Midnight Promises (11 page)

Her father had said to keep it with her, always.

The pouch was made of very soft suede. She pulled it out and placed it on the table between her two outstretched hands, palms down. All three of them looked at the pouch, at her, back to the pouch.

She blew out a breath. Point of no return. Her mother had had a saying when taking a decision. Either it will turn out really really well or really really bad.

Time to find out.

Knowing all eyes were on her, knowing those eyes were friendly, she opened the string closure and gently tipped the contents of the pouch on the table.

A large gold medallion.

She nodded at Metal, waved a finger at it. “Go ahead.”

He picked it up gently in his big hand, examined it. A pure gold medallion, measuring almost three inches across. It nearly covered the palm of her hand but looked tiny in Metal’s huge one. On one side a bearded man in profile. On the other, a goddess emerging from the clouds. Around the rim the words
Inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes.
They improved life on earth by their art.

Felicity recognized the exact moment when Metal understood what he was looking at. His expression didn’t change, but his features tightened.

“This is a Nobel Prize medallion,” Metal said.

She nodded. “For physics. The 1989 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Nikolai Darin. My father. At the time, a citizen of the Soviet Union.”

“A Nobel. He must have been really smart,” Metal said, and she nodded. Yes. Her father had been a sad man for as long as she could remember but he had been very, very smart.

“Your dad was a defector?” Jacko asked. The way he said it made her bristle a little.

“Yes.” She gave him a hard look. “He defected from the Soviet Union, a dictatorship at the time. Actually, it still is, though it’s called Russia now.”

Metal frowned slightly. “I remember reading about it. Didn’t he die right after? I remember thinking what a bummer to die just after receiving the Nobel.”

“No,” she said. “He defected. He had the KGB following his every footstep but he managed to contact the CIA head of station in Stockholm and they got him out. The CIA faked his death and they escaped, my father and my mother. At the time, though she didn’t know it, my mother was pregnant with me.”

Silence.

“Wow,” Lauren finally said softly.

“Are your parents still alive?” Jacko asked, eyes narrowed. “Is this about them?” Lauren jabbed him in the side with an elbow, but he just looked at her then back at Felicity. “Are you caught up in some Cold War thing?”

“I don’t know,” Felicity answered truthfully. “I’ve thought about it, but I don’t see how. The Russians at the time were satisfied that my parents died. Then they—” Her voice caught. She waited a minute to steady it. “They really did die in a car accident but years later, in 2009. Whoa.” She wiped the moisture from her eyes. “Sorry.”

“You’re entitled.” Metal’s deep voice was very gentle. “That’s quite a story. I imagine after they defected they were relocated by the Marshals Service, given new identities.”

She nodded. “Aleksandr and Anna Valk. My parents’ English was never really good, certainly they couldn’t pass as native speakers. So they were relocated as Estonians. This was the period in which the former peoples of the Soviet Empire were starting to rebel. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Ukraine. There were lots of dissidents emigrating from the countries of the former Empire. My father worked as an engineer at a factory near Chicago but he disappeared for weeks at a time.”

“Being debriefed, probably,” Metal said.

“I suppose so. We never really talked about it. My…entire childhood, we never talked about big things. We never talked about the past and certainly not about the future. My mother spoke only Russian to me and I learned to read Russian before I learned to read English. I was twelve when they told me the truth. Soviet Russia was only a vague concept to me, pure history. It imploded when I was two. I guess they figured I was old enough to keep secrets. There were these huge black holes in our lives. Like an astrophysicist I had to try to figure out things from the size and shape of the black holes. My parents told me very little, except for the story of their escape the night my father received the Nobel.”

“What kind of physicist was he?” Jacko asked.

“Nuclear,” she answered and a deep silence filled the room. Metal and Jacko exchanged glances.

“Well, that’s…interesting,” Metal said finally. “So we have nuclear weapons here in the mix.”

“This was over twenty-five years ago. A generation ago. I don’t know what bearing it could have on what’s happening now.”

“Tell me about the names,” Lauren said suddenly. “How you have so many names.”

“Actually,” Metal said, “I’d rather talk about nukes.”

“Yeah,” Jacko growled.

“We’re hardwired to respond to nuclear threats,” Metal added apologetically.

“Names first,” Lauren said, her tone so decisive the guys looked at each other and shrugged. “How you ended up having lots of names.”

“Okay. Names.” Felicity blew out a breath. “The name on my birth certificate was Katrin. Katrin Valk. Estonian for Katherine. I think someone simply went to an encyclopedia and looked up Estonian names. My parents had no say in naming me. They were simply presented with it. My mother hated it. But then she hated more or less everything about her new life. We were in a small town about fifty miles from Chicago and the Marshals Service discouraged trips. So my mother, who was a biochemist and a highly cultivated woman, was forced to stay in a small town and she wasn’t allowed to work. They said it was bad enough my father insisted on having a job. My mother never called me Katrin, not once. She called me Alina, after her sister. I was in first grade when I discovered I was actually named Katrin because when the teacher did roll call I didn’t answer to Katrin. And my English was very shaky. It was…a lesson.”

God. Coming home in tears because she’d fought the teacher on the issue of her name and she’d done it in a language she didn’t speak well. And in the end she was wrong. She’d felt frustrated and ashamed and angry.

Her father had listened to her telling the story, gulping with sobs, and retired to his study. Her mother was just angry and told her that she had to use Katrin in school. But never in the home.

“So,” she said with a sigh. “That was Katrin. When I was twelve something happened. I never understood exactly what and of course no one talked to me. With hindsight I realize that someone in the Marshals Service or the FBI—because they followed my father’s case closely too—thought that someone had been leaking information. That there was a mole in the system. We were uprooted in the middle of the night, transferred to a small town in Iowa and given new names. So I became Emma. Emma Lukas. We became Lithuanian. My mother hated Iowa too.”

Lauren was listening wide-eyed. “How many more to go?”

“Names?”

Lauren nodded. “My mom had a friend who had eight names, seven marriages. Are you going to break that record without the fun of marriage and divorce?”

“Nope. Just one more name.”

“Piker,” Lauren smiled and Felicity smiled back. “So we’re now at Emma Lukas.”

Felicity nodded. “Emma didn’t last long. After my parents died, the Marshals contacted me. I was an adult and no longer under their protection in any way. But this old marshal, together with another old FBI agent, got together to give me a going-away gift. A new identity, birth certificate, passport, the works. And this time I got to choose my name. First name. They’d already chosen the last name. Ward.”

“So you chose Felicity.”

She nodded. “I was ready to apply to MIT. I’d been using Felicity as my internet handle for a few years. I probably shouldn’t have chosen Felicity as my name but I love Felicity Smoak and I wanted a name that meant something to me. So they created Felicity Ward from the ground up. I had a straight A average except for a journalism class my sophomore year. I was acting out and got a C. They wiped the C out and gave me a perfect score.”

“Whoa,” Lauren said. “That’s quite a story.”

“Okay. That’s it with the names,” Metal said. “Now the nukes.”

“I can’t imagine that we’re talking any kind of nuclear threat.” Felicity was sad and tired. The sky outside the window was turning dark but there was still enough light to see the snow falling.

All of this needed to come out, but it was so wrenching. “My father was a scientist. I don’t know much about what he did back in Russia but he was a good man. I think he worked in the field of energy, nuclear reactors. But I’m not certain. He never ever talked about his work, certainly not his work in Soviet Russia. He worked in a city called Chelyabinsk.”

Metal came to attention like a dog coming to a point. “Chelyabinsk. A
naukograd
. A science city. Cities that were closed off to the outside world because they worked on top secret stuff. They worked on all kinds of weapons in those cities, bioweapons, chemical weapons, nukes.”

“They also did basic research,” Felicity said stiffly. “That was what my father got the Nobel for—uncovering the structure of neutrinos in magnetic fields.”

“So why did he defect?” Jacko asked. His tone was aggressive and though Felicity couldn’t blame him, she felt worn-out. Yes, her father had defected, had betrayed his country. But the country had been a dictatorship and in any case, the country he betrayed was no more, hadn’t been a country for a generation.

These were battles that had been fought before she was born. The Cold War, the hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union, had cost her family dearly. Her father had uprooted himself and her mother from what her mother said had been a comfortable existence in search of some ideal he never found. Her mother had spent the rest of her life embittered at the move, unable to settle in the United States, living through a daughter she steeped in Russian culture and literature as compensation.

Felicity had been a battleground from the moment she’d been born. A child of divided loyalties, of a decision whose effects were felt a generation later, still painful like a sword to the heart. The only answer was—had always been—to lie low, curve in on herself like a small animal in a forest of predators.

She was so freaking
tired
. Tired of the drama of her parents’ defection, tired of switching identities every few years, tired of dark secrets she couldn’t understand—and now never would—swirling around her head. Those dark secrets had affected every second of her childhood and now were spilling over into her adult life, like a curse she couldn’t shake. She’d spend the rest of her life in its shadow, keeping secrets that weren’t hers.

Her eyes closed under the weight of them.

Metal rapped his knuckles on the table, hard, and she started.

“Okay,” he said standing up. “I’m the medic here and my patient has had enough. She’s been cut, she’s bled, she’s had stitches. We’ll go over this when she’s rested, and we’ll consult with Bud. Bud’s our Portland PD guy. Good guy, really smart.” This to her.

“No,” she said. “I’m fine.” But she didn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears.

Jacko was up, cupping Lauren’s elbow. Lauren walked around the table, bent to hug her. “I brought you some clothes in the carry-on, and some other stuff. You should have everything you need. It’s going to be okay,” she whispered. “Metal and Jacko are good at this stuff. So’s the company they work for. And Bud Morrison will definitely help. You’ve got some amazing people on your side. You’re safe.”

Everyone kept
saying
that. Felicity didn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade but she couldn’t see how anyone could say she was safe. Except for right this instant, of course. She was safe
right now
.

She’d seen her attacker and though he’d been young and fit, he wasn’t anything like Metal, who all but had
don’t mess with me
tattooed on his forehead and whose muscles had muscles. As a former SEAL, he’d know weaponry and martial arts and stuff. God knows she’d played Call of Duty enough. He knew what he was doing. If he’d been the one who wanted to kidnap her no way would she have escaped. It just wouldn’t have been possible.

Right now, right this minute, even weak as she was, with Metal in the room and Jacko, too, she was as safe as safe could be. It would take an earthquake to hurt her and she had no doubt that Metal would throw himself over her to protect her.

So maybe that should be enough. She was safe. For now. Maybe that’s all it ever would be. Safe. For now.

“Thanks.” Felicity hugged Lauren back, savoring her soft warmth. Absorbing through her skin the affection Lauren felt for her. They’d only just met in meatspace but she was as sure as she could be that they were friends. Like Beast Boy and Cyborg.

Lauren held her by the shoulders, a frown on her pretty face. “You look really tired, honey. We shouldn’t have kept you up talking for so long.”

“Well.” Felicity shrugged. “Considering we were talking about how to find the guy who attacked me and how to stop him, I think it was a conversation worth having. And I’m fine. A little tired, as you say, but fine. I got really good medical care.” The corner of Metal’s mouth lifted.

Lauren’s frown deepened. “Listen. I’m really sorry but—” She glanced at Jacko. “I have an out-of-town appointment tomorrow morning I can’t put off. This media mogul who is building a brand-new house…mansion…
palace
actually. He wants me to take sketches of the house in various stages of construction and then I’ll make a series of watercolors. I had a sketching session scheduled for tomorrow morning. The place is on the south slope of Mount Hood. It’s near Timberline Lodge, and Jacko and I made reservations to spend the night. We’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. I can cancel if you want—”

“Oh God, no!” The words escaped her mouth without even thinking them. Lauren had been on the run for two years. She’d nearly been killed a couple of weeks ago and Jacko had been shot. They needed—they deserved—a little getaway. “I couldn’t bear the thought of you canceling your stay. Metal is taking very good care of me and besides, I think I’m going to sleep for, like, two solid days.”