Cost of Life (10 page)

Out of courtesy, Xana waited until the interview door shut behind her before she shoved Lieutenant Dundee in the chest:

“You stupid motherfucking hick cop! Where did you learn how to practice law? Short Attention Span Theater? The man in there is our only connection to a possible hijacking! And if you knew anything about basic criminal investigation, you'd know the best way to let those of us who are actually in law enforcement instead of babysitting civilians at the airport—the best way to let us do our jobs is to let us do our jobs and that means, you pigheaded son of a bitch, you do not micromanage while you're in the goddamn room!”

Everyone in the squad room was looking at them, scrutinizing, wondering how their LT was going to react. They were all witnesses. Yes, before launching into a verbal assault, the tall middle-aged woman, whoever she was, had indeed instigated a physical altercation against their commanding officer.

Cuff her, LT.

Shrink her down to size and tell her the way of the world.

Put her in her place.

How was Lieutenant Dundee going to react? Hayley O'Leary was so frightened of the darker possibilities that she almost forgot to breathe, which, for someone in her condition, could have been very, very bad.

As to Lieutenant Dundee, he chose to react in a way sure to disappoint just about everyone else. He quietly asked Xana to follow him to his office and the two of them disappeared behind the door, depriving the onlookers of their show.

Lieutenant Dundee's office was small and nondescript, with the requisite photographs of the current president, governor, and mayor on the wall. The room's only exceptional piece of furniture was a coffeemaker on a shelf. One reason for the lack of specific décor was that Dundee undoubtedly shared the space with several other rotating shift commanders. On the other hand, Major Hewlett's office down the hall was probably garish and palatial.

Once alone with him, Xana felt her anger ease. After all, she hadn't really been angry with him; she was angry with herself. Her interviewing skills had demonstrated themselves to be, to say the least, rusty. How hubristic she had been to think that a seven-month absence wouldn't take its toll…

“Well?” asked Dundee.

She glanced over at him. Oh right. He probably was waiting for an apology. Well, he had taken the high road and brought the conversation to the privacy of this office rather than going all alpha male on her in front of the troops. Maybe he wasn't a complete tool.

“I'm sorry for pushing you,” she said. “It was impulsive and wrong.”

Dundee hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and shook his head in disbelief. “Missy, I don't give two shits about you laying your hands on me. What I want to know is what the prisoner said in there. What are we dealing with here?”

Hmm. Twice now this man had surprised her. Had she prejudged him? To be sure, his first impression had been abysmal. Xana took a seat in one of the office's tall-backed metal chairs.

“OK,” she said, gladly taking an offered mug of coffee, “what do you know about Russian–Chechen relations?”

The lieutenant sat behind the desk, his own coffee mug in his hands, and rested his boots on an open drawer. “Civil wars. Rebellions. I know what I've seen on the news.”

“Then let me take a step back. What do you know about Ivan the Terrible?”

“Are you about to tell me that we have a slain police officer in Atlanta, Georgia, because of Ivan the Terrible?”

“No. For about seven years in the 1500s, when Ivan wanted to perpetrate some really ambitious, evil shit, he assembled a secret police called the
oprichniki
and had them burn down villages along the countryside of his empire…well, just because, really. During this time, he had these torture camps established that he would visit whenever he needed a pick-me-up. This period—this reign of truly hellish tyranny—is referred to in Russian history as The Oprichnina. Officially, it ended in 1572, after the Tartar descendants of the Great Khan defeated Ivan's army and burned Moscow to the ground. All of the torture camps were disbanded…except one.”

“There's always an exception, isn't there?”

“Over the centuries, this final camp, located on the Terek River, became a fort and then a castle. Through the years, it acquired an appropriate name: The Oprichnina. The atrocities committed under Ivan the Terrible were continued by his successors within those walls to countless political prisoners, especially the Cossacks. One centuries-old tradition they maintained was to mark and track all new prisoners. They were branded on the neck. In its most recent iteration, this brand is a barcode tattoo.”

“So our guy is, what, some Cossack ex-con?”

Xana sipped at her coffee. Some kind of light roast, barely more than sweetened water. Ugh. “He's Chechen. But that's not the part that's got me nervous.”

“What is it?”

“There are no ex-cons from The Oprichnina. For the unfortunate few, the doors to that nightmare factory only open one way. No parole. I mean, how can you get parole if you've never been officially sentenced?”

“So he's a poser.”

“No. He's not.” She set her coffee on the desk. “The tattoo is real. There's a symbol hidden in each genuine mark, kind of like an image in one of those magic picture paintings. You can't see the symbol unless you look at it the right way, and nobody outside the prison is aware of it.”

“Except you, of course.”

Xana shrugged. She wasn't about to elaborate, at least not while sober—and that meant never again, didn't it? Good. Some stories were best left untold.

Lieutenant Dundee lifted his boots off their resting place and stood up. “That's a great story. It really is. But it doesn't tell me anything to help me understand why Wynonna Price is dead or if the one hundred and seventy-four passengers of Flight Eight Sixteen are imperiled.”

“Right—so here's my plan. When I go back in there, I go back in there alone. I pretend that—”

“When you go back in there? You're not going anywhere.”

Xana raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“By refusing to follow the direct instructions of a police officer in the course of an ongoing criminal investigation, you impeded said investigation and—”

“Oh, you got to be kidding me…”

“Missy, I gave you a set of simple rules.”

“Yeah, go ahead, arrest me.” She held out her wrists to be cuffed. “I'm sure that will look peachy when this turns into a case of domestic terrorism and the Powers That Be realize they can't communicate with one of the accomplices because the translator is in jail!”

Dundee chuckled to himself. “You're something else. You know that?”

“I do, yes, but—”

“You think we won't be able to find another person in this whole metropolis who can speak Chechen? Please. Now, Reidsville may not be The Oprichnina or whatever, but as prisons go, I'm sure your stay will—”

His phone rang.

He picked up the receiver.

He listened to the voice on the other line.

He hung up, having only spoken two words the entire conversation: “Yes, sir.”

“Who was that?” asked Xana.

He replied, “I need you to wait here,” and subsequently opened his office door and stomped out to the noisy squad room.

“All eyes on me, people! This is not a drill!”

Xana took a deep breath. Whatever Dundee was about to share with his people was going to be bad, bad news—and she had a feeling that his suggestion to her, that she wait in his office, had been a bad, bad suggestion.

“Effective immediately, this airport is in lockdown. All outgoing flights have been grounded and all incoming flights have been rerouted to secondary destinations. A unit of the Georgia National Guard is expected to arrive on campus at oh nine fifteen. We are expected to, and we will, assist them in securing this airport. I will have your individual assignments shortly.”

Xana's instincts had been dead-on. It was time to become scarce and skedaddle. She used the sudden buildup of activity in the squad room to sneak over to Hayley, who was still on her bench by the interview room.

“Come on,” said Xana, clasping the girl's hand, “we're leaving.”

Hayley was pulled up by Xana's momentum and had little choice but to tug her oxygen tank and follow her toward the front door. All the while, Xana cast hesitant glances over her shoulder to see if Dundee had spotted them.

Not yet.

They passed Officer Chiles's workstation. The good officer wasn't there, but Lieutenant Dundee's Swiss Army knife still was from when he had left it post-apple. Xana was tempted to snatch it. Even self-righteous chauvinists—especially self-righteous chauvinists—deserved to be cured of at least one of their disgusting habits.

But no. She left the knife.

“I don't understand,” Hayley said. “Why are we running away?”

They passed through the doors and headed for the elevator. The stairwell would have been faster, but Xana had serious doubts about this girl's lung capacity to bolt down three flights of stairs. And so the button-push and the impatient wait and the repeated hesitant glances back toward the substation.

“What are you afraid of? Oh God, did they arrest you for shoving that policeman? Are we fugitives?”

“What? No. Well, not for that. Listen, wouldn't you rather be on the other side of anywhere before the National Guard declares martial law and locks us down? That said, unless you'd rather spend the rest of your day stuck in the food court…”

The elevator doors opened. Xana hopped inside.

Hayley joined her.

“So what did the Chechen say to you?”

“Do you speak Chechen?”

“No…”

“Then you probably wouldn't understand it if I repeated what he said, would you?”

Having been delivered to the ground floor, Xana and Hayley casually hustled out through the terminal's automatic doors and into the hot morning air—and was it Xana's imagination or did she hear, in the distance, the thunder-rumbling of an army convoy on approach?

Hayley stopped mid-gait and took out her phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“The office,” the girl replied, and while waiting for someone to pick up, she mended her taxed pulmonary system with an adjustment on her oxygen tank.

“Well, can we walk while you call them?”

“Sure.”

Up the walkway now, into the parking garage, and Hayley's sticker-new compact car was within sprinting distance. If only Hayley could sprint…

“Hi,” she said. “This is Hayley O'Leary. Ms. Marx finished her interview with the…you know…the guy…and now we're on our way to…”

She looked to Xana to fill in the blank.

“Just tell him we're going to the Russian consulate.”

“
Are
we going to the Russian consulate?”

“Absolutely.”

Hayley hesitated, then finished her voice message as instructed. They reached the compact. Xana tugged on the passenger handle. Hayley fumbled for her key fob, found it, and unlocked the car.

They traveled all of fifty yards before they had to pay for their time in the garage. Hayley passed the clerk a fiver. He took his time making change.

Xana nibbled on her lower lip. She definitely could hear the convoy now. They might already be erecting roadblocks.

The security arm rose up.

Hayley didn't move forward.

“What—what the hell are you doing?” asked Xana.

“I just remembered. Atlanta doesn't have a Russian consulate.”

“What are you—Little Miss Almanac? What teenage girl
knows
that?”

“I'm not moving unless you tell me the truth.”

“Fine.” Xana rolled down her window. Screw courtesy. She needed a smoke. “What do you know about Ivan the Terrible?”

They found a parking spot in one of downtown Atlanta's sketchy prix fixe lots, where a slope-gaited, raggedy fellow collected a small sum—cash only—and in return promised to keep their car from getting stripped for parts—although any adult with decent upper-body strength could have boosted Hayley's tiny auto.

Xana and Hayley strolled the sidewalk, passing a soul-food restaurant and, beside it, a Pan-African clothing boutique from which the dance-protest beats of Fela Kuti boogied out and mixed with the hot summer breath of the midmorning air.

Hayley set her oxygen cart to keep it from tipping over and said, “I've never aided and abetted a known fugitive before.”

“I'm not a fugitive. Dundee is just acting out the part of a cliché.”

“Like you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I mean, you know…the ‘alcoholic genius investigator.' ”

“Oh good. I'm a cliché.”

“But there's still something I don't understand. It's just…I don't mean to insult you or anything…”

“Calling me a cliché wasn't an insult? Hey, if you think I won't judo-flip a girl just because she's dying, you're sadly mistaken.”

Hayley smiled. “Well…I mean…with your skill set and everything…why did you join the FBI? Why not the CIA? Atlanta doesn't even have a Chinatown.”

“Who says I didn't apply to the CIA?”

“Did you?”

A patrol car passed by. Xana looked the other way. She found herself staring at the unlit storefront of a bar labeled in rusted letters:
HI-JINKS.
She smelled booze. There must have been a few cracked empties lying in the slender alleyway between the bar and its neighbor, a twenty-four-hour Laundromat. The Laundromat emitted a yellow, radioactive glow. Xana was more interested in the shadows of the alleyway.

“If you don't want to talk about it…”

“No,” replied Xana. “I don't mind.”

They stopped at the corner and waited for the light.

“So you applied to the CIA and didn't get in?”

“No, I got in. I made it all the way to the Point.”

“So what happened?”

“The CO kicked me out.”

“Why?”

Xana let out a nostalgic sigh. “He found me sleeping with his daughter.”

“So you've always been reckless.”

“I've always been ambitious.”

“You can have one without the other,” said Hayley.

“Maybe. But where's the fun in that?”

“Sure, but that's how people get hurt.”

Xana glanced down at her. “Not intentionally.”

“Does it matter? I mean, once the damage is done…”

“You think intentions don't matter?”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“So is, I would guess, the road to heaven. Otherwise, how would anyone get there?”

“I'll let you know in a few months.”

The sign flashed
WALK
and walk they did—crossing the street. If Xana remembered correctly, Yuri's pawnshop would be on the next block. On this block was a trio of businesses shuttered up with plywood that was spray-painted with gang tags. Lines bifurcating circles intersecting circles, with a recognizable number or two here and a discernible letter or two there just to make things interesting.

Xana stopped and stared at the graffiti. “Now here's a language I can't even begin to crack.”

“It's, like, code, isn't it?”

“All language is code.”

“It looks like a trigonometry problem.”

“So translate it with a calculator.”

“Just because something looks like it can be solved,” Hayley replied, “that doesn't mean it can be solved. Sometimes we need to accept that.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

“What? No. It's something Dr. Gideon has been trying to tell my parents. They keep chasing after miracle treatments—as if we could afford them anyway.”

“Don't be so hard on them. Acceptance can be a real bitch. I used to wonder if I drank because I was reckless or if I was reckless because I drank.”

“You drank because you are an alcoholic.”

“See, that explains the third glass and the thirty-third glass but it doesn't explain the first glass.”

“Then why did you first start drinking?”

“Probably for the same reason your parents first started chasing miracles.”

Their destination was the corner store on the next block. In the window, behind the
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
sign, hung an American flag. It took Xana a moment to realize the flag was missing a stripe. She opened the door—but let her bite-sized chaperone enter first. A trio of hollow wooden balls above the jamb bounced against one another. They sounded like someone hammering down the lid of a coffin.

“The Russian consulate, huh?” said Hayley with a smirk in her voice.

Seven ceiling fans spun overhead like a flock of helicopters but did little to dissipate the reek of industrial glue and wave away the dust mites from the tall, cluttered wooden shelves that snaked in crooked rows across the store's dimly lit floor-space. Far be it from the proprietor to let the customers get a clear look at the junk they were purchasing.

As to the proprietor—Yuri—he was sitting in an armchair on a dais behind a glass counter. The armchair, all spirals and solid dark-red wood, must have once been a thing of beauty, but time had faded its veneer and chipped its smooth flesh into coarse and craggy bark. So too the man on the chair, thick white hair curling kudzu-like around his potato chip bones and corkscrewing down his temples from the flimsy thatches still left on either side of his blotchy skull. Once he may have been handsome; now he was decaying to atoms.

Over his chest and thighs he wore a black apron and over the black apron he held the base of a model Soyuz rocket in one hand and a short-haired brush in the other hand. He dipped the brush into a mason jar of glue. He didn't look up at his customers.

On the wall behind him hung an assortment of handguns, many of them made up of various parts, like a menagerie of .45-caliber Frankenstein monsters. In the glass case in front of him were arrayed a couple dozen pocket watches, each set to the same exact time—or perhaps allowed to stop ticking at the same exact moment.
Tempus moritur:
Time dies. In the space beside him on the dais rested a mini fridge as shockingly clean and white as the rest of the store was dirt-smeared and dark.

He must have really loved that mini fridge.

“Hello, Yuri,” said Xana.

Yuri briefly peered up from his model rocket and muttered, “My name is not Yuri.”

“Oh, Yuri, you're so funny.”

“Ms. FBI is here, so I am to think her recidivism is over?”

“Rehabilitation,” Xana corrected him.

Behind her, lost somewhere in the stacks, Hayley called out: “This place is neat!” She held aloft an Eastern Orthodox icon of St. Nick painted in earth-tones on a block of marble and waved it for Xana to see.

“Yes. Very nice. Now put it down. You don't know where that's been.”

“Sure I do. It's been here on the shelf.”

“All the more reason to put it down.”

Reluctantly, Hayley obeyed and then quietly joined them at the counter. Yuri, expressionless, doused his tiny brush with a dab of brown-yellow glue from the mason jar.

“I need a favor,” said Xana.

“Favors are for friends. Ms. FBI make offer and I name price.”

“I need to know if anyone has escaped or been released from The Oprichnina in the past twenty-five years.”

He laid down his model, set his brush on his apron, nodded thoughtfully. Then he replied, “Now I name price.”