Chase (2 page)

Gaia tried to push him off her, waiting for her adrenaline to kick in, waiting for that rush of energy, but it didn't come. She was just tired. And not a little bit bored. As she contemplated this, the junkie got one good punch into her gut and another to her jaw that sent stars across her vision. Gaia had had enough. She propped her calves under his torso and lifted, flipping him up and over her head onto his back. He let out a groan as he fell, and Gaia got to her feet to hover over him.

“Are we done yet?” she asked.

He waved his hands in front of his face and winced. “We're done! We're done! Please don't hurt me!”

“Fine,” Gaia said, trying not to show how relieved she was. “Just get the hell out of here.”

The junkie stood up, keeping his distance from Gaia, then ran off awkwardly into the night. Gaia
trudged back over to her bench, feeling heavy and low and disappointed.
She couldn't remember the last time she hadn't gotten worked up and focused and generally jazzed during a fight.
And right now she felt about as alive as she did in her highly
unstimulating
math class every day. What was wrong with her? It wasn't like she hadn't been in places as depressing as this before. She'd spent almost her entire life in them.

But this time was somehow different. When she reached inside and tried to summon up some kind of motivating emotion—anger, vengefulness—all she felt was . . .
broken.

Gaia lay down on the bench again, her brow furrowed as she put her head down on the pillow of her bent arm.

Don't think about anything
, she told herself again.
You can deal with it all tomorrow.

Then she closed her eyes and let sleep finally come.

Safe House

TATIANA'S HAND SHOOK VIOLENTLY
as she attempted for the third time to master the simple act of inserting a key into a lock. She blamed
her shivering on the fact that she hadn't expected the sudden shift in the weather and so hadn't dressed for it. She also hadn't expected, however, to see her mother get dragged off by a couple of huge men in black spy gear.

“Damn it. You must focus,” she said to herself through her teeth. If her mother could see her now, she'd be ashamed. Tatiana had to pull herself together. Her mother was counting on her.

Finally Tatiana gripped her right hand with her left to steady it, and mercifully the key slid into the lock. There was a moment of suspense as she turned it, but the lock clicked and the door swung open with a slow,
angry creak
, as if it had just been woken from a deep slumber. Tatiana had the right place. She was home.

She slipped through the door and quickly punched the code her mother had made her memorize into the keypad on the near wall, the red light flashing menacingly as she worked. After hitting all the numbers, Tatiana pressed her thumb into the enter key and squeezed her eyes shut. The alarm let out a loud beep, and when she opened her eyes again, the red light had turned to green. Tatiana closed the door behind her and fastened all five safety locks. She leaned back against the door and allowed herself to breathe. She was safe. Alone, but safe.

Peeling off her lightweight jacket, Tatiana decided
to explore her new abode. In the semidarkness she found a light switch and flicked it on, illuminating the small living room with the weak light from a single overhead fixture. She'd been hearing about the Alphabet City
safe house
ever since she and her mother had arrived in New York City, but she'd never been here. The moment she saw the place in the light, she felt an almost painful longing for the lofty space of the Seventy-second Street apartment.

Your mother is most likely in a jail cell right now
, she told herself.
Quit your whining.

She breathed in the musty, sooty smell of the air and took a few steps into the tiny square living room. The walls were plain and white, and an old but comfortable-looking corduroy couch stood to one side. A table next to it held a single glass lamp with a dingy shade. Tatiana walked over to the one piece of artwork on the wall—a framed print of Renoir's
The Luncheon of the Boating Party
—and lifted it from the nail that held it in place. Just as she'd been told, there was a square, gray safe door built into the wall. Tatiana quickly dialed in the combination, which she'd also committed to memory, and the door popped open, letting out a hiss of air.

There were stacks upon stacks of bills inside—American dollars, Canadian dollars, Mexican pesos, British pounds, and Russian rubles. Tatiana grabbed a few twenties from one of the bundles of dollars, then
pulled out a stack of passports. As she flipped through them—there were at least ten with her picture, each from a different country—she smirked sadly at the names her mother had given her. Annie Whitmore, Corrine Deveneaux, Marianna Alonso, Marcella Tuscano.

I could just disappear
, Tatiana thought, allowing the seduction of such a thought to momentarily send her pulse racing. She gazed at her picture on the Italian passport and imagined it—imagined herself on the white sands of the Mediterranean, sipping something fruity and letting her bare back bathe in the sun. But as quickly as the image came, she squelched it. She wasn't going anywhere without her mother. Not now. Not ever.

She took the last items out of the safe, a nice,
sleek .45 pistol
and a full clip, then crammed the passports back inside. She shoved the clip into the gun, savoring the menacing click as it locked into place. After making sure the safety was on, Tatiana slipped the gun between her waistband and her back. Then she closed the safe and hung the painting again. She had to check the rest of her provisions.

The kitchen, just to the left of the living room, which was lined with avocado green cabinets and held a large brown refrigerator, clearly hadn't been redecorated since the seventies. Tatiana walked over to the pantry and checked inside. The shelves were stocked with canned soups, pasta sauces, packets of instant oatmeal, and cans of soda and juice.

She walked back across the living room to the bedroom, which took all of three steps, and flicked on the light. Two twin-size beds, draped with blue blankets, stood on either side of a single nightstand. Inspection of a small dresser against the far wall revealed drawers filled with plain underwear, bras, T-shirts, and sweaters in Tatiana and Natasha's sizes. The closet held a few pairs of jeans, assorted footwear, and two heavy winter coats. On the top shelf was a wide array of wigs, hats, and sunglasses. Tatiana pulled down a long, dark wig with natural-looking waves and smiled morosely. Her mother had certainly been prepared.

Still fingering the coarse hair of the wig, Tatiana sat down on the closest bed and tried to remain calm. She tried not to let herself picture the events of the evening over and over again. Reliving the nightmare was not going to help her deal with it. It wasn't going to bring her mother back to her. There was only one thing that would. She had to make Gaia talk. Gaia was the only person who knew where her mother was—who the men were that had taken her.

From their uniform fighting tactics, it was clear they belonged to some government agency, and considering Tom Moore's affiliation with the CIA, Tatiana assumed it was them. But that meant nothing to her. It wasn't as if she was privy to all the CIA's secret interrogation facilities. As much as she hated to admit it, she needed Gaia. Unfortunately, she knew
that the self-righteous, egotistical bitch-on-a-mission was never going to help her.

What Tatiana needed was a plan.

Taking a deep breath, Tatiana gathered her blond hair on top of her head and pulled the wig on over it. It was tight, but all the better. She tugged at the temples, then walked over to the full-length mirror that was attached to the back of the door, suddenly hyperaware of the cold steel against the skin of her back. When she saw her reflection, she smiled slowly. It was perfect—a total transformation.

Tatiana pulled her gun out of her waistband, hoisted it, and aimed it at her reflection, her arms straight and locked at the elbow. She barely even recognized herself. Whatever her plan might turn out to be, Gaia would never see her coming.

So Blind

GAIA KEPT HER HEAD BENT, EYES
focused on the grimy sidewalk as she emerged from the subway station on East Sixty-eighth Street. It was rush hour, and she was bombarded on every side by harried commuters, juggling their coffee cups and briefcases and reeking of musky aftershave and freshly sprayed perfume. Gaia's
intention had been to remain inconspicuous, but among this crowd there was no way to keep from sticking out like a prune in a bushel of apples. She stepped to the corner and looked left and right, trying to pick out anything suspicious. Any signs of Tatiana.

The three guys who always hung out by the tiny newsstand across Lexington were there as usual, checking out the latest issue of
Boobs
magazine and sneering as they hovered over the centerfold. Mr. Han, the Vietnamese grocer, stood outside his shop, guarding his fruit with a watchful eye. A bus zoomed by, kicking a cloud of exhaust directly into Gaia's lungs. Yep. Everything was status normal.

The light changed and Gaia crossed the street, fully aware that she was taking her life in her own hands simply by appearing in this neighborhood. It was the one thing, besides school, that she and Tatiana had in common. The girl would have to be an idiot not to look for Gaia here. If Tatiana knew anything about her mark, she had to know that Gaia would come back to the apartment to look for clues. And as a morning breeze tossed a tangled clump of hair across Gaia's vision, she almost hoped she
would
bump into Tatiana. It would be nice to get this over with.

When she arrived at her building, Gaia nodded quickly at Javier, the doorman, then hopped into an open elevator. As she slowly made her ascent, she wondered exactly how long it would take the CIA to
break Natasha. They were probably using all the standard tactics—sleep deprivation, starvation, threats against her daughter—to try to get her to talk. But Natasha was trained by some of the best in the world. She could cope with torture. Gaia knew it could take days, weeks, months before the government was able to get the information Gaia needed. She didn't have that long.

The elevator pinged and the doors slid open. Gaia cautiously peeked into the hallway and found it deserted. She crept along the wall to the apartment she had been sharing with Natasha and Tatiana for so many weeks. Pressing her ear up against the door's flat surface, she heard nothing but merciful silence. Gaia slid her key into the lock and opened the door.

The moment she stepped inside, she knew instinctively that the place was deserted. It felt cold and still, almost as if no one had inhabited its rooms for years. As she stood and looked around at the living room she'd kicked back in and the kitchen she'd snacked from, Gaia was filled with a hot, suffocating shame. How could she have let Natasha and Tatiana fool her into thinking they cared? How could she have been
so blind?

She thought of all the times Natasha had scolded her for being late, of the concern she'd shown for her and her father. But suddenly she saw the bigger picture. Natasha had laughed at her in these rooms. She'd
manipulated her and had enjoyed doing it. Poor little Gaia. Poor little naive daughter of Tom. And all the while Tatiana had been in on it. Tatiana had been laughing at her, too.

Gaia hated that she'd allowed it to happen. She hated that she had been so gullible. But not anymore. She was in control now. Now it was her turn to laugh. Gaia locked the door behind her and set to work.

And just as she had done earlier, when she'd been looking for clues to the attempts made on her life, she turned the apartment inside out. She started with Natasha's room, ripping through the clothes in the closet and checking every nook and cranny for hidden compartments, false walls. She knocked along the surfaces, searching for hollow spaces, but there was nothing. The shelves were stacked with shoe boxes and bags. Gaia pulled every one down and emptied them on the floor in a pile, but the search revealed nothing except the fact that
Natasha was clearly obsessed with her feet.

Frustrated, Gaia checked under the bed, pulling out every single drawer and overturning them, emptying silky nightgowns, cashmere sweaters, and slippery scarves onto the bed. She could vividly see Natasha in this room, getting dressed, smirking her triumph in the full-length mirror, thinking of how easily she'd seduced Tom Moore. Gaia felt hot tears spring to her eyes. This was the first woman her father had trusted
since her mother had died. How was it that her father, who had been a spy for over twenty years, was so damned gullible? How could he have let her mother's memory be marred by someone like Natasha?

A sliver of anger worked its way into Gaia's heart, but she wiped her tears and tried to suppress it. This was not her father's fault. There was no use wasting time wishing things were different. Wishing he hadn't let his guard down. Gaia herself had mistakenly trusted many an enemy.

She dropped the last empty drawer on the bed, then checked under each one for documents that might be taped there and inspected lamps and phones, looking for wires. By the time she was done, the bedroom was chaos, the bathroom a total wreck of smashed eye shadows and broken bottles.

But there was nothing. If Natasha had been hiding anything in this room, she was damn good.

Gaia rushed into the hall and paused for a moment, listening for any sign of life, but didn't hear a sound. She attacked the room she shared with Tatiana with the same ferocity, ripping her precious clothes from the hangers and pawing through her school-books. She yanked bags and boxes out from under Tatiana's bed and emptied her CD collection onto the floor.
But again there was nothing.