Perfect Opposite (26 page)

However hard I punched or scratched, his grip remained vice-like and it seemed like there was no chance of getting free
. He was dragging me backwards, still gripping me around the waist with one arm and muffling my cries with the other. I tried to dig my heels in, but they dragged along the ground just the same, and soon I was being manhandled up some steps and through a doorway into a narrow, unlit hallway.

He stopped when we reached a bright room on the right. The scene that confronted me took me completely by surprise and I stopped struggling, aghast.

The place was bustling with activity. A bunch of people were moving around, but they were all real quiet. A few of them were sitting around a table cluttered with laptops, cables and some other devices I didn't recognize. Down to a man, they were dressed in black flak jackets and bullet-proof vests, looking just like the special-forces guys I'd seen in action movies, all with guns of one kind or another strapped to their bodies.

In front of us, a grizzled, middle-aged man stood in front of a
small monitor, listening to some kind of transmission through a pair of headphones. He seemed completely absorbed by what he was watching as he stroked his long white mustache between two fingers.

“Boss, I found this kid
outside,” I heard my captor break the silence.

The older man turned around, looked me up and down, and then let out a violent curse. I looked away from his face
for a second, taken aback by the livid red scar that ran the length of his cheek. When I looked up again it was not at his face but the white lettering on the right side of his jacket. Frozen in place, I felt the color drain from my cheeks.

“Could someone please explain
what’s Navarov’s daughter doing here?” he barked.

When nobody answered,
the grizzled man shook his head and made a few decisive steps towards a door that apparently led to another room beyond.

“Get your a
ss over here.” he spoke to someone inside.

“What now?”

Hearing the voice that responded, I felt my knees turn to jelly.

When he entered the
room I blinked, hardly believing my eyes. Pain flared in my chest, as though something just broke inside. I was pretty sure it was my heart.

“Sasha?” Alex's voice came to me, but from a long way away. “How did you get in here?”

I didn’t answer. Completely stunned, I could only stare at his vest, or more accurately the white
inscription
imprinted
there. Just in front of my eyes...

It said
POLICE.

Chapter 1
3 - Somebody That I Used to Know

I didn’t manage to answer his question. Evidently some short circuit had occurred in my head as I tried to process this completely new reality. The sense of confusion that rocked my foundations gave way gradually to disbelief, and then an unfamiliar base feeling I could only describe as wrath. My body felt charged with electricity, as though a powerful storm were brewing inside me, setting my every nerve on edge like live wires. My eyes hovered somewhere near the police insignia on Alex’s vest and the silver badge around his neck, and try as I might, I couldn’t focus on anything else.

All of a sudden
, I felt an urge to laugh, and then I was overcome by it. Shaking my head helplessly, I lost myself in the feeling and what started as a nervous intake of air turned into near-hysterical hoots, so that gasping in enough air soon became difficult.

W
as there ever a bigger fool than me…

T
wo months I’d spent with Alex flashed before my eyes like scenes from a movie and every memory I pictured struck me like a new dagger through the heart. The man who still held me by one arm jerked me back and tightened his grip, probably in an attempt to silence me, but I didn’t feel the pain. Still gripped by hysterical laughter, as tears rolled down my cheeks, I brought one hand up to wipe my eyes.

“Let go of her,” Alex
shouted, pushing the guy aside and bundling me out of the room.

I didn’t resist, letting him lead me out of the room and down the dark hallway, but as soon as we were a few paces away
, I wriggled free of his hands and took a few rapid steps back. When my back hit a cold wall, I let my body slide down to the floor, feeling my legs tremble as they folded beneath me.

Closing my eyes, I raised my knees and buried my face in the space between them, muffled voices still reaching my ears from the room we’d just left.

“Team one stay in position...” someone's sharp voice was issuing orders.

“Keep
Sherazi and Navarov in sight at all times. We take no action until the merchandise is in the open…”

“Teams two and
three, confirm your location...”

“I repeat, don’t take any action until the merchandise appears... The transac
tion must be underway. If there’s no deal in progress, we have no case. Do you copy?”

As an unwitting observer, I was forced to listen as a sting operation went into full swing just a few hundred yards away, the main aim of which was apparently to put my father in prison.

“There is no merchandise. Not tonight,” I whispered mostly to myself, hugging my knees even tighter.

“I know. I tried to tell them, but the captain didn’t
want to listen,” Alex’s voice came low in the darkness.

A few minutes passed while we sat in the dark,
listening the voices from the room down the hall.

“Damn it, Princess..
. I told you to stay in the car.”

“And now I know why.”

“I'm sorry this is the way you had to find out.”

“Yeah, well... I'm sorry about a lot of things,” I raised my head and searched the darkness with my eyes “Just tell me...
How long?”

“Princess...”

“Stop it!” I snapped, “Stop calling me that and answer me! How long have you been plotting against us, hey?”

“I don’t want to go into details.”

“Right now I don’t care what you do or don’t want. You owe me that much at least, Alex. But I doubt that’s your real name.”

Several more minutes passed in a silence. I felt like I was at the bottom of a deep, dark well and that I mustn’t attempt to climb out for fear of the bad things waiting up on the outside.

“Just over two years,” he answered quietly.

I shut my eyes tight and bent my head down, struggling to imagine that I could have lived with an imposter for months. I slept with him. I fell in love with him.

I fell in love with a man who doesn't even exist.

From the very beginning he’d been acting a part, a mask conjured for one purpose only - to blast my life apart again, or what remained of it.

“Say something, please,” I felt his hand touch against my arm and realized he was now sitting close to me.

I was hit by an urge to back away, but couldn’t. I wanted to scream, strike out, shout that I hated him and wished he were dead, but ins
tead I went on sitting, inert. Alex moved his hand closer and wrapped it around my own, which suddenly felt very small.

“
You don’t look like a cop. “

“Yeah, I get that a lot.”

I wondered if it might be possible to love a person and hate them at the same time. On one hand, I felt an overwhelming desire to hurt him the way he’d hurt me, but another part of me longed to turn the clocks back half an hour, take hold of the girl who’d gotten out of the car and make her get back inside.

“Was anything you said true? How is it that Nikolai never doubted you? How…” I paused to gather the strength to continue,
then whispered, “How is it that I didn’t ever suspect you?”

“Well, sweetheart... it’s my job to make sure no one ever suspects.”

As he spoke, he covered my face with his hands and leaned forward, causing me such a rush of sorrow and torment that I thought I might drown in the feeling.

“And you're good at
what you do. One of the best, Nikolai said so himself once,” I spat the words out bitterly, backed away from him and dragged myself off the floor and onto my feet.

At a slow pace, I started in what I guessed was the direction of the
front door, but Alex was faster.

“You can’t go out there now, Khalil’s people are everywhere.”

“If you try to stop me I'll scream, and I’m sure that would spoil your little ambush,” I replied coldly.

Khalil was the last person on my mind
at that moment and all I wanted was to get as far away as possible. Alex looked at me for a few moments, then shook his head once and started to remove his bulletproof vest. When he pulled it over my head, I offered nothing in the way of protest. It felt like I’d used up my last ounce of strength when I’d forced myself to move away from him.

“Wait for me here. I'm going to tell them that I'm leaving and taking you home.
I’m no use to them here, anyway. Don’t go out there without me. Understand?”

I nodded and stood where I was, following Alex with my eyes as he moved towards the light coming from the room. As soon as he was gone, I grabbed the door handle and turned it to step outside.

Looking left and then right, I tried to figure out which way I should turn to get back to the car, but I was apparently too distraught to think rationally. Moving off the bare front porch and down the steps, I followed the path to a gate, which hung crookedly off its hinges in the artificial amber glow of the streetlamp nearby. Having to choose, I made the decision to walk downhill.

When I’d gone a little way, I stopped next to a yard surrounded by high c
oncrete walls and looked around. I was pretty sure I hadn’t come that way, which meant I was going in the wrong direction.

Turning
around, I saw Alex running towards me, signaling something with his hand. He was only a few feet away and I wondered why he was gesturing instead of calling out, but then I caught sight of a man’s silhouette on the wall across the street. The moonlight didn’t reveal much, so it was hard to make out any of his features, but I was pretty sure he was looking at me.

All of a sudden, my line of sight was broken entirely by Alex's body, which moved swiftly in front of me just a split second before a strange hissing sound pierced the air. I found myself
shoved down to the ground with force, gasping for air with Alex’s weight on top of me. He was squeezing me hard between his arms, covering me completely with his body, his face buried in my hair. Immediately, the night air resounded with gunfire.

“You’ll never learn to do what you're told, Princess,” he murmured, his voice somehow disconnected from the scene unfolding around us.

I felt his breath on my neck and thought I heard an indistinct whisper, but in all the chaos I couldn’t tell what he was trying to say, if anything. Closing my eyes, I could only stay pinned beneath him, fear flickering behind my eyes.

Car engines soon roared into life nearby, moving off at a frightening speed, followed by several police cars with their sirens wailing. A last crack of gunfire split the night from a distance, and then it was over; the blitzkrieg had ended as abruptly as it began. Loud but indistinct shouting was all that was left, coming from somewhere up the street.

“Looks like it's over,” I whispered and opened my eyes cautiously.

The way I was
lying, with one cheek pressed against the ground, I had a sideways angle on the street and could see two cops in the distance, running towards us. I was grateful for the warmth of Alex’s body because it offered me some measure of reassurance, but it was getting harder and harder to breathe as I lay beneath his weight.

“
Alex, you are crushing me.”

Breathing heavily, h
e pushed himself up a little and I used my hands to drag myself out from under him, deeply inhaling the cool night air. I looked up through the treetops to see a sky now full of stars, how many thousand pinpricks of light I couldn’t begin to guess.

“
It’s beautiful, huh?” I sighed, and rising slowly to my feet, turned around.

Alex
stayed where he was, lying face down on the grass, motionless.

“Alex?”

Startled by the lack of any reaction, I bent down and jerked his arm towards me, hard. When I loosened my grip on his hand it slipped from my own and landed with a thud on the sidewalk.

“Quit fooling around
and get up!”

I grabbed him by the shirt and started to shake him forcefully, seeing but not registering the red marks that were already staining my fingers.

“Alex! I’m serious!”

Air was escaping
my lungs in broken gasps, which slowly turned to sobs.

“Get up! Please, get up!”

My eyes had come to rest on a patch of wetness that was slowly spreading over his T-shirt, glistening now in the starlight. More shouts and sirens came from the distance, but I went on tugging at his shirt.

“You idiot!”
I screamed, “Why did you step in front of me?”

Someone grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me away, but I managed to
get free and throw myself down next to Alex.

“Don’t
you dare! Don’t you dare do this to me!” I yelled, shaking him with all my might. “Please, please, open your eyes!”

A firm pair of hands took me by the waist and lifted me off my feet,
dragging me away. I kicked out violently, not taking my eyes off Alex and a man kneeling now next to him, my vision blurred entirely by tears.

“
Where’s that goddamn medic?” the man shouted into the transmitter, “Andreyev is shot! I think he caught a sniper bullet!

“No! No! Let go of me!”
I screamed, but the hands gripped me more painfully.

“Stop it
, now!” said the sharp voice next to me, “You can’t do anything for him.”

No! It’s not true! It can’t be true! He’s lying!

“NOOOO!” I screamed into the night and my vision blurred completely, just before a thousand stars went out.

***

I lay curled up on the bed, looking at the same narrow crack in the wall that had held my gaze for days. It began at one corner of the room and spread out like a cobweb, branching out into several thinner, less distinct lines. I heard the door screech closed at the far side of the room and footsteps approach, but paid no attention to who entered, preferring to go on staring at the wall.

“Good morning!” came the familiar, chirpy voice, “How are we today?”

The same useless phrases were repeated day after day after day, whenever one of the nurses paid me a visit. As I had every time before, I only closed my eyes in response and hoped they’d soon see fit to leave again. There seemed no reason to reply to the inane questions they rained down on me every time they did their rounds.

When I’d woken up a few days earlier to a haze of delirium, brought on by the cocktail of tranquilizers they’d pumped into me, I had no idea where I even was. Groggy and disoriented, I thought I might still be in Alex’s apartment and that all the scenes of horror I remembered might be flashbacks from an awful nightmare. My resistance to the facts didn’t last too long, because the room that came into focus
was clearly part of a hospital and the infusion wire trailing from a needle in the back of my hand sealed it. And then, it hit me. He’s dead.

I wasn’t sure what happened after that, but I remember an impression of great commotion, with people in white coats clamoring to shine lights in my eyes or check my pulse. It was probably because I started to scream.