I scan the nearest monitor.
Flight 2334 is already boarding.
CHAPTER 47
My mother matches her stride to mine. My father stays close on my right. In the first few weeks after my kidnapping, they circled like this, hovering like a president’s security detail. However, I am no longer certain whether they are protecting me or imprisoning me.
In the security line, we—François, Lizette, and Adeleine Dubois—smile demurely at one another and speak French in hushed voices. Four hours later, we land in Geneva. Before leaving the terminal, my mother steps into a duty-free store.
A shuttle drives us to the long-term parking lot at the periphery of the airport. My father leads us down two rows and over one. He pushes his phone against the key lock of an Audi hatchback.
As my father drives, my mother hands me her purchase—a slate-gray Longchamp nylon backpack. It is folded into a tiny two-inch square with a leather snap.
“You don’t need to put anything in it now,” she says as I tuck the square away.
We drive a short distance and, at midnight, check into a bed-and-breakfast.
Early the next morning, I shower and change into my black pants, boots, and a clean sweater.
In the center of Geneva, the narrow streets are empty. Cradled between the mountains, the city is calm and sleepy. Most Genevese go to their country homes for the weekend; the remaining citizens stroll leisurely to church or Sunday brunch.
We drive on Rue des Moulins over the Place de l’Île with the windows cracked.
On the south side of the Rhône River, my father stops adjacent to the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre. Farther down the road is the Geneva branch of the Swiss National Bank, with an eleven-story stone facade with no windows above the sixth floor.
My father opens my door.
There is only one wardrobe in Geneva in December—an expensive ankle-length coat. My mother has one ready. Putting it on, I step onto the sidewalk and face my father.
His steel-gray eyes, the color of washed-out rain, meet mine. “We’re good?”
I peer down the road. They’ve been flanking me like security for hours; now they want me to proceed alone?
“We’re good,” I murmur softly.
Stepping away from the curb onto the cobblestone sidewalk, I walk south along Rue Guillaume-Farel, in the direction of the bank. Behind the thick, bulletproof-glass windows, the gleaming lobby is awash in a fluorescent light to deter theft—should anyone dare to approach the burly, armed security team pacing the marble floor.
Inhaling long, steady breaths, I near the entrance to the bank—a pair of tall antique wood doors with matching brass handles—and keep walking.
Within a few strides, I have passed the building. A few meters farther down, I casually cross the street.
I walk several blocks, past rows of tidy buildings with painted blue doors and shutters, until I reach an old building with a brass doorframe lodged into stone.
Through the window is a beveled-glass case of pastries. In front of it, chairs are tucked in to tables covered in lace tablecloths.
Gently, I push the door open, ushering in the familiar smell—chocolate and almond cream and fresh yeast dough.
Patisserie Claudette is quiet except for the hushed conversation of two elegant Swiss women wearing their ankle-length coats and pearl earrings.
I wait for the women to collect their pastries from the white-haired boulangère, Claudette, then I step up to the counter—an intricate etched-glass dome conceals rows of fruit tarts, pear galettes, and petits fours with lavender frosting.
Immediately, Claudette looks over my shoulder. I turn. The only other person inside is an old man reading a paper while drinking a cup of coffee.
She watches me apprehensively. I run my hand along the supple velvet trim on my wool coat, unsure what to say. However, Claudette steps out from behind the counter, walks to the glass door, and flips around the sign—Closed.
“Suivez-moi,” she says reluctantly. So, I follow her.
Behind the counter, past the ovens, around the thick slab of marble on which she rolls out dough, Claudette leads me through the building and down a steep spiral staircase into the basement.
I follow her to the far side of the room where she opens a door to a closet and motions for me to step inside.
Protruding from the back wall of the closet is a shiny brass knob. The wall around the knob isn’t wood like the rest of the basement, but metal—titanium alloy—like the outside of a jet.
I look at Claudette expectantly, but she only sighs and leaves. I listen to her feet pass through the kitchen and into the front of the shop. Then, silence.
I stare back at the vault. I run my forefinger along the cool, gray metal.
A ring of numbers circle the knob. I trace the grooved numbers with my fingertips.
Cramped in an old closet, in the basement of this charming boulangerie, I realize I’ve known the combination to open this vault my whole life.
It takes only one pass to unlock it.
The vault creaks open. On the floor, wedged between the sides, are several metal boxes. After I match the right lock with the right code, the first box unlatches.
I scan the contents: stacks of files and envelopes, an abecedarian list of names, sealed documents.
Some files are in Cyrillic, some in German, Farsi, Hebrew … most are in English.
I open the next box. It’s the same. Frustrated, I unsnap the Longchamp backpack and shake it open. I dump the contents from the first two boxes in.
I open the third, larger box and blink.
I pick up a brick of euros, calculating quickly … 500,000 euros—I scan the other half—and 450,000 American dollars.
I gather enough cash out of the third box to fill the bag and leave the rest. I snap the lids shut, twist the locks, open the vault door, and step back into the closet.
Upstairs, the boulangerie is bustling. I walk to the door, with my backpack tight around my shoulders.
“Mademoiselle, attendez!”
I turn on my heel. Claudette motions me forward sternly.
She pushes a white carton into my hands. “You forgot your order,” she reprimands.
Inside the carton, set on ivory doilies, are three warm pains au chocolat.
CHAPTER 48
I half expect to be stopped, apprehended, arrested, but ten minutes later, we are at the train station.
“Why did you send me in alone?” I ask my mother. “You could have done that.”
Her azure eyes stare reluctantly into mine. “Claudette’s orders were to lead you to the vault.”
“But why alone?”
“Don’t you see, Sophia? You aren’t alone. You have a network, our network, so that if something were to ever happen to both of us—”
“Nothing is going to happen to you,” I snap, irritated.
“—you have contacts. You will be looked after,” she finishes.
My father takes a clean stack of euros and buys three tickets at the kiosk.
“Why Vienna?” I inquire, staring over his shoulder.
“We’re tracking where Bekami gets his money. We find out who funds his network? We find him.”
“And this person is in Vienna?”
“Nearby. In Odessa. There was a money transfer there last night. It’s our best lead.”
At 11:38, we give the boarding agent our tickets and file down the train to the last remaining enclosed compartment.
Separating us from the aisle, two Plexiglass doors enclose the row seats.
Once the train departs, my father unwraps his cashmere scarf and tosses it aside in a heap.
My mother takes the Longchamp backpack from me and removes the contents, dispersing the items from the safe between her bag and my father’s duffel. Standing up, she tucks all our bags onto the metal luggage rack above our heads.
We eat the pains au chocolat. All afternoon and into the evening, I try to sleep, but it comes in restless chunks; ev
ery time I fall asleep, I wake up thinking I am back in Waterford and the pain hits all over again.
Why do I have to go along with this? Why do I have to stay with them? I watch the front of the train twist around snow-covered mountain peaks. The intercom announces we have passed into Austria. We speed by signs marking the road to Hallstatt, an old village with timber houses, chocolate shops, and a church whose reflection shines in the lake beneath it.
When I first arrived in Waterford, it reminded me so much of these alpine towns. Now the alpine towns are near again, and Waterford is across the world.
“I want to go back,” I say. The intercom has announced dinner. We are all awake. “I’ll tell a story—we had to unexpectedly visit your dying aunt—and unless our house is gone, I’ll stay there. After you find Bekami you can come back too.”
“You can’t go back,” my mother rebukes me. “Not yet.”
“ ‘Not yet’ as in it’s a possibility? Or ‘not yet’ as in never?”
A woman wearing a maroon uniform and jaunty hat opens our compartment doors, pulls down the collapsible table, and delivers three entrées of beef bourguignonne, three bottles of San Pellegrino, and a bowl of demi-baguettes.
“Did Aksel ever tell you about his parents’ plane crash, Sophia?” My father tears off a piece of baguette and dips it into the rich wine sauce. My mother sits quietly, writing into a notepad, ignoring the food for now.
I stare coldly at my father. “Is this when you tell me about knowing Aksel’s father?”
“I didn’t know his father.”
“Then why did Aksel ask you about him on the tarmac?”
Remembering when I left Waterford is like being asphyxiated—Aksel’s arm tight on my waist, his lips pushed hard against mine, his words muffled by the engines, No matter what happens … I have loved every minute I’ve spent with you …
“What did he tell you about his parents’ plane crash?” my father asks again, deflecting my question. In the fading daylight crackling through the windows of the speeding train, my father’s face passes between being shadowed and lit.
I take a long sip of San Pellegrino.
“Sophia?” he prods.
“He said their plane was shot down,” I confess. “Which you obviously know.”
The train rocks as we ascend through the mountains. I wait for the movement to stabilize before I spoon some beef bourguignonne onto a piece of baguette.
“Aksel’s father, Dr. Fredricksen, visited Pakistan frequently on humanitarian missions. While there, he was contacted by Intelligence to pass on information he gained while high up in the Hindu Kush. His information led to a raid on a village harboring a terrorist mastermind. Two weeks after that raid, Dr. Fredricksen’s plane was shot down over the Gulf of Oman on its way back to Dubai.”
“How do you know this?” I ask. I see the tension in his face. His new silver beard may disguise his bone structure, his skin tone, his identity, but it doesn’t conceal his emotions. Not to me, at least.
“Because it’s my job to find out everything I can about Aksel. To learn everything about his family, his parents, his past.”
I nearly spill my drink. “Because I was hanging out with him? Because we spent time together?!”
He looks exasperated. His fingers are turning red, gripping his mug. “In Berlin, Aksel was told his parents’ plane hadn’t crashed. He was told the truth—his father had been a hero in the fight against terrorism; Pakistani Intelligence, infiltrated by terrorist sympathizers, shot down his plane in retaliation. After Aksel was told this, someone told him differently, that it wasn’t Pakistani Intelligence who shot down his parents’ plane, but a rogue American Special Operations Unit—”
“It was his grandfather,” I interrupt. “He doesn’t want Aksel to join the military. I think he is worried that Aksel will end up dead like his parents …” I trail off.
“Sophia.” His voice is like a deep bass drum, echoing my beating heart. “Aksel’s grandfather, Senator Martin Kennecott? He told Aksel it was ON-YX. He told Aksel it was me.”
CHAPTER 49
Standing, I knock the bowl of bourguignonne to the carpet. The thick stew seeps beneath my father’s seat.
“It’s not … It’s not true …” Except it could be; if there is one unequivocal fact I know about my father, it is that he is capable of anything.
I am on the verge of exploding—I can’t stand to look at my father one more second.
If Aksel believes Martin, he will never want to see me again.
“Sophia, calm down,” my mother scolds me. “We did not shoot down that plane!”
I glare at her, unwilling to believe anything either of them says.
“We contact dozens of agents like Dr. Fredricksen all over the world to help us gather intelligence,” she says brusquely. “HUMINT—human intelligence—is what we do! We’re not technicians; we deal with on-the-ground intelligence from real people.”
“So, maybe he wasn’t even working with ON-YX. Maybe it was another intelligence arm … CIA … MI6 … FVEY … maybe it was friendly fire …” I am desperate for an alternative explanation.
“Dr. Fredricksen was working for ON-YX, Sophia,” my mother says firmly. She takes her cardigan from the seat and buttons herself into it. “A year before Dr. Fredricksen was killed, an ON-YX operator met him at a café in Lahore and asked him to relay intelligence, told him he would save many lives if he did, and warned him of the risks he was accepting if he agreed.”
“How do you know this?” I whisper.
My mother breathes in deeply. “Because I was that operator.”
I sway. I have to sit. I have to stand. I have to keep moving. My mother keeps talking.
“When Pakistani Intelligence found out we had killed one of their own based on Dr. Fredricksen’s intelligence, they shot down his plane. Retaliation. Revenge. We don’t know. What matters is someone killed my agent,” my mother says fiercely.
Processing this information is like pushing gravel through a sieve. Is this another fabrication to conceal the truth?
Whether they shot down that plane or not, my parents are responsible.
“Why did we move to Waterford?” I ask.
“Andrews thought it would be a good fit,” my father recites, “mountains, fresh air, skiing—”
“Stop lying!” I shout. “I know there’s more! We could’ve gone anywhere, since it was never truly over. Why Waterford?”
For so long, I’ve always accepted their deviations from the truth, their lies of omission, because I felt that by accepting them, I was playing along too. I never felt betrayed, but, rather, that I was somehow part of the secret, because I kept it.
Knowing they’ve deliberately deceived me is like being knocked unconscious. “There is no retirement in our field, Sophia. There aren’t enough of us. A terrorist needs only an ideology and an afternoon to train. We need a decade. We can’t afford to let our operators phase out. In Waterford, we were as close to retirement as we’ll ever be.”
“And?” I prompt, sensing his hesitation.
“Our enemies—terrorists, arms dealers, dictators—multiply each day. We can barely find enough special units, let alone covert operators. But occasionally, someone emerges who is a perfect fit for the way we function: discreet, capable, motivated, and easily taken off the grid …”
How did it take so long for me to realize it? To connect it? To see the truth?
He continues, speaking faster now: “We didn’t know when we arrived. It was weeks before we learned his name.”
I am starting to hyperventilate. I don’t want to hear it.
My entire life I have been trained to trust my instinct, and from the day we arrived in Waterford, my instinct warned me.
Nothing is a coincidence.
“Recruitment?” I choke out. “The phase of retirement you entered was recruitment?”
“Yes, Sophia.”
“We moved to Waterford for you to recruit Aksel?”
M
y mother swallows. “Not quite. We were running Rec-S, recruitment surveillance, on Aksel, it’s not the same—”
Fury erupts like a volcano within me. “You had video footage of Aksel’s house! Of us!”
“Only after he turned on the video security system, Sophia. We didn’t turn it on, although we should have, and we didn’t access it until we had to!”
“So, I should thank you?!”
“We didn’t want to invade your privacy, Sophia, but we had to protect you. It wasn’t an easy position—”
“You’ve been underwater for four minutes, trapped in razor wire, and you figured out how to survive! But you didn’t know what to do when Andrews told you to spy on my boyfriend?! On me?!”
“We wanted you to have a life in Waterford, make friends, go to school, have fun—”
“And you gave me this life by spying on us?!”
“You make it sound like we were peeking through his windows with binoculars! That’s not what it is! Rec-S takes years; it’s what makes ON-YX operators unique. We observe personality, reaction time, threat perception, aggression control, survival instinct, emotional intelligence. These traits can’t be assessed in a three-month training camp. Some recruits are watched for years before they’re even approached by ON-YX.”
“But ON-YX has already approached Aksel,” I say. “Right?”
“He’s a once-in-a-generation candidate, Sophia. We don’t turn down Andrews’s orders. It’s how we recruit. There is one difference between highly trained operators and cold-blooded killers and that is knowing when to take the shot. You can’t assess this in an application process, or at a training facility. You can only discern this quality through years of observation—”
“So, if we’d stayed in Waterford, you would have been monitoring Aksel until he graduated?!”
“We only wanted what was best for you, Sophia,” my mother says. “We left the field as soon as your father killed Farhad in Tunis. We didn’t know who our Rec-S assignment was—it could have taken us a year to receive it—but you ran up Eagle Pass in the middle of a blizzard and Aksel brought you home, and”—my mother pauses—“well, he looks like his father. I contacted HQ to get status on our Rec-S assignment, and that’s when Andrews sent us Aksel’s file.”
Girl from Nowhere Page 23