Alex’s tears burned out of her soul and down her face like acid. Her jaw locked and her fists clenched until her knuckles turned white and her fingernails—short as they were—dug into her palms.
Beck squeezed her wrist gently and went on in a voice slightly broken. “I don’t know about you, but to me, that is a huge success. Huge. Because that’s why I went there. That’s why I do this job. For what those twenty-four young people now have. Freedom. And I think if it had played out any other way, if he had had any time at all to think, Ivanovich would have ghosted them all again, just like he had so many times before. But God works in mysterious ways. The pressure on Ivanovich built up fast enough in the right spots that he ran like the coward he is, and today those children are free. And I didn’t know Katya Kostaskaya in person like you did, but from what you’ve told me about her, I think that’s something she would have gladly given her life for.”
Alex gritted her teeth and kicked her running shoes across the room, upsetting several pieces of bric-a-brac on her entertainment center. “Probably, Beck. But she shouldn’t have had to. Who wants to live in a world that gives people, little girls no less, those kinds of choices?”
“Life’s not fair, Aili MacIntire. But God is still good.”
She thrashed at Beck, and he grabbed her hands, held them calmly. She leaned in close to his face. “Katya’s gone; Aggie doesn’t have her! How can that be good?”
He held her eyes the whole time she shouted at him. His tone of response was calm and even. “Because God is still good.”
She finally freed her hands from his grasp. “But you’re trying to make my huge, stupid mistake that day sound like some kind of miracle.”
“‘Sound like?’ Aren’t you supposed to believe in miracles?”
“Well, it depends on what sense you’re talking. I mean—”
“Stop it. That’s the fear speaking. Or maybe the devil himself. No, God comes out of this machine a lot more than we dare give Him credit for. As bad as things can seem, we have no idea how much worse they could be if He wasn’t here.”
“Well, that’s a comforting thought.” Her tone dripped so much irony it must’ve splashed him in the face.
He sighed. “Ah, Aili, don’t you know why I got all up in your business tonight? Why I told you that you had to talk to that fella of yours?”
“Because you’re an incurable meddler. And because you’re a sick sadist who likes to see me cry.”
He laughed. “For the same reason I gave you a chance in Shangku, that I fought with Interpol and the FBI that you should be the one to protect and raise Katya Kostaskaya’s daughter. The same reason I’m sitting here right now explaining all of this to you. Because I want to see you let go of that ridiculous fear and misery that’s been screwing you up for years, probably all your life. I want you to recognize all the gifts and talents you’ve been given and live the big, amazing, wonderful life you were designed to live. Because when I heard you were seeing someone and what a good guy he was, I had so much hope for you, and when Agent White told me he bought an engagement ring, it did my heart a lot of good. Because I want to see you happy.”
Alex tried to breathe around the tight, full heaviness in her heart. “Sometimes you drive me crazy, Benedict, but I think my life would be better if I had a big brother like you.”
He tsked then grinned at her, even as his eyes glistened. “But you do. Maybe he lives a continent, an ocean, and eight time zones away, but you do.”
She laughed a little bit, and he gave her a quick squeeze around the shoulders. They sat in silence a moment, then she burst into tears all over again. He posed a question only with his eyes.
“I just don’t want him to get hurt.”
He gave her a sympathetic smile and pulled her into his arms. “I know.”
* * *
The next day, Alex sat on her back patio with Agent Caplin, watching Aglaya play in the yard. Agent Caplin rested his arms against his belly like he was trying to look relaxed, but he sat up very straight, and he kept using his left foot to check the ankle holster under his right pant leg. He was seriously damaging Alex’s already-fragile calm.
“Beck was right,” she said, not to make conversation, or she would have talked about the warm sunshine and the light, cool breeze. The tow-headed, baby-faced agent was annoying her enough with his cool, professional vigilance that she wanted to mess with his head to make herself feel better. She continued, “He did want to come. My ‘fella,’ I mean.”
Caplin’s eyes scanned the yard again in that creepy way they always did. He nodded, just barely, in an acknowledgment, not necessarily of any specific words she had said, but just of the fact that she was talking.
“My ‘fella.’ I suppose that’s as good a thing to call him as anything else. Matthew Gold. That’s his name, my boyfriend slash fiancé slash soon-to-be ex.”
“I know his name.” Caplin’s voice was quiet but direct.
“Of course you do. You probably know more about him than I do. Your phone probably has his last five years of credit card statements saved on it. You could probably touch a button and find out, to the penny, the balance of his mortgage at this exact moment.”
“He doesn’t have a mortgage.” His cool, blue eyes still scanned the yard. “He paid cash for the house on Santa Maria Boulevard about eight years ago, three months before he married an inner-city kindergarten teacher named Sarah Levin. He got the money by selling his paternal aunt a piece of his equity in his father’s businesses Sunset Coast Retail Company and Sunset Coast Holdings Company.”
Alex realized then what a fun game they were playing. If she were going to mess with him, he would mess with her right back. Well, bring it on, she thought. She was about to get real with this guy. Let’s see what would happen then. “He wanted to come because he doesn’t trust you guys.”
“Hm,” he mumbled. It wasn’t a comment really, but another basic acknowledgment of the sound of her voice.
“He doesn’t trust you. He thinks you’re using my five-year-old daughter as bait.”
Silence then, but it wasn’t the same sort of focused, apathetic silence. This wasn’t the silence of a busy man trying to ignore her dull chatter so he could do his very important job. This was a thinking sort of silence. He was weighing his words. That scared Alexandra because it meant that Matt had been right.
Alex watched lovely Aglaya play and laugh freely in her own backyard where she should have been safe, and she couldn’t breathe.
Finally Caplin said, “You’re not exactly a civilian, Ms. Adelaide, and we don’t look at you that way. You’re one of us, part of our team. You did a lot of good work for the Bureau, and to this day, you’re still working for us, guarding that child, and doing a good job of it. Because you understand our work and what’s at stake, I respect you enough to be straight with you. But surely, you must also understand there are some things going on in this world that carry a little more weight than a single life, even if that life is an innocent child.”
Tears streamed down Alex’s cheeks, and she shook her head. She watched Aggie pick a daisy and chase a butterfly, her striped sundress swirling around her as she moved, a neon rainbow of colors. “Not to me.” Her tone was soft and strangled, but deadly serious.
“I will do everything in my power to protect that little girl right there,” he said, and she knew he meant it. “But Edward Tokan must be stopped.”
And Alex couldn’t argue with that reasoning, not at all. Edward Tokan had been responsible for the serial abuse of an estimated fifteen thousand children over twenty-five years, the untold grief of their desperate families, and the deaths of probably at least eighty percent of those miniature slaves. An estimated twelve thousand children dead. And counting. That was not okay. That was not an acceptable loss. It was horrifying and sick and evil, and it had to end. Sooner, not later. Someone had to put a stop to it.
But this…this was Aglaya. This was Aggie, her Aggie. She watched the little girl climb int
o a swing and hang upside down in it. That one, single, little girl was everything to her. How could anyone live in a world that presented such miserable choices? Watching those familiar strawberry-blonde curls, which were more precious to her than gold, trail back and forth over the grass, Alex asked Agent Caplin, “When did the world get so, so small?”
He watched Aggie too, and maybe his eyes glistened, just a little bit. Maybe. “As small as one human heart, you mean? It’s always been that small.”
Alex had a flash of memory then from, of all things, Dostoevsky’s book The Idiot. It wasn’t black and white text anymore, though. She saw the scene in her head, of just one moment, but such a poignant moment—and so utterly confusing. She saw Prince Leo Myshkin giving his last twenty rubles to the drunken General Ardalion Ivolgin, even after several people had told him, expressly and pointedly, to do nothing of the kind. Her throat tight and her hand over her mouth, she murmured, “I guess the Idiots have always known that.”
Caplin gave his trademark barely nod and observed, “Those Idiots are much wiser than we smart people.”
Katya Nikolanovna Kostaskaya lay on the soiled mattress, propped up with a stack of lumpy, ragged pillows. She was sore, exhausted, and she rested in such a terrible place, yet she was so oblivious to all the nastiness that she might as well have been lying in the richest bedroom of an enormous royal palace. She held her newborn daughter against her breast and gazed down at her with amazement.
“Oh, Anya, you are beautiful,” she whispered, in Russian, of course, though she knew the baby would never speak more than one single word (Mama) of her birth mother’s native tongue. “So beautiful, you are. I am so glad you’re here. I love you so much. You are my special blessing from God, and I love that He gave me you, even though I know I can’t keep you long. I can keep you just long enough, and that is exactly how it should be, and you are like the sunshine in my life.”
She played with the baby’s toes and her face split into a grin when the tiny girl gave a yawn that was interrupted midway by the tiniest hiccup. “Oh, my sweet girl. I love you. And you’re going to have a lovely life. This is an ugly place. I’m sorry because I know it’s dark and dirty here, but you won’t live here long in this ugly place. You are going to grow up in a bright place. A clean place. A place nicer than anywhere I have ever lived. Trust me, I know these things.”
The baby opened her eyelids just a crack and peeked at Katya through them. “You’re skeptical, I can tell,” Katya teased the baby. “But I do know, and I will tell you how I know. I have seen you. I’ve seen you digging in the yellow sand by a big ocean, and I’ve never seen an ocean up close, but you will. You will! I’ve seen you playing in parks with all kinds of people who love you and run like the wind, with beautiful pink-blonde hair trailing behind you almost into eternity. You are almost bald now, but you will have your mama’s curls someday, little Anya. And I have seen all these things. God has shown them to me.”
Katya kissed the baby’s forehead, and the baby cooed softly and sighed.
“Yes, He’s shown me. I got to see these things now, because—” And her voice broke, the only time and only a little. She took a breath then said, “Because I won’t be there. But it’s okay, sweet Anya. It’s okay. You will never want for love. You can trust me; I have seen it. Because your other mama will love you with all of her whole heart. And you will love her too, just as much. She will take such good care of you! It will be better for both of you, because you have each other than either of you having me. She will call you ‘Aglaya,’ which is a most beautiful, wonderful, special name. And her name is Aili.”
Katya laid two fingers on the baby’s chest, feeling the rapid flutter of the tiny child’s heartbeat. “I know all of these beautiful things, my sweet girl. You can trust me because God showed them special just to me. Isn’t that nice? I am so thankful, and I love Him very much. You will love Him very much too. I have seen that more than anything.”
She stroked the baby’s rosy cheeks. “But you want to know the strangest thing? The most magnificent thing? You know that as beautiful it is, the place where you will be? The place where I will be is even much more beautiful! Isn’t that crazy? But it’s true. I have seen it. He showed it to me. And He was there with me, I saw Him! Can you believe it, sweet Anya, my love? It’s true, and it couldn’t possibly be any more beautiful!”
Chapter Ten
Alex’s phone rang, showing a photo of Wendy on the screen. Had Matt asked his sister-in-law to call Alex?
Matt had called Alex several times, but Alex wasn’t doing any answering. Alex made a smile for her voice and answered the phone.
“Hey, stranger,” Wendy greeted, that musical lilt in her voice. “What’s up?”
Alex cracked her fingers and forced her tone into natural parameters. “Oh, nothing much.”
“How are you?”
“Oh, fine. Normal, you know.” Huge lie. She and Aglaya had rattled around her house for two days waiting for something—probably something bad—to happen. She was bored and anxious and tired of being bored and anxious. And she missed Matthew Gold like heartache. “What about you?”
“Oh, just the standard crazy life for a mother of five. You should’ve seen…” Wendy described the mess her kids had made in the kitchen when they made her breakfast last Sunday.
Alex knew all about crazy parenting. As much as she loved Aglaya, the little girl made a trial of herself these days. Aglaya missed her Mattie. Aglaya wanted to go to the park. Aglaya wanted to go see Fern. Aglaya wanted to have Rachel and Micah over to play Escape from the Desert Island. Aglaya didn’t understand why she couldn’t have any of these things that she had asked for so, so nicely.
Alex had lost track of the number of times she had had to tell herself the same thing she’d had to tell herself the day she’d lost Aggie in the front yard, the same day she and Matt had started their relationship (Crap! Matt. Don’t think about Matt! It’ll be easier): “Don’t go off on her. If you do, you’ll scare her, and if you scare her, she will learn to be panicky and unstable, not sharp and vigilant.”
She covered the phone for a second to take a deep breath and tuned back to her normal act for Wendy. “How’s Jacob?”
Wendy laughed and related the latest stresses of Jacob’s job at Sunset Coast. Matt worked at the store too, of course. Alex wanted to ask Wendy about him, but if Wendy didn’t know anything was wrong, it would shoot up a huge warning flare if his almost-fiancée asked his sister-in-law how he was doing. But the questions burned through Alex’s brain day and night.
What was he up to? Would he go to work with all this going on or would he be too worried? Was he eating right and exercising so he stayed sharp? Did he think that he and Alex were over? Were he and Alex over? Was he seeing anyone else yet? She knew she had gotten ridiculous, but in the absence of anything to do, her thoughts just circled the block a million times and went exactly nowhere.
The phone lapsed into awkward silence, and Alex rushed to fill it. “How’re the kids? How’s potty training going with Sarah?”
“She makes me feel like a novice parent, Alex. Honestly. None of my other kids were so bound and determined to stay in diapers. I’ve tried everything.”
“Incentives?”
“Stickers, candy, extra iPad time. None of it has worked. What did you do?”
“I don’t know if I have any advice to give you, Wen. It almost seemed like Aggie was as ready to be done with diapers as I was.” Life had been easy then. Not like now.
Mostly Alex was bored. She hated being bored. Worst thing in the world. Except that wasn’t exactly true. The worst thing in the world was being bored while you were in danger. And, oh, yeah! Alex had the danger part covered too. Yay (without any hint of actual glee, of course).
“How is your sweet girl, anyway?”
“Oh, Aggie’s fine. You know Aggie.”
“Did you take her to the park today? It’s such a nice one. Not too hot.”
“It’s a beau
tiful day, isn’t it? No, we haven’t made it out yet. Maybe later.” Lie. All they had was these four walls and their tiny backyard for the foreseeable future.
Alex warned herself constantly to be calm and vigilant. Keep your head. Be alert. Scan for threats. Reassure Aglaya. Keep your head. Be alert. Look for threats. Be calm and reassuring. Keep your head. Be alert. Watch for threats. Stay calm. Keep your head. Be alert. And if you shoot yourself right now, it will all be over, and you won’t have to listen to this annoying broken record anymore, and wouldn’t that be just so completely, deliciously, wonderfully beautiful! Freedom at last; that would be the ticket!
Alex had no idea what Wendy had told her or what question she was now waiting to be answered. “Oh, that’s my oven alarm, Wendy. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, housework. It never ends, does it?”
“Yeah, I know. Let’s talk again soon, okay?”
Kiss, kiss. Buh-bye. Click.
Alex kind of hated herself for being so false and dismissive with this kind and interesting woman who had become one of the best friends she’d ever had in her life. But it couldn’t be helped. She also had gotten pretty stinking tired of making that same excuse for every asinine thing that she did.
Man, she really hated being bored.
* * *
Alex had burned her toast.
Sometimes she overheard the two FBI agents talking in the next room about the things the Bureau had done to “expedite” the situation here on Orange Grove Avenue.
They were using Aggie as bait.
Most definitely.
They still called Aggie “Aglaya,” and she knew not to trust them too much. There wasn’t much more Alex could do to keep her daughter safe, besides being just as sharp and aware as she always had been. And she only went to sleep when she knew Beck had both eyes on Aggie, which meant she never really slept more than ten minutes at a time. That was fun. She was tired. But That Just Could Not Be Helped.
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