Tiger

WILLIAM RICHTER

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Tiger: A Dark Eyes Novel

 

RAZORBILL

 

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2013 William Richter

 

ISBN:978-1-101-60413-7

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

 

Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE NIGHTMARES WOKE WALLY, AGAIN.

Shelter Island. The hush of the forest at first light, the touch of snowflakes landing delicately on Wally's cheek and melting there. The acrid scent of gunfire hanging in the air.

The weight of her mother's body in Wally's arms as the life drained out of her.

“My babies,” Claire whispered with her last breath, looking up at Wally and her brother, Tiger, together for the first time.

And then she was gone. The sound of sirens—dozens of them—descended upon the scene, shattering the peace.

“Run,” Wally said to Tiger. And he did.

It had all taken place in November, five months earlier, but the memory played fresh in Wally's mind—in her dreams and in her waking hours—as if no time had passed at all.

The sky outside Wally's window was still dark. The time on her cell phone read
5
:
22
, at least half an hour to go before sunrise. She tried to get back to sleep, but it was no use. Wally slid out of bed and into her workout clothes, heading out of her apartment and south on Nassau Avenue toward Orson Dojo. Along the way, she resisted the rich, seductive aroma of coffee and pastries from the corner café where her neighbors, January and Bea, were already working the early shift.

“Well, well,” Orson said when she walked through the door. “Look who's turning into a morning person.”

“Not by choice,” Wally said.

Orson Mbaha was a chiseled and powerful black man originally from Namibia, a full six-and-a-half feet tall with brilliant amber eyes. He had quit his Mixed Martial Arts fighting career at the age of thirty-six, and now enjoyed inflicting daily agony upon his clients in Greenpoint. His studio was sparse—pure function and no frills. Every inch of the floor was covered in mats, one wall mirrored from floor to ceiling.

There were eight or nine other students joining Wally for the class, and Orson led them through a sadistic, twenty-minute routine of core exercises that left them gasping for breath and sweating buckets in the hot, humid air. They finished off the session with six minutes of military leg lifts, Orson walking the line and hurling an eight-pound medicine ball to each of them in turn, challenging their balance and intensifying the misery. It was impossible to think about anything but the pain. Wally's adrenaline gave her a warm, buzzy feeling of tranquility.

“Go to pairs, everyone,” Orson said. “Live target.”

He matched Wally up with a young guy, muscled but a little heavy, maybe a former college athlete who still worked out but was overindulging on New York nightlife. He had six inches and at least seventy pounds on Wally.

“Ladies first,” the guy said with a slightly condescending tone.

He slipped into a protective target outfit: headgear, target vest, full leg padding, and target mitts on his hands. There were orange target circles all up and down the outfit, from his knees to his thighs, kidneys, ribs, solar plexus. He held out the mitts, up high, and crouched into his ready position.

“Go,” he said.

Wally began slowly, holding back on the force and speed until her muscle memory could take over and establish a rhythm. Crosses to the mitts,
whap-whap
, right and left, six times each. Then down to the kidneys,
whap-whap
, crouching and rotating her entire body to deliver the blows, four times each.

And now down to the thighs, the first kicks of her assault. People outside the discipline had little understanding of the importance of these blows—of the devastating, debilitating effect the kick could have on thigh muscles. Enough clean strikes and the opponent would lose all ability to balance or launch a counter-attack. Wally delivered the kicks cleanly, driving hard off her back foot and into the guy's upper thigh. She heard her partner exhale with each blow and knew he felt the force of the attack even through his pads.

Wally started to feel the heat and rhythm and adrenaline coursing through her well-toned physique. She renewed her assault on the mitts, now picking up the pace and force, driving hard with each crisp blow.
Whap-whap, whap-whap.
She could hear the force of her shots echoing against the walls louder than all the other fighters in the dojo. Mitts, abdomen, thighs, and back up again. Her target's exhalations became grunts as he received the increasingly powerful strikes. He crouched lower in an attempt to keep his balance.

But then the images came again, uninvited.

Her mother, Claire, and Tevin, her best friend, gunned down in front of her by Alexei Klesko, her father: a psychopath who killed without hesitation or regret. Every morning in the mirror Wally saw Klesko's eyes in her own reflection, a fathomless, merciless gray.

Ochee chornya.
Dark eyes.

Klesko had left her only one thing of value: a brother, Tiger.

Wally had said “run” and Tiger had obeyed, turning away from her and disappearing into the woods of Shelter Island without once looking back. He'd been lost to her since that moment.

Where was he?

Wally tried to keep her focus on the elegant, ferocious rhythm of the attack. Her strikes continued, coming faster and harder now.
Whap-whap! Whap-whap!
She felt the delicious ache and burn of her muscles as the assault became one continuous blur of violence, the individual strikes flying too fast to count, anger and frustration rising closer to the surface with every blow. Something powerful and unnamed took hold of her.

Wally heard a loud
snap!
and froze, cutting short her attack. She looked to the floor and was surprised to see her training partner lying on his back, fear and outrage covering his face as blood gushed from his mangled nose and spilled out onto the floor.

His thickly padded headgear had not protected him.

Wally looked at her right glove and saw the smear of blood on the leather. She had no memory of the strike. It was as if some dark corner of her soul had reached out on its own. When she glanced to the mirrored wall and looked into her own eyes, Wally caught sight of the violent stranger within.

WALLY EMERGED FROM THE SUBWAY STATION AMID the swarm of morning commuters and hurried up Lexington, headed to work. Her day had gotten off to an early start, but a long, harsh lecture from Orson—her sensei—had held her up for almost half an hour, compounded by a maddening wait for the
G
train. She'd be at least forty minutes late and stressed out by the time she reached the Ursula Society office in Manhattan.

Not that it mattered much—it wasn't as if she'd become an indispensable part of the team. She'd been doing her internship with Lewis Jordan at the Society for nearly four months, and so far she hadn't even come close to taking on a case of her own.

It was starting to piss her off.

Wally spent her time at the Society tidying up the office, brewing oolong tea for Lewis, and, of course, digitizing all the Society's case files, which was a massive undertaking. The Ursula Society was dedicated to reuniting family members who had been separated for various reasons, specializing in complicated adoption cases in which clients had tried all the standard methods and come up empty. The file room in the back of the office contained the paperwork for almost three thousand cases, some reaching back for decades. Wally had been assigned the Herculean task of entering all of them into a new digital, searchable database.

“You're messing with me, right?” was her response to Lewis that first day in January, the two of them standing together inside the musty, unheated file room, the air in there so cold they could see their breath. “You want me to build a database for
all
these? There must be thousands of them.”

“Better get started then,” Lewis said, without sympathy. “And as a gesture of my endless appreciation, I will brew the oolong this morning.”

Once she had begun the grueling task, Wally calculated that it would take her nearly a year to finish. She'd stomped into Lewis's office to object, and he'd looked up at her through his reading glasses, his eyes bulging at her through the thick lenses.

“This is bullshit, Lewis. It's too much.”

“I'm sorry to hear that you're so easily discouraged,” he answered in a measured voice that she found maddening. “The work we do requires a great deal of patience and optimism. Instead of being daunted by the size of the task, you could be focusing on the wealth of opportunity.”

“What opportunity are you talking about?”

“I mean that when the job is done, you will know more about the history and casework of the Ursula Society than anyone in the world, myself included. My memory isn't quite what it used to be.”

The two of them had a complicated relationship—Lewis had unintentionally played a role in the devastating loss of her mother, Claire, just five months earlier—but when it came to the mission of the Ursula Society, Wally and Lewis shared a genuine passion rooted in their own experiences of loss. Wally's commitment to the Society, of course, was just four months old, while Lewis had worked tirelessly at it for almost seventy years.

Seventy years
. A frighteningly high number. For Wally, almost beyond imagining.

She had swallowed her objections and gotten back to work, determined to finish the job ahead of schedule. After four months, she had entered over a thousand cases into the database and hoped to finish the entire job by early the next fall.

Lewis had been right, of course, about the benefits of the job: Wally's sixteen-year-old brain had absorbed tons of new information, including the research strategies used by Ursula Society caseworkers and some of the shadowy resources that were available to them. Many clients whom Lewis had helped over the years worked security-sensitive jobs—in law enforcement, government, the military, technology—and they often put themselves at risk, showing their gratitude by helping solve the Society's cases.

Wally had recently digitized a case from the early nineties, when Lewis had reunited a young guy with his father, who had been classified as “Missing In Action” during the war in Vietnam. It turned out that the U.S. Army knew all along that the soldier had gone AWOL and had been hiding in Canada for almost twenty years.

“How did we get this information?” she asked Lewis, interrupting some research he was doing at his desk. He set aside his work and peered thoughtfully at Wally over his reading glasses for a moment before answering.

“A former client of ours works in the Pentagon,” he answered simply.

“Okay,” Wally said, considering this for a moment. “But this information would probably be classified, wouldn't it?”

“Certainly.” Lewis kept his eyes on her, giving her a chance to puzzle the situation out.

“Then our source gave us classified military information. So that's very illegal. And illegal in the military means treason. Right?”

Lewis's nonresponse was her answer.

“And the penalty for treason is very harsh,” she went on. “Sometimes even death. Why would our source risk that?”

“Because we helped her with her own search some years ago,” Lewis replied. “Free of charge, when no one else was willing to take on her case. We provided her with the outcome she needed to get on with her life.”

“So she's returning the good deed by feeding us classified information.”

“Because it was something she wanted to do,” Lewis said, wanting to be clear. “Not because we compelled her.”

Wally thought some more. “And if government people came in here with a warrant or something, they might go through these files and discover clues to the identity of our source, and what she had done for us.”

“Maybe,” Lewis said, considering her point. “I've been careful to avoid leaving details in the files that might be traced that way, but I suppose it's always a danger.”

“Okay then,” she said, after thinking the problem through. “Since I'm digitizing everything anyway, maybe I should encrypt the database as well.”

“Good thinking,” was all Lewis said, and returned to his work. He was not huge on handing out compliments, so
good thinking
qualified as a major pat on the back.

Wally stopped for a couple of chocolate-glazed doughnuts in the shop downstairs from the Society offices, then punched in the security code to enter the building. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and was fishing through her messenger bag for her keys when she became aware that there was someone else in the quiet hallway: a young guy around Wally's age was seated on the floor at the very end of the hall, right outside the dark doorway of the Ursula Society. He was leaning forward with his head resting on his folded arms, and Wally had the impression that he had been there for some time.

The guy stood up—a little stiffly, she noticed. He was tall at around six foot one, with a lean and athletic build. He wore jeans, expensive high-tops, and a faded blue polo shirt under a brown canvas work jacket. He combed his fingers through his longish dark hair in an apparent attempt at looking presentable. Behind his bangs were warm blue eyes that were swollen and bloodshot—had he just woken up, or had he been crying? Wally also noticed a mark on the left side of his face, above his jaw: a fresh bruise.

“Can I help you?” she asked. Wally could tell the guy was a little puzzled at the sight of her—he probably wasn't expecting someone so close to his own age.

“Uh . . . yeah. Are you with the Ursula Society? That's what I'm here for.”

“How'd you get into the building?” she asked.

He gave a little shrug. “I was here really early and no one answered the buzzer. I typed in the building address as the security code and it worked, so . . . anyway. Maybe you should get your super to change that.”

“Technically, that's probably breaking and entering,” Wally said, making a casual observation. The guy gave another shrug but didn't offer a response.

“Okay,” Wally said, unlocking both bolts on the door of the Society. “Come on in. I'm Wally.”

“I'm Kyle.”

Wally sat down behind Lewis's desk and invited Kyle to take the visitor's chair across from her. He folded his arms tightly across his chest and began casting his eyes randomly around the room. Wally opened the bag from the doughnut shop and pushed it toward him, but he just shook his head.

Wally grabbed one of the doughnuts and took a bite. It was partly a stall tactic—she had a decision to make. Wally was all alone in the office, and here was a new walk-in client roughly her own age. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for her to take on a case of her own. Would Lewis sign off on it? Probably not.

“You don't seem old enough,” Kyle said.

“I'm actually still an intern here,” she said. “You'll need to talk to one of our caseworkers. Someone should be here soon, if you can hang . . . ”

“Uh, okay.” Kyle checked his cell phone for the time. “I guess so. This place . . . you help people find their biological parents and stuff? Kids who have been adopted?”

“That's one of the things we do, yeah. We bring people back together who have been separated for all sorts of reasons.”

Kyle just nodded, keeping his eyes on the floor. Apparently, he was in the right place.

Wally checked the time on the wall—
10
:
20
A.M.
—and guessed that Lewis wouldn't be in for a half hour. Both of the other caseworkers, Carmen Black and Peter Maduro, were out in the field, not due back until the end of the week.

Wally turned on her computer and started her usual slog of data entry, but the silence quickly became awkward. There was no harm in having a regular conversation with the guy.

“I'm guessing we're about the same age,” she said. “You go to school in the city?”

“Sexton,” he said, “since I was five. I'm a junior. But I haven't been in a week and I'm not going back.”

The sudden force of Kyle's declaration took Wally by surprise, and she studied him for a moment. The Sexton Academy was a private school on the Upper West Side, and Wally could see that Kyle—a more together version of Kyle than he was right now, anyway—would naturally fit in there. She pictured him in the dark blue blazer, colorfully striped school tie, and light khakis that made up the uniform, a Sexton insignia on the breast pocket of the blazer, of course.

Wally herself grew up in that privileged part of town, and she remembered the Sexton boys making the two-block trek from the school to the athletic-practice fields in Central Park, wearing their full sports gear. Wally could picture Kyle in that scenario too, a lacrosse stick slung over his shoulder with helmet and gloves hanging off the end, striding easily along the city streets with his Prep friends, a mob of handsome, born-to-rule guys with endless wealth and success in their future. Oftentimes, girls from nearby sister schools would linger on Central Park West to flirt with the boys as they ambled by.

Wally wondered what secrets those girls knew about Kyle.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I'm currently reevaluating my educational options.”

“Cool. Me too.”

Another silence fell, but Kyle seemed restless and eager to keep talking.

“My mom, her name was Laura,” he said, clearing his throat. “She died two years ago, a car accident on the Parkway. October sixteenth.”

“Oh . . . that's awful. I'm really sorry, Kyle.” He was being unexpectedly candid, intriguing Wally but also making her feel a little cautious.

“My father, he's . . . I'm sorry, he's a total fucking prick, like a weapons-grade asshole. And he's probably . . . ” Kyle hesitated, as if nervous about a leap he was about to take. “Not even
probably
, he's
definitely
a dangerous person. So now he tells me that he's going to marry this new woman. Deandra. Whatever. Some art dealer or something—I met her once for like two minutes. So my dad and I got into it. I mean, I don't really give a shit who he wants to marry. . . . ”