Chapter 7
the second location
LEXI
The elevator doors opened, and Clementine swished out into the lobby ahead of the security guys and me. “Come on! Keep up!”
I followed, but the guys got more and more twitchy as Clementine strode for the dark-glassed doors to the sunlit street.
“Miss Kaas,” Ueli said. “Current standard security protocols do not allow—”
“My cousin thinks I’m not a good driver,” she said with a flip of her moonlight blond hair. “He’s wrong. I’m an excellent driver. You have to be aggressive when driving so the other drivers will respect you.”
Dusha rounded in front of her and stopped dead in his tracks, standing so that she almost ran into his broad chest. “That’s not how it works at all, Miss Kaas.”
“Of course, it does. Everyone knows that.”
“Did you rent a convertible again?”
“And again, I say, of course. Everyone knows you need air exchange. America is full of sick buildings and hermetically sealed cars. Europe would never allow such stale, moldy environments.”
Dusha’s wide shoulders rose until they were practically around his ears. “Miss Kaas, surely you can see why convertibles are not allowed under our present heightened security protocols.”
“You’re always at DEFCON Five or whatever you call it. You swarm around him like attacking bees, all the time. You don’t allow Nico to live his life at all.”
I stepped backward, away from Clementine and Dusha, like a kid when Mom and her boyfriend were fighting. Nope, I was not getting in the middle of that. “Hey, we can just wait a minute for Nicolai. He’s probably right behind us.”
“His position is very different than yours. You can’t compare—” Dusha told Clementine.
“I can and I will. So he can never ride in an open car his whole life—”
“Maybe not. After the incident in Paris—”
“Everyone has ‘incidents’ in Paris. That’s not even unusual.”
They bickered, not fondly like an old married couple, but with the surgical ferocity of siblings, each going for vital organs with words like scalpels.
“Miss Kaas, Paris was very unusual in that—”
“Oh dear God, Dusha. You don’t have to tell me. But he can’t live his whole life cooped up in an SUV, being driven from one security-approved activity to the next.”
“That is not how we operate. You have to admit that. He went to the nightclub last night, where several of our operators were put in harm’s way, and God only knows what would’ve happened if the principal would have been in the garage when it happened.”
“Even at school, he was enrolled under that ridiculous pseudonym, and everyone pretended not to look at him or at me when we studied the Russian Revolution in World History and how to hold onto generational power. He can’t live his life with you black crows fluttering around him all the time!”
“His security is our responsibility.”
“Maybe if he were allowed to live his life, he wouldn’t have to ditch you people in order to have one night of fun.”
“Maybe you could tell him to stop doing that.”
Behind us, the elevator dinged. The people coming out skirted our heavily armed, arguing group and headed for the smoked-glass front doors.
Dusha slapped his hands on his thighs. “And it is different now that he has been officially recognized as—”
“Nip! Nope! Enough!”
“Miss Kaas!”
“You are not the boss of me, and you are not the boss of Lexi.” Clementine grabbed my elbow and yanked me against her side with surprising strength.
She wasn’t waify. She was wiry.
“We need to go shopping, Dusha, and we will go first to meet my Birkin rep and then to the couture consultation. Get out of our way.”
“Miss Kaas, I cannot in good conscience—”
“I said, move it. We’re leaving.”
I wanted to yell “Just kiss already!” at them, but becoming the target of their increasing exasperation seemed more dangerous than just standing here, watching them. Those two would totally turn on me.
“Security protocols are currently in place such that—” Dusha said, his voice lowering further.
“I don’t care. Lexi and I are going shopping right now.”
I might have to escape Clementine’s clutches rather than get in the car with her. Her crack about driving aggressively on the very congested streets around the Strip hotels was terrifying.
A tremor shot through every one of the security guys, and they touched their earpieces with a synchronicity that made them all look like extensions of the same controlling AI, and then they turned outward, encircling Clementine and me in a ring of strong, black-clad backs.
Some of the hotel reception staff ducked behind the counter. One concierge watched us warily, his legs braced and his arms spread as if he were deciding which way to bolt, but the other guy rolled his eyes and leaned against the wall, checking his phone.
Clementine stomped her foot on the carpeting. Her grip on my arm loosened. “Are you serious? Did you call a code just to win the argument? Because that’s cheating.”
Behind us, Ueli muttered, though not to us, “What happened?”
Just a quick downbeat of time, one signal from Ueli, and Dusha wrapped one arm around Clementine and tucked her head, grappling her like a squirming cat at the vet.
Clementine shouted, “Ew! Get off me!”
Ueli grabbed me with a lunge and lifted me off my feet with one arm, mashing me against his side.
“Which way?” Dusha asked Ueli, ignoring Clementine’s flailing.
I tried not to fall because Ueli’s thick arm was around my shoulders and about to slip up around my throat.
He wouldn’t strangle me, right?
But if Ueli accidentally killed me, that sure would solve Nicolai’s problem of the divorce and annulment. He wouldn’t even use up one of his three marriage strikes with the Orthodox church if he were a widower.
Ueli might do his boss a solid, whether Nicolai actually wanted that or not.
I lifted onto my toes and grabbed onto Ueli’s strong biceps and wrist as if I could stop him from crooking his arm a little more and pinching off my circulation and airway.
“Cars,” Ueli announced and marched for the front door. “The transports should be here. Nechtan, the principal is in the lift. Wait for him with Delta Team.”
The horde of security guys split like they were square dancing, a small cadre heading for the elevators while the rest rustled Clementine and me toward the exit.
“No,” Clementine insisted as Dusha hurried her along, one arm around her shoulders and the other under his coat at his hip. “I acquiesced to your ridiculous security standards yesterday, but today, I will drive my own damned car!”
Dusha scanned behind them and ahead as he trotted and hauled Clementine. “It would be helpful to know whether you are trying to get yourself or your cousin killed.”
“My cousin was upstairs alone when something obviously happened. Your protocols need work.”
Ueli’s arm was still cinched around my shoulders and collarbones and inching upward. Above my head, he said, “Secured. Your cousin is not pleased with the delay. What’s the situation?”
My feet scrambled on the carpeting and then the sidewalk as Ueli dragged me to the door and outside into the late morning’s fetid heat.
The SUVs were waiting at the curb, engines rumbling above the growls and sharp commands from the security guys ringing me.
Being separated from Nicolai felt wrong. “Where’s Nicolai? Is he okay?”
Dusha was hustling Clementine toward another SUV ahead of us in the caravan. She was letting him, though she was sniping bitterly at him the whole way.
“And yet you didn’t activate the panic button on your watch,” Ueli grumbled above my head, a statement obviously not directed at me.
Maybe he was talking to Nico? Please, dear God, let him be talking to Nicolai and Nicolai talking back to him. “Is he all right?”
Ueli was dragging me across the sidewalk toward the SUV, heat radiating from the cement and his gun pointed low, just past my sneakers.
And yet with one quick movement, Ueli could press that gun against my temple.
The gun was right there.
“We could have apprehended him,” Ueli complained.
Down the sidewalk from me, Dusha shoved Clementine into the rear seat of the SUV.
Her blond head popped back out of the door hole, definitely haranguing him with one finger wagging hard.
Dusha palmed Clementine’s skull and pushed her head back inside to shut the door, and then I was worried for Dusha’s life.
Ueli was still talking above my head to Nicolai, presumably, hopefully. God, I hoped Ueli’s calm and dry demeanor meant Nico was okay. I was about ready to ralph on the stove-hot sidewalk from terror at Nicolai’s safety and my own maybe-impending death at Ueli’s hands.
He frog-marched me toward the SUV, its door open and gaping into the darkness inside.
Desert sunlight needled my arms and the top of my head.
Ueli still pointed his gun at the sidewalk and griped at hopefully-Nicolai as he spoke through his Bluetooth headset.
Don’t let them take you to the second location.
That mantra was drilled into girls as soon as they could understand in an attempt to keep them safer from men, to keep us from complying with men’s commands like we are pressured to do in every single aspect of our lives except when we are somehow responsible for our own safety from men.
The SUV was closer, and Ueli was going to shove me into it to take me to a second location.
Whether or not I trusted Nicolai was immaterial. Nicolai wasn’t here. Ueli had separated me from him. Or I had gotten separated. It was a blur.
But Nicolai hadn’t told me I could trust Ueli.
If anything, Nicolai didn’t trust Ueli. All those little glances and taking me into the bathroom to talk out of their hearing rose in my head like a thunderstorm.
And Ueli was dragging me away from him.
My knees collapsed under me, and I hung from Ueli’s arm by my chin.
Even buff, burly Ueli couldn’t handle gravity pulling the dead, floppy weight of a whole limp human hanging on his shoulder joint, and he bent, following my descent.
I twisted and ducked.
I rolled.
I got away.
I ran.
Behind me, Ueli said a bunch of words in German and then yelled, “Come back here!”