by J. M. Lanham
Another week, another move. And not one step closer to protecting his family from the powers that be at Asteria Pharmaceuticals. Paul had plenty to worry about, but a single thought dominated his mind as he pulled up to the drugstore, hand still clenching a freshly wadded yellow citation.
“Michelle’s going to kill me.”
Chapter 2:
From Bunker to Bungalow
Snow was sure to slow the fighting down in north Estonia, but it never came to a full stop. Gunshots echoing across the Bay of Tallinn could have been mistaken for the chop of helicopter rotors, were it not for the short bursts followed by silence in between. Explosions were less frequent, rattling the nerves of rebel factions holed up on the small island of Aegna about once a week. The conflict seemed distant from the island outpost, still wild and relatively isolated from the turmoil in Tallinn’s Old Town: a well-preserved remnant of the country’s medieval past that represented the boiling point of the War of the Baltics. Although the heaviest fighting filled the snow-drifted alleys and cobblestone streets of the ancient precinct to the south, everyone occupying the wooded Estonian island to the north knew they could be pulled into battle at a moment’s notice.
Especially Claire Connor.
The abandoned bunker which Claire called her Baltic home had a variety of guests. Estonian fighters determined to hold off the encroaching Russian Federation. Civilians seeking safe haven from the fighting across the Baltic Sea. Journalists eager to earn the title of war correspondent, naively optimistic they would make it back home in one piece. The cement remnant of a partially underground World War II facility was cold, dark, and uninviting, but to the exhausted guests taking up cots between the concrete columns it might as well have been the Ritz Carlton.
Claire sat on her cot holding a flashlight in her mouth, hands busy working on her camera, when a soldier smoking a cigarette walked by.
“Shutter jamming up on you?”
“No,” Claire answered without looking up. “It’s these damn batteries. Temperature drops below freezing and they won’t hold a charge past a few dozen shots. A friend told me to try insulating the space around the battery compartment, so we’ll see. Maybe it’ll help a little, so long as it doesn’t get any colder.”
“Colder,” the soldier repeated. He looked around at the hissing propane heaters spread in ten-foot intervals down the corridor. “If it gets any colder, we won’t have enough gas to make it through the winter.”
“I thought the U.N. was taking care of all that, dropping off gas and food every two weeks.”
“They were, back when the rebels still had real international support. You haven’t been back on the island long, have you?”
Claire shook her head. “Nope. Just got back from a six-week tour in Old Town.”
“Then you know as well as anyone the fighting is going nowhere. Russia has the east; the U.S. holds the west. Estonians are caught in the middle. Voiceless and unheard. If communications weren’t down, things might be different. But, out of sight, out of mind, right? To the rest of the world, our battle has long been forgotten, so naturally, the U.N. is pulling out.”
“I’m sorry, Marko. You know if I thought a headline would—”
“Do not worry, Claire,” Marko said, waving his cigarette. “The work you’ve done here has shown the world what’s happening in our streets and in our cities. It’s not every day you meet a westerner who is willing to put their own boots on the ground. That’s what we Estonians call vaprus, Claire. Courage. Bravery.” He punched his abdomen. “Guts.”
Claire forced a smile. She had never been good at responding to flattery. “Who knows,” she said. “Maybe the world will start caring again.”
The soldier took one last puff and then dropped the cigarette butt on the floor, the heel of his combat boot twisting the last of the smoke into the cold concrete. “Maybe,” he said. Then he turned and left.
Claire could tell Marko wasn’t holding his breath. She had been covering the ongoing battle in the Baltic State of Estonia for the last six months, and in that time she had witnessed the United Nations slowly distance itself from the growing conflict between the U.S.-backed rebels and the Russian-backed establishment. With one side hungry for territorial expansion, and the other doing its best to abstain from foreign conflicts, the international community had developed a distaste for such proxy wars, leaving smaller countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to fend for themselves. Sure, an international military presence could be seen in the streets—red in the east, blue in the west—but for all intents and purposes, the fighting was going nowhere. Estonians were in the midst of a perpetual standoff, with no rational end in sight.
And Claire was right in the middle of it.
She examined the camera in her lap; the modified battery compartment looked like it would hold up in the cold, but she would have to test it first.
She threw on her parka and walked to the bunker entrance. A guard saw her coming and nodded, lifting the large steel lever and swinging the heavy door open. A whoosh of cold air blew in, carrying with it a flurry of snowflakes and a vicious bite that drew a scowl from every person camped out near the entrance. She made a quick exit, and the guard shut the door behind her with a heavy metallic clunk that rang out into the otherwise quiet and snowy scene outside.
Claire looked out on the horizon while she adjusted her scarf. At first glance, the northern European landscape seemed serene and peaceful. The bunker entrance jutted out from a moss-covered hill, opening into the middle of a thin grove of pines a quarter mile from the rocky coastline. She squinted as she looked out into the whitewashed landscape, spotting the horizontal streak of dark blue water in the distance that was the Baltic Sea.
Not a soul in sight. Alone. Just the way Claire liked it.
The cold still of a gentle snowfall always took Claire back to her childhood, time traveling past years of work and travel and college and grade school in the blink of an eye. The moment the chill set in, she was back in her rec-ball hoodie and Chuck Taylors, back to the field beside her parents’ house in Kansas, lying in a snowdrift and staring up at the sky, watching tiny flakes growing larger on their descent before landing and melting on her rosy red cheeks.
Her parents had always warned her not to lie down in the snow for too long; cold made the body lazy, her father had said, touching on his fear that his only daughter would get too comfortable playing outside in the snow, drift off to sleep, and freeze to death. Claire could remember the first time her father had issued such a warning before bundling her up and sending her out to play; it hadn’t been ten minutes before she’d hurried back inside to the safety of the wood-burning stove. But after a while, she’d pushed the limits, lying in the driven snow first for half an hour, then a full one, growing bolder while beginning to think her father was being overly protective of his ten-year-old baby girl.
Then it happened. She remembered it like it was yesterday, lying in the snow, ignoring her father’s advice once again. Cold turned to warmth, and although the snow continued to gently fall, everything else became quiet and still. Her eyes grew heavy, her breathing slowed. Sleep was irresistible now, a temptation she no longer fought.
I’ll just rest my eyes, she thought. Just for a minute or two.
But instead of opening her eyes to the serenity of frosty flakes gliding down from the sky while she lay there peacefully, Claire awoke to her father’s face mere inches away from hers, panicked and afraid, nervously tapping her cheeks as he desperately tried to wake her up.
“Come on baby, girl, wake up,” she remembered him saying. She had fallen asleep outside, nestled in a mound of new-fallen snow near the creek by their house. Had her father not spotted his daughter’s motionless body in passing between the garage and the house, Claire’s snowdrift ottoman might have become her eternal resting place. It was the first time—and the last—Claire ever saw her father scared.
Every time Claire stepped out into the snow, she recalled the peace she�
��d felt lying in the cold and billowy drifts, followed by the fear she’d heard in her father’s voice. She always found it strange how two contrasting emotions always seemed to mark the most pivotal events in her life, the order in which Claire experienced such emotions never varying, not once. Calm, then the storm. Any time an internal sense of peace and well-being overcame her, the alarm bells went off, with fear sure to follow.
That made the current state of tranquility that much more unnerving. She lifted her camera, scanning the perimeter through the viewfinder with the knowledge that the still woods could turn tumultuous at any second. She only needed to take a few shots to complete her field test, then she would know if her modification had improved the camera’s battery life. Either way, she wouldn’t be out too long.
Just a minute or two.
Claire slowly panned the camera across the horizon, the telephoto lens uncovering distant details like the charcoal-colored pine bark wrapping the trees, surrounding the snowcapped ruins of a WWII gun battery a hundred yards down the road. Everything seemed in its proper place, except for a fuzzy figure sitting atop a decades-old slab of concrete. Claire stopped, giving her lens a clockwise turn to zoom in on the object.
It was a Eurasian lynx, easily distinguished from other big cats by a silvery gray coat, black spots, and dark tufts of sharp, pointy hair protruding from the tips of its ears. The cat rested on its massive webbed paws, surveying the coastline from its perch near the battery ruins, oblivious to the bundled-up photographer nearby.
Claire sharpened her focus and took a few shots, wondering if the big cat would react to the unnatural clicking of the shutter. It didn’t. She tilted the camera to check the battery: 98 percent. So far, so good. A battery that could hold up to a hundred or more shots would be more than enough, especially since she carried several into the field.
She switched over to high-speed shooting and shot some more, her stealthy muse none the wiser. She checked the battery again; the fix had worked. Satisfied with the results, she turned off the camera, bid the lynx farewell, and turned to walk back to the bunker, when something stopped her dead in her tracks.
An explosion.
It was distant, across the Baltic separating Aegna Island from the mainland, but still enough to send shockwaves through the atmosphere. She lifted her camera to observe the pillar of smoke rising from the capital city, casting a shadow over the centuries-old architecture on its slow climb into the atmosphere.
The cloud grew and the roar continued, Claire’s peaceful moment in the wilderness interrupted by violent destruction and shattered nerves. In the short moments following the blast, countless innocents had likely lost their lives. But for whatever reason, Claire’s thoughts weren’t with the victims. They were with the lynx.
She moved her camera back to the pile of concrete ruins and was immediately relieved. Her furry subject was right where she’d left her, unflinching and resolute, watching the smoke billowing into the air along with the rest of north Estonia. The lynx turned its head to face Claire, big eyes staring into her zoom lens, unfazed by either the human trespasser or the fiery destruction on the other side of the foamy dark blue sea.
Claire stared back through her viewfinder, disturbed by the lack of reaction from the wild creature. Finally, the lynx looked away, back to the smoke on the horizon. She wasn’t sure why, but the sheer calm of the endangered animal made Claire nervous and afraid. How could it be so composed? Why wasn’t it scared or frightened or running to safety, like she would be doing if she weren’t frozen in place?
Suddenly, Claire felt a cold hand on her right shoulder. She jumped and turned, expecting to see Marko standing behind her, bidding her to come back inside where it was safe and warm.
Instead, she was face to face with her Torturer-In-Chief, Dick Doyle.
His face was a cold gray, eyes milky and glazed over. Claire looked down, horrified to see a crimson hole in Doyle’s torso. A thin stream of blood slowly oozed from the opening and down the front of his shirt, the mortal wound delivered courtesy of the bullet she’d put there months ago.
“I don’t under—”
“Claaaire,” Doyle called out, extending a feeble hand. “Time to wake up, Claire.” He took a step closer.
Claire stepped back, tripping on a stone in the road and falling back into the snowy embankment. She looked up in horror as Doyle continued his slow advance.
“Claaaire.”
She screamed. “Get away from me! You’re dead. You can’t be here. Get away! Get. Away . . . ”
Doyle closed in with a darkening face that was no longer his own. Suddenly, the gray and wintry Estonian sky shifted into a white coffered ceiling, held up by canary yellow walls soaked in afternoon sunlight. Tall windows on three sides of the room cast beams of angled light across the hardwood floors.
“Claire.” A Hispanic man loomed over the frightened reporter on the couch.
It was Alejandro Aguilar.
“Claire. Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.” He gently shook her shoulder as she came to.
“Wha—where am I?”
“In my sunroom.”
“No, I mean where.”
“San José.”
“California?”
“Costa Rica.”
Claire sat up on the couch and looked around. Not a snowflake in sight. In fact, the scene was quite the opposite. Fans hung from the ceiling slowly twirled and steered the muggy air through the room, but did little to cool the place. Claire found it odd that a man of such renowned wealth and taste as Aguilar had never invested in an efficient air-conditioning system. Perhaps he liked it warm, she thought. That made one of them.
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes as Aguilar watched, sipping his coffee.
“How can you drink that stuff in this heat?”
“Heat? I was just about to turn the fans off—”
“Please, don’t.”
A look of concern arose on Aguilar’s face. “The Baltics again?”
Claire somberly nodded. She found her tennis shoes by the couch, kicked off in her sleep. She laced them up while changing the subject. “How long was I out for?”
“Not very long. An hour, maybe two.”
“Get any calls?”
Aguilar took a deep breath. “Just one, of course.”
“Ford?”
Aguilar nodded.
“Jesus, what’s the deal with that guy?”
“My guess? Señor Donny Ford seeks the companionship of a smart, beautiful, fierce—”
“Oh, come on, Han,” Claire rolled her eyes, and Aguilar playfully backed away into the safety of the kitchen. The Costa Rican aristocrat had never made advances toward Claire in the past, even though their relationship had outgrown its professional façade in the years since Connor’s investigative reporting had led to the recovery of Aguilar’s young daughter. Aguilar was a devoted family man, and they were only friends. Nothing more.
But 2021 had been a difficult year for Aguilar, one that had changed the man Claire once knew. When she’d contacted him in February, looking for a low-key flight out of San José, the man she had spoken to had been proud, upbeat, and confident. A man of industry. The epitome of power and success in Latin America.
When she’d called a month later, seeking refuge after the case against Asteria Pharmaceuticals had fallen through, however, the man she’d spoken to on the other end of the line had been broken and alone. Aguilar’s wife, Isabel, had died unexpectedly of a heart attack, just one week after Claire and Paul had snuck back into the United States aboard one of Aguilar’s planes.
The charitable aristocrat had still been willing to help, hiding Claire out in his mansion outside of San José; setting her up with a fake identity so she could move around the city without popping up on Yankee radar; and helping her establish a secure home base for her investigation into the remaining Asteria clinical trial outliers.
Aguilar had always been more than willing to go out of his way to help a friend in n
eed, but Claire suspected that perhaps this time he was the one who needed support; if anything, just to keep his mind from the crippling depression that had come from losing his beloved wife.
Claire tried to press the wrinkles out of her T-shirt and jeans with her palms but the creases were there to stay. Falling asleep on the couch had left her a disheveled mess. She got up and shuffled into the kitchen, straightening her tussled hair just as Aguilar was fixing brunch. He stopped to slide Claire’s cellphone across the bar to her, then went back to frying eggs.
“I don’t get it,” Claire said, taking a seat on a barstool. “I tell Ford every day: when I know something, you’ll know something. And still, he calls. What the hell does he expect from me?”
“I already told you what he expects.”
“Be serious.”
“Okay then, let’s be serious,” Aguilar said, his tone changing from that of a playful chef to a more familiar no-nonsense businessman. “This man Ford is a showman. Business owner. Likes to be in control, no?”
Claire agreed.
“So here is a man who thrives on the spotlight, craves attention, publicity. And he’s been hiding away at his friend’s . . . What was it, David?”
“Dawa.”
“Yes, Dawa. Anyway, Donny has been hiding away for months now. Away from the world. Naturally, Dawa isn’t going to let him out of the house, because he’s risking his career just to keep him there. So, Donny is getting a little, how can I say this”—he waved the spatula—“stir crazy?”
“I’m sure that’s it,” Claire said. “I just wish he would pester someone else for a change.”
“You know, Claire, you didn’t have to contact him in the first place. You’ve had a new life here for what, six months now? And no sign of these people from Asteria, the CIA . . . no one. Why don’t you lose the phone and forget about Donny Ford? The man is bad news, Claire.” Aguilar slid Claire a plate. “And look at this: right before your very eyes, you have a man who will cook for you. Give you room and board. Keep you safe.”