The Moscow Meeting. James Frey
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the weapon, but I find myself worrying about them anyway. I know Boone has given them instructions on what to do in the event we don’t come back, and I hope they’ll be safe.
“No,” I say. “Not from our side, anyway.”
“How many sides are there?” Cassandra asks.
“I’m not certain,” I say, and this is the truth. “Things became complicated.”
“Which is why I’m here,” my sister says. “To uncomplicate them.”
There they are, the words she’s been wanting to say to me all along. I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist forever. This is what she’s been waiting for, the chance to tell me how I’ve failed.
“When we couldn’t reach Theron, Cilla, or Europa, we knew that something had gone wrong,” Cassandra continues. “And then we had word that Misha had been killed.”
So there was someone else inside the MGB spying for them. For us. I’m not surprised. In fact, I assumed there was. I do wonder who it is, though. I don’t ask. I’m not ready to give Cassandra even the smallest bit of satisfaction.
“The council decided it would be best for me to come see if you were in trouble,” she says.
“Of course,” I say. “And since you look like me, it would make it easy for you to assume my role as Player without arousing the suspicions of anyone else who might be involved.”
“The look on the American’s face when he thought he was seeing double was worth the trip,” Cassandra says. “It was almost as if I’d broken his heart.”
Her words are not lost on me. Again, though, I ignore them. We’ve reached the street. Cassandra stops at a car, takes some keys from her pocket, and unlocks the door. She gets inside, and I walk around to the other side. When she pushes the door open, I get in. “Are we driving back to Heraklion?” I ask as she starts the engine.
“Train,” she says as she pulls away from the curb. “It will take a little more than two days, so we’ll have lots of time to catch up. I have a bag for you, so we can go directly to Berlin Friedrichstraße. Unless there’s something else you need to do.”
She looks over at me. I look back at her. “No,” I say. I pat the box I’m holding in my lap. “Sauer is dead. We have the weapon. That’s what I came for.”
Cassandra grins. “Good,” she says. “This will be fun. Just the two of us, with nothing to do but talk. It will be like when we were children.”
That’s what I’m afraid of, I think as I grin back at her and say, “I’m glad you came.”
Boone
As I sink through the water inside the air shaft, all I can think about is how cold I am, how my muscles won’t do what I tell them to, how hopeless I feel. Without any light, I’m in total blackness. I can’t turn around in the cramped space, so I have to keep going down, back into the flooded chamber where Sauer’s body is. Then I have two choices: I can either come back up the shaft, or I can go back into the elevator and climb up the cable again. Neither one seems possible. I barely made it up the elevator cable the last time. Now my body is even more worn out and damaged.
To make things worse, the only thing waiting for me if I do manage to get out is a whole bunch of problems. My brother is dead. The weapon I worked so hard to find is gone. The thought of going home and telling my council that I failed my assignment, and that the Minoans now have the weapon, is horrible. Even worse is the idea of telling my mother that Jackson didn’t actually die in the war, but that now he’s dead, and it’s because I couldn’t save him.
Then there’s Ariadne. I don’t want to believe that she betrayed me, that she played me like a fool in order to get her hands on the weapon. And part of me doesn’t believe that she did. She could easily have killed me, or let her sister kill me, but she didn’t. Why? I’m no longer any use to her. She doesn’t need me. Any good Player would have used the opportunity to take me out. And Ariadne is an excellent Player. So why am I still alive? Why did she give me a chance?
Maybe, I think, she doesn’t believe I can make it out. Maybe she’s hoping the freezing water and the darkness will do what she couldn’t bring herself to do.
And she might be right. I can feel myself growing more and more exhausted. It would be easy to just close my eyes and wait for the air in my lungs to run out. I can practically hear the cold whispering in my ear, telling me to give up. It would be so easy.
I feel myself pass through the bottom of the shaft and into the chamber where, somewhere, Sauer’s body still floats. I can’t see anything, can’t even really orient myself to know which way to go. The explosion caused by the grenade Ariadne dropped down the shaft has filled the room with pieces of debris, which further confuses me, as things keep bumping against my body. And I’m running out of time.
I feel my thoughts slowing down. Instead of thinking clearly and quickly, making decisions, I’m lost in a fog, following one idea for a short time and then stopping. The darkness is closing in. All I want is to go to sleep and wake up somewhere else.
Then the voice of Fawn Flowers, my harshest trainer, cuts through the darkness. “The human body has limits,” she says, and I instantly picture her standing over me as I lie in the mud. It’s sleeting, I’m soaked through, and I’m completely worn out after running for what seems like a thousand miles through a snowstorm. My feet are covered in blisters that tear and burn with every step, my hair is frozen into icicles that sting my eyes, and now she tells me I have to turn around and run all the way back the way I came.
Fawn doesn’t help me. She just stands there, scowling as she lectures me. “No matter how strong a body is, it can become too damaged to work. But sometimes the mind can push us past those limits. If you ever get into a situation where you think you can’t physically go on, think about the person you love most in the world. Think about how you need to get from where you are to where that person is. Don’t think about how tired you are, or how much you hurt, or how impossible it seems. Just think about that person and start moving.”
That day, I thought about my mother. I pictured her waiting for me back at our house. I thought about never seeing her again. Then I imagined the look on her face when I came through the door. I kept that image in my head as I forced myself to get to my knees, then to my feet. I kept my mother’s face in front of me as I stumbled a few feet, then as I began to walk. I kept telling myself that she was so close. When my blistered feet screamed for me to stop, I ignored them. When I slipped in the snow and fell, I shut my eyes and saw my mother smiling at me, telling me how much she loved me, and I got up again.
I ran the whole way home like that, one step at a time. And when I finally did reach our front door, I went inside and collapsed in my mother’s arms. Even though my body was wrecked, I’d never felt so happy.
I think about her now. I see her face, looking at me with that expression she has that means she’s worried but doesn’t want to let me know. I can tell she wants me to come home. I try to move my arms and legs, to move toward her, but I feel so heavy. I’m being dragged down into the black water, and my mother’s face starts to fade away.
Then something unexpected happens—I’m looking at Ariadne. She’s standing in front of me just like she was a few minutes ago. Her eyes are locked on mine, and without saying a word, I know she’s asking me to trust her. And I do. I know I shouldn’t. Every Player instinct I have is screaming at me to fight her and her sister, even though I have almost no chance of winning. Instead I look into her eyes and know that I’m here now because she cares about me, that she sent me back into the cold and the dark because it was the only chance she had of saving me.
Suddenly I want more than anything to be with her again. She and Cassandra are probably on their way out of the museum already.