“Please.” His voice breaks on that syllable, and the shards of the word hover there like the cloud of condensation between us. “I’ve tried — I’ve tried to be okay with this, but I’m not.”
I have to think through the blood rushing in my ears. No. This is a three-day mission. I’m not goign to let it ruin our real lives. “Look, I know this is hard right now, but it’s only for twenty-four more hours—”
“No, it isn’t. The restaurants, the food, the claustrophobia, the constant stops — it’s the rest of my life. I can’t live like this.”
He . . . can’t . . . ? What is he saying?
But the frost shooting through my chest tells me the truth. I already know. My parents. My mother, three times. Two of my brothers. Half my coworkers or more. Divorced.
No, no, no. He has to understand. “Danny, I have to, especially now, especially here—”
“It’s fine — it’s great that you want to keep us safe here. I’m down with that. But watching you over the last day, I’m seeing what you do at home. I’ve tried—”
“I’ve tried. I started keeping food, I stopped worrying so much about restaurants, I—” I have nothing else to list. I haven’t given much, but it was all I could.
“You skipped lunch today,” he finishes for me. “Because they were alone with your food. Right?”
The truth is not my ally, and my sarcasm is spent, so I resort to silence.
“Isn’t it exhausting? Aren’t you tired of looking over your shoulder?”
“Exhausting? It’s a mental marathon every time I walk out the door. But it keeps me alive.” We’re close enough to the street and its lights that I can see the argument building behind his eyes again. I cut him off with some of that aircraft-grade titanium in my tone. “We. Are. Working. And when you’re on assignment with me, you have to live by the rules.”
He moves an inch closer, and drops his voice to the edge of a whisper. “You going to pull rank with me when we get home, too?”
I gape at him, but he answers his own question. “It won’t work there.”
How is this backfiring? How is this getting worse with every second? I can’t even face him any longer.
Danny catches my elbow. “Please,” he says again. “You’re going off the deep end with the paranoia. Being here is just making it worse.”
I yank free and start walking. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe I don’t.” He follows. “But you can at least hear me out. Because I really have done my best to follow your rules, so I think I’ve earned that much.”
I nail him with a go-ahead-and-try-to-sway-me expression, which I know he can see when we reach the streetlight.
And when we reach the streetlight, I can see his face too. The pain and the pleading in his eyes cracks my concentration — and my heart.
“Please stop,” he says. “Please come back. You know I’ve been here before.” He pauses to let that sink in, the real underlying message.
The only “here” I can think of would be his relationship with his ex-fiancée. The one who had a serious mental illness, who screwed up Danny’s life for way too long, who tried to kill herself to get him to take her back.
My paranoia doesn’t reach the level of a personality disorder. Does it?
“I think you still have a choice. You can still stop it; you can still come back, now, before it’s too late. Please.” He inhales before he takes the final plunge. “Please choose me — end this.”
I try to swallow, but I can’t. I try to speak, but I can’t. I try to process this, but I can’t.
I’ve tried to be his wife — but maybe I can’t.
Slowly Danny’s gaze falls. Whatever he was expecting me to do or to say, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’m just . . . not. Not enough. Not who he thought.
He shakes his head a tiny bit, like he’s trying to renege, trying to say something, but all that comes out is the last two words again. “End this.”
He starts down the street, and I can’t stop him. I don’t dare. He walks out of sight, on a straight course back to our hotel. (Fortunately, it is easy to get back from here.)
As he disappears out of sight, the dread hits rock bottom in my gut. The worst part is that I don’t know what “this” I’m supposed to end.
No — the real worst part? I think I know exactly which “this” he means. It’s all my nightmares, worse than even Fyodor, come true.
Once I’ve changed into my Lori disguise, thanks to my backup makeup kit, I start my surveillance detection route back to the hotel. Though it’s less than a kilometer away, suddenly it feels like marching to Moscow.
How is this my life? A life that yesterday felt so perfect is now pretty much pulverized.
I kind of feel the same way. I don’t know how to get Danny back. If I even can. If he even wants me to.
Two nights without sleep, now this? I think I’ve earned a bus ride.
I check the street for any form of public transit, and that’s when I see a broad-shouldered beefcake veering across the pavement. Toward me.
In the States, it would be odd to have a stranger approach you on the street to get your number. (Or it was for me. Or it would’ve been, considering it happened exactly no times.) In Russia, that’s normal. Not that I got propositioned a ton (well, not by sober men . . . this really isn’t helping my self-esteem, but it’s not like I can sink lower). Still, it’s not completely out of the ordinary to have a guy come up to a woman and flirt with her or even ask her out, though she’s a perfect stranger.
Fortunately, it’s also not completely out of the ordinary for the woman to say “No” and the man to get lost.
I monitor Tall, Dark and Hulking, bearing in mind that I’m still wearing lots of eye makeup and heels and that copper hair. I’m Lori (with PhotoShop). The guy reaches me at the corner. “Devushka, may I make your acquaintance?”
“No, thank you.” I pause half a second to pick a route around him. He doesn’t make a move either direction, so I take the corner to see if he’ll follow. Hoping he won’t.
He does. Also not completely out of the ordinary for a guy to ignore a “no.”
I don’t like anybody pursuing me, even if it’s because they think I’m cute. I hug my market bag, running a mental inventory for a makeshift weapon — something that’d draw less attention than pulling a gun on a guy trying to get a date. (Pulling a gun = compromising the mission. Which is why I don’t carry a gun.)
My attention stays focused on Tall, Dark and Hulking, concentrating on his footsteps behind me. Not too close, not too far. At least we’re not alone on the street.
I’m halfway down the block before my hand grips an engraved metal Shcherbakov pen in my bag. Perfect. I slow to give the guy a chance to reach me. Just before I draw and wheel on him, a pedestrian down the block straightens from leaning against a building. He’s staring at me.
Okay, yeah, I look nice with the makeup and the wig and all, but that’s too much. I race through my mental map of the other pedestrians. There’s another guy behind my pursuer, and two men chatting in the streetlight at the corner. Everything about these guys is innocuous.
Too innocuous.
My tongue goes drier than the arid Russian steppe.
I can fight this — this paranoia, this overreaction. For Danny. Five men on a street do not automatically constitute a crisis. I keep moving forward, trying to put more space between me and Tall, Dark and Hulking.
I study the buildings for stops to lose these guys, though they haven’t converged on me yet. Dry cleaner, closed. Place for rent. Bank, closed. (How late is it?) Running out of options.
No. It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is totally routine, and the warning bells ringing in my brain are wrong. The guy in pursuit weighs enough to crush the life out of me, but I reach the corner without running. (See, Danny? I can be normal, even if in practice it seems more like being stupid.) (Please still love me.
)
A black sedan swoops to the curb. My warning bells turn into a cacophony, and my heart turns to solid ice. I grope for the pen again, willing this panic to be wrong, to be an overreaction.
“Lori,” the man behind me calls.
Yep. Well past time to run. Glancing over my shoulder, I feint a dodge to the right. When the guy goes for it, I switch directions to take the corner and run down the street.
He’s faster than a guy his size should be. His hand clamps on my elbow. I flail to wrench free, but he’s got me good.
I search the street for someone to shout to, someone to help, but the guys I thought were his cohorts are gone, and the nearest pedestrians can’t get here in time, half a block away.
Tall, Dark and Hulking’s other meaty paw seizes my other elbow, and he pulls them together so I can’t resist. He rotates me toward the car, my waiting prison. Though this is nothing like my memories, my brain keeps dredging up images of the only time I’ve been taken prisoner. By Fyodor Timofeyev.
My pulse skyrockets. Did Danny fall into their trap, too?
The sedan’s back door swings open, and my lungs instinctively seize, prepping myself to once again find Danny at gunpoint.
Borya sits in the backseat. Alone. Waiting. Like won’t you join me?
As if I have a choice. My meat-fisted friend thrusts me forward, ducking my head to shove me into the backseat. (Because apparently he’s done this before.) The door shuts, and the car joins the flow of traffic.
One-on-one with an FSB officer. I should be smarter than to fall prey to a classic rendition, snatching someone off the street. Even if I was a little distracted.
“Hello, Lori.” Borya smiles like he didn’t just abduct me. “I see you’ve met my cousins Anton—” he gestures at the driver, then back at the street — “and Evgeniy.”
“Pleasure.” Now what’s the smartest course? If I leap from a moving vehicle or give him attitude, like I did Fyodor, I’ll tip him off I’m not some poor interpreter. If I can lull him into that sense of security, maybe I can figure out what this is about.
I regard Borya with wide eyes. “What’s going on?”
His smile turns sinister. “I suppose I should ask you the same thing.”
My heart hovers, waiting for the other shoe to fall, waiting for him to say my real name, waiting for him to call me on my real relationship with Danny. But he says nothing.
Ah, silence. The interrogator’s BFF. Not falling for that trick. I didn’t know if it was physically possible, but apparently I can make my eyes even wider and more innocent. “What will you do to me?”
Borya flinches. (And I ignore a flash of victory at throwing him off his game.) “Who said I was going to do anything to you?” he asks.
I cast a pointed look at the door, as if we haven’t already left Tall, Dark and Hulking well behind us. “Is that how you get a woman in a car with someone she knows? You couldn’t ask?”
“We did. You said no.”
“Doesn’t count.”
Borya relaxes into the leather upholstery. “Well, should we drop you off at your hotel?”
“Yes, please.”
His laughter dismisses that possibility. Yeah, that bodes well. “We have much to talk about first.”
Oh boy. But to keep my cover, I dangle the bait I pray he won’t take. “Don’t you want to talk to Danny?”
“This doesn’t concern him, unless he was the one trying to hack me.”
Danny’s (hopefully) at the hotel inspecting those hacked files. Is either of us safe? “No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Did al-Ansari send you?” Borya springs the question like he can startle me into confessing.
“Sorry, still don’t know what you mean.” I offer an apologetic shrug though I know exactly what he’s talking about: his email buddy.
“You or Danny logged into my email on my computer. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
Um, yes?
“Registry files show a USB device connected to my computer with an afterhours time stamp yesterday when you and Danny came back to the office to search for his watch.”
I squint like my memory scan came up empty. “I didn’t see anything like that, sorry.”
“Tell me what you know about al-Ansari.”
Now would be a good time to lie. “Al Ans-what-i? I guess it’s . . . an Arabic name?”
“Do you know who he is? Do you know what he does?”
“I didn’t know ‘he’ was a specific person.” I fixate on Borya, but I try not to lock on his gaze too long.
“And you are not working for him?”
“No. Never heard of him.” I look around, like I’m expecting a candid camera crew to jump out.
“What did you read in my email?”
“Nothing,” I say quickly. “I didn’t even mean to log in. I just wanted to check my email, but yours popped up.”
Borya eyes me. I hope he’ll chalk up any deceptive indicators that subconsciously sneak past my defenses to innocent nerves. “What’s your login?” he asks.
“To — to mail.ru?”
“Yes. You went to mail.ru to read your email. So what’s your login?”
I rub my seatbelt. The real Lori’s account would be the best answer, if she had one. I’ll go with something I can sign up for as soon as I get out of here. (I’m getting out of here, right?) “LoriDolman87.”
“Why don’t you log in?” He holds out his giant screen smartphone, Mail.ru’s page already loaded.
This is a test. And I’m going to fail. I take the phone, my brain paging through possible excuses. I type the login I gave him, and a few random characters as a fake attempt at my password. Not too surprisingly, it gives an error message: Nevernoye imya pol′zovatelya ili parol′. Invalid username or password. I barely have time to see it before I hold it out to Borya.
He takes his phone back and consults the screen. Without moving his head at all, he looks up at me, the classic librarian-over-the-glasses glare. “It didn’t work.”
“No?” I feign surprise. I take his gloved hand wrapped around the phone and tilt the screen to me. My shoulders drop. “I just changed my password. I haven’t memorized it yet. You know how InterpretiRossiya is with security. I’ll have to look it up again when I get home.”
“They make you use your work password on your personal email?”
“Of course not. I like to only have one password to remember at a time.”
Is it me, or does that excuse sound even lamer out loud? But it should be good enough for the dude who keeps his password on a Post-It on his monitor. Unless that was a trap.
Borya purses his lips. “That is not good security, either.”
Is he calling my bluff? I’ve got to play the cover harder. I cover my mouth. “Oh my gosh, please don’t tell them.” I go for the wide-eyed innocence he fell for earlier, and add a twist of neurotic fear. “They’ll fire me — please, I can’t lose this job.”
He waves away my hysterics. “Endanger their security however you want.” He puts away his phone, and the tension in my shoulders releases.
“So now are you going to tell me where you’re taking me?” I ask.
“Where I’m taking you?” Borya nods at the windshield. The Hermitage Hotel looms ahead down the street.
I’m almost free? I draw a silent breath. But I can’t leave without trying to exploit this opportunity. “So who is this al-Answari guy?” I trip on his name on purpose.
“Al-Ansari,” he corrects me automatically. “And he’s none of your concern.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. “You practically kidnap me to accuse me of stealing your files for someone who’s none of my concern? Do I need to tell Danny about this?”
“No,” Borya answers so fast he almost cuts me off. “If you mention this, it will bring trouble. I doubt that’s what he’s paying you for.”
I don’t respond to that. “And not mentioning getting s
natched off the street is supposed to keep him out of trouble?” I shake my head in fake wonder. “I guess Danny’s wrong about you.”
“Hm?” Borya can’t hide his piqued interest.
“He kinda can’t stop talking about you. He thought you were becoming good friends. Hope I’m not getting in the way.”
He contemplates that a long second, and I can see the fight. He wants to give me something, for Danny’s sake. “Keep him away from ulitsa Novatorov tomorrow afternoon.”
Not sure where that street is. We pull to the curb, but I’m not done. “Wait, what’s tomorrow?”
“The less you know, the better,” Borya says. He focuses on my floor mat, and something about his flat tone raises a yellow flag of worry in my mind.
I lean forward. The upholstery creaks beneath me. “And Danny? Does he know too much?”
“Danny knows nothing. Keep it that way, and you’ll both be safe.”
“From you?”
“From al-Ansari.” Again, his tone is oddly flat. Either he’s lying, or something else is going on.
“Are you in trouble?”
Borya brushes off my concern. “No. I’m fine. And you will be too, if you do as I say.”
Oh, I will. But I’ll also be calling Semyon as soon as Borya drives away. “All right.” Would an interpreter take control of a client for the day? That seems awkward (even if your client doesn’t hate you). “If you really want to keep Danny safe — without getting his suspicions up — you should find something for him to do at Shcherbakov.”
“Our visit ends at noon.”
“I’m sure you can find something else—”
Borya shuts me down, flicking away my argument. “I will not be there, and no other directors are available.”
Right. “Okay, I’ll figure something out.”
“See that you do.” He signals the driver and the door locks click. Unlocked. I’m free.
But this still feels like one for the loss column. I bite my lip, staring at him from the corner of my eye. “Are you sure you don’t need help?”
Spy Another Day Box Set: Three full-length novels: I, Spy; Spy for a Spy; and Tomorrow We Spy (Spy Another Day clean romantic suspense trilogy) Page 73