A figure in white stepped between Alex and the accuser. Then the gunshot. The white-clad person crumpled to the ground in the middle of the boulevard. A spot of red spread across his chest as his breath grew congested, then shallow and weak. Alex hardly noticed his life ebb away onto the street.
The executioner pulled off the mask. It was Aili, and she looked satisfied. She turned and walked away, calmly and normally, her figure flickering in and out of the shadows of the boulevard’s side street.
Alex scrambled to her feet as the accuser turned away. “Where are you going?” she asked. When the figure, the twisted clone of herself, didn’t turn back, Alex screamed after it, “No! NO!”
Suddenly it was full daylight, and the city was a city again. A snap of the fingers and all the lights in the buildings were on, and the buildings and streets were full of people, all going about their business as if nothing strange had happened at all.
No one looked at Alex, standing barefoot in the middle of the street. No one even seemed to notice her, except one woman. This woman was middle-aged and pretty but tired-looking. She had the tan skin and flowing blonde hair of a life-long beach bum; she could have been any one of a million aging California girls. She wore a white button-up with a teal tank top under it, both tucked into a pair of white “mom jeans” fastened with a woven, brown leather belt.
She was walking on the sidewalk, but stopped when she noticed Alex. She gave her a look that was part puzzlement, part sadness, part incredulity. She asked, in lightly accented English, “What do you want? What is wrong with you? Do you need to die too?”
“Who are you?” Alex asked her.
The woman shook her head in frustration and told Alex, “Go home!”
Then she turned away and continued walking up the boulevard. Alex watched her go, and suddenly she knew who the woman was. The tan, the hair, and the clothes had thrown her off, but she had seen that face before, about four years ago. She had gazed into it, watched tears stream silently down it while she told the whole pathetic, terrible story of Operation Free Bird and what had happened in the Shangku jungle.
Tatiana Kostaskaya. Katya’s mother, the bereaved woman who lost her daughter once when she disappeared, then again when she learned of her death. The woman who had cared tirelessly for her dying husband. Nikolai had clung to life for years to learn of his oldest child’s fate and died just days after Kati’s memorial service. Right after his funeral, Nikolai’s wife surrendered her lovely granddaughter to Alex’s clumsy care, extracting a promise that if the disgraced FBI agent was to be the one to raise and protect that baby, the last living piece of her precious and fearless daughter, Alex must—absolutely must—love her too, with all of her heart, as her very own.
“Go home!” Tatiana’s last words echoed through Alex’s head as she stood in the exact center of the intersection with cars buzzing and honking around her and a dead man at her feet.
“Mama, why are you crying?” Aglaya was sitting on the asphalt, with the white figure’s head in her lap.
“I’m not crying,” Alex told her.
* * *
But she was. She woke in Aggie’s dark bedroom with tears streaming down her face.
“You are crying, Mama.” Aggie was cuddled in Alex’s arms, and her little hands rubbed gently at the tears that dripped over the bridge of Alex’s nose, trying to wipe them away before they could soak the pillow they shared, a pillow that already had a sizable wet spot on it.
“Oh, honey.” Alex squeezed her daughter tight. She had meant to be guarding her little girl, but had fallen asleep holding her instead. Aggie’s clock radio said 1:23 a.m. Alex had slept soundly for hours, by far the longest she had slept in several days.
“Are you okay?” the little girl asked her.
“I had a sad dream. That’s all.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, Mama.”
“Go back to sleep, honey. It’s okay.”
Aggie sighed and turned over, snuggling into a “spoon” position with Alex, her back against Alex’s belly, her head pressed against her heart. She started to drift off quickly but when a dull thud came from the spare bedroom next to hers, she bolted awake. Alex heard it too. For a second, neither of them breathed. Then Aggie asked, in a voice barely above her strangled breath, “Mama? What was that sound?”
Alex allowed herself a few seconds to decide what to do. She could try to hide her daughter in her room while she investigated the noise in the spare room or tried to get help from one of the other agents in another part of the house. Only… if Alex was incapacitated, Aglaya would be defenseless.
Alex could call 9-1-1, but ordinary Glendale cops weren’t prepared for guerrilla-trained assassins. Also, if Tokan’s assassins saw emergency responders, things were going to escalate quickly on Orange Grove Avenue, and Alex’s daughter would suffer for that.
She could take her daughter with her while she looked for back-up. If Alex found herself in the line of fire, Aglaya would too, but at least she’d be with her mother. This, to Alex, seemed the least bad of all the terribly miserable options that she had.
She drew the gun from her ankle holster and pulled Aggie into her arms. The little girl wrapped her arms around Alex’s neck and her legs around Alex’s waist, and Alex stood, glad that she kept up with her strength training workouts. This kid was not getting lighter. Her gun aimed in front of her, held securely in both hands, Alex opened the door and silently exited the room, checking, gun first, in each direction with every step that she took. She made her way toward the point where the bedroom hallway opened into the top of a “T,” one way going toward the great room, the other toward the front door.
When they reached the split, Alex looked toward the living room, where her limited view of the wall with the entertainment center showed her nothing in the way of live bodies. This was one of the worst spots in the house, because it split off into the hallway in both directions, and where the hallway ended toward the living room, the wall hid a blind alcove.
Even though she trusted Beck the most of all the agents in her house, she decided Caplin—stationed by the front door—would be the most accessible, so she turned in that direction.
Caplin was lying flat on his back on the floor. Alex swore to herself silently. She put Aggie down, stationed her at the mouth of the hall, with her back against the wall on the door side. She could tell Aggie wanted to ask what was wrong with Mr. Caplin, but she didn’t dare open her mouth. And Alex didn’t dare open hers to tell her. The discovery of the incapacitated fibbie upset Alex. The noise she and Aggie had heard from the spare bedroom hadn’t been a no-big-deal thing. FBI field agents weren’t injured—or killed—by innocuous noises.
Praying he’d be revivable, Alex made her way to the body…and saw in a second that he was dead. His trachea had been crushed, and a bullet had been put between his eyes, a quick one-two punch that had first silenced and choked him, then ended his life maybe a second later. Alex looked toward the door, which had somehow been removed completely from its hinges and propped up on the porch, still mostly covering the doorway. Alex gave herself two seconds to decide whether to go out the front door—where more hostiles could be waiting—or head to the great room where she hoped Agent Beck would be healthy and armed. But before she could even weigh the downsides, she heard a childish scream that was brief, then muffled, then silent.
Alex turned back to where her daughter had been, and she stopped breathing. Somewhere she had made a mistake. Somewhere she had miscalculated a risk or turned a wrong direction, or maybe she’d just made the mistake of being born so pathetically human that she could only be in one place at a time, but a man in black body armor stood right there, just a couple steps away, at the end of the hall toward the great room—and he had Aggie.
The man had a gun on his back, an arm around Aglaya’s waist, and a hand over her mouth. Alex stood up on grounded legs, held her semi-automatic handgun out steady with both arms, flipped the safety with one, mean jerk of a thumb, and took a
im at his head as she stepped forward into the cross of the hallway, cutting the distance between them. She didn’t care one iota if this fool ate at Tokan’s right hand at his personal dinner table every Sunday afternoon; she would blow his brains to Amsterdam and back before she let him ghost her innocent, vulnerable five-year-old daughter.
Too late, she realized someone was behind her, coming at her from her seven o’clock. The figure had come out of the spare room, and now rushed at her down the hall. Before Alex could even look over her shoulder, the world went black.
Transcript of a phone call between Special Agent Melinda White of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Sheriff Philip Anderson of Marion County, Indiana
White: I understand your concerns, sir, but—
Anderson: No, ma’am, I don’t think you do. I have a deputy in a coma right now. They’re telling me it’s alcohol poisoning, but I know she’s been sober five years. She had no reason to relapse at this point, and now she’s never gonna wake up. She has a little boy who just turned a year old. I was at that birthday party. What am I supposed to tell that child now? What am I supposed to tell her husband?
White: I can refer you to some grief counselors—
Anderson: It’s not the (expletive deleted) grief! It’s this case! Ever since we started building it, I’ve been getting these creepy calls at home, and my wife’s identity was stolen. One of my guys found a hollowed-out deer carcass hanging on his front porch one morning! And was it a normal deer? No! It was a reindeer! A (expletive deleted) reindeer! Like we got some kinda sick Santa Claus giving us visits! And I know this is all connected, because the only girl who ever dared say a word to us about this pimp turned up face down in a field less than half mile from our station! And what was in her pocket? An ID. Specifically, that girl’s picture on my wife’s driver’s license!
White: I know this all is alarming, Sheriff.
Anderson: Alarming?! That ain’t the half! I called you guys a month ago, because I knew we need help on this, but this…this is a lot more than I bargained for. And you aren’t helping a bit!
Anderson: I assure you, Sheriff, we have put some of our best analysts on this case. We have been pursuing this criminal a long time, and—
Anderson: Then why the (expletive deleted) haven’t you caught him? Who are these people that they can even do stuff like this?
White: Well, that is one of the questions we’ve been working on, Sheriff Anderson. We believe this pimp is only a middleman in a worldwide forced prostitution network, and—
Anderson: And you think my little Sheriff’s Department is cut out to take on some big monster like that? Oh, (expletive deleted), no.
White: Your department brought the case to us, Sheriff. And we have only asked you to provide intelligence and back-up support.
Anderson: Well, I’m done. I’ve got a community and a department to protect, and right now all that is falling behind so I can try to help some foreign street trash.
White: Sheriff, these children are not trash. They are people’s daughters and sons. Tax-paying people just like those who pay your salary. If we are learning anything at all in this investigation, it’s that this could happen to anyone’s child. Yes, some of these children have come from abusive home situations, but does that make the children themselves any less deserving of protection and care? Are they any less deserving of justice, just because they didn’t get any at home?
Anderson: Special Agent, I’ve got to think about my children, and the children of those in my department. Who protects them if these people take all of us out, like they did Deputy Shannon Harris? Can you answer me that?
White: Sheriff, we will provide all the protection we can. We just need you to keep an eye on the house one more night. I’m on my way out there right now. I’m assembling a team of agents and—
Anderson: You assemble all the teams you want, Agent. Just make sure they’re big enough to handle the situation in that house. Because when you go into that hellhole, no one from my department will be with you.
White: Sheriff, you can’t stop the surveillance. If you do, they will disappear, like they have so many times over the years.
Anderson: I can’t, can I? It’s already been done. I’ve got a hospital room to guard.
White: Sheriff, please, that surveillance is crucial. You must understand—
(Phone slams down. Dial tone.)
White: (expletive deleted)!
Chapter Twelve
Alex’s eyes shot open, and she tried to sit up.
“Easy, easy,” Agent White said. She dropped the ammonia she had been holding under Alex’s nose and helped her prop herself slowly.
“What happened?” Alex asked.
The handler nodded at a brute man who sat with his arms cuffed behind him while an agent Alex didn’t recognize held a rifle under his nose, “That one beaned you with his rifle. You’ve only been out a few minutes. But it’s all over.”
“Aggie!” Alex screamed, suddenly remembering her little girl helpless in the other intruder’s arms.
“It’s okay, Mama,” her daughter responded, appearing at her left elbow and climbing into her lap. “I’m safe now, Mama.” Aggie covered Alex’s face in sloppy, sticky, jam-scented kisses, and Alex didn’t mind it a bit. She wrapped her arms around her daughter.
“Who gave you jam?” She tried to wipe off the child’s face with her own sleeve. It was probably a ridiculous concern at a time like this, with at least two hired assassins being held captive inside her house and a dead FBI agent in her front hall. But then again, Alex always would be this girl’s mother, and she took a bit of comfort and peace from the normalness of having to clean her young child’s face.
Aggie only giggled at Alex’s silliness.
Alex peered at Agent White while her eyes filled with tears. “You saved her. Thank you.”
Agent White shrugged. “Actually, I didn’t.” She nodded back in the direction from where Aggie had come. “He did.”
Alex turned and saw Matt sitting on the couch, looking a bit rumpled, with a spot of blood seeping through some bulky white wrapping on his right upper arm. He smiled at her. “Hey,” he said, “you okay, babe?”
She cried some more, and he came over and crouched on the floor wrapping his arms around her and her daughter. “It’s okay. I mean, I broke one of your bar stools, but I’ll get you a new one, I promise. I’ll get you a whole new set if you want it.”
“Why are you here?” she asked finally, with a sob.
“I realized it was time to stop calling and come over to see you. You were asleep when I got here, so I waited. I was talking with Beck when they broke in, and Agent Caplin went down. We took cover in the dining room while he called for back-up and tried to work up a strategy. But when that guy brought Aggie out here, I lost it a bit, and—”
“You saved our daughter,” she blurted.
“What else was I gonna do?”
She didn’t answer, and he kissed her. And he kissed her again and again, until Agent White pushed him away. “Hey, mind her head. She still needs an x-ray and all that before she does anything too strenuous. And you! Remember you sustained a GSW and might be in shock.”
“I’m not in shock,” he said.
White insisted, “One of the major symptoms of shock is thinking you’re not in shock.”
He laughed a little and smoothed Alex’s hair. “Then what are the major symptoms of not being in shock?”
White pursed her lips but backed off a little.
Alex stroked the soft skin inside his elbow and eyed the lumpy field dressing on his arm. “You let Beck patch you up, didn’t you? You shouldn’t have done that. He doesn’t know a bandage from his own right arm.”
“Or my right arm for that matter,” Matt teased her.
“Well, he doesn’t.”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. The ambulance will be here to get us in just a few minutes. Then they can fix whatever he did wrong. After they look at your head, of course
.”
She sighed and he smiled. He kissed her again.
* * *
It wasn’t over.
That thought swirled around in Alex’s head as she rode in the ambulance with Matt and her daughter by her side, got her x-rays, and waited for the radiologist to give her a clean bill of health. She fidgeted in another exam room and watched a physician’s assistant patch up the grazing gunshot wound on Matt’s arm, where the assailant who beaned her had shot him but mostly missed (mostly).
It wasn’t over.
She had always known that, but she wasn’t sure if Matt realized it. She hoped he at least had an idea, that he wasn’t thinking she and Aggie would go straight back to the cozy house on Orange Grove Avenue where they would live and laugh, where he could drop by, and where, eventually, he could present her with that diamond ring he purchased a few weeks back.
She wanted to tell him, to explain everything, and she hated that she had to wait. Because it wasn’t exactly the thing you could discuss in front of EMTs, radiologists, or physician’s assistants.
It was only when they were leaving the hospital in a car driven by a stern-looking FBI lady, whom Beck introduced as Agent Decker, that Alex could speak freely at last. It was almost dawn by that point, and Aggie was curled up in Matt’s lap, fast asleep.
“We need to talk about what happens now,” she said.
Matt looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean this isn’t over.”
“Oh, I know that. They have to catch Tokan.”
“And that will take time.”
“Well, a little, but Beck told me that they would be questioning the suspects right away. They probably already have. We were in that hospital for hours, and their best interrogators were already waiting. He said they would want to swoop in and capture Tokan before he could disappear again, and they had already mobilized strike forces in all four of the regions that he was most likely to be hiding.”
“But Aggie won’t be safe until he is brought to justice. She’s a threat to him until his crimes are on the record, and he’s convicted. That could be months, at the least, maybe even a couple years.”
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