Chapter 21 - Zara
The photographs, spread across the study desk in overlapping rows, stare back at me, organized by the three recurring background environments.
The rough stone interior, the coastal-adjacent exterior shots, and what may be a covered outdoor space—a terrace or courtyard—that appears in eleven of the forty-three images consistently.
Each photograph has a number penciled on its back in my handwriting and a corresponding entry in the notebook that catalogs every little detail—light angle, vegetation, material, visible horizon line, the quality and color of the sky.
Here is what I know: they are somewhere Mediterranean.
The sunlight and plants tell me so. The stone construction belongs to a time older than the mid-century, belonging to a place that existed before tourism found it.
The coastal horizon visible in four of the exterior shots shows a specific curvature that, when I overlay it against nautical charts of the Aegean and the Adriatic, gives me certain coordinates.
Greece was one of them.
I got the sub-region wrong.
My methodology was sound, conclusion close. And I will only get closer.
Mikhail is curved over the adjacent table, his own operational reports from deployed teams to cross-reference location data, communication updates from contacts across southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, all spread out before him.
His brow is furrowed, mouth a straight line as he works.
He passes me a document across the table without speaking, a satellite cross-reference for a coastal zone in the Ionian that one of his teams flagged overnight. Our fingers almost brush against each other as I take the file, the proximity sizzling like it always does.
I should be used to it by now.
Taking the document without deliberately looking at him, I keep my eyes focused on the file. Looking at him will lead to one thing, and I cannot afford that right now if I want to use the next twenty minutes.
By the third day of this dance, I call Elena.
She is the person I call when my approaches have become the problem rather than the solution, when I need a mind that looks at the same evidence from the outside and finds the corner I cannot see because I am standing too close to the center of it.
She picks up on the second ring, and forgoes any greeting. “You’re back from Greece.”
“I’m back from the wrong part of Greece,” I sigh.
She pauses briefly, and I can almost see her pursing her lips. “Tell me what you have.”
I give her all the analysis: the light data, curvature and the sort. The sound of her nails clacking against the keyboard comes through the line before I have finished the second sentence, and the typing continues steadily as my words keep pouring.
“The Ionian range is interesting,” she murmurs. “There are three island groups in that window that have the stone type you’re describing and the orientation. The smallest one has almost no room for tourism, which is—”
“—the exact place that would be chosen in this scenario,” I finish.
“Yes.” She breathes down the line, before her voice softens a smidgen. “How are you?”
The sudden shift in her voice is so weirdly abrupt and so Elena that I laugh—actually laugh a full-belly giggle, and the sound of it in the tense room is so foreign that Mikhail looks up from across the table.
I turn slightly away from him. “I’m functional,” I tell her.
“That is not what I asked.”
“I know. It’s the answer I have right now.”
She sighs. “I’ll send the Ionian data to you in an hour. Be careful, Zara. Whoever is feeding you misdirection has resources and patience, and those are a more dangerous combination than whoever is just trying to stop you.”
After I hang up, my phone stays clenched in my hand for a moment. A strange warmth blooms in my chest that I’ve never felt—at least, not by anything Elena has said. It’s weird hearing her warn me so blatantly. It’s a weird kind of sweet. A good weird.
“What did she say?” Mikhail asks from across the table.
“She’s sending Ionian data,” I narrate. “And she confirmed that I had been misdirected. Whoever sent the package knew enough about me to predict which conclusions I’d reach from the photographs.”
He is quiet for a moment, his pen still against the paper in front of him. “Which means they also knew the photographs would produce a result close enough to be convincing.”
“Close but wrong. Designed to move me somewhere specific without letting me know anything.”
Our eyes meet across the table and the truth finally comes clean in front of our eyes.
He holds my gaze for one second more, something searing behind them that he hides immediately.
“Eat something,” he grumbles, which is not what the look was about and we both know it. He can try to hide it or lie to me, but I’ve grown way too familiar with his bullshit by now.
I pull the next photograph toward me, taking a bite out of the ham sandwich he brought a few hours ago, sitting at the edge of the desk.
Control, I think, is a practice and I’m rusty at it.
By the fourth day, it feels like waiting is all I do.
All that patience has become a living, breathing thing in the penthouse—building during the long stretches of silence between updates, disappearing briefly when a message comes through from one of Mikhail’s deployed teams, then appearing again when the message turns out to be nothing of substance.
I have become acutely sensitive to it, attuned to the shifts. Every notification sound my phone makes causes my heart to start racing, palms to become balmy.
My body preempts the content of the notification, my pulse speeding up in the moment between the sound and the screen lighting up as my hands dart toward the phone urgently.
Twice today it has been Elena with additional Ionian data. Once it has been an automated reminder about a professional deadline that belongs to another Zara Kahn, in a life before all this. Once it has been Mikhail’s second-in-command updating the status of the Corfu surveillance.
Each time I pick up the phone, the cocktail of hope and dread runs through me. Hope arrives first like a lit match, dread following half a second behind like the draft that decides whether the match stays lit or goes out.
The knock at the study door at two in the afternoon makes me tip over my coffee cup.
Turns out to be Greger, holding some documents delivered from the secure courier Mikhail uses for certain transfers.
As I flail, trying to keep papers away from the little splatters of leftover, diluted coffee, my hands shake, the sudden appearance and dissolution of adrenaline nearly making me tachycardic. Thankfully, Greger either does not notice or has developed the professional tact of pretending he doesn’t.
“Thank you,” I mutter, and the steadiness in my voice costs more than it should.
After he leaves I sit for a moment with both hands wrapped around the righted coffee cup and finally come face to face with the fact that I’m losing grip on reality bit by bit.
This amount of anxiety is not okay. It has built up across weeks of sustained danger and unresolved uncertainty until it has now become a new normal for my body. I have been in enough high-stress field situations to recognize the difference between being alert and—whatever this is.
Jumping up and damn near spilling coffee on everything because I can’t let loose.
I am holding it together, but I’m sure Mikhail can see how poorly.
He comes in at intervals throughout the day, making sure they don’t feel like supervised visits by asking a question about the Ionian data, or a document, with coffee placed at the edge of the desk sneakily.
He asks me once if I have slept, dark eyes peering into my soul.
“Enough,” I mutter, not looking him in the eye.
“That’s not what I asked,” he replies flatly.
“It’s the only answer I have,” I tell him, which is the same answer I gave Elena, and he knows it too.
Thankfully, he doesn’t push it, just setting the coffee down and leaving. Picking a random photograph up and staring at it for another hour, I think about him as an escapist fantasy.
“Zara.”
I don’t even know when he’s returned, his steps not registering at all. Snapping out of my reverie, I look at him, standing in the doorway with a weird expression on his face.
His eyes are tight at the corners, mouth carefully placed in a neutral line. It’s a mask.
Something has happened.
I put the photograph down.
“What is it?”
He crosses the room and stands across the desk from me, holding my gaze all the while without letting anything come to surface.
“My team in the Ionian. The location flagged from the Corfu surveillance cross-reference,” he pauses to let it sink in.
“We got a lead. There has been a sighting. It’s recent, within the last seventy-two hours, of two people matching your parents’ descriptions.
The location is consistent with the stone architecture in the photographs and the coastal horizon data from the images Elena identified. ”
My lips part but nothing comes out. My heart climbs up my throat, making it hard for me to swallow.
“How confident?” I push out finally, voice gritty.
“Confident enough to make a move.”
My gaze falls to the photograph on the desk, the one of my mother near the south-facing window, the light falling across her shoulder so reminiscent of the Ionian range before Elena had even confirmed it, her eyes patient and weary.
A matchstick sitting in my chest coldly for a very long time, just in the space of thirty seconds, begins to warm.
“What’s the plan?” I ask.
“We can move in forty-eight hours,” he informs me. “I want the surveillance confirmation before we commit to it.”
I can only manage a nod, at a loss for words right now.
Hope rises through me slowly, warming me up from the inside, colored with a seed of dread.
My mother, in the photograph, looks at the window.
Forty-eight hours.