by Anna Zaires
After that, there’s no more withholding of answers, just verbal vomit and pleas for a hospital.
“Let’s go,” I tell the guys when I’m confident we got everything we can out of the cop. “Tie him up and leave him here.”
As we drive away, I make a mental note to call 911 and tell them the man’s location when we’re safely in the air.
Henderson’s friend or not, there’s no reason for the cop to die.
We’re on a time crunch now, so we expedite the process by nabbing our last two targets and interrogating them together. We left them for last because they’re even more distant connections of Henderson, so if we hadn’t gotten to them for some reason, it wouldn’t have been a major loss.
The first guy is Henderson’s daughter’s ex-boyfriend, Bobby Carston. He’s twenty, some three years older than the daughter, and according to our files, they broke up when he slept with her best friend at their high school prom. I can’t abide cheaters, so we rough up the kid a little as we question him—a move that ensures our last captive, Henderson’s son’s favorite teacher, is cooperative from the start.
In fact, Sam Briars is so verbose in his answers about Jimmy Henderson that we get something we didn’t expect.
A possible lead.
“—and then they vacationed in Thailand five years ago and Jimmy was saying how much they loved the local culture and all the fruit and how they wanted to live there. There was a local family that they really bonded with in Phuket. Not in one of the touristy areas, mind you, but deeper inland, away from all the crowds. Jimmy was telling all his friends in class about it. And then there was Singapore, which Jimmy’s mother always loved because of how clean it is, and there’s Iceland where Jimmy’s parents were going to go for their anniversary, and there’s Maryland where Jimmy’s sister was going to go to school, and I can think of more if you just give me time…”
The teacher is speaking so fast he’s practically babbling, so we let him talk, jotting down notes on the places he mentions so we can check them out later. We’ve looked at most of these locations before, including Thailand, but the Hendersons have been moving around to avoid detection, and we didn’t know about that local family in Phuket.
It’s certainly a lead worth exploring.
Ten minutes pass, and the teacher shows no sign of running out of steam, his verbosity undoubtedly fueled by the wails of the bruised ex-boyfriend. At this point, he’s just repeating himself, going in circles with everything he knows about the Hendersons, so I nod to Ilya and he taps him lightly on the ribs.
“Enough,” I say when Briars starts screaming like that gentle tap broke his ribs. “Tie them up and leave them here. We have to go.”
As we drive to our plane, I watch for signs of pursuit, but we make it there without incident.
The operation is officially a success: we’ve sent Henderson a message and obtained a possible lead in the process.
I should feel good, but as the wheels of the plane lift off the ground, all I can think about is that I’m no closer to getting what I really want.
That I’m still months away from reclaiming Sara.
24
Sara
“He did what?” I stare at Ryson, my palms damp with sweat and my heart hammering. My first reaction—joy that Peter is alive and well—is being quickly replaced by a painful knot in my stomach.
“He assaulted six people in North Carolina,” the agent repeats. “Two are hospitalized with gunshot wounds, and the other four are bruised and traumatized by a violent interrogation. Innocent citizens, all. Anything you can tell us about the incident?”
“I… what?” I shake my head to clear it of the gruesome images. “Why would he do this?”
“According to the victims, he wanted to know the location of an acquaintance of theirs—one Walter Henderson III. He has the misfortune of being on the same list as your late husband.” Ryson crosses his beefy arms. “It seems that Sokolov is resorting to more extreme measures to get to this man. Anything you can tell us about that? About what he’s after?”
I swallow the bile rising in my throat. Over the past couple of months, I’d somehow managed to forget the brutal reality of the man I’ve been missing, to gloss over the darker parts in my memories. “You don’t know?”
“I told you, much of his file is redacted.” Ryson uncrosses his arms and leans in. “Dr. Cobakis, you know as well as I do that this man is lethal. He needs to be stopped before more innocent people get hurt. It’s important that you tell us everything you know about him, so we can have a better idea where he might strike next.”
I stare at him, feeling alternately hot and cold. “He… didn’t tell me much of anything.” That’s what I’ve been telling the agents, and I have to stick with the story, no matter how sick I feel at the knowledge that Peter is hurting innocents in his quest for vengeance.
In any case, even if Ryson knew about the massacre of Peter’s wife and son, it wouldn’t change anything. Peter won’t stop until he finds Henderson and crosses him off his list, and as he vividly demonstrated in North Carolina, the Feds are still no match for him and his crew.
Peter and his men entered the US undetected, assaulted six citizens, and left.
He was in the same country as I, and if Ryson hadn’t decided to question me, I would’ve never known.
My stomach tightens further, and to my horror, I realize I’m not just upset about the pain and suffering he put those people through.
I’m also hurt and mad that Peter didn’t come for me.
We were just a few states apart, and he didn’t come for me.
“Dr. Cobakis.” Ryson peers at me intently. “Are you all right?”
“I… yes.” I ball my hands under the table, letting my nails dig into my palms. The hint of pain steadies me, enabling me to say in a semi-normal tone, “I’m sorry. It’s just a lot.”
And it is. It’s too much, in fact. Until this moment, I didn’t fully comprehend how messed up I am, how those months with Peter have twisted me, skewing my sense of right and wrong. Here I am, having just learned that the killer I’ve been obsessing about hurt six innocent people, and I’m upset that he chose them over me? That he didn’t abduct me when he clearly had the chance to do so?
I’m sick.
It’s obvious to me now—as is the fact that Peter may never come for me. All along, vengeance has been his true love, his real obsession, and whatever he felt for me didn’t last… if it was even there in the first place. I don’t know why I’m still being watched, or if I even am—that itchy feeling may well be paranoia—but it’s clear that I’m no longer his priority.
I somehow endure the rest of Ryson’s interrogation, answering his questions on auto-pilot, and when I get home, I pick up the phone and call Dr. Evans, the therapist who helped me before.
It’s time to rebuild my shattered life.
It’s time to accept that whatever Peter and I had may be over.
Part III
25
Peter
We spend the next two months following up on the Thai lead—it’s not easy to figure out which local family the Hendersons befriended—and when that doesn’t bring us any closer to our target, we take a job in Russia, where an oil oligarch wants us to eliminate one of his business rivals. It’s not as lucrative of a gig as some of the others, but the location makes it worthwhile.
We haven’t been in our home country in years.
“Does this feel as weird to you as it does to me?” Anton asks as we walk past Red Square, and I nod, knowing exactly what he means. Walking down these streets and hearing Russian speech all around us is a lot like going back in time. The last time I was in Moscow was when I killed my supervisor, Ivan Polonsky, for helping with the Daryevo massacre cover-up—seemingly a lifetime ago.
“Do you miss it?” I ask Anton, and he shrugs.
“Nah. I mean, it’s not exactly fun to always be the foreigner, but I’ve gotten used to it. And thanks to Sara, my English h
as improved, so…” He stops, his gaze turning wary as he realizes what he just said. “That is, while we were—”
“Enough.” My neck muscles are painfully tight and my hands are clenched into fists, but my voice is soft and even as I repeat, “That’s enough.”
Anton wisely shuts up, and we walk the rest of the way in silence. He knows he’s forbidden to talk about her, and it’s no longer just about her safety. Sara is a trigger for me these days, so much so that the mere mention of her name is enough to make me homicidal. The gaping wound left by her absence isn’t healing; it’s festering.
I ache for her every second of every day, and I fucking hate it.
The daily reports only make it worse, because it seems as though she’s forgotten me. Last month, she got another job, joining two older OB-GYNs in their practice, and she moved out of her parents’ house into a new apartment. I’m glad about all of that—I want her to be happy—but for the past six weeks, she’s also gone out every weekend, drinking and dancing with her friends. On top of that, she started singing with a band on Friday nights—a development that pleased me until I saw a recording of her performing in a sexy dress and realized every man in the audience is drooling over her.
They watch her like a pack of wolves slobbering over a hare.
If I were there with her, I could’ve stopped that—rearranged a few faces, if need be—but I’m half a world away, and it eats at me. More than that, it raises the possibility that Sara might’ve forgotten me so completely she might fall for another man… maybe even one of the idiots who come up to her after every performance to gush over her and beg for her phone number.
The only thing that keeps me from ordering a hit on those assholes is that so far, she hasn’t gone out with any of them.
It’s only a matter of time, though. I know that. The longer I’m gone, the more likely it is. And that is why, right before we took this job, I finally ordered a message delivered to her.
She should get it shortly.
In the meantime, we have a very rich—and very corrupt—man to kill.
26
Sara
“Sara! Sara! Sara!”
The chanting of the audience combined with the deafening applause is like a shot of heroin into my veins. I’m so high I feel like I’m flying, and I bow, laughing, as the chanting intensifies.
My bandmates—Phil, Simon, and Rory—are bowing alongside me. The audience, though, seems focused on me. Probably because the guys changed the name of the band from The Rocker Boys to Sara & the Rocker Boys last month, completely ignoring my objections. For whatever reason, Phil decided that the band is much more marketable with me as the lead singer, and every poster now prominently features my face in addition to my name. Last week, I actually had a patient at the clinic recognize me as “that Sara” and request my autograph—a highly embarrassing incident that resulted in the clinic staff nicknaming me “The Celeb.”
This is the first time we’ve done a larger outdoor venue, and I wasn’t sure we’d be able to pull it off. Though it’s almost May, the weather is still unpredictable, and up until two days ago, we didn’t know if it was going to be fifty degrees and raining or seventy and sunny. It ended up being somewhere in the middle—sixty-seven and partly cloudy—and we got a great turnout. Our goal was to sell at least a hundred tickets to cover the venue costs, but judging by the number of enthusiastically clapping spectators, we sold close to four times that amount.
We finish bowing and do one more song as an encore before leaving the stage. As always happens after a successful performance, it’s hard to come off the high, so we go to a nearby bar to celebrate and unwind.
Like me, my bandmates do this as a hobby. Phil, our guitarist, is a math teacher; Simon, the drummer, is a freelance writer; and Rory, our bassist, works in a call center. Unlike me, however, all three of them would like to do this as a career, and as often happens after a great performance, they immediately start talking about going on tour.
“We could start in Seattle, then make our way down the West Coast,” Phil says, picking up his beer. His blue eyes glitter feverishly in his ruddy face. “From there, we could go all across the Southwest and—”
“Fuck Seattle.” Rory knocks back a shot of tequila and slides the glass toward the harried bartender. “We go straight to California. San Francisco, then L.A. It’s the best for artists like us, not to mention the weather and the culture and the food…”
He continues, gesticulating wildly as he talks, and I grin as I notice several women openly staring at him. With his freckled face, unruly red curls, and a bodybuilder’s physique, Rory looks like a cross between Little Orphan Annie and an Abercrombie model on steroids. It’s a combination that shouldn’t have worked, but it does—and I suspect the success of the band owes as much to his looks as it does to our combined talent.
Not that Phil and Simon are bad-looking. Simon, in particular, reminds me of a young Denzel Washington, only with a punk-rock vibe. Phil is a bit more average, with a receding hairline and a hint of a beer belly, but his outgoing personality more than makes up for any physical shortcomings. All three of my bandmates are attractive in their own way—and each has hinted, at one point or another, that he’d like to take me out.
It’s too bad all I can see when I look at a man these days is that he’s not Peter.
The guys don’t know that, of course. They’re happily oblivious to the terrifying mess in my past and the FBI agents who still stubbornly follow me around. All my bandmates know is that I’m a widow, and they think grief for my dead husband is the reason I don’t date.
“How long has it been?” Phil asked sympathetically when I joined the band back in February, and I told him my husband passed away about a year and a half earlier, having never awoken from a car accident that left him in a coma. Phil expressed his condolences and has tactfully avoided the topic since, as have Simon and Rory.
In fact, after carefully letting me know that they’re interested and just as carefully being turned down, they’ve completely backed off and have taken to treating me as some kind of saintly figure, an untouchable Madonna encased in a bubble of grief.
They’re not far off, only the loss I’m grieving has little to do with George, who’s fading more from my memories each day. At this point, it’s been over three years since his accident, and even longer since our love suffocated under the weight of his addiction. Each time I think about him now, all I remember is how I felt when I found out about his double life as a CIA agent… about the secrets and the lies that brought Peter to my door.
I wish I could forget him as well, but it’s impossible. Though it’s been nearly six months since my captor brought me home, I think about him every night as I drift off to sleep. Sometimes, I’m convinced I can feel him. Not next to me, but somewhere out there, reaching across the continents to torment me, his pull both magnetic and lethal, like the gravitational force of the sun.
I dream of him, too. Of the tender way he’d hold me when I cried and the brutal way he’d fuck me, of all the big and little things that make up the contradiction that is Peter. At times, I wake up from those dreams aroused and frustrated, but more often, I find my pillow soaked with tears and my arms wrapped around my blanket to stave off the agonizing loneliness that keeps me frozen inside.
I need to move on, I know. And I try. I go out with Marsha and the girls every weekend, and when a particularly attractive guy asks for my number, I give it out more often than not. But that’s where it ends for me. I can’t take the next step and actually agree to the date when they call or text me.
“Why even bother giving it out, then?” Marsha asked last week, when she learned that I did it yet again. “Why not just turn them down on the spot?”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say, and she let it drop, not wanting to stress me out. Like most of my acquaintances who’ve heard the FBI version of the Peter story, Marsha has been treating me like I’m made of crystal and might shatter at the slightest pressu
re. I think she—along with others at the hospital—thinks my ordeal was even worse than I disclosed. One time, when Mom was still in the hospital, I overheard two nurses talking about how I escaped a “sexual slavery ring” and am still dealing with the aftermath of being “forced into prostitution.”
It’s aggravating, but the only way to address those rumors would be to tell the truth, and I’m not about to do that.
Fortunately, my new coworkers don’t know anything more than my bandmates. Drs. Wendy and Bill Otterman, the married couple who own the small OB-GYN practice, were so impressed by my resume and academic credentials that they barely asked any questions about the nine-month gap in my work history. I told them I took a hiatus to travel around the world, and they hired me on the spot, with the caveat that I start immediately so they could take a long-awaited cruise to Alaska for their fortieth wedding anniversary.
I could’ve looked for better-paying, more prestigious opportunities, but I accepted the offer right away and started the next day. With Mom barely out of the hospital, I wanted something fairly low key, so I could still keep an eye on her and Dad. But what really cinched the deal for me was the office’s location—a fifteen-minute drive from my parents’ house and a short walk from my new apartment.
“Earth to Rory.” Simon waves his beer bottle in front of Rory’s face, interrupting his oration on the wonders of California. “Let’s just be real here. Sara, are you going to go on tour with us?”
I smile and shake my head. “No can do, sorry. Work won’t let me take off for so long.”
“See?” Simon triumphantly surveys his bandmates, as though he’s won a bet. “She’s not going. It’s not happening.”
“Oh, come on.” Phil grabs the beer from Simon and finishes it off in two gulps before motioning to the bartender to bring more. Turning to face me, he gives me the full dose of the famous Phil Hudson charm. “Sara, sweetheart...” His voice turns cajoling. “We all have work and other responsibilities, but opportunities like this come once in a lifetime. We’re catching fire, I can feel it, and we have to seize the day. You have to seize the day, because you know what happens tomorrow?”