Chapter Twenty-Three

It was Dimitri’s turn to share, but before he launched into his story, he checked the fishing line—coming up empty. “Would you believe I caught a fish this”—he held his hands three feet apart—“big just last week?”

Ivy laughed. “Never.”

He tightened his lips as if in deep introspection, moving his hands an inch closer together. “Well, maybe this big?”

There was something so…north-northeast of normal about the moment. Stranded on a tropical island with a Russian spy. His earnest, silly joke.

For a moment, she felt…light. Like everything would be okay. Or at least not like Spontaneous Combustion Man lurked around every corner, holding lighter fluid in one hand and a blowtorch in the other.

Worst. Superhero. Ever.

And then there was Dimitri. Who, come to think of it, also resembled the actor Ryan Reynolds, just a tiny bit. More Green Lantern in looks than Deadpool. But if she had to choose, she’d go for the darker hero. More Dimitri-ish. 

Deadpool with Captain Kirk’s eyes. Now there was a superhero she could root for.

She noted that his fishhook was clean of bait. “I suppose it’s my turn to collect grubs.”

“Not today,” he said. “We should head inside and not push our luck being exposed like this.” His voice had turned serious. Break time was over.

“Canned tuna for dinner again, then,” she said with an exaggerated sigh.

“We can dress it up with ramen noodles.”

“What, you’re not willing to splurge on macaroni and cheese?”

He smiled and kissed her. “Do I know how to wine and dine a woman or what?”

“Well, at least we have wine.”

Dimitri hid the kayak in the jungle, leaving it inflated and ready so they could use it later to row to the other island, then he grabbed his fishing gear and followed her up the path, wiping away their footprints in the sand as he went. The coming evening rain would take care of the rest.

Inside the cave, she witnessed a subtle shift in Dimitri’s demeanor and recognized it as the return of his darker self as he braced himself for the coming tale.

“I think this calls for something stronger than wine,” he said, making a beeline for the provisions. He grabbed the lone bottle of scotch. “Drink?”

She shook her head and settled in a camping chair in front of the folding table. He sat across from her. “So. Your sister and nephew,” she prompted.

“As I said, Sophia was eleven when we were recruited. We’d been orphaned—drunk driver in the other car—and had no extended family. Wards of the state. We were sent to an orphanage. If you know anything about Russian orphanages, I can promise, they’re even worse.” He cleared his throat. “Officials came looking for kids with high aptitude who could speak English and found us.” He paused, then added, “Our mother was American.”

Ivy startled at that. It had never occurred to her that he was part American—even legally so. If his mother was born in the US, he had a claim to citizenship.

“Montana,” Dimitri said in answer to her unasked question. “She ran away from home at sixteen. Ended up in West Berlin when she was nineteen. She was there for the music scene at first. Travel was allowed from West Berlin into the East with a visa. My mom had friends with family on the East side and made several visits. She met my father, who was from Grozny but serving in the Soviet military, in East Berlin.”

“So you’re Chechen and American.”

He shrugged. “The name Veselov is more Russian than Chechen, and to the best of my knowledge, I have no family in Chechnya. I was born in West Berlin. Raised in Moscow and trained to be an American. I’ve lived in the US since I was twenty-two. I really don’t know what I am.”

She shook her head. “Born in West Berlin. You could claim German citizenship too.”

“It would take some work to find my birth certificate, and I doubt the surname on the document is Veselov. You see, my mother never told me her last name or why she ran away. She promised she would, when I was older.” He shrugged. “Any paperwork that included her maiden name was lost when we became wards of the state—if not sooner.”

“You mean you don’t know if you still have family in Montana?”

“I probably do. When my parents died, I fantasized about grandparents or aunts and uncles who would claim us. But I gave up those dreams. Dreams are dangerous. Plus, when I was older, I started to suspect what she might’ve been running from, and that maybe her family wouldn’t be any better.”

She slid a hand across the table and gripped his fingers. His story was going to be a hell of a lot more painful to share than hers had been.

So her husband cheated on her with someone younger and prettier. Boo-fucking-hoo. Sometimes, all one needed was a bit of perspective.

“I was six months old,” Dimitri continued, “when my mother was granted a visa to bring me into East Berlin. At that point, she just…stayed. My parents married, and when my dad was discharged from the military, we all moved to Moscow. I don’t remember Berlin or anything about living in the former GDR. My first memories are in Moscow, around the time my sister was born.”

His grip on her fingers tightened. “When Sophia was six, bullies at school began harassing her because our mother was American, and my mother sat me down and told me it was my job to protect her. I was the boy and was tough like my dad. Bullies never messed with me. I vowed to my mother that no one would hurt Sophia under my watch.

“We were a typical happy family, with the slight oddity of having an American mother in the Soviet Union, until our parents died when I was eleven. After that, we were sent to the orphanage, and there were more bullies to contend with. But I kept my promise. After three years, when we were recruited into the embed program, it was…a huge relief. It wasn’t a home per se, but it wasn’t the hellhole we’d been in. In the program, we were safe. There were no more threats of separating Sophia and me. Food was plentiful and hearty. Our English was an asset, not a reason to pick a fight. We were proud, patriotic Russians.” He paused and held her gaze. “It’s important to remember, I do love the Russia of my childhood. Hell, I love Russia—the place and people—now. What I don’t love is what I was forced to do for the government, and that the country has returned to a dictatorship.”

He picked up the shot glass and stared at it without drinking. He set it back on the table. “By that time, the Soviet Union had fallen and the GRU was scrambling to figure out its role in a post-Cold War world. We were part of an offshoot shadow organization, a group eager to retry embedding Russians who could pass as Americans—a program that had largely ended in the seventies—but now was being revamped with extensive training and planning.

“My accent was cleaner than Sophia’s, but then, I’d had our mother longer. When I was seventeen, how-to-be-an-American school took backstage to the more exciting stuff—how to fight. How to shoot. Tradecraft in all forms. I was good at it—better than Sophia—but at that point, I was less enchanted with the eventual goal. The training was fun, but the idea of living amongst Americans—my mother’s people—and spying on them didn’t sound great.

“When I was nineteen, after a six-week test trip to the US where I was able to pass flawlessly, I asked to be released from the program. The powers that be weren’t happy. After all, they’d invested years and money on both Sophia and me, and we were the strongest contenders in the program. I was supposed to be just over a year out from my permanent assignment. Initially, they wanted me to establish my identity, then after a few years, join the US Navy. They wanted me to try to get on a SEAL team.”

He picked up the shot glass again and this time drank half. He held the glass up to the light. “If I were a good Russian, I’d drink vodka.” His mouth pinched as he glared at the glass. “But here I am with scotch.” He met Ivy’s gaze. “Because I balked, Sophia was beaten with a hockey stick. My hockey stick. I’d promised my mom that no one would hurt Sophia under my watch, and then a sadistic bastard beat her, because of me.”

“It’s not your fault. Your situation was impossible—”

He cut her off. “Why do you blame yourself for your husband’s cheating?”

“Touché.”

He finished his shot and set the glass in the center of the table. “The bastard who hurt her miscalculated. He’d just spent five years training me to fight with whatever was at hand. And to pick locks. Climb walls. Track data. Hack computers. You name it. I was a fucking master of tradecraft. So I used what I’d learned to find out where he lived. Late one night, I escaped our compound and paid him a visit. I brought my hockey stick and gave him a lesson in the sport. Then I told him I’d finish my training and do my job, but Sophia was out. She was to be removed from the program. Move her to a nice apartment and maybe she could go to regular school, like other sixteen-year-old girls. I also told him that if he ever hurt Sophia again, I’d be back, but next time, I’d bring a puck.”

Dimitri cleared his throat. “Sophia was moved out of the facility. They didn’t give her an apartment like I wanted. She went into foster care. The family was decent. I was permitted to see her once a month—I needed to make sure the GRU wasn’t punishing her for my actions. When my training was complete, I became Parker Reeves. I didn’t see Sophia again for three years.”

His eyes darkened, and she wondered what he was leaving out. He cleared his throat. “That visit, when I was twenty-five, was the last time I saw her.”

How awful to have only one family member in the world and be cut off from that person for a decade.

He grabbed the bottle of scotch and poured himself another shot. “During my visit, Sophia was raped by the same man who’d beaten her when she was sixteen. He made me listen to her screams. He was higher up in the organization then. No way could I retaliate and expect Sophia to live.”

Ivy wanted to cover her ears, to hide from the horror of his story. To hide from the pain in his voice, the pain Sophia must have suffered. Instead, she poured herself a shot, knocked it back, and grimaced at the burn.

She lifted her gaze from the empty glass. His blue eyes were unguarded, showing all the pain he must’ve had to cloak when he lived as Parker Reeves.

“Am I the first person you’ve ever shared this with?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. For telling me.”

He studied his full shot glass, saying nothing.

She could feel him withdrawing, but he wasn’t done yet. She braced herself to bear witness to more of his pain even as she nudged him to continue. “Have you been able to stay in touch with Sophia?”

He nodded. “She’d learned all the codes in the training, and we’d spent our evenings developing our own system. We’d known we’d be separated in the US and wanted to be able to keep track of each other without our handlers knowing.”

“How did you communicate?”

“The Internet is a spy’s best friend. Millions of blogs, news reports, op-eds, published weekly. Embedded within articles were coded messages. All I needed was to search for keywords to find the story and use my decoder ring to decipher the message.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “I’m calling bullshit on the decoder ring.”

He smiled in halfhearted amusement. “Close enough. The key depended on the date the story was posted among other factors. And on rare occasions, we used the dark web for more direct communication.” He sat up straight in his chair and rolled his wide shoulders. “About five years ago, during a dark web chat, she told me she’d been raped again by the same man. This time, she was pregnant.”

His gaze was far away. She imagined he saw the computer terminal where his sister’s words appeared on the screen and was flooded with the same emotions now as he’d felt then.

His eyes focused once again. “She was ecstatic when Yulian was born. She finally had family. A life. Someone to live for. Not just exist. Since she was sixteen, she’d been used as a tool to control me. Yulian gave her joy and purpose.” He shrugged. “Of course, Yulian gave them yet another weapon against me. His father and his conception don’t factor into my feelings for the boy. I love the little guy with all the love I have for my sister. For my parents.”

His eyes teared, and Ivy’s followed suit. He cleared his throat. “The ability to love, that’s basic humanity, but it’s also a human need. I’m not a sociopath. I need that connection as much as the next person, but forming friendships and relationships as Parker Reeves was impossible. Every person I met, I was betraying in one way or another. There’s only one person in my world who’s always known exactly what I am and who I’ve never betrayed. My sister. She and her son are the only people I can love, so I’ve poured everything I’ve got into them. My family.”

He bolted from the chair and paced away. He ground the palm of his hand into his cheek. “But the mere fact that I care about them has always been a threat to their very existence.”

He paced back to the table and reached for the bottle of scotch but then withdrew his hand and shook his head. Finally, he puffed out a breath. “This is harder than I thought it would be. Putting it all into words.”

“I’m sorry.” The phrase was paltry consolation. He wanted to stop spilling his heart, and she wanted nothing more than for him to continue. She rose from her seat, circled the table, and slipped her arms around his waist. She pulled him to her and pressed her cheek to his chest, holding him. She offered nothing more than comfort, something she suspected he hadn’t received since his parents were alive.

He was stiff against her for a moment, then his arms wrapped around her back and he tucked his face into her neck. A low sob escaped.

Her heart opened to his grief, and she cried with him, her tears an extension of his. They stood in the dim cave for a long time, her arms around his waist, holding him more than he held her.

Gratitude that he could accept her comfort surged inside her. That she could be his emotional conduit. Everything flowed through her, including strong emotions of her own for Dimitri. He needed to receive love as much as he needed to give it.

He lifted his head and met her gaze, unabashed by his tears. His strength in his willingness to show what some fools called weakness triggered a rush of awe.

He was the strongest man she’d ever met.

But then, it was safe to say she’d never met anyone like Dimitri Veselov. In the short time she’d known him, in spite of everything, she’d come to respect him. And now, she was shocked to realize, she trusted him too. With her life, but also—and this was where things got scary—with her heart.

She searched his gaze, taking in the pain in his eyes, and beneath it, a new calm. “Thank you,” he said. “I needed that more than you can possibly know.”

But she suspected she did know. He had a lifetime accumulation of needing that. Her crying jag in the wake of her marriage falling apart was nothing compared to the emotions he’d bottled up for the more than twenty years since his parents’ deaths.

He gave her a wry smile. “I’ve never even met Yulian. I’ve just seen a few photos over the years. I suppose that sounds crazy.”

“Not at all. I didn’t have to meet my sister Laurel’s daughter to love her. I loved that baby from the moment Laurel told me she was pregnant.”

He pulled her tight against him—this time, he was the one doing the primary holding—for a long squeeze. Then he pressed his lips to her neck and released her.

He stepped back and dropped his gaze to the table, but the unseeing stare was back. She could tell he wasn’t thinking about the bottle of scotch or the table. She suspected in his mind, he wasn’t in the cave at all.

“When presented with the opportunity to kill off Parker Reeves last fall, I took it. I figured Sophia and Yulian would be safe if everyone believed I was dead.” His gaze focused again, meeting hers. “Except they didn’t believe it. I told Luke Sevick I wouldn’t return to Russia. I knew he’d have to tell investigators. What I didn’t expect was someone at the GRU would get wind of it. An informant had to be privy to the investigation because there’s no way the US would share that information with Russia. I don’t know where the mole is—they could be in the FBI, CIA, DIA. Hell, it could be someone in the Coast Guard, but I’m guessing the list of those who knew the details of my conversation with Luke was damn short.”

“But someone in Russia found out, and Sophia and Yulian were back in danger,” Ivy said.

“Even worse than before. Because now I was a spy who didn’t return to the fold once his cover was blown. I was—am—a traitor on both sides. A man without a country.”

He swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed with the effort. “They were both beaten. Yulian’s arm was broken. Sophia had broken ribs and clavicle. They knew…”—he took a slow breath—“they knew she could communicate with me. Knew I wouldn’t be able to resist checking for a message from her. So she sent one, passing on clear instructions: report in to receive new orders, or Yulian would lose a finger. One per day. On the eleventh day, they’d start on hers. And on the twenty-first day, they’d both be shot.”

She wanted to hold him again but could tell he wanted physical space, so she stepped away, to fight the urge.

“I followed instructions and received orders to find the AUUV.”

“But the job—following orders—isn’t that simple anymore,” Ivy said.

“No. Not simple at all. They don’t trust me to deliver, and I’m useless as an embed now. The only thing I’m good for is—” He stopped short, took another breath, then continued. “The only thing I’m good for is one last mission. I have no incentive if they’re just going to repeat the cycle of threats and harm to keep me in line. Knowing Sophia and Yulian face ongoing torture is worse than giving up. So we struck a deal. I’ll deliver the AUUV, and Sophia and Yulian will be freed.”

“Where will they go?”

“I’ve set aside money for them, and a place to hide. Enough that they can start over with new identities.” He glanced around the cave, his gaze landing on the stockpile of supplies. “When you spend your entire adult life biding your time looking for an escape, you have time to plan.”

“But you won’t join them.”

“No. They agreed to give up their leverage against me if I surrender myself for trial. And by trial, I mean immediate execution. No way would the people I’m dealing with waste time with legal proceedings. These men aren’t part of the visible—official—GRU. They’re in the shadows of the shadows. I honestly don’t know who’s pulling my strings at this point.”

“What about Yulian’s biological father? Is he involved?”

“No. He’s dead.” His flat tone didn’t invite follow up questions. “So there you have it. That’s why I abducted you. When Ulai told me two months ago that you were coming to Palau to map Peleliu, I knew you were my only hope.

“I’m going to accomplish one thing before I die. I will get my sister away from the bastards who’ve been running us since we were kids. To do that, I need CAM, which means I needed you.”

He took a step toward her. “I know you intend to steal the AUUV away from me once we find it.”

Another step planted him firmly in front of her. All the emotions he’d shared were now cloaked. His eyes were cold in a way she’d never glimpsed before. Here was the hardened spy he’d kept hidden from her. “Don’t forget, I have nothing left to live for, so simply threatening me with a gun won’t work. I can’t let you have the AUUV, not when Sophia and Yulian’s freedom hangs in the balance. So if you plan to take it, you’d better be prepared to shoot me. My unequivocal death is the only thing that will save them at this point.”