by Skye, S. D.
The answer came. Her response required courage she didn’t possess at the moment, but she hoped to find it sooner than later. “How about we get through this op and we’ll talk about it again when we’ve put this mess behind us tomorrow? Just one more day.”
He reluctantly nodded. “Under one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Rub my feet. My corns hurt.”
She laughed and shook her head. What else could she do with a man who stopped her heart one moment and cracked her up the next...except share her life with him?
“Oh, I’ll rub your feet all right.” She grabbed a pillow and pounded him over the head. They bowled over in laughter when he finally submitted.
“Actually,” she said. “I’ve got a much better idea.”
• • •
“Ooooooooh, J.J. That. Feels. Sooooooooo gooooooood! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” Tony moaned, his eyes rolling in the back of his head. She’d expressed his body to sublime ecstasy.
She smiled, enjoying the sight of him. He was her heaven on Earth. “Is it warm?”
“Mhmmm hmmmm. Warm and wet. Just the way I like it.”
“I’m gonna stop in a minute,” J.J. said. “You gotta get down here and do me next.”
He peered through his half-open lids. “Do you?”
“Yeah! My feet hurt, too. You can change the water in the Dr. Scholl’s foot bath while I take a seat.”
“Oh, all right,” he said laughing. “It’s only fair.”
She smiled to herself, knowing he would.
Tony made her choice easy and yet hard at the same time. Did he really understand what they’d be getting into? She understood the issue of race and America in a way he never would, at least until he started dating her. Could he handle the rude awakening, the inevitable moment when society reminded him just how white she isn’t? Times had changed in some ways to most people. But not enough to all.
Maybe she was jaded by years of watching her parents in the struggle. Loving Six was easy because he was black. Leaving him was easy because he was an asshole. Loving Tony wasn’t easy, it was effortless, a natural state of being. Avoiding him because he was “not black” was the most difficult thing she’d ever done.
There were times when J.J. adored Tony’s honesty and the fact that he never made her itch. This was not one of those times.
Decisions. Decisions.
As she later slipped into bed and submerged herself beneath her comforter, she tried her best to drown out the latest string of events. Her mind spun, flustered with the onslaught of challenge after challenge. She couldn’t sleep. She reached into the nightstand, grabbed a fifth of Belvedere and gulped until her troubles washed away.
• • •
“Rise and shine sleepy head,” Tony said as he poked his head through her bedroom door. Four a.m. came four hours too early for Tony, and he knew J.J. was usually a late sleeper. He could hear the wind rustle the windows as he eased through the threshold. “J.J.? You hear me?”
She still didn’t respond, probably couldn’t hear him above her snores. He eased toward the bed calling her name and she didn’t flinch or move. As he reached on her nightstand to turn on the lamp, the moonlight shone on her face. She looked so angelic, so precious. He wanted to plant the sweetest of kisses on her lips but smiled instead. As he pressed his finger against the light switch, words emerged from her steady rumbles.
“I love you, Tony,” she murmured, followed by another round of snores.
He froze and drank in every delicious word. Then he shook it off. She’s just dreaming, he thought. Then again, she was dreaming of him.
Suddenly, her leg jerked and he heard a glass bottle fall hit the floor. She awakened, just as Tony lifted the empty bottle from the floor.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she said, running her tongue across her teeth, still groggy from the alcohol’s effects.
“Believe me, I tried. What the fuck is this? You promised me!”
“I’m sorry, Tony!” she said, scrambling to untangle her feet from the blankets. She rushed to him, arms outstretched. “I’m so so sorry! I-I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t slept in weeks. Months. Maybe years. I don’t know. I thought with you here, I could—But I couldn’t—So I—”
“Stop, just stop it, J.J. I don’t want to hear it!” Tony snatched his arm from her grip.
She placed her hand on him again but still he rejected her. “I swear to God, Tony! I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Yeah, well, apparently, you have no trouble lying to yourself! Don’t you understand we’ll be failing a polygraph tomorrow and two men will die if this op doesn’t go as planned? There’s no way I’m gonna let you go on this operation this morning.”
She stopped cold, took a step back. “Let me? You can’t ground me like I’m some kid. This is my operation… for my source.”
“Oh, your operation, huh? So I’ve just been following behind you with my head in my ass, is ‘at what you’re tryin’ to say?”
She shook her head no and walked up to him. Within seconds, his hand was in hers and he was slow to pull away. “No, that’s not—. Tony I’m sorry,” she began, tears streaming down her eyes. “Everything’s been spiraling out of control and I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know what to do. But God, if I hurt you. If I lost you, I don’t...I don’t—”
She released him, returned to the bed, and rained blankets of tears into her palms.
In all the time Tony knew her, he’d never seen J.J. cry. As with everything else in her life, she’d excelled so well at concealing her fears and emotions that the depth of her pain stunned him, stopped his breath. He had no idea she hadn’t slept. He had no idea her life was so out of control.
Everything had changed. She had exposed her deepest weaknesses and vulnerabilities to him and he saw her with new eyes—the eyes of a man who loved her come what may. His anger subsided, and he now wanted nothing except to stop her from hurting.
He knelt in front of her, wiped the tears from her eyes, and caressed her cheek. “I didn’t know J.J., I didn’t know. But I’m here and I’m not going anywhere, Hai capito?” he said.
She smiled weakly.
“We’ll make it okay,” he said, the corners of his lips lifting at the corners. “Whadaya say we just get this op over with today and we’ll figure out a solution later...together?”
She nodded and released his hands. Then she dragged her pajama sleeve across her eyes as she stepped into the closet and pulled some Dockers and a polo shirt from their hangers.
Watching her step into the bathroom and flip the light on, Tony teased, “Now, can a brotha get some coffee?”
Before she shut the door, she shook her head and chuckled. “Yeah...at Starbucks. It’s on the way!”
Inside the bathroom, J.J. dropped her clothes on the floor and gripped her right wrist so tightly the rush of blood made her fingers turn red. She wondered if she could even hold steady her toothbrush; she couldn’t will her digits still no matter how hard she tried.
“Not today,” she said in a whispered scream. “Not today!”
Chapter 37
Early Thursday Morning…
Usually slow to rise, Koshechka slipped out of bed before the street lights shut off. She knew he’d want his coffee early, even though he had been jittery and his nerves dangled on the edge of breakdown ever since he passed the information regarding Vorobyev to the embassy against her advice. His over-eager chicken shit tongue sparked a chaotic chain of events that threw Moscow and Washington into a tailspin. He’d selected the wrong moment to man up. According to a late-night text from her colleague, Freeman had turned up the heat on everyone. From the cafeteria staff to the entrance gate security police, no one had been left untouched. Full-scale internal investigations had been ordered for everyone. Freeman vowed to leave no personnel file unopened until the snitch had been identified and arrested.
Koshechka understood all too well the consequences which is the reason
she urged him to keep his mouth shut until after he’d passed the polygraph, but he refused to listen. Now they’d both pay.
She heard him ease up to the kitchen doorway as she started the coffee pot. Her back to him, she assumed he’d silently stalk her in his usual unnerving way.
“You nervous about today?” she asked, spinning around to see his face. She always monitored his responses. His facial expressions always double-crossed him and revealed his true feelings, even when his words said otherwise.
“I don’t think this is a good idea. We have travel documents, and we’ll have enough money to take care of ourselves for a long time. Why can’t we just pick up the cash today and leave? You know, take the money and run.”
“I have no immunity. I must be careful...and I also have a child to think about now. This isn’t about you and me. We have another life to consider here. I won’t be left with nothing, ever again!” she snapped. Her obvious contempt threw Chris off guard. She stammered for a moment and then softened.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a sexy moan. The coffee pot sounded and she deeply inhaled the aroma. “You need coffee, darling. Come, let me pour.”
He followed her to the counter as she prepared his cup.
Her voice calmed. “I just don’t want to leave here to live in some godforsaken country in the middle of nowhere with a new baby, do you?” she battered her eyelashes and rubbed her hand against his chest. “And when the money runs out, what do we do?”
His spine curved. With a grave expression, he gazed down. “You’re right my love,” he said. “I’m gonna pull myself together.”
“I knew you would honey. Never doubted you for a second.”
Koshechka had been running from poverty as a loner for most of her life. She had few acquaintances and fewer genuine friends. Her father’s work with the KGB First Chief Directorate, which deployed officers to Western countries such as the United States, kept him away from home for most of her childhood. Her mother, who had nary a nurturing bone in her body, succumbed to a bottle-a-day vodka habit, refused to travel with him. Koshechka’s days were filled with squandered money and unpaid bills. As she scorned her mother, she placed her father on the highest pedestal, promising to rise to meet him at all costs.
Her will and determination to succeed at almost any cost, coupled with her introverted nature, set her apart from her classmates at the SVR’s Red Banner Institute. So, their plans for her changed—slightly. Directorate S, which closely monitored her progress, decided she was well suited for a clandestine position under a special cover legend they’d been developing for ten years—Madeleine Bouchard. She traveled from the Ukraine to Bern, to Vienna, and finally to Canada. In each country, she established a new identity and abandoned her past. In Canada, she received her final documents a Canadian birth certificate and a passport, virtually erasing the life she’d longed to forget.
The father she yearned to know had just begun his first tour at the Russian Embassy in Washington. She wanted so much to see him, to be near him, to hear him call her Solnyshko once again. But maintaining her cover meant she could never go anywhere near the embassy. If the FBI lookouts noticed her walking in, she would come under immediate scrutiny. She was forced to rely on impersonal communication to contact him and so dropped a letter into his vehicle during one of his cover stops. His absence would be her only regret, but he’d return home to her soon. And she’d be there, in Moscow, waiting with open arms and an eager heart.
Although she realized Chris’s suggestion to bail and leave the country had been more common sense than nonsense, she had hoped closing in the physical distance to her father would help bridge the emotional one. Then J.J. had to go and fuck up the plans, whining about that pig Polyakov. If Jack had done his job and gotten rid of her as she ordered him years before, she’d have been long gone and the ICE Phantom investigation a memory.
Hanssen’s arrogance, narcissism, and greed had led him to his demise and Koshechka’s unquenched thirst for her father’s adoration and her nation’s respect had nearly led her to the same dark sticky end.
Almost.
She entered the cramped office in her intentionally modest home. Although the photocopied files she’d collected and stashed away for the past few weeks might serve as Chris’s last drop, they certainly would constitute her final U.S. operation. She hadn’t been in the habit of drinking, but a shot of Stoli would give her the patience to get through the morning without making Chris suspicious of her true intentions. She reached behind her favorite book, The Daughter of the Commandant by Pushkin, and pulled out the small flask from which she drew two long sips. She reminded herself of her mother, hiding liquor. Her reflection in the framed photo sitting on her bookshelf, the one into which she’d been Photoshopped, gave her pause. The Stoli slipped down her throat with barely a wince and warmed her to the tips of her fingers. She’d have chased it with a cigarette, but Chris must leave first.
After wrapping the packages carefully to seal the exposed edges with the gray duct tape, she carried it to its courier.
“You ready?” she said, watching him descend from the stairs cloaked head-to-toe in black clothing and an unattractive stench of fear.
“Ready as I’ll ever be I guess.” He grabbed the package from her hand and bent slightly to kiss her blushed cheek goodbye. She offered it to him so he wouldn’t smell the scent of alcohol on her breath. And then she wished him luck.
“What are you going to do until I get back home?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe have another shot of vodka and smoke a cigarette,” she said.
He paused until she smiled, then he laughed.
“You’re joking,” he said, chuckling. “But don’t quit your day job.”
“Too late. Already did.” She patted him on the back and followed him to the front porch. “Don’t forget what I told you about the test and you’ll be fine. I promise.” She watched him shuffle to the car and blew him a kiss goodbye as his car disappeared into the distance.
“Finally,” she exhaled. “It’s time.”
Chapter 38
Chris white-knuckled the steering wheel as he weaved through traffic. He debated whether he should take I-66 and drive to Washington Field office; there he could turn himself in and confess the whole sordid affair. But could he do so without implicating his Koshechka? After all, she was carrying his child. No child of his would be born behind bars because he ratted out the woman he loved. Who would care for it? Both of his parents were globe-trotting retirees. Saddling them with an infant grandchild, born out of wedlock no less, was hardly an option.
Refusing the test, which would’ve placed him under immediate suspicion, was also a non-starter. Employing countermeasures was his only option. He’d pass the test and maintain his cover through the painful four hours. Afterward, he’d have the grounds to insist they defect sooner than later.
He pulled into the park and noticed more people than usual were out exercising. But then again, he had little to compare it to as he’d only been in the location one other time. Still, if the drop site had not been so far down the trail, he might have considered aborting the op. Given the distance, he’d be able to tell within seconds whether he was being followed.
He exited the car, and a cool howling gust made him shudder, sent a chill through his core. He grabbed the package from the trunk then paused and listened, wondering if the universe might be whispering to him, maybe the winds of change. He pressed on, hoofed to the drop location. The sound of crisp $100 bills was, at that moment, his only real concern.
• • •
Koshechka grabbed her cell phone and dialed his number. He was her one true love, the lone silver lining in the dark clouds of her chaotic world.
“Darling.” Her voice smiled at the sound of his. Her father would be proud of her choice. He was stronger and even more cunning than she. After all, he’d conned more people in less time. Though years younger, he reminded her of what little she knew of her father, an
d those characteristics are what drew her to him.
“There’s my girl,” he sang. “What took you so long?”
“Eh! Took forever to get him out of the house.” She placed a few family photos into a large moving box. Their flight was scheduled and they had nothing to do except show up at the airport and survive the security checkpoint. Once through, they were home free. She wished she could see the expression on Chris’s face. She’d duped him in more ways than one.
“I’m so glad you won’t have to deal with that asshole anymore,” he said after his hearty chuckle ended. “What time’s his polygraph this morning?”
“I think it’s at ten,” she said.
“You taught him the countermeasures, right? I can’t believe he thought he passed those practice exams.”
“I can,” she said. “Now, we don’t have much time. Unlike my colleagues at the embassy, if they catch me, I have no diplomatic immunity and I’ll be no better off than Jack.”
“I know. This operation should be over by noon. I’ll go home, switch cars, and meet you at Dulles,” he said. “We’ll be in the air before anyone’s the wiser.”
“Yes, indeed.” Koshechka looked out the window at the autumn rainbow along her fence line. She’d miss her house most of all. Her flat on the outskirts of Moscow would be home for some time. She wished she could transport the Cape Cod to her village. “Now I’ll meet you outside the security gate at 1:00. That should leave us plenty of time. Maybe we can stop at Harry’s to toast our future before we board the plane.”
“You’ll have sparkling apple cider, remember? We don’t want you to hurt the baby,” he said, enjoying a sinister laugh at Chris’s expense. “Silly schmuck.”
“Enough of your jokes already. We need to get moving,” she said. “I can see the finish line.”
“Me, too. Meet you there.”
• • •
The sun’s rays broke across the horizon, and a strong acrid breeze whipped through the trees. Thanks to Director Freeman’s call to the Park Police chief, the patrol officers unlocked the gates a few minutes earlier than usual to give the Gs a head start. Tony and J.J. watched the surveillance personnel move into their positions—some camouflaged and crouched beneath piles of leaves, others dressed in plain clothes, passing themselves off as early morning fitness freaks.