Without wasting another moment, he tapped the button on the panel beside the room’s double sliding doors. He was expecting, at best, to hear Anna ask who was there. To his surprise, the doors slid open with only a quiet hiss of the pneumatic mechanism.
“Come in, before security gives you a hard time,” Anna’s voice came from just inside the doorway.
Stepping into the room, Cyrus heard the doors slide shut behind him. He was surprised by the size of the room. It was large and open, broken into zones, with a bed and set of dressers in one corner, a group of furniture and an entertainment center in another area, and a large display cabinet filled with trophies and awards taking up its own space. Even then, there was a tremendous amount of open floor left to move about.
“You’re up late,” Anna observed. She motioned for him to come further into the room.
“It’s sort of hard to sleep with what happened at dinner. Is there any news about Gretchen? Is she okay?” his voice was somber.
“She’s on her way back now. She’s okay, but she’s really shaken up. Beyond that, I don’t know much more. Dargo’s gone to investigate. He’s on his way to the States right now.”
She motioned him over to the grouping of chairs near the entertainment center. He took a seat in one of the over-stuffed armchairs, and sighed. “Dargo seems pretty hardcore,” he offered.
She laughed. “You could say that. He takes his job seriously. He takes the security of my entire family very seriously.
“It’s odd,” she continued. “First, you were attacked, and now Gretchen…someone clearly has an agenda. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what that might be.”
He nodded. “I’ll admit, I’m extremely interested to find out what happened to Gretchen. What she saw, who she saw, and what exactly happened. I want to know if there is a connection to what happened to me.”
She smiled. “That’s understandable. You were nearly killed.”
He considered her statement. “There’s that,” he admitted. “But Gretchen patched me up. I’m not sure I would’ve made it without her care. I owe her a debt that I can’t repay.”
“What happened to you, anyway?” Anna asked. The question poured out of her mouth so fast, and was delivered so bluntly, that Cyrus knew she’d been thinking it for a good, long time.
“I mean…on your way here with the device for my father,” she elaborated. “At the gate when you arrived, you were in worse shape than I’ve ever seen anyone in my entire life. I heard that it happened on a train… But what exactly happened?”
Cyrus considered the question. He could feel his disposition darkening as he replayed the fictitious version of the scenario in his mind—the version that supported his cover story. “A man and a woman cornered me in my sleeper car. At first, I figured they were just a couple traveling together like couples do. But there was something different about them. They just looked…wrong—carried themselves differently. I think that’s what tipped me off.
“The next thing I knew, one was pulling a gun,” he explained. “Everything after that was a blur. I don’t think they expected me to fight back. When I did, they were as surprised by the situation as I was.”
“And you got shot,” she said, in an effort to coax the story along. Cyrus had drifted off in his thoughts, reliving the real experience in his mind.
Cyrus shook his head. “I don’t remember getting shot.” His eyes rose to meet hers. “There was at least one gun—maybe two. One of them had a knife at some point. It all happened in one of those little sleeper cars, so it was close quarters. My memory is sort of a jumble.”
Anna didn’t interrupt. She just waited, giving him time to fill in the gaps in the story as he saw fit. It was the right way to draw information from someone, and he was impressed by her patient skill.
“I killed them,” he said quietly. “I killed them both.”
She waited, giving him more time to speak, but he said nothing.
“How do you feel about that?” she asked, in a calming, sensitive voice.
After a long moment, his eyes once more raised to meet hers. “I’m sorry? What was that?”
“I asked how you feel about the fact that you killed the man and the woman. I can’t imagine that taking the life of another person is easy to deal with.”
He shrugged. The truth was that he hadn’t given it a moment’s thought since. In his line of work, you didn’t dare. Doubt could eat you alive. You trust your instincts and refuse to second guess yourself. In this case, it wasn’t hard. “I probably don’t feel as bad as I should, in that case,” he said matter-of-factly. “They tried to kill me—almost succeeded in the end, actually. I can’t say that I’m losing any sleep over that part, to be honest.”
He was silent for a long while, then he looked at her again. “Do you think that makes me a bad person?”
His cover story being what it was, much of his conversation with her was more honest than he would ever admit. Especially the part about killing his would-be assassins. In a life or death fight, he wasn’t willing to risk being on the losing side.
“I think that makes you a very practical person,” she said, sending him a sincere smile. “It sounds like just the right attitude to get you through the experience.”
After that, she grew silent. She seemed to be contemplating the things he’d said. The stillness of the room stretched on for some time, but Cyrus was surprised to find that the silence was neither uncomfortable nor troubling. He didn’t feel like she was judging him. She just wanted to know him better—to understand what was going on around her. And he could respect that.
But judging by the darkness that had fallen across her face, he knew that something new troubled her. If she felt as comfortable talking with him as he had with her, she was now considering the pros and cons of sharing it with him. Not sure how to proceed, he simply waited for her to make up her mind.
It was nearly a full minute before Anna spoke again. When she did, Cyrus could see tears threatening to form in the corners of her eyes. “Thank you for sharing that with me,” she said quietly. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”
“You’re easy to talk to,” he said, and offered his best reassuring smile. “If you’ve got something on your mind, I’d like to return the favor.”
His statement had the effect of breaking the emotional dam that was Anna’s disposition. Tears erupted from her eyes, and her body shook with silent sobs.
Cyrus’s eyes bulged at the shocking transition as she crumpled before him. He knew she was approaching a precipice where she would either say what was on her mind, or she would push the troubling thoughts away…and him along with them. The aggressive step she’d taken over that figurative threshold had been powerful and quick, and it caught him off guard.
Moving quickly from the armchair, Cyrus dropped onto the couch and put his arms around her. She buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed for several minutes before starting to put together a coherent string of words. Once she was able, it seemed the waterworks had offered some cathartic purge, clearing away whatever emotional blockage was keeping her from voicing what was on her mind.
After a few additional minutes of sniffling and wiping the tears from her puffy red face and runny nose, Anna was ready to talk.
“I think that what happened to Gretchen was my fault,” she said, in a scratchy voice.
Cyrus smiled and shook his head. The idea was foolish. “It couldn’t possibly be your fault,” he offered. “We don’t even know what happened yet.”
“I don’t need to know what happened,” she explained. “Gretchen wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me. She went to Atlanta because I sent her. She was there because I told her I wanted to be in that stupid tournament.”
“Okay,” Cyrus said. He was beginning to understand her logic, or at least her line of thought. “So you’re thinking that, if you’d never decided to participate in the tournament, Gretchen would never have gone to Atlanta and would never have been in d
anger?”
Anna nodded.
It was linear logic, he reasoned. But the events of life seldom follow a linear process. “Consider this,” he began. “For the sake of argument, say Gretchen was targeted the same way I was. If that’s the case, then it didn’t matter if she went to Atlanta yesterday, today, or in a month. If she went to the U.K., or even the mainland here at some point, it’s likely that the very same thing would’ve happened to her.
“If she was targeted, you asking her to go somewhere or do something didn’t get her in that bind. Whoever is behind it did it for a very specific reason. The attack must serve some sort of purpose. And in all honesty, whatever’s going on, I don’t think it has anything to do with your decision to participate in a tennis tournament.”
Anna listened to everything he said, and he could see her thinking it through. Slowly, the light returned to her eyes. Finally, she offered a small nod and a slight smile. Wiping the last residual tears away, she squeezed his arm.
“You make a good point,” she said quietly. “And I think you’re a pretty good listener, too.”
Cyrus laughed.
“Plus,” she continued, “I don’t see how anyone could possibly have known I was joining the tournament at the last minute. Gretchen had to pull strings to get me in, actually. That’s why she had to fly out so abruptly.”
Her statement stopped Cyrus’s warm and fuzzy moment dead in its tracks. This was new information, and it was troubling. “How last minute?”
“Ah,” she stammered, looking away in embarrassment.
“What?”
She took a deep breath and finally met his eyes. “Okay,” she explained. “I hadn’t actually planned to participate in the tournament. I was kind of looking forward to some down time. But when you showed up, you caused a big upset around here. I mean big.
“Once they finally brought you inside the gate, they realized how bad you were hurt, and you were taken to the infirmary. You were unconscious down there for days. Anyway, right after all the drama, Natasha came back from a trip to some God forsaken lab somewhere. I was telling her the story of everything that happened while she was away. And why not? It was the first interesting thing to happen around here in forever.
“So, I took Tash down to the infirmary so she could see what all the fuss was about. Only the reaction she had when she saw you wasn’t at all what I expected. In fact, I’ve never seen anything like it from her. It was only made worse by the fact that she wouldn’t tell me what the hell it was all about. She just told me to keep quiet and don’t tell anyone that she’d seen you.”
By this point, Cyrus was sitting on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. For all the ways he’d considered first seeing Natasha again, he could never have imagined the way things had actually transpired.
“How does all of this relate to Gretchen ending up in Georgia?” he finally asked, talking into his hands.
Anna puffed out a breath before continuing. “Tash wouldn’t tell me what was going on, but she kept an eye on you while you were unconscious. I mean, she didn’t think anyone noticed, but I’m her sister. She can’t hide that kind of thing from me. So, while I knew something was up, she wouldn’t talk about it. Then you finally woke up. I thought she would be over the moon!
“But she wasn’t. That’s when she really got moody. There was an entire day where I couldn’t get more than one word answers out of her. She’d pretty much just checked out. It was like her mind was somewhere else.
“So, what could I do? I knew there was something there. I knew that you two knew each other, and she obviously had feelings for you—whatever they might be. So I thought I would help her along a little bit.”
Not understanding where the long story was going, Cyrus finally pulled his face from his hands. He didn’t want to know what happened next, but he needed to… He needed to understand. There was something more going on, and he needed to get a handle on it. Even though he’d used the attack on the train as a cover, that attack had taken place nonetheless. At the time, he wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with Voss or his own past work. But now there’d been an attack on Gretchen, equally odd from what he could tell so far, and the only thing that connected the two events was their mutual relation to Voss.
“I understand that you’re confused and worried about your sister,” Cyrus said, with as much sympathy as he could muster. “But what does this have to do with Gretchen?”
“Gretchen deals with all of our medical issues here,” Anna explained. “But that’s a lot of responsibility to put on one person, so she has an assistant—an understudy. When Gretchen is otherwise occupied, her understudy takes care of the infirmary.”
Cyrus groaned, as he understood what she was getting at. “And Natasha is Gretchen’s understudy,” he concluded.
She nodded. “Once you were stable, you just needed daily antibiotic shots, and your bandages changed. That was something Tash could do in her sleep. So I figured that, if I could get Gretchen out of the picture for a day or two, it would put you and Tash in the same room a couple of times a day. Maybe whatever it was that had her so upset would finally get resolved. I mean, be honest, you may have delivered that prototype for my father, but that’s not the real reason you’re here, is it?”
He couldn’t contain the proud smile that he offered Anna. She’d put together a great deal. She hadn’t compromised his mission, but she’d figure out what the spymasters back at the Coalition couldn’t. She was putting together his past relationship with Natasha, and she was keeping it on the down-low.
“So you signed up for the tennis tournament at the last minute knowing that Gretchen would have to fly to the States in order to finalize everything. All so you could put Natasha and me in the same room?”
“Well, you have to remember that I did this while you were still on lockdown. You were confined to the infirmary. I didn’t anticipate whatever magic you worked on my father to get yourself the run of the place. I figured I would need to get creative if you were going to get the time with her that you’d clearly gone to so much trouble and pain, to afford.”
Cyrus thought about all Anna had done and her motivations for it. “You’re a good sister, Anna,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze. “And a good friend. Thank you.”
She smiled back weakly.
“I can’t see how you could be in any way responsible for whatever happened to Gretchen, though. Like you said, she went out there at the drop of a hat. The question that comes to mind is, given that odd situation, who would even have known she would be there? Whatever happened, it couldn’t have had much planning. Even Gretchen didn’t know she would be visiting Atlanta until, what…an hour or two before she stepped on board a private jet? That’s pretty suspicious, if you ask me.”
Cyrus considered the situation further. “You know,” he said, with a hint of enthusiasm. “Would it be possible for you to put together a list of anyone who knew about Gretchen’s outgoing flight?”
“You mean, just between the two of us?”
He nodded. “At least for now. Something doesn’t smell right. And if there is a connection between what happened to Gretchen and what happened to me, I might be able to find it.”
“I don’t see why not,” she muttered, already giving the matter some thought. “There would be the people in the building, but we would need to consider anyone who knew that the jet was being prepared. It’s hangared at the King’s private airfield. Let me give it some thought. I should be able to pull a list together.”
“Perfect,” Cyrus grinned. “Then maybe we can get some answers.”
“Ah…on another note,” he said somewhat sheepishly. “I realize Natasha doesn’t want to talk to me, but I really do need to see her.”
“Did you try her room?”
“Twice. She didn’t answer.”
Anna cringed. She picked up the phone from the table at the end of the couch and dialed an extension. After letting the line ring fo
r nearly a minute, she placed the phone back in the cradle.
“I don’t think she was blowing you off,” Anna said with trepidation. “I don’t think she’s even in the building.”
That was the last thing Cyrus had expected to hear. “Not in the building? What about the lockdown? No one in or out until Dargo gets back with some answers—that’s what he said. Are you saying she talked her way out of that? Would they let her leave, even with a security detail?”
Slowly and nervously, Anna shook her head. “Dargo’s lockdown’s aren’t as effective as he thinks. If Tash has left the building, she did it without anyone knowing…and without a security escort.”
Chapter 43
The Voss Compound
11:13 pm
With concern for her sister growing, Anna led Cyrus down the hall to the door of Natasha’s room. She didn’t waste time knocking. That she was gone had become a virtual certainty in her mind. Natasha had been acting strangely over the last week, and when she was stressed, she liked to get away from the compound and everyone in it. Unfortunately, given that Gretchen had just been attacked in the U.S., it didn’t seem like a good time for her to be off on her own. And since sending security after her would only add to a growing list of problems, Anna was willing to let Cyrus go after her.
Punching the access code into the touch screen lock on the door, Anna shot a quick look toward each end of the hallway before grabbing Cyrus’s elbow and stepping into the room.
“What’s wrong?” Cyrus asked, as the doors hissed shut behind them.
“I would rather no one noticed us coming here,” she explained. “It would only draw more attention. Are you sure you can find her and bring her back?”
Cyrus nodded. He looked like he had a reply, but whatever it was he kept it to himself. “Why are we here?”
He looked around the wide bedroom suite for the first time. She watched his eyes as he took it all in. Like her own room, Natasha’s was expansive and separated into smaller areas by the way the furniture was arranged. The main difference in the case of Natasha’s room was that there was no wasted space as there had been in Anna’s suite. A large section of the room along the right wall was dedicated to a small painting studio. A wide easel and two smaller stands, along with a stool and a pair of small tables covered with assorted, half-used supplies.
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