Ewww.
“So,” she said casually, “how does this disease spread?”
Ilia looked at her in the rearview mirror. She recoiled and pulled the jacket collar tight around her neck.
Pavel turned as well. “We don’t know for sure,” he said while stealing a look at Ilia.
“But?” she replied.
“But. Well, I’m guessing the sickness is everywhere. In the air. In the water. There’s too many for it to be anything else. It’s like that Volga River barge explosion a few years back, but a million times worse.” He laughed, but not for long.
They drove a few minutes more before Ilia intentionally ran off the road, over a curb, and into a wooded courtyard of one of the endless block tenements. It looked like he was going to stop there, but he kept driving until he had to stop in front of a flight of steps going down. He nosed the truck over the edge, got a good look below, then drove down the staircase. She strained in her seatbelt as everything tilted toward the front.
At the bottom, he turned left and drove along a bicycle path. The path ran along the river, which was visible when the trees thinned. He kept slowing down, then speeding up. He looked into the nearby woods as if someone was waiting for him.
Without warning he tapped the brakes and backed them up. He turned the wheel and continued to reverse until he was in a thick copse of trees. A handful of glistening skyscrapers towered above them through the young leaves. The business district was just across the water.
“Get out,” Ilia demanded as he jumped out his door and slammed it shut.
“You must do as he asks,” Pavel said, not looking back.
The bill has come due, she thought, feeling as if the short time she’d been granted wasn’t quite worth the payment she’d soon have to deliver.
Ilia knocked on her window, but didn’t open her door.
“Pavel, you can’t let this happen,” she whispered. They’d always had a respectable relationship with a flirtation or two. That had to count for something. Surely he was a better man than his boss.
“You almost got us killed,” he droned. “He’s not happy.”
“And you?
Pavel sighed and tilted his head down. “He's not as bad you imagine.”
Another knock on the glass. “Now!”
In the stress of the moment, she gave a fleeting glimpse to the baton, but found herself thinking of her phone. Perhaps she could call Yuri directly, and let him know what his men were doing.
If only.
The phone was one item she was absolutely certain was lost. She’d placed it on a chair back at the boutique, then stacked a bunch of clothes on top of it to hide the ringing. It was her way of ensuring no interruptions to the all-important task of clothes shopping.
Yuri demanded her attention at all hours, but she could hardly answer the phone if she was changing into different clothes.
She smiled inwardly at the fleeting memory. That innocent transgression seemed wildly rebellious when she did it with Yuri’s men so close. She’d give anything to have such trivial worries again.
At last, she opened the door. At the first sign of opening Ilia pulled it faster.
Pay the devil his due.
She thought that’s how the saying went.
19
Ilia pulled her by her arm, from the truck almost all the way to the bank of the river. Just before the last row of a particularly thick clump of frumpy bushes he stopped and tossed her down.
“I don’t have time for pleasantries,” he growled. He’d been liberal with the sarcasm since he decided hurting her was more important than protecting her, a change she desperately wanted to understand.
She pretended—sort of—that she was in a lot of pain. Her head continued to pound behind her eyes, the buzzing continued in her ears, and her vision seemed blurred.
I’m not going to cry for him, she insisted, though the water had already lined up behind her eyes.
“Please. Why are you doing this? Yuri trusted you to be my protector.”
The question seemed totally legitimate, but Ilia crouched down to her and got in her face. “It’s always about dear Yelizaveta, isn’t it? It’s always what can someone do for you. Well—”
He pulled out a large knife and held it between them, closer to her face than his. A moment later he slashed at the sandal strap on one of her ankles.
“No. Please don’t,” she cried. The tears would not be stopped.
He cut the laces of both her sandals with methodical determination. They fell from her feet. Then he started to cut up the left leg of her pants. She lamented the destruction of the expensive leather until she thought how stupid that was.
Ilia got almost to her knee before he stopped. The fabric hung limply from her leg, exposing her machine-tanned calf muscles. He licked his lips, then changed his focus.
“You said you’d do anything for me. We aren’t going to have a problem, are we? I just want a taste of what Pavel got.”
“He got nothing. Please. I just flirted with him. Nothing more,” she said, struggling to speak without stuttering in fear.
“Not a chance. He bragged about you,” he shot back.
She looked back toward the truck. It was lost somewhere in the trees.
“Pavel's not coming. There’s something you should know about us. We’re a team, see? He and I don’t have to like a thing the other does. We keep each other alive, see? But I also can't have him getting something I don't.” He smiled his sick smile.
He pulled back, then seemed to remember something. He got so close she could smell his breath—a surprisingly pleasant cinnamon gum odor. “The world is ending, darling. Money don’t mean shit anymore. All that matters is staying alive. You need us.”
He pointed to her chest. “Now give me what you gave to him.”
She closed her eyes and suffered the indignity of a kiss. The pleasant cinnamon instantly turned sour.
A brutal few seconds later Ilia came up for air, with a laugh. “See? That wasn't so bad.”
“Are you going to rape me?”
He hesitated. “Yuri won't believe any of this took place. But taking you by force leaves evidence. We're just having a pleasant walk in the woods, right? Just like you did with Pavel,” he said with an oily voice.
“But I—”
He yanked at her leather jacket. “Off with it.”
Instead of waiting for her, he continued to pull at it. She made it as difficult as possible, but the delay served no purpose. No help was coming and nothing she could do was going to matter. She had dull fingernails as weapons; he had several guns and at least one knife.
Ilia brushed her hair back, exposing her injured neck. He let go of her like he’d been shocked.
“You’ve got to be shitting me!” he burst out. “You’ve been bitten?”
“You’ve been bitten,” he repeated, with building panic.
He licked his tongue on his sleeve and spit over and over on the ground. Finally she realized he was trying to purge the saliva they’d shared.
She chuckled to herself, instantly regretting it.
“You think this is hilarious? Seriously?” He pulled out his knife again and held it menacingly in front of him.
Somehow, after the preview of what was to come, the knife didn’t scare her. At least it would be over fast. Still, she shut up and cast a demure look.
Ilia stood there staring at her. He seemed to be thinking over what to do next. Maybe getting bitten wasn’t so bad. At least it kept her from having to kiss him some more.
“Damn you.” He put away the knife and pulled out his smartphone. He pressed a few keys and held it to his head.
“It’s me. I retrieved her. She's alive, but she’s got a—a bite.” His voice was businesslike.
The response wasn’t on speakerphone, but she heard the yelling. Ilia held the phone away from his ear, listening at a distance until it was his turn to reply. “Yes, sir. It's definitely a bite.”
Even more y
elling.
“No crazier than normal, no. I don’t know why she hasn’t changed.” He tried to laugh it off, but turned serious as he spit quietly on the ground. “Someone got the timeline wrong, sir. We were surprised in the boutique. Thousands of them swept down the street before we could get her out of the hot zone.”
He listened for a long time, then spoke. “I didn’t see it. We got separated; she jumped onto one of Omon's fancy new walls. But that barricade fell to the zombies before we could help her.”
She wanted to scream out at the edited version of events.
Despite her complaints about him being a soldier, Ilia was always brilliant when it came to security. Numerous times over the years he’d taken her out of situations he claimed were shaping up to be problems. Fights in bars. Riots near the Kremlin. One time he whisked her out the back door of a party at the home of an English diplomat and ran her—in high heels—through the sprawling grounds to a waiting Rover. Later, she learned one of the help staff had been tasked with planting a bug on her.
She stood up, intending to shout so the person on the other end—she was sure it was Yuri—could hear her. Instead, she got the point of Ilia’s knife an inch from her face. Like he’d been waiting for her to try.
When she saw the blade, he drew it to his lips, then across his throat to make the “shut up or die” gesture.
The person on the line argued with Ilia, though the security chief sounded deferential.
The call seemed to go on forever. She remained fixed in her spot, though Ilia’s knife was no longer pointed at her. Several times he used words she knew but didn’t fully understand without context. Air freight tonnage. Tread widths. Fuel consumption. And a city: Denver, Colorado. Dan-fer. The word sounded so foreign.
She’d been to America, but only to the coasts. Yuri had taken her on one of his many trips there. She'd been enthralled by New York. They’d been at all the tourist destinations, but her favorite memory was skating hand-in-hand in Central Park. Yuri being Yuri, he rented the entire rink late one night for the two of them. He flew in the rock band Vee-Dva and they had a private skating concert complete with Russian music. It was one of the highlights of her life.
“But I have family, sir. I can’t just leave them.” He listened intently before responding. “All the money in the world won’t protect them from these things. These are demons incarnate. They destroy everything.”
They discussed things for a couple more minutes before Ilia seemed ready to end the conversation. “I understand, sir. I’ll get her there for you. But the second she’s in Denver I’m going to Leningrad.”
A pause. “I swear it.”
He hung up and turned on her like he’d just remembered what they’d been doing.
She saw the look and quelled her own fear as she stepped backward and spun around to run. She got about twenty feet when she came out of the woods at the edge of the river, slipped on a patch of mud, and fell on her butt.
Swim to freedom!
She got back on her feet, and was a second from jumping in, when she stopped herself. Bodies floated in the dark water, contrasting sharply with the smart-looking glass skyscrapers just over the otherwise pleasant little river.
“I wouldn't if I were you,” Ilia said from nearby. “Those things never quit. And I'm not jumping in after you.”
She wanted to cry, but only turned back to him with a scowl.
“Pavel and I never touched. Don't you get it? I would never do that to Yuri.”
Calmly, he stowed his phone in his pocket. Then he put his knife into a sheath in his waistband.
He walked away, leaving her to do as she pleased. Escape was right there—a swim to the other side would take ten minutes. But it might also take a lifetime.
When the Rover's horn summoned her, she went to it.
After all the stresses she'd endured, she fell asleep in minutes as the truck bobbed and weaved across the city.
She dreamed of running from Ilia.
20
Liza woke up in the bright lights of a business suite. It was vaguely familiar, but the square tiles and halogens could have been any of a million different offices in the Moscow area. She caught a whiff of a scent confirming where she was.
Yuri had taken her to most of his numerous companies over the years, including such exciting places as paper mills, port warehouses, and cement factories. But he often said his favorite was one that specialized in auctioning old Soviet military equipment over the internet. She found it no more exciting than any of the others, but there was one thing that made it worth her while: coffee. Because he had money to throw away, the programming team convinced him they needed a certain kind of coffee machine that was only made someplace in America. He had it shipped over and installed for the crew, and then spent a small fortune getting the monthly service that sent all the supplies from overseas. It was the best coffee she’d ever had. The Americans at least got that right.
The smell of the specialty grounds hung on the air.
“Yuri?”
She sat up. Someone had placed her on the sofa in Yuri’s office—for those rare times he visited—and left her with a cold compress on her swollen neck. It hurt like hell, but wasn't as bad as it had been. The buzzing noise in her ears remained.
I’m falling apart.
Lots of posters hung on the wall. Displays of olive drab and gray machines and equipment she only knew from the movies. He'd recently picked up a collection of Soviet-era helmets that for some reason he couldn’t stop talking about. Perhaps that explained why she didn't really want talk to him anymore.
She held the thought for a moment, then let it go.
Shaking her head and tossing the compress she stood up and looked at herself.
Barefoot. Torn pant leg. And dammit if her clean shirt hadn’t already been ruined. One sleeve had grass stains and dirt streaked all over it. The mess continued down the side of her shirt. Her fall at the river's edge—
The door opened and Ilia stormed through. Pavel followed, as did several men and women who looked a hell of a lot less threatening. A couple she recognized from her prior visits to the corporate office. She smiled weakly at them.
A young woman strode up to her with a look of concern. “Ma’am, are you all right?”
“She’s fine,” Ilia said with an authoritative air. “Right, Miss?”
She turned but he didn’t even bother to look at her. He continued walking to a desk. He motioned for everyone to find chairs as he sat in the big glass-topped workstation.
Yuri’s workstation, she thought.
“You all know what this is about. Our boss wants us to save this woman,” he said, while pointing to her. “And he’s going to make it worth our while.”
An older man with gray hair and deep-cut jowls murmured agreement, but replied, “We came here because he said we’d be safe. Now you’re telling us that safety depends on her? I don’t think she’s worth the risk.”
“No offense, ma'am,” he said with a curt nod.
Liza was acutely aware of how her status had waned. What would normally be an occasion for her to berate the old man was now something more akin to being a child and watching the adults make decisions. She could no more order him around than she had authority over Ilia and Pavel. Of course, their betrayal was much more extreme, but in some ways the cut went deeper to see a lowly office worker give her no respect.
I could have had you fired, she fumed to herself, staring daggers at the old man. It was difficult to project the anger necessary to carry it any further. It was a joke between Yuri and her. He would often tell her he'd fire someone if they made mistakes, like giving her the wrong soup at the bistro. She wouldn’t have dreamed of having someone fired just because they looked at her funny. She was pretty sure Yuri was never serious about it, though Ilia was a different story. He'd shown her a side she never dreamed possible. The stress brought out the worst.
She looked away from the old man, as if to remove him from considera
tion for termination.
“I understand your concerns, Mr. Cheppin. I assure you that the best way to protect yourselves and your families is to help me get Anastasia running so I can get her—he pointed condescendingly at Liza, even though there couldn’t be any question of who he was talking about—to where Mr. Saratov demands she goes.”
“Iosef is project lead. Only he knows if what you ask is possible,” the old man replied.
All heads turned to Iosef, including hers.
“I have her running like a champion. Just last week we finished with the exhaust manifold. I can button that up. Check the electronics. Make a few adjustments—”
“Just tell me how long,” Ilia demanded with impatience.
The young man tugged at long, dark hair. She noted it was probably longer than hers. He looked a lot like a girl, she thought. He had soft features and wide eyes, but his hands looked mangled and gray. He was a mechanic, based on his dirty fingernails along with the filthy state of his overalls. But why was a mechanic working for an internet sales company?
“You can’t rush—” the old man began.
“I can. We all have to do our duty.” Ilia sounded tired, but his authority was no less effective.
“It’s okay,” said Iosef. “I can have it done in a few days.”
“You have twenty-four hours.”
“Deal.”
Everyone seemed satisfied as they left the room, but Liza was left with a chill as the smiling Ilia got up from Yuri’s desk. The room cleared out until it was just the two of them. On his way out he gave her a nod and a fake salute. His malicious smile returned. “Don’t get lost.”
She stared at the floor, praying he would keep walking.
The security officer hovered next to her for half a minute before he drifted out of the room. He didn’t slam the door, but it startled her as it latched shut.
She was more alone than ever.
21
For Liza, time seemed to stand still inside Yuri’s office. The electricity flowed into the bright halogens overhead, and the couch provided a degree of comfort for the endless hours of waiting. Other than bathroom breaks and the occasional delivery of bits of food, she spent her time staring at the floor or paging through promotional materials for the auction items on the website. Eventually, she was so bored she sat at Yuri’s computer—she hated computers on any other day—though the password screen kept her from doing more than looking at the picture he used as a background.
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