Chapter Seventeen #2
“Because that’s what we used to do. Trace asked me to look in on his place if I was in town. A long time ago, Marc and I lived in that building too.”
“And you talked to Trace a week or so ago?”
“Texted.”
“A text can be faked.”
“What?”
“It could have been anyone on the other end. What did your text to him say?”
Okay, Maggie thinks, that’s enough. “It said none of your goddamn business. Let me ask you the same thing: When was the last time you talked to Trace?”
“Here. In Dubai. Five months ago. The day you called him.”
Maggie frowns. “I didn’t call Trace five months ago.”
“That’s what he told me.” A tear runs down Nadia’s cheek. “He was upset. He said he was going to fly to Baltimore. That he had to see you in person.”
Maggie shakes her head.
“I went with him to the airport,” Nadia says. “I kissed him goodbye at Terminal 1. I watched him walk through security…” Nadia stops and looks away. “And that’s it. Trace never came back. He never called me again. He just… vanished.”
Silence.
“What did you say when you called him?” Nadia asks.
“I didn’t call him, Nadia.”
“And what happened when you met with him in Baltimore?”
“I didn’t meet with him in Baltimore.”
“So Trace was lying to me?”
Maggie doesn’t know how to answer that.
Nadia lifts her hand and points to the emerald ring. “He proposed, you know.”
“I had no idea.”
“We were going to get married.”
It made no sense. It made perfect sense.
Trace had always professed to be a confirmed bachelor, that he wasn’t built for long-term relationships, and his past actions more than bore that out. So had Nadia changed him?
Could be.
Nadia made for a pretty amazing package. Maybe Trace had fallen for real this time. He gave her his mother’s ring, for crying out loud. Maggie couldn’t get over that. Trace’s mother’s ring on Nadia’s finger.
Wow.
So maybe, in that way at least, Trace had changed. What do they say in finance? Past performance is not an indicator of future results.
“Then suddenly,” Nadia continues, “after Trace goes to see you—”
“He didn’t see me, Nadia—”
“—my fiancé vanishes and supposedly ran off to help people in Bangladesh or somewhere else too remote to reach him. Not one word to me. Not a goodbye. Not a breakup. Nothing. Don’t you find that strange?”
Maggie doesn’t reply.
“And no one knows any details about his whereabouts. If he’s working for a relief organization, no one can tell me which one. No one sees him or communicates with him. Meanwhile the last place he said he was going was, well, to visit you. So I start to wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“You left WorldCures—”
“My mother—”
“I know. She was ill. But come on, Maggie. You left WorldCures. You had some idea of what was going on. Let’s not pretend.”
That accusation again. What’s the old joke her father used to tell?
“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.” Had she intentionally looked away from the finances?
Probably. And yes, she knew that Marc and Trace were risk-takers, that they were pushing boundaries, that they were frustrated by the normal protocols that slowed down medical advancements.
They wanted to speed up their progress, ends-justify-the-means kind of guys, and when those two were both together, when you blended Marc’s and Trace’s passion, the result bordered on the toxic.
And there had been that surgery, that awful surgery here in Dubai…
“Do you see how it looks?” Nadia continues. “You leave WorldCures—
and then on his very last humanitarian mission, someone sells out your husband.”
“Oleg Ragoravich probably.”
“That was my thinking too,” Nadia says. “At first. Which is why I made it my business to get close to him.”
“How?” Maggie asks, and as soon as she does, she realizes how stupid the question is. No need for subtlety. “You, what, seduced him?”
“The man I loved had vanished. I would do anything to get him back.”
Sounds like a yes. “So how did it happen?”
“Like a lot of oligarchs, Ragoravich had made Dubai a big part of his life. I made sure we crossed paths. At this very club, as a matter of fact.”
“Jesus.”
“Are you judging me again?”
Maggie shakes her head. “No, go on.”
“I wanted him to take me back to Russia.”
“Which he did.”
“Yes. I thought I would find answers there.”
“And did you?”
“No, not really. I searched Oleg’s computers and files. I don’t think he had anything to do with Marc or Trace. So I kept asking myself: If Oleg isn’t behind all this, who else could it be?”
Maggie makes a face. “And the answer was me?”
“I couldn’t forget Trace’s face getting on that plane. He was so shaken. Scared, even. I’d never seen him like that. Don’t you see how it looked? Trace gets a call. He’s upset. He drops everything and flies to you and then, poof, no one ever sees him again.”
Nadia gives Maggie a challenging look. Maggie shakes it off.
“I had nothing to do with that,” Maggie says. “Trace is my friend. We were in combat together.”
Nadia’s eyes continue to bore into hers. “I just want to find the man I love. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“Of course.”
“So now I’m in Russia, with Oleg. I’m learning about how he had his hand in all these medical charities. But I’m getting nowhere with my original mission.”
“Finding Trace.”
“Yes. But I’m starting to wonder what you’re hiding.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“Meanwhile Oleg, he keeps saying how he loves me, but I’m too skinny. When a man says you’re too skinny, well, you know…”
Maggie knows. They both know. Most women know.
“So Oleg, he was already looking into finding a discreet surgeon for some plastic surgery of his own. When I heard that, I suggested that at the same time, hey, I could get bigger boobs. He loved the idea.”
“Big surprise,” Maggie says.
The two women share a knowing smile. Men. They don’t change much.
“So now I put myself in charge of finding the surgeon.”
“And you made sure that I got selected?”
“Yes.”
“So you could get me to Oleg’s weird palace and hope, what, I’d crack?”
“Yes,” Nadia says. Simple as that. “I’d control the environment.
You’d be isolated, out of your element, off-balance.
I wanted to confuse you, make you question everything.
The tattoo was a big part of that. By the way, I saw the tattoo on Marc in a pool here in Dubai.
He and Trace told me the story about how he got it in college.
I had other things planned for you, and if they didn’t work, I planned on directly confronting you—like I am now. ”
“You had other things planned?”
“Yes.”
“More head games?”
“Yes. You were supposed to stay longer. Your first demand was two weeks.”
Maggie remembers. “So what went wrong, Nadia? Why was everyone suddenly in a panic after the operations?”
“I don’t know. But it had something to do with Oleg.”
“What?”
“From what I could make out, he ran after the surgery. I heard gunfire. A couple of guys got shot and killed, I think. Ivan wanted me out of the way, so I asked them to fly me back home.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t kill you.”
Nadia smiles. “Not luck. I took precautions. Killing me would have made it worse for them.”
Maggie thinks about it for a moment. They’re missing something…
“Wait, why would Oleg Ragoravich want facial surgery anyway?”
“Oleg kept making jokes it would make him prettier.”
“But we don’t believe that.”
“We don’t,” Nadia agrees.
“Oleg wanted to disguise himself. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“And if that was the plan, why would he run?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia says. “I also don’t know how you escaped. How did you get out?”
Maggie shakes her head. She’s not ready to go there just yet.
A man dressed in, yep, a black suit opens the curtain. He says something to Nadia in Arabic. She nods.
“I have to go.”
“So now what?” Maggie asks.
“I’m not sure. I don’t even understand why you ended up coming to Dubai.”
“The same reason you did,” Maggie says. “To get answers. To find Trace.”
“And maybe also find…?” Nadia asks, her voice with a little tease in it.
Maggie isn’t about to go there. “And maybe also find a way to bring down this whole enterprise.”
Nadia still has a hint of a smile on her face. “So the two of us should work together?”
“Yes.”
“Except, Maggie, I don’t trust you.”
“Perfect,” Maggie says, “because I don’t trust you either.”