“You have to let her go. Move on. Like I let Yuri go.”
“This is not about her.”
“Until you learn to open up to?—”
“No! I don’t love you, Nika, and I never will, okay? This was a mistake. I’m gonna take a shower. And then let’s talk about what we’re going to do with you.”
“You make me sound like some pain-in-the-ass chore.”
“You know it’s not like that.”
“Someday you have to let yourself feel things again,” she shouted after him.
As Carter tried to drown his hangover and his guilt in the running water, he became aware of thuds, voices. He shut off the shower. They were coming from inside the room. He looked around for a weapon, but there was nothing more deadly than a hairdryer.
Someone hammered on the bathroom door, and the handle moved. He’d locked it to stop Nika from coming in naked.
“Beck?” A man’s voice. “You in there? Is he in there?”
“Wait, I’m coming out!”
Carter walked out wrapped in a towel, since he had no other option, to find a dozen people in blue FBI windbreakers in the room. Nika was dressed in a bathrobe. Her bra was hanging from a chair. Her panties were strewn on the carpet.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Sorry to interrupt the celebrations.” Standing by the door with her arms crossed was Silvia Maldonado, one of his trainers from The Farm, now deputy chief of the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division. Next to her was a balding guy in a suit. FBI? “Must have been quite the operation to pull off.”
“What’s this all about? Her papers are legit. If they hadn’t been, we wouldn’t have gotten through immigration last night.”
“Yes, you almost slipped right through. I was surprised to see you’d checked in here under your real name. What were you planning next?”
“Checking in at Langley, like normal. Is there a problem?” He looked at Nika, who was being held by the arm by an FBI agent, her eyes downcast. “I thought this was all sanctioned, above board.”
Silvia stared at him like she was trying to see inside his head. “Sanctioned and expedited in very strange circumstances by someone who can no longer corroborate.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Moscow COS. His body was found overnight in one of our safehouses. Shot dead.”
“What?” He looked from face to face—every one wearing a don’t-mess-with-me expression, except Nika, who was still staring at the floor.
“He was last seen alive the day you left Moscow. Put some clothes on.” She told the agents to take him and Nika in separate cars. “Don’t let them talk. Use handcuffs—if we lose either of them, we might never see them again.”
“What the fuck? Are you arresting us? Whatever’s happened, we had nothing to do with it.”
“You’re not being arrested yet. But you’ll forgive me if I have the utmost respect for your ability to slip away into a crowd—given that I was the one who taught you how. Hence the precautions.”
Finally, Nika looked at Carter, her eyes hooded. Her mouth was shut in a tight line.
She wasn’t surprised by this. She knew.
Chapter 16
Alice
Present day
Alice cleaned up after their meal, which took all of a minute, and sat on the porch under a blanket, spritzed with bug spray and trying not to freak out at every rustle and scurrying noise in the forest. She was relieved Carter was listening to the recordings on earbuds. It was hard to hear Nika speak like that—jolting between confusion, anger, sadness. It wasn’t even the Nika she’d known, let alone the Nika he’d known.
