returning all trash to the large white bag and carefully folding the top down, once then twice.
“A little.” I took the last sip of nearly cold coffee as I steered with one hand. “Probably less than you since you’ve studied it. What I picked up isn’t exactly for use in polite company.” It was a fairly good bet that he knew more proper Russian than I did. I could get my point across, but it would be a hard, ungrammatical road. My fluency was in the language of the job and those were not pretty words. “Our father’s from Russia. Our mom was too.”
“Was?” he repeated neutrally.
“She died.” I crumpled the cup and let it drop from my hand. “A long time ago.”
He considered that with eyes on a distant point; then he shook his head. “Your mother, not mine. I never had a mother or a father.” His gaze moved to fix on me as he went on implacably. “Or a brother.”
Hey, square one . . . How you doing?
It shouldn’t have hit me as hard as it did. Since we’d pulled him out of that place, I’d known it was going to be an uphill battle. I’d known and I still knew, but . . . ah, fuck. “Eyes like yours aren’t a dime a dozen, Misha,” I said quietly. I didn’t know if he was listening to me or not as he sat beside me as still as a stone, but I pushed on as best I could. I was working without a script, flailing in unknown territory. My line of work hadn’t done much to train me in the ways of gentle persuasion. Now I had to learn the hard way, and at a time it had never been more important that I not fail. “They took you when you were seven. We were on a beach riding horses, and this man”—I swallowed against a nightmare that was as fresh now as it had been then—“this goddamn son of a bitch with a gun took you.”
“Horses.” It wasn’t said in a questioning tone, but more in one of contemplation.
I didn’t care how it was said. He was listening. He was hearing me. I grabbed on to the sliver of optimism and refused to give it up. “Yeah, we had horses. They were Christmas presents.” I didn’t think it was necessary to tell him they’d both died the same day he was taken. It was a detail that wouldn’t help him to hear. It wouldn’t do much for me either.
“What kind of horses?” He was curious despite himself, poor damn kid—my poor goddamn brother.
It’d been so long that I couldn’t recall if they’d been Morgans or Quarterhorses. “Harry and Annie. Annie was yours. She was a sorrel mare, a tiny and frisky thing. Harry was a bay gelding, a big lovable guy.” It might’ve been that Harry loved apples like all other horses, but Annie liked only carrots. Could be Annie wanted the soft, sweet velvet between her nostrils rubbed while Harry liked his ears scratched. I never had the opportunity to find out the small details of affection before they lay dying on the sand. “We rode them to the beach. We talked about . . . oh, hell . . . kids’ things. Who was the hero and who was the sidekick.” I flashed him a look of mock annoyance. “Somehow you were always the hero. Go figure.”
He gave me a look of his own—utter and complete dismissal. The curiosity had vanished. “That’s a story you should tell your brother, not me. If he’s alive.” Resting his head back against the seat, he ended without emotion. “If there ever was a brother.”
I didn’t lose my temper, not at him. He was a victim in all of this. I saved my anger for those responsible. “Can you drive?” I asked abruptly.
He straightened, startled by the curt question, then said, “What did you—”
I cut him off. “Can you drive?”
Nodding slowly, he said with a trace of uncertainty, “Theoretically.”
Whatever that meant, it would have to be good enough. “Fine. Take the wheel.” As he hesitated, I took his hand and put it on the steering wheel before twisting around to reach the duffel bag behind my seat. Ignoring the sudden weaving of the car, I searched until I found what I was looking for. Sitting back up, I reclaimed the wheel just in time to keep us from riding up the ass of a semi. “Whoa.” I applied a light foot on the brake and peeled Michael’s hand free of the wheel. “Thanks. I’ve got it now.”
Blinking and a little pale, he said with faint dismay, “It’s harder than it looks.”
“Most things are, kiddo.” And that was perhaps the truest thing I’d ever said. Without any further comment, I dumped the picture frame in his lap. He stared at the back of it for a moment. The crisp black velvet had the sheen of a smugly healthy cat and he ran his fingers along it in a stroking motion. Thanks for the Christmas present, Dad, I thought with grim satisfaction. It’s going to help me after all.
It was the portrait of a knife-edged moment lost in the greedy maw of time; two children who could’ve grown up to become anything at all. Instead one was now a criminal and the other a teenager lost, in body and mind. And both of us might very well be damaged beyond repair. All that and more was waiting behind velvet.
“Turn it over,” I commanded softly, hoping what was at once painful and wonderful to me might trigger something similar in him.
With one last petting motion, he did. There we were . . . in all our glory. And it was a genuine glory, despite the ache that hit me every time I saw it. I didn’t know what I would see in his face as he took it in. An explosion of memory that opened a floodgate in his mind? No, I didn’t think it would be that easy; nothing in life ever was. The most I could realistically hope for was a small sliver of recognition or a flash of yearning for something just beyond his reach—the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, that he knew something was there even if he didn’t know what that something was.
I didn’t get any of those. What happened was a shade to the left of that and one step lagging. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but in many ways it was close to what I’d expected. You know what they say: Expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. Not so. Expect the worst and find out your imagination is sorely lacking; that was my philosophy.
Confusion was the primary emotion that washed across skin that saw far too little sun. He truly hadn’t believed there was a brother at all, much less one who could be him. “He doesn’t look that much like me,” he murmured with automatic denial. The same finger that traced the velvet now touched the glass gingerly. “Just the eyes, that’s all.”
“Isn’t that enough?” He didn’t want to look past age-regressed features or the light hair of childhood. He wanted to hold on to something familiar, no matter how horrible the familiar was. It was understandable, the fear, but I wasn’t going to allow him to overlook the more obvious similarities. “That and the age. How many seventeen- year-old kids in southern Florida are running around with those eyes and are lacking parents? Go on, Misha, take a guess. How many?” It was a coincidence even too great for him to deny . . . or so I thought.
He hesitated, then turned the frame over again, the picture safely hidden against his legs. Our history was dismissed just that quickly. “I don’t know that I’m seventeen.” Strangely, it seemed as if he’d been about to say something else at first. What did finally come out was meant to be logical, I could tell, but it had more of a stubborn ring to my ears. It made the corner of my mouth twitch upward until the meaning of those obstinate words hit me.
“What do you mean by that?” I demanded. The semi was still ahead of us, ambling along, slowly and placidly, like an elderly elephant on Prozac. “Are you saying you don’t know how old you are?” I didn’t know why that surprised me. The Institute undoubtedly didn’t spend much on birthday cakes or clowns with balloons . . . unless the clown was hiding a hypodermic in one Day-Glo orange glove.
“No, I don’t.” He pushed up a sleeve that had slid down over the heel of his hand. “Nearly old enough for graduation, that’s all I know.”
“Graduation? What . . .” I wasn’t able to finish. The widening of Michael’s forward-facing eyes had me jerking my attention back to the road in front of the car. The back of the truck had opened to reveal five men, four of whom were wearing disturbingly familiar tan pants. It was hard to believe that I’d come to a point in my life where the sight of a pair of khakis or passing the Gap gave me the same surge of adrenaline than a hit attempt on my former boss once had. Marginally worse than the pants were the guns pointed in our direction. HK assault rifles were serious weapons, and I wondered if the concern was to get Michael back alive or simply get him back period.
The fifth man answered my question by pointing at us and saying something I couldn’t hear through the glass. It was our pal from the van. He was dressed this time and not in goddamn khakis either. A dark gray suit and black shirt set him apart from the others almost as much as the ferocious intelligence in his dark eyes. Then I decided to stop with the fashion assessments and try avoiding a shitload of bullets instead.
Yanking the wheel to one side with one hand, I took the car into the emergency lane. With my free hand I grabbed Michael’s shoulder and shoved him down into the small space between the seat and the dashboard. “But
