“No,” I say quickly, dejection setting in.
“All right, then. Good evening, Miss Morrell.”
Stunned, I hang up without returning the greeting. I guess that answers the question about my limitations. How far is Alex willing to go? Why not just lock me in while he’s at it?
Wait. He wouldn’t. Would he?
When I leave the study, I’m no longer discreet about wandering through the house. I stride decisively to the front door. Once there, I take a deep breath. I don’t really want to go outside into a garden from which I can’t escape. I just need to know.
Gripping the doorknob, I turn it. It slips in my sweaty palm. I wipe my hands on my thighs and try again.
It’s locked.
I can’t believe it. Why I expected otherwise, I don’t know, but being locked in only adds to the claustrophobia closing in on me. Running from door to door, I try each one, but the verdict is the same. They’re all locked.
A baffled Tima stares at me as I storm into the kitchen and sprint for the back door. I yank on the handle, pushing with all my might, but the heavy door doesn’t budge.
“Kate,” he says, his tone apologetic. “Don’t wear yourself out like this. It’s no use, my poor little rabbit. You know it.”
Leaning with my back against the door, I slide to the floor, finally admitting defeat. There’s no sugarcoating this truth.
I’m Alex’s prisoner.
“Come on,” Tima says, discarding the spoon he was stirring something in a pot with and pulling me up by my arm. “Let’s get you back to your room.” He lowers his voice. “You don’t want Lena to see you like this. You can’t show weakness if you want to survive, am I right?”
I take a closer look at his face. His skin is marred with pockmarks and his nose is knobby. The light is his gray eyes is friendly.
“Tima, you have to help me.”
“I am helping you,” he says, guiding me to the door.
“You have to let me out.”
He clicks his tongue. “Now, that won’t be helping you, little rabbit. That’ll be sending both of us straight to a shallow grave.”
3
Alex
The security team jumps to attention when I enter the basement of my office building in the tech district of St. Petersburg.
“Anything?” I ask, loosening my tie as I walk down the aisle that separates the state-of-the-art workstations.
Igor and Leonid tail me, their weapons within easy reach, while Dimitri guards the door. With the measures I put in place, we’re safer here than anywhere, but there’s a weakness in the system I can never overlook—humanity. Human beings are fickle, and human nature is always an unreliable and inconstant variable in the equation.
Like I explained to my pretty, angry kitten on more than one occasion, I’m not taking anything for granted. That’s the only reason I’m not six feet under.
The head of my security team, Pyotr Nelsky, waits at the wall-mounted monitors in the front of the room, standing in a military pose with his arms plastered to his sides.
“Nothing, sir,” he says when I reach him, an undercurrent of fear in his tone.
I slide my gaze toward the flatscreens on the wall, which reflect the status of every workstation. The results of the data each employee is compiling are summarized in code. “Did you get the hospital security tapes?”
“Yes, sir. We’re going through them as we speak.”
Going over to one of the monitors, I press the button to wake up the screen. A mosaic of black-and-white photos is puzzled together. These makeshift mugshots are freeze-frames taken from the video feed, singling out the patients who frequented Coney Island Hospital’s ER yesterday.
At best, the images are blurry. In some of them, only the backs of the patients’ heads are visible.
Frustration eats at my gut. “What’s the operation status?”
“We’re in the process of trying to identify all the patients and visitors who were present in the building yesterday,” Nelsky says to my back.
I turn to face him. “How long?”
“It may take us a couple of days.” His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “We pulled the records of the patients who signed in. The staff aren’t a problem since they clock in and out for work. It will be harder to trace the visitors and service providers, especially considering that there are camera blind spots.”
“What are you saying?” I ask, drumming my fingers on his desk.
He fixes his gaze on a spot over my shoulder, not looking me directly in the eyes. “It will be impossible to draw up a list of everyone who moved through the building in the span of twelve hours.”
The news infuriates me, not that I expected otherwise. Still, it’s worth a shot. “What about Ms. Morrell?”
He stumbles over his feet in his eagerness to boot up the second of the five monitors on his desk. “I already put together a visual file for you.”
He presses a button, pulling up a kaleidoscope of faces, some with Katerina in the picture and others without. Many of the faces are hardly discernible. Others are partially or fully hidden from the cameras.
“Patient list?” I ask, my irritation growing.
“Here, sir.” Grabbing a printout from his desk, he offers it to me. “As you’ll see, there are a lot of Russian names, but seeing that the hospital is situated in an Eastern European neighborhood, nothing out of the ordinary jumps out.”
I scan over the names printed on the paper. The list is long. “Pull whatever records you can find on every one of them. Use my government contacts to speed things up.”
“We’re already working on it, sir.”
“Good.” I shove the paper back into his hands. “Report to me on the hour, and let me know the minute anything comes up.”
The paper trembles in his hand. “Yes, sir.”
I make my way to the door with long strides. My employees busy themselves as I pass, not daring to meet my eyes. I suppose I have somewhat of a reputation. People fear me, including the ones who feed their families on the generous salaries I pay. Good. In my world, you don’t get very far with kindness. No one is complaining, though. They’ll search long and wide to find better fringe benefits or working conditions.
The kind of work they do requires the room in which they spend eight hours a day to be underground. The walls, ceiling, and floor are fortified. No radio waves or infrared beams can penetrate the structure. That means the industrial intelligence I keep in this room is safe from unwanted eyes and ears, but it also makes the room blast-proof. A sophisticated system carefully monitors and purifies the air. The lights are bright without being harsh on the eyes, and the temperature never varies from a comfortable twenty-three degrees Celsius. Wallpaper depicting a mountain landscape covers the gray concrete bricks, and trees planted in pots provide greenery. A fountain in the corner creates the tranquil sound of a waterfall. It empties into a pond populated with koi fish. Apparently, the fish have a calming effect on the human psyche. As per the advice of the interior designer who specializes in Zen environments, the air purifier releases minute organic notes of bergamot and citrus into the air. The fragrances are supposedly uplifting and revitalizing. Yeah, there are worse bunkers to work in.