Mission Critical
Still wincing from the cold and the pain he said, “Nobody’s shy in Thailand. Can you give me a hand? If I try to squat down on my own my ribs and back are going to retaliate.”
She helped him down, and within moments he was covered in ice water. It took only seconds to slow the bruising and swelling and a little more time to begin to numb his pain. He lowered farther, sinking his face up to his nose in the ice bath and cooling the pain in his mouth and jaw.
Zoya now unzipped the black athletic hoodie she’d been wearing and let it fall to the floor. She wore a white T-shirt underneath, and as she sat down on the cold bathroom floor she untied her black climbing shoes and kicked them off.
She opened the bottle of vodka, reached into the tub between Court’s knees, and grabbed a few cubes of ice. She dropped them into a plastic cup she’d brought from the kitchen, poured the clear alcohol in, and swished it around.
Court was still trying to adjust to the cold, and he did not speak, but Zoya eventually broke the silence.
She said, “So . . . that big guy in the stairwell. Why didn’t you fight back?”
Court lifted his mouth out of the water but kept his lower jaw submerged. He turned to her, shivering now, and his eyes narrowed. “That, back there, was me fighting back.”
“Did you even hit him?”
Court looked down to his hands on the sides of the tub. They shook with the cold. “My fists are the only part of my body that don’t hurt, so . . . I guess not. Certainly not in any way that he seemed to notice.”
She drank the shot of vodka, leaving the ice in the cup. Matter-of-factly, she said, “He kicked your ass.”
“He had a lucky punch or two.”
“Or twenty.”
Court chuckled and it hurt his split lip to do so, so he sank it back down beneath the ice.
* * *
• • •
Thirty minutes later Court was dressed in dark blue pants and a fresh undershirt, and he’d given Zoya a pair of gray warm-up pants and a black T-shirt to wear.
They sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, cups of iced vodka with lemon positioned on the coffee table in front of them, and the bottle alongside. Zoya grabbed her drink, bumped it against Court’s on the table, and drank the entire contents down, spitting the twist back into the cup.
Court tried to lean forward to get his own drink, but the pain in his ribs was too severe. Zoya handed it to him and asked, “You don’t think anything’s broken, do you?”
Court shook his head. “I’m just bruised. Doesn’t hurt to breathe, just to move my torso.”
Zoya nodded, then got back to business. “Were you on a private contract when this started or are you working with the Agency?”
“Agency. Sort of. I hadn’t actually been assigned to anything.”
“So did you enlist in this op, or did you volunteer?”
Court replied, “I was sort of ‘voluntold.’”
Zoya said, “Brewer can be persuasive.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“She’s a bitch.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I did.” Zoya nodded. “Yes, she’s a bitch, but she’s good at her job.”
“She’s run me around the world like her little puppet, so I guess I can’t disagree with you there.”
Court switched the subject off himself, a skill he’d developed by necessity in his work in denied ops. “Let’s talk about you. All I know is what Brewer told me. You were at a safe house in Virginia, and you beat feet out of there ten seconds before a crew of sicarios wiped out the place.”
She nodded faintly in the dark. “I got lucky. I’ve been working on a puzzle, somewhere in the back of my mind, maybe unconsciously, for a long time, and I got a new piece from Brewer. Once I had that piece, I knew I had to come to London to solve the puzzle.
“It just so happened to be on the same night the Mexicans came in shooting. Fortunate for me, but of course, if I had been really lucky I would have left twenty minutes earlier.”
Court said, “Tell me about the puzzle, and this guy Belyakov.”
Zoya hesitated; he could tell she had reservations about what she was going to say. Finally she nodded a little in the low light. “Belyakov was in the Army. As was my father. My father ran the Aquarium. Do you know what that is?”
“The headquarters of GRU, military intelligence. It’s at Kodinka Airfield, in Moscow.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You know my country well.”
“Just the shitty parts of it,” Court replied. “Spies, soldiers, criminals, Kalashnikovs, that kind of stuff.” He smiled a little. “I haven’t been to the ballet.” He already knew the answer to his next question, but he didn’t want to let on that he knew. “So you are saying your father was head of GRU?”
Zoya nodded. “Yes.”
“You told me both of your parents were dead.”
“Yes, I did tell you that.”
The comment hung in the room till Zoya poured both herself and Court another drink. Court thought she was on her third already, but she did not seem muddled by it at all.
“Russians,” he said aloud, marveling about the Russian skill of hard drinking.
“What’s that?” Zoya asked as she handed Court his drink.
Court replied with, “Tell me about your mom.”
She recoiled a little in surprise at the question, then looked out the window into the tiny and darkened high-walled courtyard of the basement. “My mom? Well . . . she was born here, in London. Her parents were UK citizens.”
Court sipped his vodka with a nod. “How did a lady from London end up with a Russian GRU officer as a husband?”
“When she was seven the family moved to Southern California so her mom, my grandmother, could teach acting at UCLA. My mom was raised there, went to school at UCLA in the eighties; she got a degree in speech pathology and became a dialect coach in Hollywood for a short time. Partly because her mom had worked on that sort of thing with her her entire life, and partly because she considered herself half British and half American.” She chuckled and rolled her eyes a little. “My mom was also a raging socialist. She moved to the USSR to study in the late eighties. She’d picked up a degree in English as a second language, and she was very open and supportive helping students at Moscow State University learn the language of the capitalists. The KGB heard about her—her skills and her political leanings saw to that—and they recognized an opportunity. Soon she was working with GRU and KGB soldiers and spies, teaching them not just English but how to pass as either Americans or Brits.”