Girl from Nowhere

by Tiffany Rosenhan

  My father runs back toward us.

  The airman puts his hand back on my elbow. “She has to come.”

  “No, I don’t!” I wrestle my arm free.

  “We have to go,” my father says, reaching us. “Flight plan’s initiated—”

  “I don’t care!” I shout. My vision is blurry. Clutching Aksel’s hand, I stumble backward, away from my father, from the plane. “I’m not leaving!”

  Tears roll down my cheeks. I feel the blood drain from my face, from every part of my body.

  “We’ll come back soon,” my father reassures me.

  “No, we won’t!” I shout. “We never come back!”

  Aksel’s eyes flash between my father and me.

  Can we escape? I can grab my father’s gun, take a double-shot at the left fuel tank. Aksel can get into the SUV, spin and reverse, enabling me to climb easily into the passenger seat—

  “Now,” my father says firmly. “We go now!”

  “I’m not going with you—”

  “—or they will be able to track us.”

  “They have been tracking us! Almost two years they’ve been tracking us, and you haven’t stopped it!”

  “Ninety seconds!” another airman shouts from the bottom of the staircase.

  “Stop being obstinate and get on the damn plane, Sophia! You know protocol!” My father is hurting. I see it in his eyes—that same glassy, tormented expression he wore when he walked into Jozef’s office; when he saw me for the first time in eleven days—beaten, filthy, and covered in blood.

  Now I am standing, beaten, again.

  The jet revs high. The airman shouts again. “Seventy-five seconds!”

  Out of the corner of my eye I notice movement. I look up to see my mother emerge in the doorframe atop the stairway. She is dressed in jodhpurs, boots, and a dark green button-up blouse, her hair pulled off her face in a barrette.

  Ordering the airman to stand aside, she leaps down the steps two at a time.

  “Sophia, honey, come on. Aksel will be fine,” she cries desperately.

  But a glacial crevasse separates me from my parents and there is no way I am crossing it. My body trembles. “I’m not going with you.”

  My mother’s face lights up in vibrant blue flashes as the jet’s navigation lights blink above us. “Todd will take Aksel back, make sure he’s safe.”

  “And what about Sophia?” Aksel snarls. “Who’s going to make sure she’s safe?”

  My father studies Aksel as if seeing him for the first time.

  Aksel is taller than my father, muscular, with broad shoulders, and large hands, tightly fisted around mine. He resembles a battle-hardened soldier rather than a high school senior. He glares brazenly back at my father.

  “We do,” my father answers icily.

  “Like you did before?” Aksel asks vehemently, stepping toward my father. “Like you did tonight?”

  “We have to get in the air,” my mother says, stepping between my father and Aksel. “We have to get in the air before they can track us—that’s how we stay safe.”

  “But you’re not safe!” Aksel interjects furiously. “Sophia hasn’t been safe, and you can’t protect her!”

  “And you can?” my mother snaps. “You don’t understand.”

  “Sixty seconds!” the airman yells.

  “I understand she should stay!” Aksel responds angrily. He turns to me, “Stay.” Then to my father: “Let her stay.”

  My mother takes my free hand. A fissure splits my heart—Aksel on one side of the crack, and my parents on the other.

  “If we don’t leave now, Sophia won’t be safe,” my father says to Aksel. “It’s simple, how we operate, and one day you’ll understand.”

  “Is that what you told my father?” Aksel asks.

  My gaze snaps to my father in time to see a shadow pass over his face, a quick pocket of surprise. “I never knew your father, Aksel,” he says coolly.

  “And yet you just happen to move here.”

  “Precisely,” my father says.

  “You’re lying,” Aksel sneers.

  “And you’re about to get Sophia killed. Let her go. Or we are going to be forced into a fight we might not win.”

  Aksel glares at my father. Untrusting. Undoubtedly assessing him the way he assesses everyone.

  I sense his conclusion—my father is a threat, not to Aksel, but to me.

  “I’m staying with you,” I say ardently to Aksel.

  But suddenly Aksel’s grip around me releases, like he has unbuckled the harness that has prevented me from falling to earth. He takes my waist in both hands and turns me in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” I cry.

  Aksel tilts his head forward until our foreheads touch, holding the back of my head with his hands. His vibrant green eyes lock with mine, as if memorizing them.

  “Promise me, Sophia,” Aksel says, his fervent voice piercing my skin, “no matter what happens, no matter what you hear—you’ll remember I meant everything I said. I have loved every minute I’ve spent with you, and I will see you again,” he says fiercely.

  “Stop it.” I shake my head. “Don’t—don’t say that.” My words come out in choking gasps.

  “Promise me!” he yells above the roar of the jet engine.

  “I’m not leaving!” I whisper frantically. Pushing at his chest, I try to force him back. This is our chance. We have to go. We have to try.

  But pushing against his chest is like pushing against a stone wall.

  “You have to go, Sophia!” he says urgently.

  Cradling my face in his hands, Aksel presses his lips hard against mine.

  Then he pries my hands from his neck, unlocking my fingers.

  I whip my head side to side. “I’m not—”

  “Sophia, now!” my father roars.

  “You’ll come back,” Aksel whispers in his deep, familiar voice. In a single motion, he thrusts me into my father’s arms.

  “NO!” I reach for Aksel, but he is staggering backward, as if he can barely walk. Todd clamps his hand onto Aksel’s forearm like a handcuff. Aksel doesn’t resist.

  The engines reach capacity, muffling my screams.

  I try to break my father’s tight grasp, but he lifts me off the ground, throws me over his shoulder, and bounds up the stairway.

  “I’m not going with you!” I pound both of my fists into my father’s back. I pull at his ear as if I can rip it off his head. “Put me down!”

  But no matter how loudly I scream, no matter how furiously I hit him, no matter how badly I want him to stop—he keeps going.

  My father hurls us through the doorway, the staircase rolls away, and the door closes on Waterford.

  CHAPTER 41

  For nine hours, I fight to quell the maelstrom brewing in my stomach. Now, I feel it in my throat. I suck in long breaths of stale air to force the sickness down. My eyes are raw and puffy, but still I squeeze them shut to block out everything around me.

  “… Sophia …,” my father says.

  It is his fault—all of it. For becoming involved in ON-YX. For lying. For taking me away from Aksel. Aksel.

  “Sophia.” My father touches my shoulder. Lifting my head, I notice the plane is still. The rumbling jet engines have stopped.

  Across the tarmac of the Berlin Airport Private Terminal, a small red Peugeot waits for us, its vibrant color murky beneath the hard sleet.

  After driving a short distance through Berlin’s wet streets—kebab shops with neon signs tucked into nineteenth-century Altbau buildings, bike paths converging at every corner, women strolling by wearing fur coats and kitschy sneakers—we reach the Brandenburg Gate and turn left onto Ebertstraße.

  We drive alongside the Tiergarten until we slow ahead of another gate—this one metal and three meters tall. Behind it stands a four-story stone building with elaborately carved moldings around the windows.

  A female marine with freckles and a brunette bun waves us through the gate
. We descend into a parking garage beneath the American Embassy in Berlin.

  Two more marines greet us underground. They are accustomed to visitors: intelligence officers, foreign dignitaries, congresspeople.

  “Right this way,” says a marine with dark brown hair and black eyes that crinkle around the edges, like if he wasn’t in uniform, he’d be smiling. He watches me with concern, recognizing immediately we are not like the others—I am not like the others.

  The marine uses a badge to open the embassy door. Inside, he escorts us past security, scanners, and metal detectors, and behind a bulletproof-glass-wall barricade. We walk up three flights of stairs, turn left down a long hall, and take an immediate right into a room with computers, screens, maps, and two dozen people.

  We walk through this room to the far wall. Behind a vault door is a spacious white room where a few people quietly work on headsets. The marine takes us to a door in the center of this room—a room within the room.

  It is a windowless, dome-shaped structure, constructed of beveled, reeded glass. Although light filters through the glass, the blurry shapes inside are unidentifiable.

  My mother has a hand on my shoulder. Her fingernails dig into my shoulder blade; whether for her sake or mine, I can’t tell.

  A barrel-chested man greets us at the door to the Bubble. “Come in,” he says.

  CHAPTER 42

  While the man debriefs my parents, I sit between them in one of four aluminum chairs surrounding a table. I want to turn everything off. Make it stop. Return to Waterford. To Aksel.

  The domed walls of the Bubble are closing in around me—I place my head between my knees to stop the movement of the room. I am wearing an oversize air force jumpsuit I was given on the plane. Now, I grip the stiff khaki fabric bunching at my ankles.

  “… We have some questions for your daughter …”

  I burrow my head deeper against my thighs, wishing for something to hold on to, pleading for some way to escape the pain of knowing I will never see Aksel again.

  “… Sophia?”

  I lift my head; my long, matted hair falls like a curtain between me and my parents.

  “… It shouldn’t take long,” says the man. He is wearing a gray polyester suit. Baggy. Ill-fitted. American.

  “Please”—he stands and motions behind us—“if you’ll step inside, we’ll continue.”

  Collectively we turn. To the left is a tall glass box, with metal wires running at intersecting angles through the glass. Attached to the outside is a small, glowing screen.

  “She has no reason to go in there.” My father’s deep voice startles me.

  I notice my father’s right leg has inched in front of my chair, like I’m back in one of our old photographs, always partially obstructed from view, fully protected.

  But we are inside the Bubble—a fortress within a fortress—there is no safer place. So why do my parents look worried? Are they concerned with what I might say?

  “It’s routine,” the man explains. “Only a few questions.”

  “She’s barely sixteen! Who ordered this?” my father asks.

  “Headquarters. Your daughter might have useful information—”

  “You mean she is suspected of—”

  “No. I’ve simply been asked to debrief—”

  “This is absurd,” says my mother, rising to stand beside my father. “Sophia is not going in there.”

  “It’s for her own protection,” the man answers.

  “In an interrogation cube?!” my father interjects, eyes blazing.

  “The Chechen Nationalist Front knew you were in Waterford within hours of your arrival, and since she was with them for eleven days—”

  “You’re not suggesting—”

  “Nobody is accusing her of anything.”

  “We won’t force her in there, and neither will you.”

  While they argue, I walk over to the glass box. On the front, below the screen, is an orange button. I press it. The door slides open.

  Their heads snap my way. I step into the box. My mother moves for me, but the door slides shut, separating us. Her palm lands on the glass.

  You don’t have to do this. I see her lips move, but I hear nothing.

  CHAPTER 43

  “Do you recognize this person?” The man stands on the opposite side of the glass, holding a photograph—fuzzy and gritty around the edges, taken at a distance and zoomed in close. I don’t need a high-resolution color image to recognize the Chechen who followed me, the man with the hazel eyes who attacked me in Waterford sixteen hours ago.

  I see my reflection in the glass. My blond hair blurs into the khaki uniform. I glance at my parents. They are standing on either side of the man like sentries—arms folded, faces expressionless.

  “Ms. Hepworth, have you seen this man before?” His voice is clear inside the cube’s speaker system.

  My parents’ impassive faces offer no clue of how they want me to answer. I look away from them and nod.

  “Verbal answers,” the man says sharply.

  “Yes,” I say. My voice is raspy. After so much crying, it hurts to talk.

  “Where?” he asks.

  “In Waterford.” I swallow. “Where your drone took that picture.”

  He glances to my right, at the screen attached to the front of the glass box.

  “How many times have you seen him?” he asks, not taking his eyes off the screen.

  “Three.”

  “How long were you aware you were being followed?”

  “I wasn’t aware—”

  “You saw him three times. With your history, I presume you thought that odd?”

  “With her history?” my father interrupts. His face remains expressionless, but his voice has dropped an octave.

  The man pivots to my father. “Kent, you neutralized an entire terrorist cell based on a fourteen-year-old girl’s recollection of conversations that occurred during a violent kidnapping, in a language she hadn’t heard since she was seven. Her history is better than most of our recruits.”

  Turning his back on my father, the man shifts his weight to his left hip and points to the figure in the photograph. “Ms. Hepworth, why was he in Waterford?”

  “Objection,” my mother says coolly. “Speculation.”

  The man sighs. “Why do you think he was in Waterford, Ms. Hepworth?”

  “Ask him.” I nod at the photograph.

  “I’m asking you.”

  I remember once, a very long time ago, we attended a horse race in Dubai. My parents stood silently, motionless, awaiting the end of the race in anticipation. This is how they stand now. Riveted.

  “Why was he in Waterford?” the man asks.

  “To kill me, I guess.”

  “Who ordered him, Ms. Hepworth?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

  The man holds up a second photograph, also poor quality; but this time it is a different man’s profile, zoomed in until his face covers two-thirds of the photograph.

  My throat seizes.

  “When was the last time you spoke with Ilyas Farhad?”

  I swallow. “In Istanbul, twenty months ago.”

  “But you’ve had contact with him since Istanbul, correct?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Did you Snapchat, text, tweet, email, darknet, use a chatroom, or communicate with Farhad in any way after Istanbul?”

  “Do you see that scar across his face?” I point at the photograph. “I did that.”

  The man inspects the photograph, then looks back at me. “Notwithstanding, you saw Farhad in Tunis before his death, correct?”

  “When he broke into our safe house with a locked and loaded Makarov? Yeah, I saw him.”

  “And what did Farhad say to you?”

  “Nothing. He was dead.”

  His eyes switch rapidly between the screen and me. “Was he dead the entire time he was inside the flat?”

  “No.”

  “Then he had time to spea
k with you, yes?”

  “He entered the flat, came into the kitchen, and my father shot him in the back of his head. So, yeah, he was alive inside the flat”—I pause—“but only for twenty-five seconds.”

  The man stares down at me like Krenshaw did when I told him I took a test at the embassy in Tunis.

  My father watches the man carefully—assessing his threat potential, calculating whether he is an enemy or not.

  “How did Farhad get into the flat?” he asks.

  “He broke in,” I say.

  “How? Through a door, or a window?”

  “The door. He used a key.”

  My mother’s mouth twitches. I must have said the wrong thing.

  “A key?” The man puts down the paper. He looks pleased. Like he’s been placing a bet on another racehorse, and his horse just crossed first. “Using a key isn’t breaking in.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to be there. That’s breaking in.”

  “It was a poorly equipped and infrequently used safe house on the outskirts of Tunis. No one except your parents and HQ knew you were there, and you’re saying Farhad, uninvited, happened to have a key to let himself in?”

  I flush. He thinks I’m lying? “I heard the lock turn,” I say firmly.

  “And you’re certain he used a key?” He watches the screen, eyes rapt.

  “Yes. He would have had no way to open that door without one.”

  There is a pause. A slight wrinkle in my father’s forehead.

  The man studies the screen, then looks at me. “Unless you let him in.”

  “I did not!” I object angrily. He thinks I let in Farhad?

  The man steps toward the cube. My father mirrors his movement. It doesn’t matter if we are inside the most concealed, defended position in Europe; if this man tries to hurt me, my father will kill him.

  “Farhad arrived at the safe house while your parents were out. Since Farhad had no key, and only one person was in the safe house at the time of his arrival, there is only one person who could have let him in. You.”

  “Do you know what Farhad did to me?” I counter.

  “When was your last contact with Izam Bekami?”

  My mother paces behind the man. My father seems to be holding his breath.