“Finally … you are here, fahişe,” Bekami whispers.
Biting down on my lip, I fight every urge to scream; I fight every muscle in my body to remain still, to not recoil. I can’t be weak. He can’t think I’m weak.
“He wants to see your face.” Bekami leans forward until his mouth is centimeters from mine. His breath smells of yenibahar and black tea; his skin still emanates an overwhelming aroma of Yves Saint Laurent. “But I know your face well … I could draw you in my sleep.”
“You don’t know me at all,” I say viciously.
Bekami slides his hand around the back of my neck and pinches my spine so savagely between his forefinger and thumb I nearly black out.
“I know you’re still the spoiled little girl from nowhere,” he taunts.
I can see every pore on Bekami’s smug, malevolent face, every tiny hair above his sneering lips.
Slowly, I tilt my neck back then ram my head forward. My forehead collides into his face with a hard crunch.
Bekami claps a hand to his nose, stumbling backward. Blood gushes from his nostrils, soaking the collar of his shirt.
His face wrinkles in fury. He lunges for me—
“Izam!” the man obscured behind Bekami snaps.
The man has been leaning against a large mahogany desk with a tumbler in his hand, watching. Now he walks toward us.
Disguising his weathered face is a bushy beard and shoulder-length silver hair. He is wearing an Italian navy wool suit with a waistcoat. His leather shoes are shiny and polished. On his left lapel is a pin of the Russian flag. He looks both lustful and impatient, like he wants something now and also has someplace else to be.
Above us is an old crystal chandelier, and when the Russian steps forward into the light, I inhale sharply.
“You look as though you recognize me.” His lips part, revealing dazzling white teeth too big for his mouth.
The photograph had been grainy, but that hadn’t disguised the drooping left eye, the overprominent brow.
His nose must have been broken many times in Lefortovo because its aquiline shape is mangled; it bulges at the bridge and veers sharply to the left. He is also now missing an earlobe.
But it is, unmistakably, him.
A tremor ascends my throat.
“Abramovich,” I breathe out, stunned. “You’re Sergei Abramovich.”
CHAPTER 59
“Sergei Abramovich is dead.” I stammer, “H-He died in Lefortovo.”
Yet, the dead man before me runs a pudgy finger along the rim of a crystal tumbler. Tiny particles of condensation sweat from the glass.
He raises the tumbler to me and savors a slow sip of vodka. “I am not a medical miracle, I assure you.”
“How are you alive?” I want his blood test. I want dental records. I want to be wrong.
He switches to his native Russian, and with it his voice shifts—throatier and deeper.
“For five years I was tortured, until, finally, they released me. They offered me a new name and a new position, Dmitri Yesnev, assistant to the sub-director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service in the Caucasus. They couldn’t let a highly skilled officer like me simply retreat into civilian life.”
“Why change names?”
“Russia does not admit to torturing the wrong man for five years,” he laughs. Then abruptly, he stops. “I died when they said I died.”
Bekami continues circling the perimeter of the room, pretending to admire the Ottoman art, the brocade draperies, the ornate eighteenth-century molding. But holding a hand to his bleeding nose, watching me, like a viper ready to strike.
Assessing Abramovich as the more powerful of the two, I focus on him. “What do you want from me?”
“From you?” Abramovich drains the last of his vodka. “Everything.”
He puts down his tumbler and walks toward me, taking off his immaculately tailored suit jacket. Though older, he is a strong and fit man. He lifts his hand. It hovers on my cheek. I refuse to flinch, to give him the satisfaction of terrifying me.
“You’ve become a pretty girl,” he says. “Strong, slender, like Katarina.”
Katarina—I look like my mother? For one moment, I want time to stand still. I want Abramovich to tell me everything he knew about Katarina.
With his thumb, he tilts my chin back. When he touches my scar, he makes a tsk tsk sound in his throat. “I told him not to damage you,” he says, indicating Bekami. To my surprise, Abramovich sounds almost upset.
“Well?” Bekami lets go of the brocade drapery. He shoves the cloth he’s been holding up to his swollen nose into his pocket. “Are you satisfied it’s her?”
Abramovich’s eyes linger on mine, the way my father’s do when he is waiting for me to understand, the way he tells me everything, without telling me anything.
“Most certainly,” says Abramovich. “It is her. You did well. Finally.”
“Then our deal is done,” Bekami says.
Abramovich walks behind his desk. In the center of the wall is a gilded ornate frame encasing a painting of a ship. Abramovich opens the frame, reaches his hand into a concealed, hollow spot in the wall behind it, and removes a dusty, aluminum case.
He pauses, holding the case above the desk, and stares at me. “I’ve always appreciated irony.”
I purse my lips, frustrated I don’t understand what he means.
“After my life was destroyed, and the program I’d spent a decade developing was dismantled, I searched for you. Sixteen years I searched for you.”
Abramovich grins with his cosmetically restructured mouth. “It was Mr. Bekami who found you the first time. My offer was simple. I would give him what he wanted most, if he brought me what I wanted most.” Abramovich lays the aluminum case flat on the desk.
“You see, before I was imprisoned, my enemies did not entirely dismantle my program. A few Kosheleks remained. So, it’s ironic, isn’t it? The weapons that once destroyed me …” He bends forward and takes an antique key from his breast pocket.
Click.
The case unlocks; the lid opens.
“Those weapons now save me”—he pauses—“because I get you back.”
Bile rises in my throat. Bekami never wanted my father. Never cared about revenge. Never intended to use me to “get to him.” From the time he kidnapped me in Istanbul, he has only wanted me.
Me. To trade me.
Bekami leans forward over the case, scanning the contents. Then he opens a Louis Vuitton briefcase, sets it on the desk, and cautiously reaches both hands inside.
He lifts out a simple metal canister thirty centimeters tall by eight centimeters wide, surrounded by an interlocking cage—a Koshelek—and places it into the briefcase.
Gloating, he snaps the gold buckles closed and then buttons his coat.
Bekami glides back over to me. He bends forward to stare me in the eye. He traces my collarbone with his fingernail. His nose has blood crusted in the nostrils. “Girls like you need to learn their place,” he says in a chilling voice.
“Because boys like you can’t keep up?” I smile.
With the back of his hand, he swings the weight of his forearm across my jaw.
Blinking lights go off in my head. All the pain, all the bruises, all those nights on a cold tile floor come flooding back.
“You dare insult me?” he fumes.
Except those memories that once haunted me now fuel me. I lift my chin. “Whatever it is you’re planning?” I glare at Bekami. “I will stop you. Again. And again—”
He grips my neck, pinching my esophagus, strangling me.
“Never!” he declares, dousing my face in a barrage of spit.
“You have what you want.” Abramovich steps between us and places his hand on Bekami’s chest. “It’s time for you to leave, Izam.”
With a final squeeze, Bekami lets go of my neck.
I slump forward in my seat, coughing blood onto the marble floor. I listen to Bekami’s footsteps fade.
Abramovich takes a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and shakes it loose.
“Why are you helping him?” I ask. “He’ll kill innocent people—”
“Many, possibly.” Abramovich presses the embroidered edge to my cheek, wiping away Bekami’s spit, my blood, my sweat. “A small price for you.”
Refolding the silk handkerchief, Abramovich places it back into his pocket. Blood stains the wool of his jacket. “None of this would have happened if your American parents had surrendered you from the start.”
“You mean if your men had found me in Kotka and killed me too?” I retort.
Squirming in my seat, I try to loosen the knot, but it is so tight that my hands become covered in sweat and blood.
“I wasn’t entirely truthful earlier,” Abramovich says abruptly. He folds his fingers together, then unfolds them, and tucks his hands into his pockets. “The truth is, I died long before they signed my death certificate in Lefortovo.”
His eyes gleam as he watches me, captive, immobile, unable to do anything except twist my hands and listen to him.
“Shortly after your father, Anton …” He pauses. “You know about him, the traitor?”
I grimace. “Hero. Yes, I know.”
He scoffs. “After Anton escaped with your American parents, SVR came for me. We were staying at our dacha when Spetsnaz arrived in the middle of the night. My wife, Elizaveta, ran outside. ‘My father is wealthy,’ she pleaded with the commander, ‘He will pay you to go away, to leave us alone.’ ”
Abramovich removes a tusk-handled knife from his breast pocket and twists the handle between his thumb and forefinger. “It is Anton’s fault she was killed.” His voice becomes almost a whisper. “It is Anton’s fault they both died.”
“Both?” I ask with trepidation. I watch his fingers curl and uncurl around the handle. I can’t be sure if he is telling the truth. Is this some elaborate tale to gain my sympathy? My trust? I continue working on the knot.
“Elizaveta wasn’t alone.” Abramovich goes still. “He followed her outside. He never let her out of his sight … Spetsnaz gunned Elizaveta down with my little boy clinging to her chemise. So, you see, Sophia, Spetsnaz may have shot them, but it was your father, your hero, who killed them.”
“You’re lying.” I force back tears. He’s not going to see me cry. He’s not going to make me feel sorry for him—make me feel guilt.
Abramovich puts the blade on my scar and runs the tip down my clavicle. I dare not breathe. “I was being tortured in Lefortovo when she told me you had survived. I can’t express to you what I felt. You gave me a reason to live again.”
Exhaling, Abramovich steps away from me, and returns the knife to his pocket.
I rub the rope up and down the back of the chair, hoping for a nail or a splinter in the wood to catch it. But the back is smooth, varnished mahogany, and the blood-soaked rope slides along it seamlessly.
“Do you know what is harder than seeing your family murdered?” He begins pacing, his head snapping in my direction every other syllable, as if he’s rehearsed his words a thousand times and now he has stage fright and can remember none of them. “What is more tormenting than years of torture and starvation?” He steps behind his desk. He puts both his fists on it, straightens his elbows, and angles his body forward. “It was the moment I learned my own brother … my own brother … did this to me.”
I stop wrestling with the knot and blink up at him, unable to grasp the irrationality of this statement. His brother?
“You look like Katarina,” he says softly, “but you have our mother’s eyes. They are neither gray nor green nor blue. Baltic eyes, our mother called them.” Abramovich is staring not at my eyes, but through them.
He opens a desk drawer and lifts out a Tokarev pistol. He loops his forefinger into the trigger, dangles it from his hand, and walks back around the front of the desk.
A choking sob rises from the back of my throat. I don’t want to believe him, but his words pierce my veins like a syringe of venom, infecting me.
“You’re wrong,” I say. “Anton died protecting his family! He would have never hurt his brother—”
“You didn’t know your father!” Abramovich roars. He pushes the barrel hard into my temple. His eyes are alight, little flames burning in the irises. “He was a traitor to his country, to his family.”
He’s going to kill me.
“This is all I want,” he says. “To see you this once, my only family.” He looks exhilarated. “I made myself live to see this moment. To see you. To finally achieve вендетта.”
Vendetta.
He thumbs off the safety.
At least he has the courage to look me in the eye.
A gunshot sounds. Followed by another. Pop! Pop!
Neither bullet strikes me.
Abramovich crumples back against the mahogany desk, blood pouring from the silk handkerchief in his pocket.
CHAPTER 60
Craning my neck, I stare, shocked.
Standing in the hall, backlit into a silhouette, his towering physique fills the doorframe.
There is a moment of complete silence—then everything goes into overdrive.
Tucking his SIG into a left hip holster, Aksel rushes toward me. With a knife, he saws at the ropes on my hands first. Dropping to his knees, he cuts the rope binding my ankles. He loosens it around my feet before wiping the blood off my cheek.
He scans my features, the green of his eyes growing fierce and bright; his face betrays how bloodied and bruised I must look.
His fingertips skim my jaw, tracing toward the nape of my neck. With my face braced between his hands, he leans forward and kisses me.
I clasp my hands around the back of his head, tangling my fingers into his hair. We kiss again, more desperately this time, and his hands tighten against my back, drawing me into him.
He kisses me hard. Our lips cling; my body trembles in shock. Aksel is here?
I’m breathless; our foreheads touch.
“Looks like you’ve got your aim down,” I murmur, nodding at the SIG.
Aksel pulls away from me, smiles, brushes his lips against mine once more, and lifts me from the chair. “Actually, I meant to hit him in the head,” he utters under his breath.
The rope had cut off the circulation to my feet, so I stomp, flinching in pain, to get the blood flowing.
“I have to find Bekami,” I say to Aksel, who is holding me tight around my waist as I stumble along with him into a cavernous hall.
“We have to get you out of here,” Aksel says.
We reach a landing overlooking a courtyard. We are on the third floor of what must be Abramovich’s estate—an old Ottoman palace with wood-paneled walls, intricate tile work, and arched moldings.
It is eerily quiet. Men like Abramovich don’t live without security—where is his guard?
“How did you even get in here?” I ask Aksel as we descend two flights of a blue-mosaic staircase.
Before Aksel can answer, a pop-pop-pop of automatic fire interrupts us. We have found Abramovich’s security, or they have found us.
At the bottom of the staircase, we turn into a glass-roofed atrium with a black-and-white parquet floor and lush ferns sitting atop marble pillars.
Aksel pulls me behind a pillar. “I’ve got her,” he shouts to the figure letting off the thick pop-pop rhythm.
Todd backs over to us, firing an HK on semiautomatic.
He glances in our direction. “Then it’s time to roll.”
Through the atrium windows, I count nine guards scattered among the ring of cypress trees outside the palace entrance. All are shooting in the same direction. Ours.
Glass shatters behind us. We cover our heads and dart for the atrium’s back door. Aksel moves first, sweeping me aside as a bullet hits the wall beside my head. Todd covers us from the north, backing toward us, firing off rounds.
Two guards attack from the far side of the atrium while four others position around back,
attempting to flank us.
Outside, we take cover behind a low garden wall adjacent to the estate. The guards motion to one another, maneuvering around us.
Todd makes eye contact with me and lifts his Smith & Wesson revolver from a hip holster. I nod. He passes it to me.
Although now, I’m not sure how my hand, slippery from my own blood, can hold it. I look out—the guards are ten seconds from outflanking us.
“We have to find Bekami,” I say to Todd.
“We have to leave Istanbul,” he answers, watching the guards.
“Listen!” I persist. Beneath a sporadic assault of gunfire, the words tumble out of me. “Bekami left with one of Katranov’s weapons—a micro-nuke. Bekami was working with Abramovich this whole time, and he—”
“Abramovich?” Todd interrupts.
“Yes, Sergei Abramovich didn’t die in Lefortovo, and Bekami traded me to him for one of Katranov’s weapons, the Kosheleks he defected with—”
“Those weapons were … destroyed,” Todd says haltingly.
“Not all of them.” I wipe my bleeding hands on my pants. “I just saw one.”
Shots whiz above us, and the three of us burrow into the earth.
Aksel chambers a bullet, rolls onto his stomach, and fires back.
“My father died because of me!” I shout at Todd beneath the staccato of gunfire. “All those years they were after me! Now Bekami has one of those weapons, so we go after him!”
Todd stares back at me. He is young, midtwenties, maybe, but his eyes have a familiar, hollow, calculated look—how long has he been living this life too?
I implore Aksel, “Bekami hunted me for almost two years so he could exchange me for one of those weapons. He will use it—”
“This is not your job, Sophia!” he responds furiously.
Thick vibrations of gunfire pound in my skull. Todd crouches beside us, reloading.
“But this is my fault!” I put the back of my hand over my mouth, fighting emotion.
“Why?” Aksel stares at me, incredulous.
“Because I survived!” I choke back tears. “If Katranov hadn’t betrayed Abramovich he’d still be alive! And … Katarina … and my brothers …”
Aksel’s bewildered expression reminds me he has no idea who I’m talking about.
Girl from Nowhere Page 27