by Cindy Dees
Isabella did her best to stay out of the way as Anya and her coach ate breakfast and began the mental psych up for this afternoon’s skate. The two women talked through Anya’s program, reviewing every detail. It was shocking how involved a single, four-and-a-half minute long routine could be. It was planned, literally, down to the exact number of foot strokes.
At about midmorning, Anya and her coach went for a walk for a change of scenery and a mental break. Karen stayed ahead of them and Isabella trailed close behind. After a light lunch, Anya headed back to her room for a nap while her coach ran a few errands.
Isabella and Karen cleared the room, then stepped outside, preparing to hand over guard duty to Misty and Kat.
A scream erupted from inside Anya’s room. It was followed by an anguished wail. Isabella charged inside, ready to kill. They were through the door before Isabella registered that it had been locked and they’d busted right through the doorjamb. Anya stood in the middle of her room, keening, handfuls of rags grasped in her hands.
“What’s wrong?” Isabella asked her sharply.
“My costumes!”
Isabella frowned. “What about them?”
“They’re ruined!” Anya cried.
Isabella’s gaze went back to the brightly colored rags. Those were her costumes? They were shredded to ribbons.
She noticed a small crowd had gathered in the hall. “Show’s over, folks.” She closed the door in the onlookers’ faces. It only half-latched, but it was enough to keep the gawkers at bay.
She turned to deal with the disaster. “Are any of them salvageable?” she asked Karen, who was examining the dresses. Her teammate was having trouble even finding a recognizable top so she could hold them up. Karen shook her head in the negative.
“When’s the last time you saw them intact?” Isabella asked the skater.
She repeated her question before Anya gasped out between what had turned into wracking sobs, “Th-th-this morning.”
When they were out taking their walk and eating, then. Housekeeping had come in during that time to clean the room and straighten the bed. And someone had come in to wreak a little havoc, too, apparently. She keyed her throat mike. “Ops, Adder.”
“Go ahead, dahlin’,” Beau drawled.
“Someone got into the subject’s room and destroyed all of her costumes. Probably within the last thirty to forty minutes. Subject is safe.”
“Gee whiz. That sucks. Doesn’t she skate in a few hours?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s she gonna wear?” Beau asked.
Isabella sighed heavily. “No idea. We’ll cross that bridge later. Can you locate her coach, an Aussie named Liz Cartwright, and get her here ASAP?”
“You betchya, sweet pea.”
Never in her wildest dreams would she have guessed any man could call her sweet pea and not completely piss her off, but the guy was harmless.
Roughly ten minutes later, Liz Cartwright burst into the room. She took one look at Anya’s ruined costumes and her eyes snapped like lightning. She might be a tiny thing, but she clearly had a she-bear’s king-size temper. She gathered Anya in a motherly hug and let the girl cry on her shoulder.
Eventually, she murmured over Anya’s head to Isabella, “I need you to call the ISU. Tell them what’s happened. Ask for permission to skate in training wear or something.”
Isabella nodded and called Beau. “Hey, Hobo, it’s me. I need a phone number. Woman’s name is Lily Gustavson. She’s an ISU official.”
“I S who?”
She smiled. “ISU. International Skating Union. The governing body for the women’s figure skating competition.”
Beau was still tracking down a phone number for Ms. Gustavson, who happened to be the only ISU official whose name Isabella knew off the top of her head, when a knock sounded on the door.
Phone still plastered to her ear, Isabella cracked it open. Blinked. Opened the door all the way. No less than twenty young women stood there, all carrying garment bags.
“Uh, Beau,” Isabella said into the phone, “never mind. If I need that number, I’ll call you back.” To the young women she said, “May I help you?”
“Well,” said one of them, “actually, we were wondering if we could help you. We heard what happened. So we brought our extra costumes to see if one of them might fit Anya. My name’s Ashley Caldwell. I’m American.”
As if Isabella couldn’t figure that one out by the girl’s Texas twang. “Come on in, ladies.” She stepped back from the door.
Anya looked up, red-eyed, as nearly two dozen of her competitors piled into the room and proceeded to unzip their bags and spill out a riot of silk organza and crystals all over the king-size bed. Giggles erupted before long and the party was on. The girls laughed and chattered, trading their opinions on everything from the latest rock music to which of the male skaters was the cutest.
Before long, Anya was smiling tentatively. Half a dozen costumes into the impromptu gathering, she was laughing along with the others. It turned out the girls came from all over the world: Karis Neidermeier of Germany, who was one of the favorites to win; Kimberly and Stephanie Takamura, sisters from Indonesia; Shyamali Fernandes from Argentina; Alyssa Walcheka of Russia; Sara Dormonkova of Ukraine; Alexandria Marweshandra of India.
And every last one of them offered up gorgeous costumes worth thousands of dollars to an unknown skater from a tiny country who had no realistic chance to win this competition. Isabella was touched enough that she finally asked, “Why are all of you doing this?”
Darlene Cameron, a Canadian, answered for all of them. “Because she’d do the same for us. Skaters get a bad rap for being cutthroat and unfriendly, but it’s not true. Sure, there’s the occasional nasty skater. But all of us have worked so hard to get here, we can’t help but respect each other.”
Karis Neidermeier piped up in her precise English. “Each of us competes against a numerical standard. All I can do is skate my best and post the highest score I can. We only compete against each other to the extent that I hope my best is better than someone else’s best on a given day.”
“And anyway, judges are sometimes right and sometimes not,” one of the Takamura sisters added. “Not always does best skater win. You do your best and not worry about results.”
Alyssa, the Russian skater laughed. “I admit I sometime wish for other skater bad day have. But nothing I do make them do better or worse score. So it is nothing if I hope for them to fall or skate clean.”
All the girls laughed. Isabella got the gist of what the girl was trying to say. It didn’t matter whether the skaters rooted for or against each other, because it was up to each skater to do her best or not do her best. Therefore, the skaters didn’t bear each other any direct animosity. They concentrated instead on skating well themselves and not worrying about the others. A pretty healthy attitude overall.
Anya stepped out of her bathroom in a stunning yellow silk costume that faded into fire-engine red at the bottom of the skirt. It had plunging V’s of flesh-colored tricot, front and back, that went practically to her waist. It was slathered in faceted crystals and burned like fire against Anya’s skin. All the girls oohed and ahhed.
“That’s the one!” they exclaimed.
Isabella sighed, and spoke up from her perch by the door where she was keeping an eye on the maintenance man fixing the door frame. “I hate to be a wet blanket, Anya, but that’s a pretty…suggestive…costume.”
Anya rolled her eyes. “It’s got fabric up to my neck. Nothing shows!”
“Honey, on television, it’ll look like you’re half-naked. There’s already an uproar over the fact that you’re skating at all. I really don’t think you should fan the flames by wearing something that racy.”
The room went silent. With a defiant edge to it. Crud. The other girls had no idea what was really at stake here. Isabella tried again. “People want to kill you. There’s no reason to egg them on by waving a big red-and-yellow flag at them.”
Anya scowled. “I understand you’re trying to look out for me. But I am not here to make a political or religious statement. I’m here to skate in the Olympics. Period. And I’ll wear whatever I want. This costume is gorgeous, and if Karis wouldn’t mind my borrowing it, I want to wear it. It makes me feel pretty.”
Several of the girls jumped in. “It makes you look pretty, too…. Those colors are awesome with your coloring…. I say go for it….”
Isabella closed her eyes in a combination of frustration and dismay. “Anya. My job is to keep you alive. If you do this, you’re going to enrage people who are already gunning for you. Literally. I can’t let you do this.”
Anya spoke firmly. “’Bella, you must let me do this. On behalf of all the women who are still trapped behind the veil.”
Aww, hell. Did Anya have to nail her Achilles’ heel like that? A sinking feeling settled in the pit of her stomach as she realized she was going to let the girl skate in the gorgeous costume. And just as surely, they both were going to regret it.
Chapter 10
Isabella escorted Anya and her coach into the covered tunnel that took the skaters practically all the way to the ice, protecting them from the spectators. But nothing could protect Anya once she stepped onto the rink. Thirty thousand people would be within striking range, and the girl would have nothing but a thin layer of silk between herself and all of them.
Anya was parked in a mirrored, heated waiting room, hanging on to a ballet bar with her foot over her head, stretching, when Isabella’s cell phone rang.
“Go ahead,” she murmured.
“Hey, baby. It’s Hobo.”
Baby? This was an open frequency, able to be monitored by anyone in the Ops center. She replied briskly, “What do you need?”
“I’ve got a pile of news for ya.”
She stuck a finger in her free ear and turned away from the speaker blaring music into the room. “Lay it on me.”
“Well, you remember that fella you and me were both chasing the day we first bumped into each other? When we got all tangled up and—”
She cut him off. “I remember. What of it?”
Breckenridge laughed. “You’re just playing hard to get, aren’t you?”
Hard to get? God help her if Dex was monitoring this call. “Did you have some news for me or not, Rhett?”
“As in Butler?” He laughed heartily in her ear. “Why, thank you kindly for that. Let’s see. First, the FBI got a fingerprint match on that guy you whupped up on in the alley. He’s a Bhoukari kid named Reda Aziz. We don’t know much about him, but we’re trying to find out more from his government.”
“Ask if he’s a disciple of Ahmed al Abhoud’s.”
“Wilco, baby.”
Her voice silky with the promise of violence, she said, “Beau, quit calling me baby.”
“All right…dahlin’.”
Incorrigible. “Anything else?”
“The FBI also ID’d some of Lazlo Petrovich’s friends from last night. Turns out they’re the skater’s father, mother and two sisters. One of the other three guys is a dude called Ilya Gorabchek. Chechnyan terrorist with a rap sheet a mile long. The Russians have already asked the Justice Department for permission to nab him, but they got turned down. It’s the Olympics, after all. So now they’re trying to work some quickie extradition deal for the Americans to arrest him and ship him back to the motherland.”
“What about the other two thugs?” she asked.
“Still working on it. FBI’s guessing they’ll turn out to be associates of Gorabchek’s.”
She frowned. Associates? As in, say, members of the same terrorist cell? That didn’t sound good. “Any other news?”
“Some guy named Picante or something called. Said to tell you no luck on the search yet. Should I be jealous of this guy, baby?” Fumbling noises came from the other end of the phone as if Beau had just jerked the receiver well away from his ear.
She gritted her teeth. “The name is Piccone. Lake Placid police. He’s looking for Al Abhoud for me. And if you call me baby again, I’m going to have to hurt you.”
A new male voice replied dryly, “Sounds like fun, but I’ll pass. And trust me, I’ll never call you baby.”
Aww, jeez. Dex.
“Hello, Dex,” she mumbled in chagrin.
“Adder.”
“Anything I can do for you, sir?”
“How’s it going over there?”
“So far so good. But I haven’t put her on the ice yet.”
“I’ve sent every warm body I can spare to the arena to mingle with the crowd and keep an eye out.”
“Thanks. And we’ll need the help. Wait till you get a load of her costume.”
“What did she do?” Dex asked in alarm.
“Watch her on television. You can’t miss it.”
He swore under his breath. “We didn’t need any more complications.”
“Tell me about it. I tried to talk her out of it.” Her conscience twinged. She could’ve tried harder. But a secret part of her wanted Anya to wear that daring costume, wanted her to make the bold statement it represented.
“Yell if you need anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Quit sirring me. You’re making me feel like an old man.”
She retorted, “Hey, at least I’m not calling you ‘baby.’”
“You need me to kick Hobo’s ass for you?”
So, he had been listening in on the frequency. “Thanks, but I’ll kick his butt myself if it comes to that.”
“I’m serious. Do you need me to back him off?”
“I’m serious, too. I’ll take care of it myself.”
“But—”
She cut him off. “If one of your men were having a problem with another guy calling him names he didn’t like, would you intervene?”
“Hell, no. I’d tell him to either get over it or do something about it.”
“There you have it,” she said firmly.
He exhaled hard. Sounded frustrated.
“You gotta let go of this need to protect the girls, Dex. I’m telling you. I can take care of myself.”
He retorted, albeit very quietly, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should always have to.”
“It does until we’ve earned the respect of everyone in the Special Ops community.”
Another sigh. “That’s going to take a while.”
She shrugged, even though Dex couldn’t see it at the other end of the line. “Then I guess I’ll be fighting my own battles for a while to come.”
Dex must not have known what to say in response for there was heavy silence at the other end of the line.
“Gotta go,” she announced. “It’s time for Anya’s warm-up.”
“Be safe.”
“Always.”
She pocketed the phone and escorted Anya into the tunnel. Someone came rushing at them from behind, and Isabella whirled, her hands up at the defensive. Lily Gustavson. The ISU official. The woman shoved something at Anya, and Isabella intercepted it reflexively. She looked down. The black fleece wad resolved itself into a jacket and a cap with a jaunty, multicolored pom-pom.
“What’s this?” Isabella asked.
“We heard about what happened earlier. We’re concerned about the safety of all the skaters, so the ISU is providing matching warm-up jackets and hats for all the female skaters. All the other girls have agreed to wear them during the warm-up so that Anya will be difficult to distinguish.”
Isabella looked around. Sure enough, the other skaters crowding into the tunnel, talking to the their coaches, taking off their skate guards and jumping up and down were all wearing identical jackets. She handed the garment to Anya, who was already taking off her red sweater.
Anya put on the jacket and looked at the ISU official. “Thanks,” she whispered.
Isabella started. Anya looked close to tears. It was the first chink she’d seen in the girl’s otherwise bubbly armor. “That was very kind
of you,” Isabella added.
The blond woman smiled. “Good luck, Anya. The hearts of millions of women around the world go with you.”
Anya’s eyes widened. Never thought of it like that, huh? Abruptly the girl looked nervous. Aww, hell. Isabella knew from her own training that sometimes it was a bad thing to think too much about what you were doing. Sometimes you just had to put the danger and the difficulty of a task out of your mind and go for it.
She put a hand on Anya’s shoulder. “Just focus on your skating. There’ll be plenty of time to worry about all the rest of it later.”
Liz piped up, “What’s the first thing you have to think about?”
“Take my time on the opening arms, then push off strongly. Long glide…”
Isabella smiled as the girl fell easily into the litany of her program. She was ready.
A male ISU official called from the gate at the edge of the ice, “Group three, onto the ice please. You will have six minutes to warm up. Our first skater will be Kimberly Takamura. She may stay on the ice at the end of the warm-up period.”
As a group, the young ladies stepped up to the gate and onto the ice.
And Anya was gone. Out of Isabella’s hands and into the fingers of fate.
In the past week, she’d started to feel almost like a big sister to Anya. And all she could do now was stand by and watch. She moved up to the rail beside Liz.
“How do you stand here and watch so calmly?” Isabella murmured to her.
Liz laughed. “I’m a mess. But I can’t let my skater see that. Besides, she’s either ready or she’s not. No coaching I do now will make a difference. My only job at this point is to get her into the right frame of mind. The rest is up to her.”
Isabella glanced around the big arena. If other OSG types were roaming around, they were being subtle about it. She looked back to the ice. The matching black jackets and hats were working. All the skaters looked the same. The only reason she could pick out Anya was because she was so familiar with the girl’s build and movements. Still, it was the longest six minutes Isabella had ever experienced.
A bright light exploded to their left, and Isabella coiled to launch herself at Anya before she registered the source of the flash. A team of television broadcasters had just gone back on the air and were talking into the cameras directly beneath the row of bright lights. Oh, good Lord. Now she was jumping at stage lights.