The Double

A confusion of voices on my earpiece. Calahan’s voice but quiet, as if he was turned away from his mic, and someone else, arguing with him. “What?” I heard Calahan say. “Where is he?!”

I jumped to my feet, sucking in a huge, panicked breath. I slammed the safe shut and locked the handle.

Calahan’s voice, deafening in my ear as he shouted in panic. “Hailey, get out! We don’t have Konsta—”

I raced towards the door. But just as I got there, it swung open and I was face-to-face with Konstantin.

43

Hailey

HIS EYES went from my face to the safe to the gadget in my hand. I saw the shock turn to disbelief and then to fury.

He grabbed for me.

The panic was total. It felt like being a child, caught by my parents. I wasn’t thinking rationally, I just bolted, away from him and across the room, into the bathroom. All I could think of was to get rid of the evidence, as if I could somehow deny the whole thing as long as it wasn’t there. I hurled the gadget into the toilet bowl and slammed the flush, holding it down. Konstantin arrived a second later and shouldered me aside. He shoved his hand into the whirlpool in the bowl but the thing slipped through his fingers. And then it was gone.

But it was too late. He’d seen it. He’d caught me in his office.

He slammed me up against the wall. The only thing worse than the fury in his eyes was the hurt. Oh, God, the hurt. I never meant to hurt him.

“Who are you working for?” he yelled, his voice shaking the walls of the tiny room. “Did the FBI get to you in the hospital? Did they offer you a deal?”

I opened and closed my mouth helplessly. There was no explanation I could come up with, no way to talk myself out of it. But when I thought about telling him the truth, my throat closed up with fear.

He growled, took hold of my wrist and—

He dragged me. The shift was terrifying: that morning, we’d been a happy couple. Now I was a prisoner, not worth speaking to or even looking at. He marched all the way downstairs like that with me stumbling and begging behind him, desperate to stay on my feet because I knew he’d just pull me along the carpet if I fell.

Grigory stared at us as we came into view. Konstantin snapped orders to him in Russian. Grigory looked horrified and asked a question of his own, something short and desperate like are you sure? But Konstantin just nodded grimly.

Grigory went pale with fear. Fear for me...or fear that our affair was about to be discovered? Oh God, what are they going to do to me?

Together, they pushed me into the back of the car and we set off. No one talked. Even Calahan had gone silent in my ear, unsure if it was safe. Darkness had fallen and a storm was building, the dark clouds blocking out the moon. As we whipped through the city streets, Konstantin was just a motionless silhouette beside me. I couldn’t see his expression until a passing car’s headlights lit him up for a second. Then I wanted to throw up in fear. His face was back to that cold, emotionless mask, as if none of this, none of us, had ever happened. How did it go so wrong, so fast?

The car slowed. We were outside a nightclub that had some sort of horror theme: the front was lit up with flaming pentagrams and the line of people waiting to get in were mostly goths. Pounding industrial music, mixed together with recorded screams, shook the car’s windows. I didn’t understand. Why would they bring me here?

But we didn’t pull up outside. We turned into an alley alongside the club and then around the back. Konstantin pulled me out and hauled me down a set of steps to a metal door, and then down a featureless concrete hallway lit by flickering fluorescent lights. He opened another, heavier door and pushed me through.

At one point, it might have been a cold storage room, where meat was hung and butchered. That would explain the drain in the floor. Someone had added a long mirror on one wall and there was what looked like a dentist’s chair in the center. My stomach twisted as I saw the leather restraints dangling from it. We were directly below the nightclub: the music and screams shook the ceiling.

I knew what this was. An interrogation room. One where screams wouldn’t be heard.

Konstantin left and slammed the door behind him. My legs had gone shaky and I fell to my knees beside the drain, unsure if I was going to be sick...

As I knelt there, I remembered the earpiece. If there was any hope of lying my way out of this, I had to get rid of it. But I assumed I was being watched through what had to be a one-way mirror, just like I’d watched Christina in our interrogation room. I put my face in my hands and managed to claw the tiny earpiece out of my ear and drop it down the drain, making it look like I was crying. And I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream at myself for volunteering, for falling for him, for trying to do something instead of staying safely behind the camera where I belonged.