The Athena Protocol

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The Athena Protocol Page 10

by Shamim Sarif


  “That’s what an order is!” Hala snaps in an undertone. “You broke orders and killed Ahmed, and you broke us up as a team.”

  She’s right. I raise my hands and walk slowly toward her, defeated.

  “Put it down. I’ll come in with you.”

  Hala looks relieved but doesn’t actually drop the dart gun.

  “Do you have a car?” I ask her.

  “Motorbike.”

  “Do you really want to haul my drugged body all the way to your bike and drive me unconscious through the streets of Belgrade?”

  I reach her and push the gun gently aside and then wait while Hala holsters it. I even offer to carry her backpack for her, because that’s what friends do, but she declines. We walk back toward where her bike is, which is very near mine—not surprising, as we both must have taken the same path in. And then I drop back a pace and deliver an almighty chop to the back of her knees. While she’s still down, kneeling in the dirt, I come around to her front and deliver a couple more blows. I literally hate doing it, but she hasn’t given me much of an option. A one-two punch to her solar plexus and then an upward push from her stomach to her ribs winds her. That’s all I want to do—buy some time to escape.

  She lies there, gasping for breath and, for a moment, I hesitate. In any other universe, I’d be helping her, not hurting her.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, and I mean it.

  I run hard, to my motorcycle, kicking it on and roaring out of there as fast as I can.

  As I ride back toward the center of town, something occurs to me. I veer off into the tower blocks and, when I can’t see anyone around, I pull up next to one of those big rubbish dumpsters. I take off my beautiful, broken-in jacket, empty the pockets, and toss it inside, just in case Hala has thought to stick a tracking device on me. Amber’s team makes everything so transparent and wafer-thin that I don’t trust I’ll find anything just by patting myself down.

  Back at the apartment, I get into bed, but I’m too keyed up to sleep. All I can think about is Hala, out there, gasping in the forest. And the way I lied to her so I could catch an element of surprise against her. It’s not doing wonders for my self-esteem, but the alternative is to be waking up in the Athena house a couple of hours from now with a bloodstream full of drugs and zero control over my destiny. I switch on the TV. They’re playing an old movie dubbed into Serbian, and finally I drift into sleep.

  I wake just after 8:00 a.m., blinking and gritty-eyed. The television is still on. I flick it off and reach for my laptop and my new morning routine of scanning the local newspapers online. The only thing worth translating this morning is a profile piece on Aleks Yuchic. The article is about how many arrests he’s managed since becoming justice minister, though there’s a snide paragraph about how the gangsters he’s rounded up so far are small-timers. But it all bodes well for the job that Peggy has lined up for him—bringing Gregory Pavlic, the biggest gangster of them all, to justice.

  When I go into the gallery this time, I don’t head straight for the coffee area at the far end. Instead, I move slowly from exhibit to exhibit, pausing before each piece of photography and examining it. The prints are a series of city scenes, highly treated, saturated with color in a way that seems to have sapped the life out of them without replacing it with any other meaning. Maybe it’s art, or maybe it’s someone trying a bit too hard. While I’m looking, I run through the coming conversation with Paulina in my mind. How she might begin it, how it could end. It’s a habit I’ve had for a long time now. Playing out a situation in my head. I first started to do it when I was nervous to see my mother again after Kit had been away for weeks; when I wanted to seem confident and funny, not nerdy and intense—a daughter who Kit would appreciate and who she might regret not being with more. Sometimes it worked, but after a while I began to resent the fact that Kit was still always away, and I stopped trying so hard to please her.

  When I’m done with the exhibit, I swing my bag off my shoulder, drop it onto a chair, and sit down. Finally, I look over at the coffee bar. Paulina is using a remote control to flick through silent TV channels on the big flat-screen above the bar while a waitress ties on a black apron and prepares to come over to serve me.

  With her eyes still on the screen, Paulina says something to the waitress, and the girl stops in her tracks. Paulina goes over to the coffee machine and throws me a smile.

  While she makes the coffee, I look out the window, counting passersby to focus myself. Soon enough, Paulina’s standing before me and I half rise to take the cup she offers.

  “Your macchiato.”

  “Thank you. You didn’t have to make it yourself.”

  “But I don’t want you to terrify the staff.” Paulina’s eyes smile.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” I say.

  “You were more relaxed at the bar. It was good to see you.”

  I nod my agreement, and she sits down at my table, while I take a sip of the coffee.

  “I feel like I did all the talking last night,” she begins. “I want to know more about you.”

  It flashes into my mind that Paulina might not just be making conversation. What if she suspected my motives yesterday and spent the past twelve hours using Gregory’s highly evolved network of Eastern European tech geniuses to trace my true identity? What if she knows that, far from being a graduate student, I work for a rogue organization that is now dedicating all its resources to taking down her father? I blink and try to focus on Paulina’s eyes. Which are smiling at me.

  “What’s your subject? At university?” Paulina asks kindly. Maybe she’s used to people behaving like nervous idiots in front of her.

  “Electronic engineering,” I say, recovering myself. “I like circuits and wires and computer code.”

  “Wow, that’s impressive,” she says, and it feels like she means it.

  I reach into my bag and bring out a small gift-wrapped package. She hesitates, confused.

  “To say thank you for the coffee yesterday,” I say. “And the drinks.” Although I originally arranged this “gift” with an ulterior motive, it turns out I’m genuinely happy to be giving it to Paulina.

  She lifts up the tape, edging back the wrapping paper as carefully as if she might use it again one day, and lifts out a book of photography. I watch her fingers caress the dust jacket and then open the book gently, as if the pages might be made of glass. She looks up at me.

  “It’s really beautiful.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  The moment feels awkward, somehow, and I glance away, to the pictures on the walls.

  “Who are your favorite photographers?” I ask.

  She names a few people, none of whom I’ve heard of, and I ask her a little more about how she became so passionate about it. It’s clear she knows a lot about photography and art. The conversation comes to a natural pause. Here’s my opportunity. I steel myself.

  “Why don’t we have a drink tonight?” My voice is low, so the waitress can’t hear me, nor the older couple who have just strolled in for coffee.

  Paulina meets my gaze. “I can’t. I would have but . . .”

  “It’s fine,” I say lightly. Funnily enough, I still feel disappointed, even though I know very well that she is busy tonight. Paulina seems anxious to explain.

  “I have to be at my father’s birthday party.”

  You don’t say.

  I try to appear uninterested and take a sip of water.

  “Sounds nice and quiet.”

  There’s a bit of teasing in my tone, and Paulina gives me a half smile.

  “My father is lacking in a lot of things—but he knows how to throw a party,” she says.

  I look unconvinced. “That’s great.”

  “Have you heard of Kit Love?” Paulina asks, apparently intent on defending the family honor. “She’s pretty good. And loud.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  Paulina shakes her head indulgently at my ignorance.

  “Come a
s my guest tonight.”

  I look appalled at the idea. “Seriously? No! I wouldn’t crash a family birthday!”

  “You won’t be crashing.”

  I shake my head again, brushing her off.

  “Really, trust me,” she says, working hard to convince me. “It’s me, my father, and five hundred of his closest friends. He won’t even notice you. You have to.”

  Paulina touches my hand gently. As if to stop me from protesting. Does she have any idea how I feel when she touches me? I look at her and I realize, yes, she does. She smiles. And I nod, hesitantly, accepting her invitation. Paulina’s eyes are clear and direct, and yet I can’t read them right now. For a moment, I wonder if I’ve opened the door to more trouble than I can handle, getting myself invited to Gregory’s party, where my mother is the headline act. But the thought flies out of my head as quickly as dust in a breath of wind. I have what I wanted.

  I make plans to meet Paulina back here this evening and go with her to her father’s house, and then I head out to the state registry, where I’m hoping that they finally found my files.

  9

  DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS ANYWHERE in the world is a big pain, but the public records office here is something else. It’s been over an hour since I went up to a metal counter that looks like a relic from the sixties and communicated my request to the clerk. She’s a hundred years old if she’s a day, but with hair dyed platinum blond and a cigarette stuck in the side of her mouth.

  She keeps me hanging around forever, even though I had an appointment. The place smells like boiled cabbage, and there are a few people in and out, but it’s hardly overrun. While I’m sitting there, I start thinking about all the births and deaths and marriages that have been registered here. Millions of them over generations, just for this little city in this tiny country. Babies being born, screaming for air, learning to walk, going through school, falling in love, having more babies, working like mad to pay a mortgage and food bills, and then dying. It makes me wonder if I’d ever want to have children. I’d want to be someone they could look up to and trust. Not like Gregory with Paulina. Though, he probably thinks he’s giving her a good life, and on some level, she must love him. Even if she wants to break away.

  Thinking about Paulina and Gregory makes me think about my father. Except there’s a big vacuum where that thought should be. At first (meaning, for the first fifteen years of my life) Kit told me that he’d died when I was two. I had a whole story about him in my head that I built on when I was a kid. I used to picture him to myself as a long-haired hippie type of guy who played guitar and who’d had a quick fling on the road before dying of an unspecified illness, probably due to him being a sensitive, poetic soul in love with a self-absorbed music star who’d flung him aside.

  This definitely made it easier at school when it was time for us to make Father’s Day cards. I always made a card for my mother instead and got the silent sympathy vote from my teachers. And that, if you can believe it, was Kit’s justification for using that lie my entire life. She lied to make it easier for me. What she really meant was, to make it easier for her.

  When I was fifteen, I got fixated on the idea that I wanted to see his grave. Kit evaded it for a while; tried to avoid the subject. But then, I tracked down my own birth certificate and there it was—a big blank in the space for my father’s name. After which, Kit admitted that my father wasn’t dead at all. That he had been married at the time (to someone who wasn’t Kit, clearly), and that she had never told him about me.

  To say I was upset is a bit of an understatement. I didn’t talk to her for a week. The deceit drove me crazy. That all my life she had lied to me and only crumbled and told the truth when I pushed it. Not because it was the right thing to do.

  I’ve worked myself up into such a fury about Kit that I miss my name being called by the clerk. She has to practically yell at me to get my attention, and I jump up and take the folders she’s handed me. They are files on the two directors of the holding company linked to Gregory Pavlic, the two my research suggested might possibly still be alive. Inside the thin cardboard covers, there is nothing much on the Russian guy, Mikhail Rostov; but there is a birth certificate and social security number and basic information for the woman director, Katarina Volim. From the certificate I calculate that she’s twenty-three. So it could actually be the same person I saw on Facebook; but could she really be the third director?

  I ask the clerk if there isn’t another record under the same name, but she insists that’s the only one. I snap a picture of the birth certificate, address, and other information with my phone, hand back the file, and get out of there.

  The address is in an old part of the city, in an area of tiny little houses packed together. At least some of them are painted, and a few have flowerpots on the window ledges. It takes me a while to find the right place, because street names around here seem to be hit or miss. Kit’s always lecturing me about the law of attraction—visualize something and it will happen over time. So when I knock on the door, I imagine the girl—this mystery director of the Russian shell company—flinging open the door and speaking perfect English. What I actually get is a man who might be around fifty but who looks older just because he’s so desperately sick. Pale, ashy skin, and flyaway hair. He stares out at me, and the sound of his every breath hangs between us, a series of painful-sounding wheezes. Before I can say anything, he is pulled away from the door, and a plump, tired-looking woman takes his place. The man shuffles back into a living room with a patterned carpet and a small oxygen tank sitting next to his flowery armchair. He probably has emphysema. Though he still keeps a pack of cigarettes on the side table.

  His wife seems pleasant enough, but she rattles off a question in Serbian.

  “I’m looking for Katarina,” I say in English. “I’m a friend of hers.”

  I’m not sure she understands, but speaking in English is helping me, I think. At least she must figure I’m not police or the tax authorities.

  “Katarina friend?” she repeats.

  I nod encouragingly.

  “Do you have her address?”

  Nothing.

  “Where is her house?” I try. The mother (because I’m assuming this is her mother) hesitates.

  “You have work for Katarina?” she asks.

  I look at her. Her eyes are hopeful.

  “Yes,” I say.

  The woman disappears, leaving the door open. The father turns a bit in his chair and looks at me balefully. I venture a smile, but he just turns back to the TV. The sounds of game show buzzers and applause floats out to me.

  Katarina’s mother comes back with a piece of paper on which an address is neatly written in scrolled letters, the kind they must have taught in school forty years ago. I smile and thank her. Then she steps back as if to welcome me in and says something else, making a tea-drinking motion with one hand. I thank her, but point at my watch to suggest that I have to hurry. Disappointed, she stands at the door and waves while I get back onto the motorcycle. I wave back and head off before stopping farther down the road to tap the address into my navigation system. Katarina lives quite a way from here, over in New Belgrade.

  I haven’t been wandering around this section of town for long before I figure out it’s where the prostitutes work. Maybe Gregory Pavlic has a setup here, but it certainly doesn’t look like the place in which a legitimate company director would be hanging out. But then this is a shell company, an obvious front for something dodgy, something to do with that Russian clinic.

  I walk through a warren of urine-scented alleyways that pass between gray blocks of government housing. Empty beer cans decorate the streets here, and even the ever-present graffiti looks less skillfully applied.

  The address I want leads into an open doorway where a sheet of paper is taped to the wall with an arrow that points up the staircase ahead. Above the arrow is written a word in Serbian and, below that, the word SERVICE in smudged orange marker. I guess they don
’t want to miss out on the international clientele. As I pause at the foot of the stairs, I hear a clicking sound. Behind me, an old lady is sweeping the steps in the opposite doorway. She wears a head scarf patterned with yellow daisies, a bit of freshness in this depressing place, but she regards me with suspicion, clicking her tongue again, disapproving. Quickly, I head up the concrete steps, taking them two at a time. I’m freaked out, to tell you the truth. I’ve never been in a place like this before, and I’m not sure what to expect.

  Turning left into a tiny hallway, I find the right door. It has a splintered edge that I touch as I knock. I focus on the rough shards of broken wood under my fingertips as, again, I try to picture Katarina coming to the threshold and having a nice chat. The door opens, and there’s a huge man standing there. He’s not just tall but also wide, shaped like a squat refrigerator. This visualizing thing is not happening for me.

  “Is Katarina here?” I ask.

  The man just looks at me.

  “I’m a friend of hers,” I say.

  The great thing about being a girl my age is that no one ever sees you as a threat. Or, in this case, as a customer.

  He holds out a paw-like hand to indicate that I should stay put. Then he leaves the door ajar and lumbers back into the apartment. When he returns, someone is with him. With a careless flick of her wrist, a young woman draws him back and steps onto the threshold. She’s not that much older than me, but it feels like she’s seen a lot more of life than I have. She’s wrapped in an indigo polyester robe that stops just above the knee. Her dark, tousled hair falls over eyes that are still hazy with sleep.

  “Katarina?” I ask.

  “Who are you?” she says, having acknowledged her name with a quick nod of her head.

  “My name is Daisy,” I say, thinking about the flowers on the head scarf of the old lady sweeping down below. “Can I have a few minutes to ask you something?”

  “Journalist?” Katarina asks. Her eyes rake over me.

  “No. I promise, I’ll only take five minutes.”

 

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