The Truant Officer (41 page)

He was desperate to follow the woman, but had to remain patient for another ten minutes to get his audience with Natalie. When he did, he handed her his CD like any other fan.

“Whom should I sign this to?” she asked, looking at him, but not seeing him.

“Zuckley, Brick Zuckley,” he said.

The unique name caught her interest and she took a closer glance. When she did, it was if she’d seen a ghost.

He was prepared for this. “It’s good to see you again, Audrey. Just act normal.”

“I thought you were…”

“Yeah, and let’s keep it that way. What are you up to?”

She faked a smile. “I’m just here to meet my fans, Mr. Zuckley.”

“I saw her here. You gave her something. Where’s she going?”

Natalie held her smile as she opened the case of the CD titled
Naughtily Gold
, with the obligatory sexy photo of her on the cover. “That would be Zuckley with an
e-y
or just a
y?”
she asked.

“If she fails—which is the most likely outcome—it won’t be long before he figures out that his wife was the one behind it. But if she succeeds, you will both face a much worse fate—you will become just like him.”

“Thank you, Mr. Zuckley. I hope you enjoy the CD,” she replied indifferently and looked to the next in line.

When he got outside, he opened up the case and read what she wrote. It gave him their suite number at the ritzy hotel just up the street, and the room code to get in. He ran up Newbury Street until he came to the Taj Boston, which used to be the famed Ritz Carlton on the corner of Newbury and Arlington. It was all the way at the other end of Newbury, near the Boston Public Garden.

He had no patience for the elevator, so he ran up the stairs, his boots echoing with each heavy step. He arrived at the top floor, and came in contact with three of Nick’s guards. But all of them were knocked out and gagged in the stairwell. The woman’s covert attack had worked.

He punched in the room code to gain entrance. The elegant room looked more like a luxury townhouse than a hotel suite.

He checked the marble bathroom and then ventured into a guest room that included rich fabric wall coverings and a pricey-looking armoire. He moved to the window that provided a view of the park. He took note of the ice skaters gliding atop the frozen frog pond. It sparked his urgency to find her before Zellen returned from the skating competition.

That is when he felt the cold steel of the gun on the back of his neck. He put his hands up in surrender.

“Hey Nick, welcome to the South Chandler High Reunion. I just voted you most likely to get a bullet in your head,” she stated and pushed the gun harder.

Darren spun around and removed his skullcap. She had the same look as Natalie. Like she’d seen a ghost.

“Oh my god, Darren—I thought you were dead,” Becks exclaimed.

“Darren is dead, and so will you be if you don’t get out of here.”

“Sorry, I have a job to finish.”

“Then you are going to have to kill me, too.”

Her face turned angry. “I can’t believe after everything he did to you, that you would risk your life to save his sorry ass. He stole your wife and then he stole your life.”

“I’m not saving him, I’m trying to save
you
. If you go through with this, your life is over either way.”

She looked at her gun and then up at Darren, contemplating. She surprisingly lowered the gun and ran to him. She wrapped her arms around him. “I thought you were dead, you big idiot.”

It felt good, but there was no time for sentiment. Darren pushed her toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

The minute they stepped into the hallway, the elevator at the end of the hall dinged. Out stepped Nick Zellen, his sister Sasha, with a pair of ice skates slung over her shoulder, and a team of sinister-looking bodyguards in long leather coats. The only good thing was that by coming up the elevator, they’d yet to discover his security detail tied-up in the stairwell.

Darren urged Becks to move to the stairs before they came into view. But she refused, walking directly toward the new leader of the Russian Mafiya. Darren had no choice but to follow. As they crossed paths, Darren avoided eye contact. But Becks had always believed life was a contact sport.

She “accidentally” bumped into Zellen and staggered him. He caught himself, before falling to the floor. He appeared taken aback, while his guards looked trigger-happy.

“Sahry, didn’t see ya thahr,” she uttered in her deepest Boston accent.

Nick looked at her and his eyes softened. “Don’t worry about it—just watch where you’re going next time.” His bodyguards scrambled to help their leader back to his feet.

She then pulled down her baseball cap, and followed Darren to the elevator.

Chapter 99

Nick’s first sign that something was out of place was that no guard was on duty in front of his door. So he sent his bodyguards in. If someone were waiting for him, they would never get a chance to deal with him.

But it was strange. Nobody was inside, and nothing was missing. They found the guards tied up and unconscious in the stairwell. They never saw who hit them from behind. Nick was thankful for this “fire drill,” which taught him that these men couldn’t be trusted with his life.

He mentally Rolodexed his many enemies, and felt relieved that Zubov was still incarcerated. The question nagged at him—
who was trying to send him a message?

After a long afternoon of promoting her new CD, Natalie arrived to the suite. She looked surprised to see him, which he found peculiar. But it was consistent with the strange vibe he’d received from her lately, especially the part where she had started to give in to his every whim without a struggle. He made a mental note to watch her very closely in the future.

He grilled her as to whether she’d noticed any suspicious behavior at the store that might be connected to the attack on his guards. She claimed nothing or nobody appeared out of the ordinary, which was the expected answer. But not being the trusting type, he would call over to get copies of the surveillance tapes to take back with him to New York tomorrow.

He wouldn’t let the incident ruin his evening. Nick still planned on taking Natalie and Sasha out to celebrate the opening of the new Sarvy Music store, Natalie’s new album, and Sasha’s runner-up finish in the US Figure Skating Championships. They had a lot to celebrate, which made it more puzzling as to why he felt no joy. In fact, he felt empty.

The one thing he took satisfaction from was the knowledge that his mother would be proud of how he and Sasha had thrived in her absence, even if she wouldn’t have been a fan of the tactics they were forced to use. And even though she tried to shield him from who he was, everyone eventually becomes who they are. He thought of her constant motherly advice, “Just be yourself, Nick.” That was what he was doing, even if it wasn’t the life he’d chosen.

Nick rented an entire restaurant on Newbury Street for just the three of them and a couple of bodyguards, whom he called the
oprichniki—
based on the name Ivan the Terrible referred to his merciless palace guards, who were the precursor of the KGB. Throughout history, danger was always around the corner for Russian leaders, and protection was a priority.

Nick raised a glass of Stolichnaya Gold vodka. He toasted today’s triumphs, again noticing Natalie’s distant demeanor. Nick and Sasha held their own private toast for their mother. Nick could only hope that he had gotten her the justice that allowed her to rest in peace. He then swigged the vodka, savoring the bittersweet taste, which was symbolic of his life.

When they returned to their hotel suite, Nick’s lead bodyguard informed him that the men who failed to guard his room had been dealt with. It was a good reminder to the others that it was a privilege to work for Nick Zellen, and if their job was not done correctly, people could die. Before retiring for the night, he received a call from Pavel Kovalenko, who ran Nick’s businesses in the western United States, to discuss an urgent business dealing in Los Angeles.

It seemed like his days never ended, but that was all well and good, because all downtime did was give him time to think of the life he’d left behind, and how much he missed both his mother and Audrey.

He had come to grips with the fact that his life from birth until law school was nothing but a fantasy. All it did was hide what lurked within him, and ran through his veins. When the layers were peeled away after his mother’s death, he looked in the mirror and saw who he really was. And that person was no different than Karl and Viktor, whether he liked the reflection or not.

Natalie was drunk again—the memory of Audrey slipped further away with each passing day. Either she was turning into an alcoholic or she was acting to avoid being with him. Neither was acceptable, and he would put a stop to it. But he didn’t have the energy tonight for one of their fights.

As Natalie fell into a drunken stupor, he prepared for bed. When he took off his suit jacket, he reached into his pocket to remove his wallet and cell phone. But what he found froze him.

It was a note. It read:
Becks + Posh = TL
F
. The F in the
True Love Forever
acronym was underlined. He understood the symbolism—she would be chasing him forever. There was also another line written on the other side of the note.
Sorry to hear you killed your father. Both of them. My condolences.

How did she know that? Everybody who knew that secret was dead, and Zubov was locked away in solitary confinement. He would get those answers when he found her. And to find her, he would have to figure out how she got the note in his pocket.

Could she have been at the skating competition? He doubted she was at the restaurant, it was only his group and the wait staff, and he’d have recognized her. No person escaped his scrutiny these days. Maybe she paid one of them to do her dirty work.

But then it hit him—
the woman
. The one who bumped into him with the heavy Boston accent. She was the one who had sandbagged his guards. She put the note into his pocket when she walked by, just to prove that she could get to him. But who was the man she was with?

Nick’s initial instinct was to scour the streets of Boston until he found her. But she was a former marshal. So she was smart enough to be halfway around the world by now.

“What are you up to, Becks?” he muttered.

Chapter 100

After leaving the Taj Boston hotel, Darren and Becks traveled to the other end of Newbury Street and picked up a subway. They took it to the hilly village of Chestnut Hill, near the campus of Boston College. Becks led him to one of the seemingly endless number of Murphy’s Pubs in the Boston area. She claimed it had the best burgers in New England.

She took off her baseball cap, revealing a short bob of brunette hair. She looked at least ten years older than when she sported a mishmash of blonde and pink, and light years in the sophistication department. Darren removed his skullcap and she couldn’t resist rubbing her hands over his completely shaved dome. If she had gained ten years, he had taken ten off, except for the gray that was creeping into his goatee.

They were seated at a booth table and just stared at each other, still too shocked to say anything. Finally Becks broke the silence. “So is this one of those
It’s a Wonderful Life
glimpses into an alternate existence? Christmas
is
only two weeks away. What’s going on here, Darren—I thought you were dead?”

“I’m not Darren.”

“Then who are you?”

He pushed his Massachusetts driver’s license across the table for her to read.

She started laughing. “Brick Zuckley—you must not be Darren because he didn’t have a very good sense of humor. In fact, I’m not sure he had one at all. But you do know that Brick Zuckley isn’t a real person’s name, right? It’s like a spy novel name.”

“That might be fitting.”

“So are you going to tell me what happened to Darren?”

He shrugged. “The hijacker? From what I heard on the news, he died in a plane crash.”

What he didn’t tell her was that when they came to the end, looking into Zubov’s soulless eyes, they found out that he really did have a soul, or at least a principle he lived by. He claimed to never have killed an innocent person—it didn’t go with his brand—and he considered Darren and Lilly to be innocent victims in the battle for control of the Russian Mafiya.

He told them the tale of how he came up with that philosophy. When he was a young Russian immigrant in Brighton Beach, he worked for Psyk Miklacz, a man he detested. But he put up with his crap because his comrade, and fellow vor, Viktor Sarvydas, had married Miklacz’s daughter. But when Trina found out that Viktor had gotten his mistress pregnant, she ordered that Zubov kill Paula Branche, or Trina would have her father kill Viktor. He’d killed hundreds before coming to the United States, he had never killed anyone he believed to be innocent, and Paula and her child were innocent. So he informed Viktor of his wife’s intentions, and together they planned the ambush on Trina and her father.

But just because he wouldn’t kill Darren and Lilly, didn’t mean he planned on helping them. He gave them one chance to leap off the cliffs into the sea below, hoping for God’s mercy. If they went against his wishes, he would no longer consider them innocent. It was a business deal. They would get the opportunity to live, albeit slight, and Zubov would get to claim to Nick that he completed his job, while not going against his principles.

Before they took the ultimate leap of faith, Zubov mentioned that Natalie Gold always left a second set of scuba gear at the bottom of the cliffs. He was suspicious that she’d been preparing for a quick getaway, so he decided to keep an eye on her. He never shared this information with Viktor or Nick. Zubov knew to always keep an ace in his hand.

Even though they’d never done it at this height, or in darkness, this wasn’t Darren and Lilly’s virgin voyage in cliff diving. It was a pastime that Lilly and her brothers did growing up in Mexico, and maybe where she found her love of the ledge. When Darren took a vacation with Lilly to Acapulco while they were dating, Lilly convinced Darren to take a turn at cliff diving. He was scared out of his mind, but there was no way he was going to let Lilly see any weakness in him. It was one of the photos he used during his interview with Jessi Stafford. Who knew it would save their lives one day.