by Tessi, Zoya
I stopped taking in air as I listened to Alex, whose breaths had become rapid and shallow. The sound reminded me of a dog at bay, and in response I eased my body deeper into the recesses of the couch, so that I was almost hidden between the armrest and some cushions.
“You've got to be fucking shitting me! But, we’re not ready yet. You said you’ll give me more time... Oh, I’m losing it? You know what? Fuck you!”
After he’d hung up, he stared at the screen of his phone for some time before launching it full force at the wall in front of him, where it smashed to smithereens. I gasped and buried my head behind a cushion, just moments before the awful sound of breaking glass and furniture filled the room. It was only when the noise died down that I dared look up.
That whole part of the room looked like a bomb had exploded. A bookcase lay overturned on the floor and the stereo lay smashed to pieces in a corner ten feet from where it was supposed to be. Damaged books and other bits and pieces lay strewn across the room. Alex was sitting on the floor with one leg bent underneath him, staring up at the ceiling, expressionless. I guess I breathed out loudly when I saw him, because he lowered his head to look at me, seemingly astonished to find I was still in the room.
“Jesus,” he shouted, jumping up from the floor to reach me in a couple of long strides.
“I’m sorry. I forgot you are there.” with desperate hand movements, he stroked my face and hair, then reached around to rub my back and then my thighs, his eyes reflecting some inner horror.
“Alex,” I tried to reach to him, but he seemed oblivious to my words as he went on trying to reassure himself that I was OK.
When he'd finally come down to Earth a little, he cupped my face in his hands and closed his eyes, leaning in with his forehead so that it met my own.
“You’re alright...” he whispered softly, keeping his eyes closed. “ I was afraid that something hit you. I’m so sorry...
“Alex... Look at me,” I begged, but he just shook his head.
“Please, look at me,” I pleaded more softly, at which he finally opened his eyes.
“What’s wrong? “
“Everything just went to hell.... I can’t believe this.”
He was rolling his head and it seemed like he was talking to himself.
“Did something happen to Nikolai?” I asked, anxiety twisting in my guts like razor wire.
“No.”
“Then, what...”
I didn't get to finish my question because Alex was already moving to his feet. He went running into the bedroom and came back a couple of seconds later with some clothes bunched under his arm.
“Get dressed, fast.” was all he said before thrusting the clothes into my hands and moving away into the hallway.
Without asking any more questions, I started to put on the jeans and plaid cotton shirt, keeping my eyes fixed on where he'd headed.
Moving a little further towards to hall, I was able to watch as he moved into the kitchen with a bunch of keys in his hand, crouched down in front of the cabinet next to the fridge, unlocked it and pulled out his black sports bag. I pursed my lips, realizing that all along that closet had been locked to me. Maybe I’d even tried to open it when I was looking for something or other, but the fact of it hadn’t registered.
Within minutes we were in the garage and I started going towards his bike, but he took my hand and motioned with his head towards the Jeep. I got into the car and observed as he reached into the bag for something slightly bigger than a phone and switched it on. A screen flickered into view, showing a map of part of the city, with a flashing red dot at its center. It looked like some tracking device.
Letting it fall onto the seat between his legs, he started the engine and reversed at such a speed that I probably would have cracked my skull against the windshield if I hadn’t already done up my belt. After we’d hit the street with a bump, it wasn’t long before we were cruising at a steady seventy miles per hour.
“For God's sake!” I screeched, holding the sides of the passenger seat with all my strength, “Do you want to tell me where we’re racing to like a space rocket?” glancing down at the speedometer, I could see that the needle was hovering at close to eighty by now. “Alex! What the hell’s going on?”
“I wish I could tell you, Princess, believe me,” he spoke in a low voice that almost matched the growl of the engine, before overtaking a taxi that was moving pretty fast itself, and then, to my horror, he put his foot down hard to jump the red light.
I stopped breathing, expecting to feel the crunch of metal or smell the acrid stench of burning rubber at any moment. Luckily for us, the streets were almost deserted, it being one o’clock on a Monday morning.
“You’re going to get us killed!” I gasped, covering my face as we jumped yet another red light.
“Sasha, listen to me carefully,”
I heard Alex's voice, but didn’t dare look ahead through the windshield, or over in his direction. The car went right on lurching this way and that, always leaving my stomach a pace behind.
“It’s vital - outta the way, motherfucker! - it’s absolutely crucial that when we get there, you stay put in the car. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” I felt my breath hot against the sweat on my palms.
“I’ll get out, and then I’ll be gone for a little while, and you’re going to lock yourself in the car and wait for me. OK? Maybe I’ve already made a big mistake in bringing you with me, but fuck it. I couldn't just leave you there alone. It's done now...”
The car was slowing down, so I finally summoned the courage to move my hands away from my face and look around. We were in a gloomy, narrow street somewhere in an older suburb, and all around us there were rickety houses, evidently built in some bygone era. The only light came from a sickly orange streetlamp on the other side of the road. Just one look at the setting made me shudder, but when I opened my mouth to speak, Alex moved a silent finger over my lips.
“I can’t explain anything to you now. Remember what we agreed - whatever happens, whatever you hear, you have to stay in the car. Understand?” he gave the last word a good deal of gravity and I could only nod.
“OK. If I'm not back in half an hour...” he pressed some buttons to type an address into the GPS on the dash, “I want you to go straight to Mike's place, this is his address. Tell him what happened and he’ll know what to do. Your passport’s here in the glove box.”
“How... how do you mean if you don’t get back?” I asked frightened, grabbing his arm,”Why would I need my passport? What's going on?”
“Sasha! You’ve got to do exactly as I say. There’s no debating.”
He grabbed the bag from the back seat, flicked the door handle and started to get out of the car, but then turned around. For a moment it seemed like he wanted to say more, but then he just breathed in, leaned towards me and gently pressed his lips against mine. In no time, he was outside, leaving me to watch helplessly as he moved further away into the darkness down the street.
Eyes glued to the glowing green clock on the dashboard, I tried to focus and get a grip of the situation, but as much as I tried to summon some courage, I just couldn't seem to calm down. Entering a sort of nightmare, it felt like I’d been in the car for hours, but when I focused again on the clock it showed that only fifteen minutes had passed.
“OK... OK... everything’s going to be OK,” I spoke out loud, hoping to convince myself, but I couldn’t go any way to shaking off the anxiety that was creeping all around me like poisoned ivy.
Looking out onto the street where Alex had disappeared, I strained my eyes in the hope of seeing his figure running back out of the gloom, but the only things visible were some broken down cars, crippled against the sidewalk.
The night air was chill and a mist hung down over the shadows. There wasn’t a living soul around, and again I looked down, this time to find that a full thirty-five minutes had passed. Somehow, I found myself stirring and moving past the gear
stick to sit in the driver’s seat. Slowly, I turned the key in the ignition.
I should go. He said I should go...
“ Shit...” I whispered to myself, then turned off the engine and flew out of the car.
Folding my arms around my chest protectively, I headed at a fast pace in the direction Alex had gone, searching frantically with my eyes, feeling like a wild animal cut off from the pack. At the first corner I turned and then stopped, wondering desperately which way to go.
Suddenly, someone grabbed me from behind and a strong hand pressed down over my mouth in an instant. The initial shock took my breath away, so I failed to react at first. When it hit me that he already had me up in the air, and that I was being carried away towards a dark building off to one side, my instincts kicked in and I started flailing around madly.
“Stop moving!” a deep, unknown voice spoke close to my ear, as I felt a trickle of cold sweat roll down under my arm.
However hard I punched or scratched, his grip remained vice-like and it seemed like there was no chance of getting free. He was dragging me backwards, still gripping me around the waist with one arm and muffling my cries with the other. I tried to dig my heels in, but they dragged along the ground just the same, and soon I was being manhandled up some steps and through a doorway into a narrow, unlit hallway.
He stopped when we reached a bright room on the right. The scene that confronted me took me completely by surprise and I stopped struggling, aghast.
The place was bustling with activity. A bunch of people were moving around, but they were all real quiet. A few of them were sitting around a table cluttered with laptops, cables and some other devices I didn't recognize. Down to a man, they were dressed in black flak jackets and bullet-proof vests, looking just like the special-forces guys I'd seen in action movies, all with guns of one kind or another strapped to their bodies.
In front of us, a grizzled, middle-aged man stood in front of a small monitor, listening to some kind of transmission through a pair of headphones. He seemed completely absorbed by what he was watching as he stroked his long white mustache between two fingers.
“Boss, I found this kid outside,” I heard my captor break the silence.
The older man turned around, looked me up and down, and then let out a violent curse. I looked away from his face for a second, taken aback by the livid red scar that ran the length of his cheek. When I looked up again it was not at his face but the white lettering on the right side of his jacket. Frozen in place, I felt the color drain from my cheeks.
“Could someone please explain what’s Navarov’s daughter doing here?” he barked.
When nobody answered, the grizzled man shook his head and made a few decisive steps towards a door that apparently led to another room beyond.
“Get your ass over here.” he spoke to someone inside.
“What now?”
Hearing the voice that responded, I felt my knees turn to jelly.
When he entered the room I blinked, hardly believing my eyes. Pain flared in my chest, as though something just broke inside. I was pretty sure it was my heart.
“Sasha?” Alex's voice came to me, but from a long way away. “How did you get in here?”
I didn’t answer. Completely stunned, I could only stare at his vest, or more accurately the white inscription imprinted there. Just in front of my eyes...
It said POLICE.
Chapter 13 - Somebody That I Used to Know
I didn’t manage to answer his question. Evidently some short circuit had occurred in my head as I tried to process this completely new reality. The sense of confusion that rocked my foundations gave way gradually to disbelief, and then an unfamiliar base feeling I could only describe as wrath. My body felt charged with electricity, as though a powerful storm were brewing inside me, setting my every nerve on edge like live wires. My eyes hovered somewhere near the police insignia on Alex’s vest and the silver badge around his neck, and try as I might, I couldn’t focus on anything else.
All of a sudden, I felt an urge to laugh, and then I was overcome by it. Shaking my head helplessly, I lost myself in the feeling and what started as a nervous intake of air turned into near-hysterical hoots, so that gasping in enough air soon became difficult.
Was there ever a bigger fool than me…
Two months I’d spent with Alex flashed before my eyes like scenes from a movie and every memory I pictured struck me like a new dagger through the heart. The man who still held me by one arm jerked me back and tightened his grip, probably in an attempt to silence me, but I didn’t feel the pain. Still gripped by hysterical laughter, as tears rolled down my cheeks, I brought one hand up to wipe my eyes.
“Let go of her,” Alex shouted, pushing the guy aside and bundling me out of the room.
I didn’t resist, letting him lead me out of the room and down the dark hallway, but as soon as we were a few paces away, I wriggled free of his hands and took a few rapid steps back. When my back hit a cold wall, I let my body slide down to the floor, feeling my legs tremble as they folded beneath me.
Closing my eyes, I raised my knees and buried my face in the space between them, muffled voices still reaching my ears from the room we’d just left.
“Team one stay in position...” someone's sharp voice was issuing orders.
“Keep Sherazi and Navarov in sight at all times. We take no action until the merchandise is in the open…”
“Teams two and three, confirm your location...”
“I repeat, don’t take any action until the merchandise appears... The transaction must be underway. If there’s no deal in progress, we have no case. Do you copy?”
As an unwitting observer, I was forced to listen as a sting operation went into full swing just a few hundred yards away, the main aim of which was apparently to put my father in prison.
“There is no merchandise. Not tonight,” I whispered mostly to myself, hugging my knees even tighter.
“I know. I tried to tell them, but the captain didn’t want to listen,” Alex’s voice came low in the darkness.
A few minutes passed while we sat in the dark, listening the voices from the room down the hall.
“Damn it, Princess... I told you to stay in the car.”
“And now I know why.”
“I'm sorry this is the way you had to find out.”
“Yeah, well... I'm sorry about a lot of things,” I raised my head and searched the darkness with my eyes “Just tell me... How long?”
“Princess...”
“Stop it!” I snapped, “Stop calling me that and answer me! How long have you been plotting against us, hey?”
“I don’t want to go into details.”
“Right now I don’t care what you do or don’t want. You owe me that much at least, Alex. But I doubt that’s your real name.”
Several more minutes passed in a silence. I felt like I was at the bottom of a deep, dark well and that I mustn’t attempt to climb out for fear of the bad things waiting up on the outside.
“Just over two years,” he answered quietly.
I shut my eyes tight and bent my head down, struggling to imagine that I could have lived with an imposter for months. I slept with him. I fell in love with him.
I fell in love with a man who doesn't even exist.
From the very beginning he’d been acting a part, a mask conjured for one purpose only - to blast my life apart again, or what remained of it.
“Say something, please,” I felt his hand touch against my arm and realized he was now sitting close to me.
I was hit by an urge to back away, but couldn’t. I wanted to scream, strike out, shout that I hated him and wished he were dead, but instead I went on sitting, inert. Alex moved his hand closer and wrapped it around my own, which suddenly felt very small.
“You don’t look like a cop. “
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
I wondered if it might be possible to love a person and hate them at the same time. On one hand
, I felt an overwhelming desire to hurt him the way he’d hurt me, but another part of me longed to turn the clocks back half an hour, take hold of the girl who’d gotten out of the car and make her get back inside.
“Was anything you said true? How is it that Nikolai never doubted you? How…” I paused to gather the strength to continue, then whispered, “How is it that I didn’t ever suspect you?”
“Well, sweetheart... it’s my job to make sure no one ever suspects.”
As he spoke, he covered my face with his hands and leaned forward, causing me such a rush of sorrow and torment that I thought I might drown in the feeling.
“And you're good at what you do. One of the best, Nikolai said so himself once,” I spat the words out bitterly, backed away from him and dragged myself off the floor and onto my feet.
At a slow pace, I started in what I guessed was the direction of the front door, but Alex was faster.
“You can’t go out there now, Khalil’s people are everywhere.”
“If you try to stop me I'll scream, and I’m sure that would spoil your little ambush,” I replied coldly.
Khalil was the last person on my mind at that moment and all I wanted was to get as far away as possible. Alex looked at me for a few moments, then shook his head once and started to remove his bulletproof vest. When he pulled it over my head, I offered nothing in the way of protest. It felt like I’d used up my last ounce of strength when I’d forced myself to move away from him.
“Wait for me here. I'm going to tell them that I'm leaving and taking you home. I’m no use to them here, anyway. Don’t go out there without me. Understand?”
I nodded and stood where I was, following Alex with my eyes as he moved towards the light coming from the room. As soon as he was gone, I grabbed the door handle and turned it to step outside.
Looking left and then right, I tried to figure out which way I should turn to get back to the car, but I was apparently too distraught to think rationally. Moving off the bare front porch and down the steps, I followed the path to a gate, which hung crookedly off its hinges in the artificial amber glow of the streetlamp nearby. Having to choose, I made the decision to walk downhill.