Critical Space (28 page)

"I am not a monster, I am not some freak who can only achieve climax through another's pain or death. I am -- I
was
-- an assassin. Everyone who has died by my hand, they died for a very specific reason, either because they were the mark, because they led to the mark, or because they were trying to kill me."

She turned her head to see my expression, but I kept my eyes on the divers in the water.

"I do not torture animals," she said.

We watched the skin divers in the water for a while as they surfaced and dove and surfaced again.

"Why does Oxford want to kill you?" I asked her.

"Because of you," she said, and turned and walked away, calling for Miata to follow her.

"Bullshit," I told the Caribbean.

"I should have killed you," Drama said. "I should have gone through the door after the explosion, and shot you, and Dale Matsui, and Pugh."

"You would have died, too."

"Yes. But that should not have stopped me."

We had moved back into the house, into the kitchen, which was a narrow rectangle with the same earth-toned tile that covered the second floor. Drama was washing the dishes from breakfast, dumping the grounds from the French press into a trash can beneath the double sink. For a moment, I flashed on her as a kind of lethal Donna Reed, and the mental image had me grinning without meaning to.

She saw it and frowned. "When I was younger, Atticus, when I was training, death did not frighten me. Now it does. I knew if I went through the door, if I finished the job and killed you and Pugh, I would die as a result. And I wanted to live. So I ran."

A stainless steel bowl was on the floor by her feet, and she picked it up, then filled it with fresh water from the tap. When she bent to grab it, the muscles in her legs were taut and defined. I realized that she shaved her legs and pits, found that surprising. The bullet she'd taken to the thigh was a through-and-through, and it looked like she'd been lucky, that the round hadn't expanded as it passed through her body. It made me remember when I'd been shot.

"Then your friend, Chris Havel, she writes this book," Drama said. "I should have stopped her. I didn't. I should have come back and killed her, and you, and Dale, and Natalie, and Corry. I should have made the statement."

"Why didn't you?" I asked.

She moved her eyes from me, looking out the window. The breeze had picked up, and shadows came and went as the branches randomly blocked the sunlight. After a minute, I realized she wasn't going to answer.

"Why did you tell me where you live?" I asked.

Still no reply.

"Alena," I said.

Her head whipped around, and there was the hint of distraction in her look, as if I'd caught her attention by accident, as if the usage of the name amused her. Her lips came together, the corner of her mouth rose briefly.

"You will laugh," she said. "I didn't like Pugh, but I saw things in you that I saw in myself. You understand this, I know you do, it happens in your profession as well. The sense of artificial intimacy. I watched you for several weeks, and although I knew it was false, I felt it anyway. So I wanted to give you something that was special to me, something that no one else had. I gave you my home."

I nodded, thinking that I should be surprised, and finding that I wasn't. What she was describing wasn't that unique a phenomenon. There was a reason, after all, that so many bodyguards ended up sleeping with, romancing, or in some cases, marrying their principals. The nature of the relationship is intimate and high stress, and in such an environment connections between individuals develop in unexpected ways and with an alarming intensity. More than once I'd had a principal indicate a willingness to let our relationship stray from professional to personal, and I knew that Natalie had experienced the same thing with an even greater frequency. What Drama did and what I did were different sides of the same coin.

I thought about the last night I'd spent with Bridgett, the argument we'd had.

Alena took a blue-and-white dish towel from the hook by the sink. She started drying the dishes.

"By letting Havel publish her book, I made myself a target," she said. "There is too much truth in it. It generates interest, attention, pressure. And it marks me specifically. An assassin is supposed to be invisible. I let Havel inform the world about me."

"And Oxford's been hired to keep the world from learning anything more?"

"Oxford will try to discredit Havel, and possibly you as well. He will most certainly destroy me."

"So it's in my best interest to help you?"

"It is in your best interest to keep Oxford from succeeding. Keeping me alive is only part of that." She assembled the now clean and dry French press and folded the towel. "You believe I should die?"

"I believe you should be punished for what you've done," I answered. "Thirty-seven people are dead because of you, eleven of them murdered to line your own pockets."

"General Augustus Ndanga," she said.

"Who?"

"General Augustus Albertus Usuf Kiwane Ndanga, Uganda, four years ago. I shot him through the head at six hundred and forty meters."

"Nice shot."

She moved closer, leaning on the counter to meet my eyes. "Ndanga would enter villages with his army and murder all the men, even the boys, even the infant boys. He would kill the women, even the little girls, but those who could bear children, he would rape them repeatedly, until he was certain he had made them pregnant. I killed him. I should die for that?"

"Depends who hired you for the job."

"The CIA paid me four million dollars for his death," she replied. "You have killed. You must understand."

"Yes. I have killed. But I have never committed murder. If a man comes at my principal, I'll draw my gun not to kill him but to stop him, and there is a world of difference in that. For me a gun is a tool, used to force an assailant to stop their assault. For you, it's a means of ending a life as efficiently as possible."

"You shot Erika Wyatt's mother, four times. One bullet would have stopped her."

"One bullet
might have
stopped her," I said, more harshly than I intended. "She had a gun and I had to be sure."

"And being sure, that is more or less a reason to kill than organizing the rape of a whole people?"

"I'm not about to argue the necessity of Hitter's death, or Stalin's. We had this conversation the first time we met. What I do and what you do are very different."

She stared at me for a moment longer, then moved away from the counter, back to the sink. I'd seen nothing in her eyes. She hung the dish towel on the hook.

"Has it not occurred to you that I didn't kill anyone when I took Lady Ainsley-Hunter from you?" she asked. "That I did not kill you, or Natalie Trent, or Corry Herrera? That I did not kill Bridgett Logan or Dale Matsui or Robert Moore?"

"It has occurred to me. And I think the only reason you didn't is because you want something from me, and you know that if you'd killed any of them, I'd make it my mission in life to..." and I shut up, because I realized what it was I was about to say.

She didn't press it, just opened the refrigerator and, after viewing the contents, asked me if I wanted fish for lunch.

We ate on the patio, grilled yellowtail with thick slices of pineapple. It was the kind of lunch I'd have chased with a beer if she'd had any, but there was no alcohol in the house, so we both drank water. The Walther stayed by my plate, but I was getting tired of lugging it around, which I supposed was one of the things she'd thought would happen.

She'd put music on her little stereo before taking her seat, and I could hear the Beatles singing softly inside. The album was
Rubber Soul.

"I couldn't simply approach you in New York and ask to hire you," Alena said. "You understand why I had to do it this way."

"I would have run screaming," I admitted.

"Yes."

I put my utensils down and looked at the bare bones on my plate. "Why me? You've certainly encountered other PSAs."

"None that I respect." She drank some water, gauging my reaction. From what she saw, she felt the need to clarify. "You beat me. No one has ever done that before."

"I didn't beat you."

"My job was to kill Pugh. I failed."

"I was lucky and I was working with people who were outstanding at their jobs," I said. "What you're asking me to do, you're asking me to do alone. You, of all people, should know what that means."

"You're forgetting that I will be your principal. Pugh could not fire a gun, Lady Ainsley-Hunter could not rig an explosive. Pugh was an old man, diabetic and possibly alcoholic. Ainsley-Hunter is an activist, a public figure and a zealot. I am a thirty-one-year-old woman in excellent physical condition, mentally acute and -- despite what you would care to believe -- emotionally stable."

I hated the fact that I was actually considering what she was saying. I hated it even more that, once again, she knew what I was thinking.

"There is more," she said. "No one you have ever protected before can teach you what I can teach you, Atticus. I can teach you everything Oxford knows, because I know it, too."

"You're offering to turn me into an assassin?"

"I'm offering to show you how we work, how we think. How we see the world. How we see ourselves." She looked at me across the table. "There's something else. You
need
to do this."

I didn't quite laugh, but it came close to an outright snort. If I'd had water in my mouth, she'd have gotten an impromptu shower.

"You are losing yourself," Alena said softly. "Fame does not suit you. It is distracting to you, and perhaps even offensive. The money is nice, it allows you comforts, allows you to provide for Erika and even Logan..."

"Logan makes a fine living without my help."

She blinked at me, waiting to see if I was finished, then continued. "It allows you to provide for Erika, but that is not enough for you. It has allowed you to meet those people who, culturally, you have been told it is desirable to know, women like Skye Van Brandt. But your association with people like Van Brandt has not made you happy. It has, in fact, made you weak."

"Hold on..."

"Last year would what I did in the elevator a week ago have worked? Last year, given the same situation, would you have debussed your principal to a publicly known location after an attempt had been made?"

"The 'attempt' was a man playing with himself."

"That should not have mattered in the slightest," she said, annoyed with me.

I drank water and didn't say anything.

"The man who beat me a year ago never would have made that mistake."

I set the glass down empty. It wasn't actually made of glass, but instead a clear molded plastic, light blue. Hers was from the same set, but pale green. "Then why would you want to hire that man?"

"You are also the man who put himself between an Accuracy International AWM and Ainsley-Hunter, and then demanded to see his principal safely to the car. You are the man who bid his principal goodbye, and then came to meet me, believing that his life was a fair trade for hers. You are the man I want to protect me."

"Her life was worth saving."

Now it was her turn to drink water and not respond.

I shook my head and looked off the patio. The breeze was moving palm fronds and branches, as if they were waving me either to come closer, or to make a discreet exit. It was getting warmer as the day progressed, but in the shade of the patio, surrounded by the concrete and tile, it remained comfortable.

"You killed three men in Dallas, Texas, ten days ago," I said. "Video surveillance caught you leaving the scene."

"No I didn't." She said it with conviction and almost surprise.

"There were pictures, Alena. Three men -- Ortez, Montrose, and a third whose name I don't remember. All had been shot. There was a picture of you leaving, driving a car out the gate."

"It was not me. The photograph was a fake."

"Sure."

"I have not been to Dallas in over three years. Who showed you these pictures?"

"It's not important."

"I did not do it."

I looked at the trees some more, felt her looking at me. I said, "Tell me about Oxford."

"He is like me."

"Another Russian?"

"No, American, I think. Maybe British. I'm not certain who trained him, but he is from the West. What little I know about him suggests a military and intelligence background."

"I heard he specializes."

"Scandal," she confirmed. "He uses sex, it is the way he stages his bodies. But it means nothing, it is simply a
kind
of job, one that takes its own special planning, the way a bombing or a poisoning takes special planning. He knows what I know."

I had to wonder about that. It could be as simple and straightforward as she made it sound, staging bodies the way other people move their furniture. But I doubted it. Someone who kept returning to the sex angle was probably someone who liked playing with naked bodies. Maybe Drama wasn't a monster, but I wasn't willing to extend the same faith to Oxford.

"Is there a history between you two?" I asked.

"No."

"And you're sure he's coming after you? You've confirmed that?"

"Yes. I have sources."

"Sources like Dan?"

"My sources say Oxford is looking for me. I take that kind of threat seriously, so I checked."

"But you don't know who bought the hit?"

"No."

"And you're sure it has been bought, that he's not doing this on his own?"

"Oxford would not undertake such an operation for free.
Pro bono,
as you say. To kill me, he would demand a substantial payment."

"How much?"

"Four million dollars, at least. More, perhaps."

"How long has he had the contract? Or whatever it is you folks call it."

"Job. I call it a job. Just as you call it."

I was silent.

She took a green orange from the bowl at the center of the table and began peeling the skin. The bowl was white porcelain, with two thin, sky blue stripes running around its center. "He has had the job only a month or two."