by Cap Daniels
I was not expecting what came out of his mouth. He muttered, “What the fuck?”
He sounded like he was from Dump Truck County, Alabama. He was American—southern American.
Why is he trying to kill me?
I shoved my foot into his shoulder and rolled him onto his side. It was impossible for him to lie on his back with his hands and feet bound together behind him. It looked quite uncomfortable. Tying people up was definitely one of Anya’s strengths. He grunted in agony when I pinned him to the floor with the muzzle of my Makarov pressed into his left eye. I wasn’t certain how much pressure the human eye could withstand without bursting, but I thought I had to be approaching that threshold.
“Ubei ego!” The words left Anya’s lips with ease and confidence.
I knew her words were a test and not an order. She’d told me to “kill him” in unmistakable Russian. Our guest didn’t flinch, so she repeated the command in angry, Russian-accented Spanish. His body stiffened and terror filled his eyes. Well, terror filled one of his eyes; the other was still full of my gun barrel.
So, we’d learned that our American friend understood Spanish but not Russian. We had asked no questions, but we already knew more about him than he knew about us. I was certain he knew there was no chance that he would leave my boat alive.
“So, now that we have your attention,” I said. “It’s time to establish some ground rules.”
I stuck out my damaged tongue for him to see. “Do you see this?”
He displayed every sign of confusion. That’s exactly what I wanted.
I returned my battered tongue into my mouth and paused for dramatic effect. I said, “She did that to me when she thought I was lying to her. She loves me. She doesn’t give a shit about you. Imagine what she’ll do to you if she even thinks you might be lying to us.”
His one-eyed gaze shifted to Anya. She was making that pissed-off-Russian look she made so well. It even frightened me a little, and I believed she was on my team, at least for the moment. What she did next would’ve made me laugh had we not been interrogating the man who had just tried to kill me.
She pulled her dripping-wet shoe from her foot, along with the soggy bandage that had been covering her wound. She then rested her heel on the man’s forehead, giving him an up-close view of the mangled flesh where her toe had been only a few days before.
When she was sure he’d fully absorbed the spectacle, she pointed at me. “He did this to me when I would not give him what he wanted. He loves me. He gives not shit about you. Are you understanding?”
The man spat saliva and blood at my hand as I continued to press the pistol into his eye. In impressive defiance, he said, “Fuck both of you!”
Anya grabbed her wet shoe and slapped the man with the sole. The sound echoed through the cabin. She shoved the shoe into his mouth, heel first, and quickly tied the laces around his neck, making it impossible for him to spit it out. She pulled out a half-gallon, metal can of cooking alcohol from the locker beneath the galley sink. It was the alcohol that fueled our stove. Whatever she was about to do wasn’t going to be much fun for our guest.
She aggressively poured the alcohol from the can into the shoe that had become our new friend’s mouthpiece. The alcohol gushed out of the can and soaked the shoe and his face. Anya placed the can on the deck beside the man and calmly said, “Chew on that until you are ready to be nice.”
The man shook his head violently and yelled unintelligible obscenities through the canvas of the soaked shoe. He bucked and shook like a trapped animal. Had he not tried to shoot me earlier, I would’ve felt sorry for him, but I was all out of pity.
Anya looked at me. “We have how much time?”
I looked at my watch. “I’m in no hurry. We’ll stay as long as it takes to get him to talk.”
“Good. I was afraid we would have to quickly hurt him badly, but we have time to have fun with him and go slow.”
I hoped our guest understood what Anya said while he was screaming and jerking around. I’m sure the alcohol was not the most comfortable liquid he’d ever had in his mouth, nose, and eyes.
When he settled down enough to talk, Anya untied the shoe strings, removed the shoe from his mouth, and asked, “Okay, are we going to be nice?”
“Fuck you!” he roared in continued defiance.
She shrugged her shoulders and reinserted the shoe into his mouth. Against the violent shaking and thrashing, she was still able to get the laces retied around his head to hold the shoe in place. She lifted the can of alcohol and deliberately poured it onto the shoe, letting plenty of the liquid puddle in his eyes and nose. When the can was completely empty, she set it on the side of his face as he lay on his side. He shook the can from his face and watched it bounce across the deck. Anya patiently lifted the can and pulled a Zippo lighter from beside the stove.
With remarkable patience, she held the can by its handle, and with its long, flat side, slapped the man sharply. “You will be still.” She opened the lighter and rolled the flint wheel until the blue flame danced from the wick. She carefully placed the burning lighter atop the alcohol can and stood the can back on the man’s face.
With absolutely no emotion in her voice, she said, “Move and can will fall. Then, I don’t know. Maybe fire goes out, but maybe not. Women are mean when men burn shoes. Do not make me mean.”
The man was motionless. Anya had his attention.
“Good boy,” she said, patting his head. “We now watch. This is first time for me to try this. I think is working.”
For the first time since we’d awakened the mysterious gunman from the sleep Anya placed him under, the man was deathly silent and perfectly still. She’d found his weakness, and it had only taken minutes. He was afraid of fire. Most people are afraid of fire, but most people aren’t professional hit men. At our core, all of us, even hit men, are afraid of something.
I wasn’t a fan of an open flame in the cabin of my boat. There’s nothing more devastating than a fire on a boat, but I wasn’t going to interrupt Anya’s technique in the name of seamanship.
After we believed sufficient time had passed, and the man trembled from the tensed muscles in his neck trying to hold the can still on his face, I lifted the lighter from the metal can and snapped it closed.
I expected the man to continue his rage, but he didn’t. Instead, he simply relaxed the muscles of his neck and let his head fall to the cabin sole. I’d learned at The Ranch that an operator will sometimes employ a tactic known as feigned submission. The captive will pretend to submit to the will of the interrogator and feed his captor an enormous line of bullshit in order to stall the interrogation long enough to come up with a plan to escape. I feared that might be what the gunman was doing, and if it was, he deserved an Academy Award for best actor.
“Both of you are insane.” The captive would-be shooter exhaled the words as if they might be the last words he ever spoke.
With my pistol pointed solidly at the man’s head, I said, “We’re not the ones who tried to motor up next to a big sailboat and kill the two extremely well-trained assassins onboard.”
The man furrowed his brow and looked at Anya. “I’m not here to kill her. Hell, I don’t even know her. But I’ll tell you one thing. She’s going to kill both of us before this is over, boy.”
I looked at Anya and saw no reaction on her face. How could a woman of such intense passion also be so cold and stoic in situations like this? She showed only resolve to accomplish the mission that had fallen into our lap.
“Who sent you to kill him?” she asked.
The man spat and blinked his eyes violently as the sting from the alcohol had obviously become unbearable. He stared at Anya through his blood red eyes. “Look, you little red commie bitch, why don’t you scoot on back to Moscow and let us men handle our business?”
The words had barely left his lips before the heel of my right foot landed squarely across his nose, sending blood, snot, and spit spraying from his face. The so
und a wounded animal would make escaped his mouth, and he shook his head, trying to shake off the horrific pain of having his nose crushed under my heel.
When he gathered his wits, he said, “Touched a nerve there, did I, boy? So, now it’s all coming together for me. The grown-up spy over here has fallen in love with Red Sonja, who’s here to seduce him and get him to spill his guts so she can get another medal from the Kremlin, or whatever they give bitches like her for screwing American agents. You’re a sucker, boy. She’s doing the same thing to you that she’s doing to me. The only difference is that you’re getting to taste a little of her red commie candy before she puts a bullet in your brain.”
Anya knelt beside the man and whispered into his ear. “I am not good interrogator. Is not what I do. I tear souls out of men like you and send them to Hell. Do not forget that. You have now one try to answer question. If you tell truth, I will kill you quickly. If you tell lie, I will have fun turning your insides into outsides, and I will watch you die slowly while I have my red commie tea. You understand, yes?”
By the look on what was left of the man’s face, it was clear Anya made him understand the consequences of lying.
He begged me, “Dude, she’s crazy. Shoot her in the fucking head and I’ll get you someplace safe. Otherwise, if she doesn’t kill you, they’ll never stop coming for you. I came, and there will be more. You fucked up when you killed Dutch. We all knew he was a traitor, but you should be smart enough to know that you can’t just go on a killing spree of your own accord. You’re a wild card, kid. You’re too damned easy to track.”
Anya looked at me, then back at the gunman. “What else do you want him to tell you? I will make him talk for you.”
I shook my head. “No. I think that pretty much covers everything we need to know, don’t you?”
“Da,” she said with calm resolve. She plunged a syringe into the gunman’s neck and watched him drift off to sleep.
I knew what she and I did professionally, but it was still a little shocking to see her kill with such lethal efficiency.
After bending the needle into a completely harmless curve of metal and tossing it into the trash, she said, “Help me put him to bed.”
“What? What do you mean, put him to bed?”
She looked at me with obvious confusion, then she realized that I thought she’d killed him. She laughed. “I did not kill him. He is not dead. He is just taking long nap. When he wakes up, I will poop trackers and we can put them in him and send him away.”
She was brilliant. I had a lot to learn from her. I helped her move the gunman’s sleeping body to a bunk and tie him securely in place just in case the drugs wore off before we expected.
We ate and watched the seabirds dive into the placid water in search of their midday meal.
“So, all of that stuff he said about you . . . I know it isn’t true,” I said.
She just stared into the sky. Instead of reassuring me that she wasn’t just waiting to flip or kill me, she looked at me like a frightened little girl trying to admit that she’d stolen the peanut butter when no one was watching.
“What is it?” I asked.
She took a long, deep breath. “I do not want to do this anymore, Chase. I am tired of killing and the games we play. I do not like it. Is not what I want. Is not what I want to be. Is not what I am—not really. Is only what I do. I want to run away from all of it, but I do not know how.”
She cast her gaze back to the deck as if she were unable to face me after admitting she wanted out of the life her country had chosen for her. Unlike me, she’d never known the freedom to choose for herself. I knew so little about her, yet she was opening up to me and sharing her deepest, most intimate desire: her desire to be free.
I took her face in my palms. She felt so fragile in my hands, but I knew that behind those hypnotic eyes was the mind and soul of one of the world’s most dangerous women. She could tear my body apart before I could blink, and she could destroy my heart quicker than that. I fell in love with her so quickly, and so easily. I didn’t choose to be, but I was completely lost in my desire for her. I longed to know her gentleness and kindness, and my body yearned to know her passion without end. I couldn’t walk away from her now, even if I wanted to.
“Listen to me, Anastasia,” I said softly.
Her gaze consumed mine almost instantly. “I told you to never call me that name,” she growled.
“Why? Why can’t I call you by your name?”
“You will think I am silly child. You will not understand.”
Her words first came out with anger, but quickly gave way to surrender. I could see and hear her resolve melting away.
I stroked her cheek with the backs of my fingers, tracing the elegant, graceful curve of her face, and I fell more deeply in love with her as every second passed.
“I may not understand, but I want to,” I said.
She looked at me with sincerity and perhaps even the earliest dawning of trust. I watched a tear fill the corner of her eye, then run down her cheek and across her lip. She licked her lips, swallowed slowly, and pressed her head into the curve of my shoulder. I wrapped my arms around her and felt her body surrender against mine. I so badly hoped this wasn’t an act. I’d been taught that foreign agents would use unparalleled tactics of deception and feigned emotion to earn my trust, but I didn’t believe Anya was doing that. I believed she’d finally found someone she could trust, and someone with whom she could be vulnerable and honest—at least that’s what I hoped.
When she finally spoke, her words came softly and slowly. “Anastasia is name my mother called me. That was her name for me—only hers. After she died, no one has ever called me by that name.”
She looked at me with eyes so wet I could barely see her pupils. She choked back the tears welling inside. “I told you my father died in war before I was born, but that is not truth. I lied only about that, Chase, nothing else. My father gave me name Anastasia before he died. My mother said he was brave, strong, best man in all of world. She told me he would sing songs to me when I was falling asleep. I do not remember him, but sometimes, I can hear him sing to me when I am alone and afraid. I do not know how old I was when my mother died. I think maybe three or maybe four. Things are different in Russia for orphans.”
She fell silent for a long moment, so I held her. There was nothing I could say that would make her feel any better. She needed to be held and loved, but I had so many questions. I wanted to know about her mother. I wanted to know about her childhood, her education, and her training. I wanted to hear how she’d grown up and how she’d become a woman.
She didn’t sob. She just breathed deeply and seemed to enjoy the feeling of being wrapped in my arms. I liked her willingness to share such personal intimacy with me.
She leaned back, away from my chest, and looked up at me with the tender, injured eyes of a child. “Spasibo, Amerikanets. Spasibo.”
She kissed me so tenderly that my lips barely felt hers.
“I have money,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“I have money. I have a lot of money, in fact. I have enough money for both of us to disappear for the rest of our lives. They paid me over eight million dollars to kill Suslik.”
Her eyes widened. I thought she was astonished by the balance of my bank account, but that was not it at all.
Her tone quickly shifted from that of a frightened child to the voice of a confident, seasoned killer. “Where is money now, Chase?”
“It’s in a bank in the Caymans. It’s very safe. No one can get to it.”
“You are wrong!” she insisted. “The people who put money in account know everything about you. They know account numbers, passwords, and what breakfast you had. When you do not answer phone that I killed, they will think you are dead and they will take money back. You must move money now. You must.”
She looked fearfully into my eyes. “The man you call Suslik is not dead.”
I didn’t know her
well, but I knew the tone she was using was more serious and sincere than anything she’d said to me up to that point, so I didn’t react. The first two thoughts that came to my head arrived simultaneously.
Of course he’s dead—I killed him. How could she possibly know he wasn’t dead?
She must’ve recognized my doubtful expression. “Chase, you do not understand. The man you call Suslik is not man. He is cat, or ghost of cat with more lives than a cat. I cannot explain it to you, but you must trust me. Move your money now before they know Suslik cannot be killed and before they think you are dead.”
I sat wordlessly, pondering what she was telling me. I had yet to decide if I was being played, or if she was sincerely as taken by me as I was by her. I didn’t want to believe that she was playing me, yet I found it almost impossible to believe that a woman like her could possibly care for me.
“Promise me you will move money, Chase. Promise me.”
“I will, Anya. I will.”
I took both of her hands in mine and squeezed them reassuringly. “Tell me what you want, Anya.”
She looked at me with a puzzled look. “What I want does not matter. I do not have choices. I am not free to choose for me. I must do as I am told. It is not simple like you think. I cannot just walk away. My world is very different than yours. I am not mercenary. I am soldier. You choose to go or do not go. I do not choose. I go. That is all. I go.”
I continued holding her hands. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Anya. I have enough money for us to live anywhere we want. You can choose right now. You can choose to stay with me.”
“If it were simple, I would stay with you, Chase. I would love you. I would have babies with you, and I would have you love me.”
“Listen to me, Anya—”
She pressed her finger to my lips. “No, Chase. You listen. You have shown me kindness with no agenda. I have only known that kindness once before. I want to believe that I remember being loved by my mother when I was baby. Because she died when I was so young, I think most of my memories are not real.”