Minutia in movement betrayed breathing behind his back.
In his mind’s eye he saw the man whose neck he’d locked onto, face not far from his, staring at his head.
Seconds dragged on like minutes.
A metal tip pressed through the pillowcase, against his throat, and a ragged voice whispered, “When is end, you pay. Urvan does not forget.”
Jack pressed against the knife, fast enough, deep enough for the point to draw blood. The blade jerked away.
Urvan hissed, “Psikh yebanutyi.”
There were a handful of ways to interpret that.
Psycho motherfucker was what the guy had meant.
Mocking laughter followed.
Urvan returned to where he’d started, and silence settled, and pain at Jack’s throat joined pain in his head and the burn of stiffening muscles and a thirst that had started with the fight and had only grown more intense since, comforting discomfort in the way so much of the hell from his childhood was comforting, because pain was familiar and he understood what was familiar and he’d been here before—a dozen times in a dozen places—interrogated, sleep deprived, beaten, starved, until reality turned inside out and his own mind betrayed him.
He’d been thirteen the first time, snatched off the streets of Bucaramanga by two men on a motorbike, and thrown into the back of a truck before he’d had a chance to react. Faces hidden by bandanna masks, camouflage and boots, AKs pointed at his head had all kept him on his stomach against the rusted floorboards.
The kidnappers had stashed him in an old storage tank, where day and night had blended together and solitude had been broken by cruelty. They had said they’d release him only if ransom was paid, had threatened to cut off toes and fingers, and had demanded information he couldn’t give. He’d relived and replayed that first half hour over and over, all the things he could have done, should have done, instead of panicking and losing track of place and time the way he had.
He hadn’t known if it was real or another of Clare’s tests.
He had been forced to conquer fear in that damp, dank dark, and he’d drawn upon his training, searching for ways to turn their habits and patterns to his advantage.
But he hadn’t escaped, not that first time.
Clare had come for him in the dead of night.
She’d shoved a knife in one hand, a garrote in the other, and crept him past the sleeping sentries, gotten him home, fed him, debriefed him, and then vanished for a week. The only thing he had to point to her involvement was that she hadn’t summarily executed the men who’d guarded him, but Clare’s immediate choices didn’t always make immediate sense. “You still have a lot to learn,” was all she’d said about it. “There’ll come a time when I won’t be able to protect you.”
He had sworn he’d never give her another chance, and never had.
He’d talked, lied, wrangled, tricked, traded, cut, dug, broken and, as a last resort, fought his own way to freedom every damn time, and he’d have done it again here, too, if he didn’t already know they’d set him free of their own accord.
Voices from within the building brought him back to the present.
At his back clothing rustled and chairs scraped tile.
The door opened, stayed opened several long seconds, and shut.
Three, possibly four people had entered.
Conversation followed, too low to hear but with none of the braggadocio or fist-bumping camaraderie that would come with a change of guard or a simple message delivery. Rank had arrived with an entourage.
This was whom his captors had been waiting on.
Bodies drew near.
Hands pulled the pillowcase off his head, and ten thousand lumens hit his face.
Eyes smarting, tears forming, he winced against the light.
A shadow dulled the brightness and morphed into the backlit outline of a man in a suit. The man tugged his pant legs and squatted to eye level and studied Jack’s face for a few long, silent seconds, then shifted to examine the neck wound and followed the trail of blood.
In accented English, he said, “You are shot?”
The question arrived more as surprise than concern, but that it had been asked at all was a message of its own. Jack tipped his head in the knife-wielder’s direction.
“Urvan stabbed me,” he said. The words scratched out like cotton dragged through brush.
The man motioned to the right.
Someone Jack couldn’t see put a bottle to his lips.
Water sloshed into his face, painted a patina over the desert in his mouth, and dribbled down his chin. Whoever held the bottle stepped aside.
Jack said, “My sister. Where is she?”
The man in the suit leaned in closer and looked at the neck wound again.
“She is near,” he said.
The reply was as much a nonanswer as the inquiry had been a non-question.
The suit tipped his chin toward someone off to the side.
The light cut off.
Jack’s eyes adjusted.
He faced a windowless wall, and the odd shadows on it spoke of table lamps on the floor and folding chairs and emptiness.
The man in the suit stood, flicked a finger toward the opposite wall.
Footsteps shuffled, the room emptied, and the door shut.
The man motioned to the restraints and then the chair.
“Is not meant to be like this,” he said. “Even so, we meet at last.”
The words implied Dmitry where Dmitry didn’t fit—where he didn’t want Dmitry to fit—and Jack scrutinized the face, searching for clarity.
The man said, “You are not recognizing me?”
Jack said, “I don’t know.”
In all twenty-six of his years, he’d only ever seen two photos of the man he assumed was his father, both of which had been taken before he was born, and neither of which had come from Clare. They’d arrived as bona fides together with the tickets to Berlin, sent by the voice who’d claimed to speak for Dmitry.
This man was anywhere between late fifties and late sixties, six feet, give or take, with a head of thick brown hair, a solid build, and the clear skin of a man who went heavy on clean eating and light on booze relative to a hard-drinking culture, but any resemblance he had to those photos was far off and faint, muddied by time and questionable provenance.
Jack didn’t believe this was Dmitry.
He also didn’t want to believe this was Dmitry.
And, like a therapist struggling to diagnose his own delusion, he was forced to give credence to a possibility he’d have otherwise rejected.
The suit pulled a key from his pocket and dangled it off a finger.
He said, “You like the chair?”
“I love the chair,” Jack said. “I also love redundant questions.”
The suit chuffed. He said, “If I unlock, we sit, we talk, have food, some drink, and you sleep in nice bed tonight. Or you fight, run, and men outside door put you back in chair, maybe use knife more on neck.”
Jack forced a patient smile. “If we were interested in fighting or running, we wouldn’t have let you pick us up in the first place.”
“Let?”
“Allow.”
“I know the meaning.”
Jack’s shoulders drooped, and he sighed loud and long, as if these were just so many wasted words. He said, “We traveled to Europe to meet Dmitry. You used that to bring us here, to this.” He tugged the shackles for emphasis. “There’s nothing you could possibly want from us badly enough to go through the effort you’ve gone through if you actually thought we were dumb enough to believe we’d find Dmitry waiting for us in Prague. That’s why you sent those Spetsnaz rejects to collect us, instead of showing up yourself. And we knew you’d pull some stupid stunt like this and came to Prague anyway, which means there’s also something we want from you. So why would we run or fight if we don’t yet have what we came to get?”
The suit stayed silent for a bit, as if weighing each word,
and then he leaned in to unlock a single wrist and stepped out of reach.
Jack shook his hand free and rubbed itching skin hard against his thigh.
The man tossed him the key.
Jack snatched metal from the air, put his arm back into the position in which it’d been shackled, opened his fist, and there, with the key nestled neatly in the center of his palm, he winked. All those years of hell, the broken bones, stitches, concussions, welts, bruises, and scars, they’d never been about bullets and blood. They’d been about this.
Legerdemain.
Mental prestidigitation.
That’s what Clare had always been after.
The rest had been to support the illusion, the way a gun supported the badge.
Anyone could be taught to vanish or fight or plan an ambush.
Anyone could point and shoot, and most anyone could even be good at it.
Hell, if there was one thing Clare refused to let him forget, it was that there wasn’t a single skill he had that someone else couldn’t do better, and the only thing that would give him an edge was being able to think ahead of the enemy. “True skill lies in convincing your opponent that he believes what you want him to believe,” she’d said. “And that he believes it of his own free will.”
Jack left the key resting in his palm.
He dragged his gaze from his free hand to the shackled one.
The man in the suit followed along.
Jack tugged the shackled wrist for emphasis, and those imprisoned fingers scratched that imprisoned thumb, each movement obvious, deliberate, theatrical, tearing through a layer of latex. He couldn’t begin to guess at how many hours he and Jill had entertained themselves during Clare’s long absences by playing Harry Houdini vs. David Blaine, locking each other up in increasingly impossible configurations and finding more devious ways to cheat. What his captors had done by securing him to the chair was a small step above the dumb-assery they’d have committed by securing his hands behind his back. For this, he didn’t even need a key.
But performance made a point while concealing a point.
That was legerdemain.
Jack leaned forward and drew the formerly hidden sliver of molded plastic from his thumb into his mouth, and with his teeth, he released the cuff that restrained the left hand, unlocked both ankles with ambidextrous flair, and tossed both keys back the direction the first had come.
The man in the suit caught them, examined them, pocketed them.
He heaved off the wall, motioned toward the door, as if inviting a guest to go on ahead, and said, “Come. We talk.”
Jack swiveled in the chair.
He said, “I want to see my sister first.”
The suit took a step forward. “Soon. Come.”
Jack stayed seated. He knew what he knew.
He didn’t know what the suit man knew.
Didn’t know if, in spite of his best efforts to keep his sister out of this, they’d gotten to her anyway, didn’t know if they’d yet figured out that Anna was but a well-paid look-alike, but performance required he push. Because, if it had been Jill who’d been gag-stuffed and dragged out of that van, he’d have killed to get to her—and she was trained for this and could take care of herself. A traumatized and terrified near stranger in her place didn’t change his response, only the reason.
He was the one who’d put Anna here.
A different burden, but a burden all the same.
They’d use Jill against him if they had her.
They’d do the same with Anna if at any point they believed his concern for her was more than a ploy to convince them she was his sister.
That was the risk of playing liar’s bluff.
Jack said, “I’m being polite, but it’s not really a request.”
The man said, “First we eat. Then we talk. Then we see.”
Jack leaned forward, picked one of the freed cuffs up off the floor, and played the metal between thumb and finger, as if debating its suitability as a weapon. “I will see her,” he said. “And if you’ve hurt her, I’ll know, and I’ll spend whatever’s left of my life hunting you down in payback.”
The man’s lips turned up ever so slightly, but amusement never reached his eyes. He said, “There is, as you say, no hurting.”
Jack exposed his neck, pointed to the knife wound.
“Is that what you’re telling her about me?”
“No. This is unintended. Unfortunate.”
“It felt pretty damn intentional when it happened.”
A flash of angry irritation broke through the facade and faded half as fast, the tell of a man unused to being threatened or challenged, a man for whom stating a thing once was effort enough and being forced to repeat it would send the oxygen waster to the morgue. He said, “I give my word, personal guarantee, she is not harmed.”
Jack let the cuff drop and slowly stood.
There were compromises to be had.
For now.
CHAPTER 22
JACK
THE ROOM OPENED TO A NARROW HALL THAT DEAD-ENDED LEFT AND forced foot traffic right. Jack followed the man in the suit, squeezing between sentries stationed at the door, and the suit man’s bodyguard entourage in turn followed him.
They were a different type, these bodyguards, different from the gumshoes who’d staked out positions at the Savoy in Berlin, different again from the psychos who’d run the snatch-and-grab in Republic Square. They were the type who missed nothing while ignoring everything, slow to engage, because they’d earned their composure, the type Clare would have sent if control truly mattered.
The hall led to an overlarge opening lit by shoddily hung fluorescent tubes, a hub of sorts, with no clear exit, no windows, no obvious doors, but from which several halls branched off. The man took a hard left into the nearest hall, which widened out into several steps that led down to a cavernous room supported by concrete pillars. What might have been a warehouse receiving area in a former life was bare and empty except for the ridiculous juxtaposition of a living room set up in the nearest corner—sofas and tables and wall art against an industrial landscape—as if someone had walked into a furniture showroom, drawn a square around an ensemble, and had the whole thing moved exactly as is, right down to the rugs, vases, and lamps.
The obvious difference was the bottle of Beluga Noble at the table’s center, and the zakuski spread and, less obvious, the diplomatic pouch on the sofa seat, like an ugly stain on the soft blue palette. The man in the suit motioned for Jack to take the oversize chair, as if this was a friendly social event and there weren’t bodyguards posted on the steps, blocking the only way out. “Please,” he said. “Please, sit.”
Jack eyed the plates filled with drinking food and then the bottle.
Whatever this man wasn’t, he was Russian, and Russian drinking culture was consistent and homogenous, and in Russian drinking culture, vodka wasn’t something drunk alone or as an everyday thing, like wine with meals. Vodka needed an occasion, even if an occasion required creative invention. The bottle was never left unfinished, and he was parched and thirsty, his stomach empty, and there wasn’t another soul or sound in this whole damn building. It was a lot of vodka.
“Sit,” the man said again.
Jack did as he was told.
The suit took a seat within reach of the black-blotch pouch.
He picked up the bottle, poured vodka into two small tumblers, handed one to Jack, lifted his glass, and said, “Za vstrechu.”
To our meeting.
Vodka required an occasion, and meeting was just the first of them.
Jack mimicked the raised glass.
“Za something, something,” he said.
The suit exhaled loud and obvious and tipped the liquor down his throat. He followed the vodka with a pickled green tomato.
Jack eyed the tumbler.
Drinking culture said nothing else happened until everyone at the table had emptied their glass, but that was Russian culture, and he wasn’t Russi
an.
The man said, “Drink.”
Jack said, “I’d rather not.”
“Drink, or you insult me. You do not wish to insult me.”
Jack tossed back the vodka.
The liquor went down nice and smooth, counterfeit water to desperate thirst in a way that left him dangerously wanting more.
The man in the suit nudged a plate of piroshki forward. “Eat,” he said.
Jack picked up a pastry, shoved it in his mouth, and took a second for good measure, bolting meaty-greasy goodness down faster than he should have in an effort to get ahead of the alcohol.
The suit poured another round. He raised his glass. “Budem zdorovy,” he said—another toast, another occasion for vodka.
He swallowed the liquor and thumped the glass down hard.
Jack raised his own in kind and then returned the tumbler to the table, vodka untouched. He said, “Perhaps some water?”
The man barked out a laugh. “Water is for women. Drink.”
Jack pushed the liquor toward the table’s center.
One shot and he was already feeling the warmth enough to want to call shenanigans on water is for women and introduce the guy to his real sister.
Jill was capable of a lot of things. Copious drinking was way up that list. She’d put this guy under the table. But she wasn’t here, and he couldn’t call her, and for him, there’d be no winning, definitely not while dehydrated on an empty stomach.
He picked up a cucumber, stuffed it in his mouth, raised the glass in mock toast, and said, “There’s vodka thirst, and there’s water thirst. I’ve got both kinds.”
The man in the suit leaned in. “You offend me with refusal.”
Anyone who’d spent time drinking with Russians knew the difference between cultural insistence and true offense, but an American kid whose entire experience with Russia was limited Hollywoodized tropes wouldn’t.
Jack had backed himself into a corner on that one.
He tossed back the alcohol and helped himself to pickled herring.
Bottle touched glass in yet another pour.
Liars' Legacy Page 17