There were no phone apps, no video program, nothing which would give her communication with the outside world.
The web browser could give her access to online email programs. She didn’t bother trying. She knew they would be barred to her, too.
Well, he had warned her he would do that.
She opened the web browser and typed in the Facebook address. She wasn’t surprised when a blank screen came up, with a message telling her access was denied.
The home page of the browser was set to the main page of the Boston Globe.
The message was unspoken but clear. Any information she got out of this computer would be one way only.
She did not doubt for a moment Noah had installed the worm, or whatever it was he would use to watch her every click and swipe while she was on the laptop.
After scanning through the Boston Globe for fifteen minutes, learning the date and the events which had happened while she was gone, Quinn went back to the search page. She typed in “base jumping, Austria,” and hit the enter key.
Forty minutes later, she knew more than she cared to about BASE jumping, winged flight, free climbing, and the even-more-dangerous free soloing, where the mountain climber used no pitons, no rope and no safety gear at all.
The Dragonwall, Drachenwand in German, was the most dangerous BASE jump in Europe. Quinn watched a video of two BASE jumpers climbing the peak, then throwing themselves from the top and plummeting for thousands
of feet, before opening their parachutes and landing on the grassy vale.
This was the BASE jump Noah had executed more than fifteen times?
She closed the laptop, her heart beating hard. Someone who jumped from the top of mountains would be ruthless in the extreme, highly disciplined and calculating.
He said he would watch her. She believed him.
How the hell was she going to get a message to Dima?
[10]
Friday, November 29th
Now she was on her feet, Quinn found her days sliding into a routine surrounding her conversations with Aslan. True to his word, Aslan sought her out during the day, to sit and speak with her. Always, the conversation was about Denis.
She slept in late on most mornings, then came downstairs for breakfast, which the staff learned to have ready for her long after everyone else had gone about their affairs. She would eat by herself in the dining room, then seek the big armchair and the crackling fire.
Only a little while later, Aslan would find her there. He would settle on the upright chair which had gravitated to the fireplace. The waiter would put the silver coffeepot and two cups on the table between them.
While Aslan served coffee, he would ask questions which led Quinn to tell him about Denis. She could tell him anything. Whatever small story she remembered and cared to share seemed to please him. While Aslan sipped his coffee, his gaze stayed on her face as Quinn spoke.
It was easy to talk about Denis with the man. Aslan understood Denis, he knew him better than anyone except Quinn. It was possible Aslan knew Denis even better than she did. They had been together longer than she had been with Denis.
Aslan did not interrupt her. It was only after she had finished some little story when he would nod and make an observation about Denis’s character or his feelings, or what he had been thinking in that moment. Aslan was an undemanding audience. He seemed happy to just listen.
Quinn found herself telling Aslan more and more intimate stories about her time with Denis. She realized that talking about Denis in this way was therapeutic. She was grieving in a unique way.
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