I stop my father at the door.
“You deceived me,” I say. “The whole time we lived in Waterford, you wanted to lie fallow until you were called back into the field; meanwhile you hoped I’d get over it—”
“That’s not the only reason, Sophia—”
“Well, your plan worked, because I am over it! And now I want to return to Waterford, but I can’t. Because instead of going after Bekami and figuring out who is leaking information, you tricked me. While Bekami hunted you, you told me to go to dances and go skiing with my friends, friends, Dad, actual friends. And do you know what is worse than not experiencing any of that ‘small town American life’ you wanted me to experience? Having it all taken away.”
We stare at each other in heavy silence. No words are strong enough to articulate how angry I am with him.
Eventually, he opens the door. Reluctantly, I follow him inside. My fists grip the sleeves of my parka. My mother has lit a fire in the coal stove. She’s set the table with mismatched blue-and-white dishes and rust-colored Bakelite flatware. Two flames flicker out of carved pewter candlesticks depicting Hungarian folk children.
In front of the stove, my father takes my gun, wipes down the barrel, clips in a fresh mag from his briefcase, and hands it back to me.
“It’s yours,” he says.
Running my finger along the edge of the cold plastic, I set it down beside the Hungarian candlesticks. “Keep it.”
CHAPTER 45
“Onward,” my mother says a few days later as we finish eating palacsintas at the train station in Budapest.
South through the Balkans. East to Lebanon. We travel light. My essentials—a Prada coin purse, a mesh bag of underwear, a toothbrush—barely fill my petite leather duffel.
From Beirut, we fly to Azerbaijan, then Turkmenistan, south to Qatar, and eventually back west to Egypt. We use only cash. Phones, computers, and electronics are turned off and sealed inside a Kevlar container my father keeps in his canvas carryall.
I am lying on a mattress at the Al Shalaam Hotel in Cairo, watching a melodramatic Egyptian soap opera when my father turns off the television. “We need to travel west,” he says carefully.
“Exactly where west?” I prop myself up on one elbow.
My mother tucks her notebook into her Celine handbag and clasps it shut. “Andrews is in Tunis. Our car arrives in ten minutes.”
A breeze sweeps down from the Mediterranean, whistling through the rows of jasmine trees shading Tunis’s broad boulevards. Mint-green Vespas weave into narrow streets concealing quaint boutiques and leafy courtyards. After years of unrest, an undercurrent of optimism flows through the ancient city.
In the medina, we check into Dar Ben-Salah, a former French palace converted into a hotel. Bedroom walls peel paint and the floors are a chipped mosaic tile, but it has access to the main highway and reliable Wi-Fi.
“You’ve been here before?” I ask my father.
“Years ago.” He points outside. “Safest place to stay in Tunis.”
“Clear sight lines and numerous exits,” I remark, scanning the horizon.
“Precisely,” he says in Arabic.
I shut the drapes to block the heat and noise. I sit down on the bed; I don’t want to see the spires of the mosques rising above the foliage, the red-tile roofs of the ancient city, the colorful woven textiles covering the souks.
While my mother runs surveillance, my father places a few photographs in my hand.
With trembling fingers, I flip through the stack: Lycée Français Saint Benoît, the corner two blocks south where the women ambushed me, an iron staircase, turquoise doors, plaster walls, a copper pipe protruding from a hole in the floor …
I snatch a bottle of water from the nightstand and drink so fast it trickles down my chin and soaks my collar.
“I want you to see where this happened, so it doesn’t haunt you any longer.” He points at a photograph; his finger lands on a broken piece of tile. “These walls are made of stone and plaster. They do not control you, Sophia, and he cannot control you. No matter where he is.”
“You promised they would never return.” I swallow. “But they did. He did.”
My father takes a match from the bedside table and strikes it on the iron bedstead.
I watch the photographs wrinkle black and gold around the edges. I watch until finally, they are nothing at all.
“I’m sorry, Sophia,” he says with tears in his eyes. “I am so sorry I didn’t kill him.”
I have never seen my father cry. Not once. Not even when he found me in Jozef’s office. Wet eyes, red faced, yes. But never tears. Until now.
If he can track the most elusive terrorists in the world, why couldn’t my father find me in Istanbul? Why didn’t he search every building, every house, every apartment? If he killed all of Bekami’s men, why didn’t he kill Bekami too?
By late afternoon, the hot room has begun to smell of spices from the downstairs kitchen; the fan in the corner spins the heat and saffron into a suffocating aroma. My mother comes and goes. She seems agitated. Worried. She says little.
On the balcony, I sink against the railing. Outside, the cacophony hits me at once: cars honking, voices, blaring sunlight, the mixed smell of jasmine and exhaust.
Ahead, I see Place de la Victoire—a large freestanding gate, resembling a miniature Arc de Triomphe. In the late afternoon sun, men fill the plaza surrounding it, sitting on benches casually sipping mint tea and chatting.
Using the rail to hold myself up I rehearse the number series: 14-36-53 … 55-65-96. I count prime numbers in Mandarin. I envision my favorite café on Beirut’s corniche. I recall the latitudes of South American capitals. I try everything not to think about Aksel, but he enters my mind like a tempest.
I see his furious eyes looking down at me on the tarmac as he realized I was leaving. Did he think I had lied to him? Betrayed him? If only I could call him … I won’t tell him details … I just need to hear his voice …
I step back inside. My father is doing one-handed push-ups on the Moroccan carpet.
I have two options. I can cross the room and retrieve my phone before he stops me. Or, I can use the hotel telephone, which is closer. I walk across the carpet and lift the receiver from the cradle.
It is an old 1990s model. Most of the buttons are worn away. I dial carefully. One beep. A second. I anticipate his voice. Sophia? he’ll say. Come back, I miss you.
Instead, I hear: This number is out of service—I slam the receiver into the cradle and whirl around.
“Where is he?” I shout.
My father continues his push-ups. “Safe.”
“Why can’t I talk to him?”
He does two more push-ups, then springs his legs forward and stands.
My father pulls out his phone, swipes, then hands it to me. On the screen is a room with a river rock fireplace and polished wood floors, scattered with glass and debris.
“Aksel’s house was wired with a video alarm system,” my father explains. “He turned it on when you returned from the ballet.”
Stunned, I watch Aksel enter the frame. His hair messy and soaked in sweat, his jaw tight, his face expressing devastation, sadness, rage … it must be after the tarmac.
Resting both of his arms on the back of the sofa, he looks unsteady. Suited figures move behind him, cleaning.
Grimacing, Aksel places his hand on the side of his stomach. Wincing, he lifts his shirt and inspects the bandage wrapped around his wounded ribs.
Abruptly, Aksel bends over, snatches up a piece of glass, and hurls it against the wall. He takes a chair with two missing legs and launches it across the room. It shatters against the fireplace.
The icy wind from the broken windows whips past him. He turns toward the hall, his emerald eyes burning in anger. Glass crushes beneath his boots. Swiftly, he yanks down a black duffel from the top shelf of the hall closet, walks back to the demolished great room, and hesitates. After a quick look around the house, he e
xits the frame. Then the image goes pitch black.
I can’t pry my eyes from the screen. My hand clenches the phone. Immediately, all the fury simmering inside me since we left Waterford boils over.
“Where is he?” I shriek. “We have to go back—”
“Aksel’s fine—”
“Where’d he go?” I can’t see my father through the tears streaming from my eyes.
“Any person close to you, like any person close to us, is a potential target. He left for his grandfather’s home in DC. He’s safe there, Sophia. Don’t contact him.”
“You can’t stop me from calling him!”
“Sophia, he fought Bekami’s men alongside you. If he wasn’t exposed before, he certainly is now. Every time you contact him, you risk putting him in danger.”
“So I don’t get to see him ever again?”
My father doesn’t answer. I throw the phone at him. He steals it from the air before it hits him in the face.
CHAPTER 46
While my father leaves to meet Andrews in the souk, my mother reconnoiters the hotel. I’m alone in the room, and the heat is smothering. I step over the ashy photographs and make for the door.
Outside our hotel, the heavy air melts into my skin. I walk west along Avenue Habib Bourguiba, wading through throngs of Tunisians doing their evening shopping and savoring the shade of the street’s lush trees.
Ahead I see it: fuchsia fabric draped elaborately over a breezeway.
Trailing a man carrying a crate of figs on his shoulder, I enter the souk.
I don’t feel lost. The noise, the smells, the congestion of people—despite the apparent chaos, all bazaars have a rhythm, a harmony to the dark intersecting streets and labyrinthine alleyways.
Cloaked by long rows of carpets, I wrap a silk scarf loosely over my light hair.
After several minutes, I spy my father beside an antique stall. I nearly miss him because he is wearing a floral button-up shirt, a straw hat, and a neon fanny pack—quite the British tourist. He speaks to a man I’ve never seen—Andrews.
Andrews is taller than my father, with fair skin and straight black hair parted neatly to the side. Despite the heat, he is wearing a suit and smoking a cigar. Beside Andrews is a prim woman wearing a linen dress and carrying a straw handbag. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere other than a crowded bazaar. A paisley scarf is knotted haphazardly over her gray hair.
As the woman buys a sparkling silver ashtray, my father nods to Andrews and then slips away.
I follow my father through two more congested alleyways before pushing between the crowd to step up alongside him, adjusting to his pace.
His hex sense must alert, because he instantly looks down at me.
Lifting the scarf off my face, I glance up at him.
I can’t help the satisfaction that ripples through me at his look of surprise. He doesn’t break his gait. “Your mother?”
“Running the perimeter. She doesn’t know I left.”
“You’re not a little girl anymore, Sophia.”
“Exactly, so you should tell me what is going on. What did Andrews say? Does he know where Bekami is?”
“Have you eaten?” he asks in Swedish—my favorite language.
“Not recently,” I answer in French, his least favorite. He smiles.
I follow him through a stall, around a corner, and past a charcoal stove with a hot fire raging inside. I am that fire—flaming, bursting, roaring. Trapped.
In an alley, my father discards his floral shirt into a trash bin, his straw hat and pack into another bin. At the next passageway, he unsnaps the hem of his pants from the buttons at his knees. He is left wearing a black T-shirt and slim black cargo pants; he no longer resembles an oblivious tourist.
After a few minutes of silent maneuvering, we reach a hillside restaurant overlooking the medina.
He must be waiting for something, or someone. It’s the only time he stops to eat.
Speaking in Scandinavian-accented Arabic, he says to the waiter, “Bring us whatever your chef is cooking.”
A few minutes later, the amiable waiter brings two yellow bottles of Boga to the table, pops the lids, and returns to the kitchen.
Lowering his voice, my father asks, “What did you tell Aksel about Bekami? About Istanbul?” He speaks in code. Norwegian vowels. Dutch verbs. Swahili descriptions.
I say nothing.
“Sophia, I’m trying to find out why you were interrogated, and I can’t do that if you don’t tell me—”
“Everything,” I interrupt him. “I told Aksel everything, okay? About Bekami and what happened in Istanbul and what I told Bekami when I escaped. How I was stupid enough to let Bekami know I’d overheard everything. But I’m not leaking information.”
My father pushes his lips together a moment, then exhales loudly. “You were brave to defy Bekami, Sophia, It’s my turn to be brave and tell you about St. Petersburg.”
“I don’t care about St. Peters—”
“You will.”
It used to fascinate me when he spoke about his experiences, the enemies he had defeated. However, now that I’ve experienced that life, I never want to hear about any of it again.
“Years ago, ON-YX assigned me to recruit an agent within the Foreign Affairs Directorate of Russia’s espionage arm, SVR.” His eyes look away from mine. “Anton Katranov was a perfect fit.”
I spread my napkin across my lap. My father hasn’t shaved since we left Waterford. He has an ever-thickening mass of silver-blond stubble across the bottom of his face. I stare at this while he speaks.
“The head of the Foreign Affairs Directorate, Sergei Abramovich, was one of the most feared men in Russia. Anton Katranov was Abramovich’s second in command, and Abramovich trusted Katranov completely. They had a special bond.
“Once recruited, Katranov became our highest-ranking asset in Russia. His intelligence was invaluable: missile capabilities, submarine routes, terrorist leads in the Caucasus …”
My father speaks slowly, choosing his words carefully. Whether this means he is lying or telling the truth, I have no idea. The waiter delivers a plate of merguez—a spicy mutton-based sausage—and my father slices off a chunk.
“But most importantly, Abramovich had orchestrated Russia’s most secret tactical nuclear operation since the Cold War.”
“Micro-nukes,” I intercede, remembering what he told me in Waterford.
“Kosheleks,” he says in Russian. “That’s what Abramovich called them, Kosheleks.”
“Purses?” I translate. “They were that small?”
“Like cans of whipped cream,” he says dryly.
“Katranov told you about those weapons?”
“He agreed to pass us intelligence about them and anything else Abramovich directed. So yes, Katranov told us all about Abramovich’s top-secret program to develop micro-nuclear weapons.”
He takes a sip of Boga and bares his teeth. “I love this stuff.”
I take a sip of the flat soda. “Me too.”
Smiling, he continues, “But Abramovich was also an arms dealer. He allied with terrorist states for profit. Because of men like him, terrorists don’t need science, or infrastructure, or materials to create weapons. They only need enough money, or leverage, to buy from the right dealer. You see why weapons like those—easy to move, nearly impossible to trace—should never exist? Not on our side and certainly not in the hands of someone like Abramovich.”
I nod. “So what happened to—”
My father silences me with a twitch of his nose. From behind me I can hear footsteps. Then the waiter leans over my shoulder and delivers a plate of fresh figs and dates.
Once he’s left, my father stabs a fig with his fork. “SVR knew someone inside its Foreign Affairs Directorate had turned. We suspected they were close to identifying Katranov. So, to protect himself, and simultaneously take down Abramovich, Katranov framed Abramovich.”
“You mean betrayed?”
My father
grimaces. “Abramovich was a tyrant, a ruthless, Machiavellian oligarch. Our only way to get close to him was to turn one of his own. Katranov did the right—”
“If Katranov was a traitor, how could you trust him?”
“At some point operators have to make a call. Can we trust an asset or can we not? On Katranov, I was right. I arrived in St. Petersburg to exfiltrate Katranov the same night SVR raided the Foreign Affairs Directorate—and Abramovich’s office as well as his home.”
Sensing his hesitation, I prod him along. “And then?”
He sighs. “We got Katranov and his family out of St. Petersburg. SVR located the documents. Abramovich was captured, convicted of treason, and taken to prison at Lefortovo in Moscow. A few years later, Abramovich died ‘of heart failure.’ ”
“And you found the weapons?”
“We destroyed the Kosheleks that had thus far been developed and dismantled the program.”
I swirl a date through the fennel yogurt, wondering what St. Petersburg has to do with Bekami. “So, if you exfiltrated Katranov, where is he now?”
My father glances at his watch, scoops the last of the merguez into his mouth, puts ten euros on the table, and stands. “Time to go,” he says. He lifts his bottle of Boga and drains the last of the soda in one gulp. “We have a rendezvous.”
Ten minutes later, my mother meets us beneath the arch in the Ville de Nouvelle. She has our duffels. Earlier the square was crowded with men sipping mint tea. Now, it is deserted.
We walk four hundred meters through the tangled, tree-lined streets until we reach the south edge of the medina. My mother hails a rickety cab. She speaks in rapid Arabic to the driver.
“Aren’t we supposed to be off the grid?” I ask in Finnish—the most obscure language to come to mind.
“Not anymore,” she answers. “Andrews ordered us back on.”
We pull into the Tunis Airport.
I turn to my father. “Where are we going? What’s happened?”
Before the taxi comes to a complete stop, my father opens the door and we glide onto the pavement. He doesn’t answer me.
He is occupied with his phone. I look over his arm. Having downloaded the SUISSEAIR app, he purchases three airline tickets for Flight 2334.
Girl from Nowhere Page 22