She’d almost quit her surveillance the evening before, tried to tell herself that thirty-six hours watching her back trail was enough, that she’d been wrong, that she hadn’t seen the CIA op she’d fought with in Istanbul standing in the line for security at Dulles only minutes after her own arrival in the U.S.
Take off, Varjan had thought. You’re good. Get your game on. Leave everything else behind you.
Varjan had almost driven to the Happy Pines to retrieve the bomb, check out, and carry on with her more pressing plans. But some difficult voice in her head insisted she’d been spotted and that she needed to keep up her vigil.
The difficult voice had proved to be the right one.
What happened then had been reflexive, nothing she could have controlled. She hadn’t meant to blow the bomb unless that CIA agent, Edith, was with them. But then that guy who’d answered the phone, he’d known her real name.
He called me Kristina, Kristina Varjan.
The very words made Varjan feel exposed and angry, made her want to lash out. She preferred to go through life playing roles, only rarely showing her true self to anyone and never using her given name in any context.
But that man had known her. He’d used her real name!
And then it had been reflexive. Uncontrollable. She’d set off the bomb.
Varjan understood she needed to inform Piotr, or whatever his real name was, and explain the situation.
However, maybe the less he knew, the better. Given the contracts he’d assigned her the day before, she understood that any weakness would likely change their arrangement and make her a target for elimination at some point in the near future.
That was too complicated. That was just too much to handle while trying to execute multiple plays as fast as possible.
No, Varjan decided as she passed the exit for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area. She’d keep her employer in the dark, get the jobs done, collect, and then vanish once and for all.
Chapter 42
What was Varjan up to?
That question and others like it ran laps in my head as I got out of an Uber at my house. The sun had set. The lights glowed in the front room. So did the big screen, which was tuned to the news.
I climbed the front steps, thanking my Savior once again.
When I opened the door, I heard Bree cry, “Alex?”
“Dad!” Ali shouted.
They all came running to the front hall, Bree, Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama too. Bree had tears in her eyes. “It’s so good... you’re here.”
I hugged her, kissed her, whispered in her ear, “I’ll always be here.”
She squeezed me tight, then stood back while I hugged my daughter, son, and grandmother.
“The local news says an assassin set off the bomb, a lady assassin,” Ali said.
Jannie said, “They showed her picture. Did you see her, Dad?”
“No,” I said. “But she saw us. She called the phone for the first time after we were in the room, so we figure she had to have been in range, watching, when she made the second call to trigger the bomb.”
Nana Mama patted her heart. “Thank God, you got out of there in time.”
“I’ve been weak-kneed and grateful a thousand times since it happened,” I said.
We went into the kitchen, where my grandmother had a steaming pot of soup made from chicken, celery, onions, basil, garlic, oregano, and halved cherry tomatoes. She’d also made two big loaves of garlic bread slathered with lots of butter.
While Jannie helped Bree ladle the soup into bowls that Ali ferried to the kitchen table, I was feeling almost overjoyed. It was such a simple thing, being with family, preparing for dinner, but that evening, it made me want to cry.
“What else, Dad?” Ali said. “Do you know where she went? Varjan?”
Ordinarily I would have deflected further conversations about an ongoing case, but since Mahoney had let the cat out of the bag with the media, I shared with them what I knew. I explained Varjan’s reputation as a ruthless killer for hire, her recent arrival in the U.S. under the name Martina Rodoni, and our belief that she was in the country to kill someone other than me and Mahoney.
Nana came to the table and we all held hands to say grace.
My grandmother finished with “Thank You for getting Alex out of that motel room this morning. And bless him in the days ahead.”
“Amen,” we all said.
After I’d eaten two slices of homemade bread, finished a bowl of the delicious soup, and gone back for seconds, Bree said, “I don’t suppose there was any evidence left in the motel room? Other than the bomb material, I mean.”
I started to shake my head, but then I remembered something. I dug in my pocket for my phone.
“About the only thing I could find that survived was a Bible, and I don’t know if this has a thing to do with anything, but there was this list of...”
I found the picture on my phone and tapped it to open it. “Here.”
I turned it and showed them the list raised by the soot:
Celes Chere
Prelim 2 sharp
Marstons, same
Gabriel, same
Conker 3
“What does that mean?” Jannie asked, passing the phone to Nana. “Did she write it?”
“Who knows?” I said. “It was just there on the inside back cover, so I shot it.”
Ali took the phone from Nana Mama, who shrugged, said, “What’s a Conker?”
Staring at the screen, Ali said, “Well, a Conker is this...” He looked up at me. “Dad, Kristina Varjan. No doubt about it.”
“How do you know that?” Jannie asked, her brow knitted.
“So, first, Conker? He’s like this crazed squirrel. Drinks. Smokes. Likes to smack people in the face with a frying pan.”
“What?” my grandmother said.
“In a really good video game, Nana,” Ali said. “Conker’s the hero avatar in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Check it out, Dad, for real.”
“I will, but how do you know that Varjan wrote the list?”
He pointed to the list. “Marstons? Gabriel? Those are avatars in other video games made by the same company, Victorious Gaming.”
Bree said, “I still don’t see how that links—”
Ali held up his hand, said, “Celes Chere? I swear to God, she has her own Victorious game too. I’ve got friends at school who are obsessed with going to—”
He grabbed up his phone, started tapping with his thumbs. “Oh my God, I think it starts tomorrow!”
“What does?” Bree asked.
“Just let me make sure,” Ali said, and then he looked up at us, grinning, and pumped his fist. “Victorious promotes these big e-sports tournaments where people obsessed with the games go to play for like a gazillion in Bitcoin. The biggest tournament of the year starts tomorrow in Atlantic City! Prelims for Blade Girl, featuring Celes Chere, start at two p.m. Same thing for the Marstons. And Conker prelims get under way at three!”
Chapter 43
At 1:40 the next afternoon, February 4, a Thursday, techno music pulsed and blared through the Atlantic City Convention Center. The raucous crowd was not at all what Mahoney and I expected. Yes, there were lots of eager tweens and doughy adolescent males who looked like they tended toward the stoner-slacker end of the spectrum. But there were also young women and grown men and women, many dressed as their favorite avatars in a Victorious game. We saw six or seven Conkers in the kind of squirrel outfits you might see at a rave concert, several women dressed as glam avatar Celes Chere, and two couples sporting the sort of futuristic cowboy garb the Marstons supposedly favored in their game.