Unforgettable - eARC (22 page)

Epilogue

I found a nice little beach in Brazil where nobody minded if I camped out in a little tent, and I spent my time trying not to think about much of anything. The local bartenders helped as much as they could.

Every week, I called Edward to see if anything had come up that could use my talent, and for the first nine weeks, he told me to stay on vacation.

The tenth week, he said, “Hmm. You’re still in Brazil, right?”

“Yeah.” I was in my swimsuit, looking out over the ocean from my seat at a big-umbrellaed table on the beach. Off to my right, the bartender, Luiz, was washing shot glasses and building a pyramid out of them on the bar. At ten in the morning, there weren’t any other customers.

“Perfect. I need you to find a couple of old friends and see what they’re up to. We’ve traced them on a private plane as far as Rio, but the trail went cold there.”

Before I could ask who he was talking about, he continued, “It looks like someone else wants Parham Rezaei and is willing to pay top dollar for someone with the skills to kidnap him. They hired Yelena Semyonova to break him out of CIA custody.”

I dropped my phone, then banged my head on the table while picking it up off the sand. “Yelena did what?”

“I know you trusted her, Nat,” Edward said, “but you have to realize that she’s not the same person who you got tangled with—”

“Entangled.”

“—entangled with before. This version of Yelena doesn’t remember meeting you, or working together with you, or falling in love with you. Yes, she remembers helping Rezaei defect and trying to stop Jamshidi, but as far as she was concerned that was all just freelance work as part of trying to rescue her sisters. Now that her sisters are safe, she’s obviously gone freelance again.”

“But I thought you were giving her family asylum. That was her reward for helping the CIA even when you didn’t remember my involvement. I can’t believe she would turn against you after that.”

Edward sighed. “Truth is, I was somewhat surprised myself. But someone paid her a lot of money for Rezaei, enough to make it worth her while to just take her family and go elsewhere.”

A sudden suspicion formed in my mind. “That sum wouldn’t happen to be one hundred million dollars, would it?”

“Umm, yes. How did you know? We’re still trying to trace where she’s moved the money, and where it came from originally.”

“That’s the amount I told the Prophet to put in Yelena’s account, when it was trying to bribe me to let it live. I thought I told you about that.”

Edward didn’t reply for several seconds, and I heard him flipping pages. “Hmm, looks like you did mention it. Of course, I didn’t remember that when this stuff with Yelena happened. Well, that explains where the money came from, but not her kidnapping Rezaei. Unless…”

“What?”

“You know your talent better than I do. But isn’t it possible that, with you forgotten, the likeliest explanation for that hundred million dollars in her account was someone hiring her for something? So that’s what she remembers?”

I grimaced. “Yeah, that’s possible.”

“So what I need you to do is see if you can track them down.”

Edward continued speaking but I wasn’t paying attention because off to my right Luiz stopped drying a glass and stared behind me toward the indoor restaurant, then ducked down behind the bar so quickly that several shot glasses fell off his pyramid and into the sand.

The likeliest thing I could think of to cause such a reaction was men with guns. Instinctively, I flung myself out of my chair and to the right, dropped to the ground, then scrambled behind the bar. Then I peeked around the corner to see what the threat was, realizing as I did so that a wickerwork bar wasn’t going to be much protection against bullets.

There was no one there.

I looked at Luiz.
“Qual problema?”
I asked in my limited Portuguese.

He rose cautiously to look over the bar, then stood up all the way. “Sorry,
senhor
. I think I see gun. Maybe is camera?” He shrugged.

I stayed down out of sight. “Where?”

“Man and woman, in restaurant. They leave.”

As I waited behind the bar for a minute to pass since the man and woman had left, I tried to think of what was going on. I didn’t have any enemies, of course, because no one remembered anything I’d ever done to them. It had to be random, just someone looking for an American tourist to rob on the beach.

Unless…I had been on the phone with Edward, so he knew about me and my location. Had the CIA finally decided I was a loose end they couldn’t control? But then why had they left without killing me? I couldn’t imagine Edward helping someone to kill me, but maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

When the minute was up, I got up and walked over to where my phone lay in the sand. The call had disconnected, but I decided to leave the phone there just in case.

I casually strolled into the indoor restaurant, which was deserted except for one of the regular employees. So I continued out the front door onto the street.

Leaning against a blue BMW parked in the dirt road was Yelena. Parham stood next to her.

“Hello, Nat,” she said.

Parham grinned. “It worked. It actually worked!”

I stared at Yelena, my heart thudding. “You remember me?”

“Yes and no,” she said, then gave me a half smile. “Very quantum. Is more than one minute and I remember you since I see you on beach. But I not remember you before. Barcelona, Moscow, Iran—I not remember.”

“But…what are you doing here, then? How did you find me?”

Parham held up a smartphone. “I built something to scan for certain quantum anomalies. The CIA wanted me to focus on a supercomputer disrupter, but finding you was a much more interesting puzzle. Edward had told me you were on vacation in Brazil, so when I detected the anomaly here, I knew it had to be you.”

“But how did you even know to…” My brain finally caught up, and I said, “Your notebook.”

Nodding happily, Parham said, “Every time I went to check my notes on my recent work, I was reminded of your existence. I even called Edward about you, but he didn’t want to bring you back just so I could perform tests on your talent.”

“Poor security,” Yelena said. “Edward think Parham will forget where you are, but he write Brazil in notebook.”

“So you got Yelena to help you find me?”

Yelena shook her head. “No, I ask him to help me find you.” She pulled some folded papers out of her purse. “Letter to my mother. I tell her all about you. And that I…” She blushed and looked away. “…I fall in love with you.”

Parham held up a device that looked quite a bit like a rifle scope. “And thanks to this, you have a second chance to get her to fall in love with you, my boy. Portable laser entanglement device. We decided to test it on you without letting you know, just in case it didn’t work. Yelena didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

I reached out and took Yelena’s hand. “I can’t believe you did all this.” Suddenly, I remembered the other stuff I’d had difficulty believing about her. “You do know that the CIA thinks you were hired to kidnap Parham?”

“I only borrow him,” she said. “The CIA would not let him go on field trip. Now we can take him back on my private plane.” She looked at Nat quizzically. “Did you give me a hundred million dollars?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Back? We can’t go back yet,” said Parham.

“Why not?” I asked.

“We need to find the other anomalies,” he said, tapping his smartphone. “Nat, you are not the only one.”