Critical Space (27 page)

"Maybe it's time you told me why I'm here," I said.

She didn't know her real name, the one she'd been born with. At the orphanage in Magadan, she'd been called Alena. Alena Cizkova. But because Oksana Zurkowska had read a book on Egyptian mythology, and because in that book there were pictures, and because Oksana thought the picture of Osiris's bride bore a slight resemblance to the small girl she liked to tease, the other children in the orphanage called her Isis.

She'd been put in the orphanage quite young, she told me, and all she knew of her parents was that they must have both been negligent. She remembered being perhaps only two years old and a man with a beard putting his cigarettes out on her back. She didn't know why he did this, and she thought that perhaps the man was her father.

Then the State came and took her to the orphanage, and she stayed there until she murdered Oksana.

"I had wanted her dead," she told me, "the way that children want their tormentors dead, and so I plotted it, and so I stole her life."

It was the shirt that had given her away. The old drunk who tended the boilers in the orphanage basement saw her trying to stuff it in the furnace, and he had stopped her and seen the blood, and had held her while a search was made for Oksana. When the girl's body was found, one of the wardens beat Alena in the body until blood came out of her mouth. Then the police were called.

She said they questioned her for several hours and that she didn't say a word. She was placed in a cell with men three and four times her age.

When she got to that part, she bent to pet the dog. After several seconds, she added, "That was a bad night. I will never allow another night like that."

The next day, two men in uniforms came and took her from the cell. They put her in another room, where they asked her different questions than before. She knew they were Government, and that they were powerful, because the police in the station were afraid of them, and because of the long night and all that had happened, this time she did talk. The two men gave her papers with problems on them for her to solve, showed her photographs and asked what she thought of them. One told her a story and then, an hour later, asked her to write down everything she could remember of the tale.

Then they gave her a lunch of black bread and dried fish and water, and when she had finished, they called a doctor in to examine her, but she fought with them when they tried to undress her for the physical exam. In the end, two of them had to hold her down.

Then they put her back in a cell, but this time a different one, where she was alone. No one came to see her. No one spoke to her. She spent a second night listening to adults crying and yelling in cells all around her, and she cried a lot, too. It was the last time, she said, that she could remember crying.

At dawn the third day, one of the Government men returned, and she was released into his custody, given new clothes and a small breakfast, and then taken away, to a school in the northern Caucasus, in Vladikavkaz, then called Ordzhonikidze, a thousand and a half miles from Magadan. The school was dedicated to the education of the children of high-ranking military officers. There were strict rules, and the students all wore black uniforms with scarlet stripes as trimming.

She was there less than a month when the man from the Government returned, this time with others, and they asked her more questions, gave her more tests. These tests were more extensive, and lasted several days. She was given another physical exam, and this time she did not fight.

Five or six days after the last test had been given and the last Government man had left, she was moved to another school. This one was on a military base outside the city of Omsk, which, like Magadan, was closed.

"That was where they trained me," she said.

The day she arrived, an administrative officer recorded all of her data carefully, her height, her weight, her hair and eye color. The distinguishing marks on her body. He had pictures taken of her teeth and fingerprints lifted from her hands. On the sheet, she saw that he left her name blank.

She was surprised when she saw that the officer recorded her age as nine years old.

Her instruction was handled by the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Soviet Army, and subtlety was not their strong suit. She was made first, as she put it, into a "blunt instrument."

"Starting with physical conditioning," she said. "Then beginning tradecraft, languages. Then advanced techniques, escape-and-evasion, construction of trade devices, electronics, IEDs, so on."

She told me she could speak Russian, English, French, and German, all fluently. When she really wanted, her English could sound almost native, and her French perfectly so. Some days, she was forbidden to speak Russian, and if she was caught doing so, she was punished. As she grew older, such periods would last for a week or more. Languages were hard for her, and she didn't enjoy them, because she didn't think she was good at them.

It was in other skills that she excelled. She was an excellent shot, had earned the designation of Master Sniper by the time she was twelve. She didn't like pistols so much until she reached mid-puberty and her hands had grown large enough to control them reliably. The courses that required her to build things she loved, the courses where she was asked to construct an improvised explosive device, or a timer, or to rewire a radio, or to build and plant and retrieve a bug or other surveillance device. A lot of the time, the courses, such as they were, were actually practical exams, live fire exercises. She was so young that the GRU was anxious to take advantage of her apparent innocence.

"When I was thirteen, I planted bugs in the French Embassy," she told me. "As far as I know, they're still there."

She wasn't actually asked to kill anybody until she was fourteen. All she would say about the murder was that it occurred in Afghanistan, and that it was a Western journalist who had been writing about the Soviet Union's war there. It was her first time in Afghanistan; before Gorbachev pulled Soviet troops out of the country, she would return another eight times, each time leaving a body in her wake.

"Nine," she said. "I remember all of them."

She held a military rank, she told me, at least she had until she'd gone independent. But before she struck out on her own, she said, she was a major in the GRU, and had been decorated many times for service to the U.S.S.R. In the course of six years, she had traveled all over Europe and Asia, had been to the United States twice. She told me she was partial to the U.S., that she liked working there.

Then she turned twenty-one, and, as she put it, "The war ended and I lost my job."

The decision was motivated by two things: greed and self-preservation. When the Wall came down, when the East opened itself to the rest of the world, the money dried up instantly. The perks and benefits she had known most of her life vanished. Work came less and less.

What made it worse was the "new openness," the information now being swapped freely in the intelligence community. Secrets were suddenly being shared with former enemies, or secrets were leaking, or secrets were simply being sold.

"If I stayed, there would be another job. And that job would fail, and I would be blown, and I would end up arrested or dead."

It was the memory of that first night in the police station, the memory of Magadan, that motivated her. She wasn't ever going to allow that to happen again. She would never be a captive.

It was then, too, that she discovered she was afraid to die.

She made preparations.

And the job came, just as she had anticipated, and she left for Amsterdam as directed, and as soon as she arrived she took another flight to Paris, and then another to Rome, then Malta, then New York, and, finally, Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv she put word in the proper ears that she could contact someone who could arrange death, if the price was right. She built an elaborate protocol for those who wanted to hire such a service, pretending that she had a partner, an employer. She used classified ads and answering services and dead drops, and then, later, the Internet, all the tradecraft she had been taught.

It took eight months, and she was nearly broke before the first job came. She investigated the source, investigated the mark, and decided it was a job she could do successfully. She spent another seven weeks preparing for it, and when she believed everything was right, she flew to London and killed a very wealthy man's wife, and made it look like the woman had stroked-out while standing in line at Harrods.

She'd earned just under three million dollars for her efforts, and never looked back.

When I pressed her, she told me that she had murdered nine men and two women for money. I rephrased the question.

"How many people have died at your hands?" I asked.

She didn't want to answer. She took her time. Then she said, "Thirty-seven."

But only eleven had been for money, she added.

She thought it was ironic that, since going independent, she'd actually committed less murder than before.

I told her that I thought it was ironic, too.

Then I told her that, while all of this was very interesting and deeply disturbing, it still didn't explain what the hell I was doing with her on Bequia.

"I want to hire you, Atticus. Someone is trying to kill me."

Miata circled ahead of us as we followed a dirt footpath beneath the trees. The sand was fine and hot beneath my feet, and the sun had risen to almost directly above us. We sat on the beach.

She had put on a pair of sunglasses. I'd taken the Walther with me, holding it in my hand, but now, as she sat watching the water and talked, it seemed a both ridiculous and obscene thing to be carrying around.

"You are fucking out of your mind," I told her.

"I do not want to die." Her eyes tracked Miata's movement, as the dog played in the surf. "Why is that insane?"

"There are too many places to begin, but for a start, I don't believe you..."

"I am telling you the truth."

"...and even if someone
is
trying to kill you, you sure as hell don't need my help to keep you alive. You've got to be one of the most dangerous people in the world, and I mean physically, lethally, dangerous. I don't even like sitting this close to you, and I've got a goddamn
gun
in my hand."

Her mouth twitched. "Thank you."

"It's not a compliment. Even if I accept everything you've told me -- and I'm not saying that I do -- you have in your head more knowledge about death, about causing it, about preventing it, than any person I've ever met. And I've met some very skilled killers in my time."

She removed the sunglasses, squinting at the water. "The man after me... he is one of The Ten."

Oh, I should have seen that coming, I thought. I should have seen the headlights on that one a mile away, coming through the tunnel and making straight for me.

"Oxford?" I asked, but it was rhetorical, and even as I said it, I hoped she wouldn't answer.

"You know of Oxford?"

"I was briefed on him four days before you snatched Lady Ainsley-Hunter. Told he was coming to New York."

"He is searching for me." Miata came trotting back up the beach, sand stuck to his paws. She scratched his ears, then brushed his coat clean. When she glanced at me, she saw that I was staring at her, and she read the suspicion in my face. "What?"

"I'm trying to figure out if Miata's for show."

"He is my dog. He relies on me."

"Is that why you cut out his voice box?"

She was up and shouting down at me so quickly it made me remember just how true everything I'd said about her, thought about her, was. In her anger, she'd turned the sunglasses in her fist, now holding them like they could double as a knife. In her hands, they could.

"Poshol
v
pizdu!"
she spat at me. "You think I would do that? You think I would do that to an animal, to a dog, to something that cannot even understand?
Nu tebya k chortu!"

The gun was still in my hand and I thought I could bring it up and maybe save my life, but she had already turned away, was striding down to the water. Miata looked at me accusingly, then followed her.

Like she cares about a dog as anything other than a tool.

Like she really needs help, anyone's help, and mine specifically.

She'd stopped at the edge of the water, letting the foam splash over her feet, and I watched as she swiped sand from the seat of her shorts, then crossed her arms over her chest. Miata was pawing at some driftwood that had washed up on the shore nearby.

I went down to join her.

She stood watching the ocean, where a boat had stopped about a mile out, at the edge of the cove. Small figures wearing snorkeling gear were preparing to dive.

"I did not cut his throat," she said. "A man in Miami did that, and he is dead now, and yes, I did kill him, and yes, I was paid to do it. But I would have killed him for free."

One of the skin divers, a woman, went over the edge of the boat. There was a small splash.

"Do you know why Miata's throat was cut?" she asked. "The man I killed, he had houses where he kept drugs, and in them he had men and dogs on guard. He set traps in the houses, grenades screwed into light sockets so that when the switches were thrown the grenades would detonate. He made pits, cut holes in his floors and then filled his basement with sharp metal and broken glass.

"And he cut the throats of his dogs so the police would not hear the animals coming. He took their voices because it would make them crazy and silent and savage. I had been paid by his competition to shut down his businesses. His guards, his men, they fled when I killed him. But the dogs did not, they were mad and they were loyal, and I had to kill them to save my own life. Miata, he was still alive when it was over, and I took him away with me."

She opened her hand, unfolded the sunglasses and then, using both hands, put them back on her face. Her mouth was closed, still angry.