They Call Me Alexandra Gastone Read online

  I took the plates to the table and sat. Albert joined me with all three Hunger Games books in hand, and Orkney, my three-legged Scottish deerhound, made his first appearance of the evening. Ork had the uncanny ability of showing up just as food was being served. He laid his snout on my lap, his brown eyes peering up at me hopefully. I patted his head and pulled a dog biscuit from my pocket to tide him over until it was time to lick the plates.

  “So,” said Albert. “Before we talk books, I want to discuss the upcoming event.”

  “Kasarian’s dinner?”

  “No, the other, more important event. Your eighteenth birthday.”

  “I don’t want a party, Grandpa,” I said, twirling my spaghetti with a fork.

  Albert shook his head. “You’ve never wanted a party. I think that’s abnormal for a teenage girl.”

  I eyed Albert circumspectly. He was twirling his spaghetti just as I had, something he rarely did. Seeing it put me on edge. Normally, Albert would cut his spaghetti a couple of times and then rotate the plate to get the strands from different angles. Albert approached this routine with the focus of a heart surgeon about to operate. Twirling his spaghetti meant Albert was preoccupied. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to end up with a surprise party like the one Albert had thrown when I was twelve. Unsure of who my friends were, he’d invited my whole grade and erected a mini-carnival in the backyard, complete with Ferris wheel and cotton candy vendors. I’d plastered a smile on my face but hadn’t enjoyed myself. It wasn’t my birthday, after all. Most of the time, it was easy to be Alexandra, but for some reason, on her birthday, it became a lot harder. The burden of the lie was somehow greater on that day. “How about you take Grant and me out to dinner? Someplace fancy in the city like Tosca or Dorian and Gray’s and then maybe we could go to a movie afterward?”

  Albert nodded. “Good idea. Thanks for throwing me a bone, Lex. Appreciate it.”

  I smiled. “No problem, Gramps.”

  Albert devoured a forkful of spaghetti and then patted the books on the table. “Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. I’m so glad you didn’t subject me to another one of those bodice rippers of yours.”

  I laughed. “Figured you needed a break from quivering members and thought you’d like the book’s Big Brother and government control themes, given your interest in the Caucasus.”

  “I did. I did,” said Albert. “I loved Katniss. She showed such strength and independence in the books. She reminds me of you.”

  I waved away the compliment, my stomach doing a few guilty flip-flops. “I liked how Collins blended all the serious themes with a reality show vibe. I think it makes the books appeal to a wider audience.”

  “The author must have been inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus. Maybe that will be my next choice for book club night. In it, Athens is forced to send offerings in the form of children to Crete, where the children are eaten by a Minotaur.”

  We spent the rest of dinner going over character motivations and contemplating the parallels with current-day situations. For a book club night, it was enjoyable, and I had, for the most part, been able to keep thoughts of the bearded man at bay. While Albert washed the dishes, I grabbed Ork and headed out for our walk.

  Ork was the one constant in my life I felt I could count on, and he had been my anchor since the day I rescued him. It was right after the crash, and I’d just met Albert. Wanting some sort of neutral ground for us, Albert had whisked me away to the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland. It was there I fished a three-legged puppy out of the rough Whitehall surf. Orkney was barely four months old and shook like a leaf after the rescue. His outward display of fear was how I felt on the inside, and I instantly sympathized. Albert must have seen our bond because he had Orkney checked by a vet and made arrangements for his transportation back to the States.

  Reaching the dog park at the intersection of two nearby subdivisions, I let Orkney off his leash and watched as he bounded away after a beagle named Maude, his doggie girlfriend. The two of them playing looked like David and Goliath, Maude weaving in and out of Ork’s three legs. I headed over to the bench where Maude’s owner, Eric, was madly gaming on his phone. “Hey,” I said, hunkering down in my seat. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine, I guess,” said Eric, not even glancing up.

  Someone else might have been offended by Eric’s brush-off, but not me. He could be rude all he wanted as long as he stayed put and gave me the five minutes I needed to mirror his phone. I shimmied closer to Eric and hit the start button on my modified phone so it would begin the syncing process. I’d recently heard some rumors about Eric that needed confirming.

  With Fair Valley so close to downtown DC, the area was ideal for families of government officials and those in the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Perun was betting some of my classmates would follow in their parents’ footsteps and might be of use someday. In the future, if I needed a favor, I could call upon the dirt I’d acquired via after-hours locker searches and some rudimentary computer hacking. I was after the material on Eric’s phone for just such a dirt-finding expedition. Although Eric’s family was of little strategic importance to Perun, and the boy himself planned to be a regular old doctor like his dad, if the note I’d found lodged in one of my classmate’s books was accurate, Eric was getting paid to take the SATs for other people. Few people escaped their teen years without dirty skeletons, and proof of a foray into standardized test fraud might be just the leverage Perun needed in the future. A test fraud scandal implying low moral character simply wouldn’t do for a future senator or congressperson, after all.

  While waiting for my phone to complete the sync, I watched Maude and Ork nose an abandoned tennis ball back and forth. Deciding they needed some human participation in their game, they bustled over to our bench, Maude dropping the ball at Eric’s feet. When Eric ignored her, she began to whine. Ork turned his attention from Maude to me as if to say, “Well, what are you going to do about this?” My phone pinged twice, indicating it had finished. Mission complete.

  “I gotcha, Maude,” I said, snatching up the slobber-logged ball. Both dogs began to pant in anticipation. I turned and threw the ball behind the bench. The area was used less frequently by the dogs, and therefore, had more grass on it. If I was going to be playing fetch, I preferred to only deal with the slobber, not the slobber-and-mud combo. As the ball was arcing through the air, I caught sight of a silver Toyota Camry parked on the street. The car was parked close enough I could see someone was inside but far enough away I couldn’t define any features or make out the license plate.

  In order to get closer without spooking the driver, I began to wave my arms at the dogs. “Come here guys, let me throw it again,” I yelled as I moved forward across the park. Ork brought the ball over, and I threw it again, making my way toward the street. I was keeping the car in my peripheral vision. When Maude returned with the ball after my second throw, I chucked the ball toward the road at an angle. It sailed over the fence and into the street. To someone watching, it would look like I merely overshot my mark. “Oh crap,” I said, leaning over to pat Ork on the head. “My bad, I’ll go get it.” I caught Eric’s wave as he whistled to Maude and moved toward the far gate. Maude gave Ork a farewell bark and veered off to follow. Perfect.

  Now that I was closer to the Camry, I knew it was the same car from school because of the license plate. Catching me off guard, however, was that the person inside wasn’t the bearded man in plaid. It was another dude, equally big but with blond hair.

  I hopped the fence and jogged over to the ball, which was twenty feet from the car. At my nearness, the man pulled out a map and made like he was lost. Nice try buddy. Ever heard of GPS?

  Having retrieved the ball, I walked toward the car like I was making my way to the dog park gate. When I was close enough, I heaved the ball back over the fence to Ork, then made a dash for the car.

  Two seconds after tossing the ball, my hand found and pulled the Camry’s door handle. The driver gasped in surprise an
d tried to shove me out of the way.

  “Why am I being followed?” I said, grabbing his hand and yanking back a finger. I kept my voice low so as not to draw the attention of nearby residents.

  “Jesus Christ,” said the man, grabbing for something with his free hand. I caught sight of a gun barrel. At seeing it, I pulled the hand I held as far out of the car as I could then slammed the door on his arm. The gun fell from his other hand as he howled in pain.

  Acting with surprising mental clarity given the pain he had to be in, the man heaved his full weight against the car door, sending it flying open in my direction. It caught me on my left side and sent me reeling backward. I landed with a thud on the sidewalk, searing pain corkscrewing through my shoulder and down my arm.

  “Bitch,” spat the driver, reaching across to slam the car door with his uninjured hand. Despite the blazing pain in my shoulder, I somehow staggered to my feet. The engine thrummed to life as I went for the door again. I watched helplessly as the car peeled away from the curb. Not only did I have a tail, but judging from the use of the same car by different guys, they were taking shifts. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

  With the car out of sight, I turned my attention to my shoulder and found it knobby and distorted. The throbbing was so intense and unrelenting I couldn’t move it more than a few millimeters. The car door had hit me in just the right spot to dislocate it. As a blackness began creeping into my vision, I stumbled toward the nearest mailbox and slammed my shoulder against the post to pop it back into place. The pain on impact was of the take-your-breath-away sort, but then it subsided into a dull ache. I sank down onto the sidewalk to catch my breath and steady my nerves. Rubbing my shoulder, I gazed across the street at one of the McMansions. It was in foreclosure, the tailored gardens in disarray. For some reason, my eyes locked onto a scrubby patch of gold chrysanthemums.

  “I have a tail,” I mumbled.

  Part of me still couldn’t believe it.

  Chapter 4

  “I’m back, Grandpa,” I called out, undoing Ork’s leash. With a stiff gait, he headed off to his dog bed. My boy was getting old.

  “You want to finish losing our game of chess?” asked Albert, coming into the den and nodding toward the board with a wicked grin.

  I gave Albert my death glare, but this only made his grin wider and more fiendish.

  I’d made a dumb move during our last session of play, and Albert had me cornered. Hating to lose, I was stalling on the game, hoping I’d see a way out. After the dog park, I was wishing I could hit pause on my life as easily as I could on the game.

  “I need to work on Dagby’s paper,” I said with a huff. I had a five-page paper on political secrets due in a little over a week. In it, I was supposed to take some point in history when a secret was kept from the public and critically evaluate how things might have unfolded if the secret had been known at the time. When he heard of the assignment, Albert had challenged me to uncover a secret being kept by Tarkan Aroyan, a.k.a. the man who’d just lost the Olissan presidential race. My interest piqued and as someone who was a glutton for punishment, I’d accepted the challenge. “Care to give me a hint before I take another crack at it?” The paper was of little interest to me after the encounter I’d just had, but I still needed to play my role with Albert.

  “The answer is written plain as day, in black and white,” said Albert, smiling. “It’s out there for everyone to see.” He chuckled.

  I shot Albert another disgusted look. “Plain as day? Black and white? Can you be more obtuse?”

  “I’m sure I could be if I tried,” said Albert, winking. “But I’m going easy on you.”

  Despite all that was going on, I couldn’t help but laugh and shake my head. “Good night, Gramps,” I said, leaning in to kiss his cheek.

  “Love you,” replied Albert.

  Taken by surprise at his words, I wrapped my arms around him. Albert rarely verbalized his affections, and given the circumstances, that was something for which I was thankful. “You’re wonderful, Grandpa,” I said, squeezing him tight, hoping the hug would somehow make up for my absent words.

  We patted each other’s backs and then stepped apart to stand awkwardly, both aware of the elephant in the room. It had been almost seven years, and I still couldn’t bring myself to say three simple little words. Or write them for that matter. I’d rehearsed them many times, running through scenarios in my head, but for some reason, they never materialized when needed.

  Albert cleared his throat, “Well then, see you in the morning.”

  “Yeah, see ya,” I said, walking to the stairs and taking them two at a time.

  As I reached my room, my cell phone buzzed with an incoming text. Hoping it was Varos with an explanation for the tail, I dove inside my bag for the phone. For safety sake, Varos’s messages were always in code. They were usually coupon deals or doctor’s appointments. The numbers on the message plus two hours indicated the meet time, and the fourth word of the message indicated one of our five standard meet locations.

  My heart dipped a little at seeing the message. It was from Perun, but not Varos. The screen showed no words, only a bunch of jumbled letters. To an untrained eye, it would look like an accidental text, maybe one sent by a young kid, but it was really a modified Caesar cipher. In a normal Caesar, the alphabet is shifted a certain number of places to the left or right. For example, in a left shift Caesar of three places, an A in the actual text becomes an X in the cipher text, a B becomes a Y, and so on. In Perun’s version of the Caesar, the size of the left alphabetical shift changed for each letter of the text, following the pattern of three, five, eight, one, six, then rinse and repeat. The numbers zero through nine were also shifted in the same manner.

  I sat down on my bed and began to unscramble the message in my head, hoping it would explain the tail. The message was short and to the point.

  Handler Replacement. Operative initiation. Meet orchid house. Wednesday 0930.

  The cold and calculating spy in me was relieved to see the message because it accounted for the tail. Something had happened with Varos, and Perun was checking on his operatives. Then there was the other part of me—the non-spy part—that was crazy worried for my old friend. Had Varos been made, or worse, captured? Were they worried he’d given up his operatives? Is that why they were tailing me?

  “Why now?” I blurted. I wanted more information. I wanted the novella of texts. The scheduled meet was in a little over twelve hours, and I was being initiated! The plan had been for my activation when I reached the CIA, not before. Whatever was going on with Varos, I doubted they were calling me up for that reason. As a high school student, I wasn’t in any position to help him. Then it hit me.

  I was Albert’s plus one for Kasarian’s gala.

  From his dog bed, Ork looked up from gnawing at his bone. I glanced at him, then back at the screen, then to him again. I felt a tidal wave of anxiety at all the unknown factors. During our last couple of meetings, Varos’s appearance had been disheveled. He’d grown a beard, and his clothes sagged. I’d chalked the change up to a busy work schedule, but then his behavior had also been odd. He’d asked strange questions, and there was the awkward exchange that ended with my own embarrassing freak-out. I’d thought it was some sort of test. Was there more to it than that? And what would be my mission at the gala? Would it be a one and done or the beginning of something long term?

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then opened them to stare at the text again with its mess of letters. It was sooner than I had expected, but my time had come. I was finally being asked to take an active part in helping my country. “It’s starting.”

  Sensing my nervousness, Ork began to whine. He came over to me, and I patted his head absently, my own mind going every which way but straight. “It’s okay. Varos will be okay. Whatever happened, Perun will fix it. They have to, right? He’s one of their best.”

  Ork lifted one of his brows and increased the volume of his whining. r />
  “Someone probably made him, and he’s going to be reassigned. That’s not so bad,” I said, trying to talk myself into believing my words. The thought of navigating my life as Lex without Varos was a kick to the gut. Although more my boss than a friend now, I still cared about him. Probably more than I should. I still saw elements of the boy I’d fallen in love with. Plus, he was the only one in my life who knew the real me. And there was more than that, too. He was my link to Olissa. To home. His presence reminded me of the other cadets who’d become my family, cadets who now served for the good of Olissa, just as I did. Something happening to Varos was a stark reminder of what could happen to any of us. Spying is a dangerous game. “As long as he’s safe. That’s what matters.”

  A glass-half-full kind of dog, Ork barked his agreement.

  “Now. It’s happening now.” Thud, thud, thud went my heart. I smiled and then frowned and then smiled again. “Now’s the time.”

  I deleted the text and chucked my phone onto the bed. With the mystery of my tail solved, I knew I should get to work on Dagby’s paper, but I felt too hyped up to tackle it. The paper was going to have to take a backseat. I had big things on the horizon. Big, scary things. I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath. “Now’s the time.”

  Ork alternated between panting and whining as I grabbed my pajamas and headed for my bathroom. In the shower, I stood under near-scalding water for twenty minutes, fixating on my wrist’s bell-shaped scar. I traced its outline over and over, thinking back to who had put it there. My country had suffered so much. Was I finally going to be of use to them?