39. Anna

39

ANNA

W hen I board the plane that evening, the crew are in a celebratory mood given it’s so close to Christmas, and one of them hands me a pryanik in a little paper bag. When I pop it in my mouth, the spice and ginger takes me right back to my grandmother’s house, and for a second it makes my eyes sting. As I’m putting my hand luggage into the overhead locker, a text lands in my phone from Mila:

Have you seen what’s happened to Arty?

A photograph of a newspaper article lands in my phone:

DOWNHILL SKIER CHARGED WITH MONEY LAUNDERING

I guess he’s got bigger fish to fry than tormenting you, girl.

Oh God, no wonder he wanted money. I slide into my seat, pull up the newspaper website, and read the whole article. The implication is that it’s been going on for several years, but doesn’t seem to be connected to the tennis academy. My skin crawls, but I can’t also help the tinge of relief creeping through my veins.

I stare out the window and watch the baggage handlers loading the hold. I’m still half expecting a couple of men to materialize at the front of the plane to slap handcuffs on me, or for an airline official to ask me to follow them back to the terminal, or for me to fall unexpectedly sick halfway across the Atlantic. But all that happens is another text appears on my phone as I’m staring at the flight attendant doing the security demonstration:

You know I can always bring you back, little one.

I close my eyes and offer up a silent prayer, and it’s not until I’m in a cab from JFK to NYU Langone that I’m convinced I’ve escaped.

Before I got on the plane, I spent most of the day texting Janus about Adam’s condition instead of concentrating on the tennis tournament. But that doesn’t prepare me for how my body swoops when I see Adam through the window in his hospital bed. His face is white, tawny lashes resting against his cheeks. I’m not really a crier. I’ve had so many injuries and lost so many important matches over the years that something inside me has settled into granite. You can’t be emotional when you have to fight tooth and nail for every point, every advantage, but in this moment my throat closes nonetheless. And as I gaze at Adam lying there, I know with a bone-deep conviction that he’s my person. There’s no one else I want. I want those evenings I keep thinking about with a desperation I’ve never felt before. It’s not sex or how cute he is; it’s him. Solid, loyal, everything I need. If he’ll even talk to me after this.

When I enter the room, Janus rises from where he’s sitting next to Adam’s bed alongside a guy with long dark hair and perhaps the most interesting set of tattoos I’ve ever seen—Fabian, I presume. Unfortunately, he’s scowling at me.

“I told you not to fucking go there!” is all he says in greeting, and Janus puts a hand on his forearm.

I step forward and take Adam’s pale hand where it’s resting against the bedclothes, trying to tamp down the nausea as guilt burns through me. “How is he?”

“Stable,” Janus says, putting an arm around my shoulders and pulling me into his side, his warmth seeping into me. “I’m so pleased to see you, Anna. I was worried you wouldn’t get out of Russia.”

I turn toward him. “They wouldn’t do anything serious to a tennis star with a profile like mine. There would be too much publicity.”

Fabian lets out a low growl. “They could have done all sorts of stuff to you, Anna—rape, abuse, targeting members of your family. I can do lots of things from here that don’t involve putting you or anyone else in personal danger, and I …”

I hold up my hand to stop more words tumbling out of his mouth. “I know. I shouldn’t have gone there. I didn’t think they’d go as far as they did. I realized far too late that I was putting Adam in danger just by being associated with him.” I stare down at his gray face. “I can’t apologize enough. I’m …” My throat tightens unbearably again. Maybe I should be staying well away from him, but I had to come here, touch his hand . I rub my thumb over his skin.

Fabian’s still scowling but says, “Apology accepted.”

“They’ve looked at everything,” Janus says, glancing at his watch. “He’s been in a coma for eighteen maybe nineteen hours now. It’s all a wait-and-see game, and hoping his stats improve.”

“Oh God.” I sink into a chair by the bed and put my head in my hands.

Janus crouches down next to me and squeezes my knee. “The prognosis isn’t bad, Anna. He’s not getting worse, and he’s had more tests and examinations than you can shake a big stick at. Fabian’s other half, Kate, is a doctor, and she’s been here since it happened. He’s in good hands.”

When I headed here from the airport, all I wanted to do was reassure myself that Adam was still alive. Now that doesn’t seem like enough. What if he doesn’t recover? Or is permanently damaged somehow? How could I ever apologize to him enough?

A woman with blonde hair appears in the glass circle in the door, talking to someone over her shoulder. She smiles tightly as she enters the room.

“Hey, guys,” she says as her eyes meet mine, and she holds out her hand. “You’re Anna Talanova.”

“Yes, more’s the pity.” I grimace, but she tuts at me.

“I’m Kate Thurman. One of the doctors here and, unfortunately, also this guy’s other half.” She jerks her hand at Fabian.

“Any news?” Fabian says.

She tilts her head. “We’re wondering whether it might be insulin.”

“Insulin?” Janus says, looking over at Adam. “Is that bad?”

“It can be terrible if it’s administered in the right quantities. It will kill you quite fast if you get a sufficient dose.”

The room swims for a second. Kate leans forward and examines one of the machines. “The fact that he’s still alive means he wasn’t, for some reason or other, given enough to kill him.”

Fabian runs a hand over his mouth. “Wow. No shit.”

“The strange part is you can only really administer insulin by injection.”

We all stare down at where Adam is lying in the bed. “Injection?” I say.

“We found him in his apartment on the couch, so, if it’s that, it’s a bit of a mystery how such a large quantity got into his bloodstream,” Kate says.

“Maybe someone broke in and …” Janus starts.

“There were no signs of a tussle,” Fabian says, shaking his head. “He was just lying there.”

“How rapidly does it come on if you’re injected?”

“It depends on the type of insulin. Some are fast-acting and work within fifteen minutes; others take longer.”

“So, he would have had at least a quarter of an hour: Plenty of time to send a text,” Fabian says. “What happened to his phone?”

Kate delves under her scrubs and produces a phone from somewhere.

“It was in his hand when we found him. I just put it in my pocket.”

Fabian plays with the screen for a second and then groans and hands it to Janus.

“It’s in a WhatsApp to you, buddy,” he says to Fabian .

When I peer over his shoulder, there’s an unsent message to Fabian on Adam’s phone:

Food poisoning.

“So, he was on his own, feeling ill,” I say.

“He ate something. There were dirty dishes in the sink,” Janus adds.

“Delivery driver?”

“Could be.”

“He’ll have a camera on the apartment, we could look at the footage.”

“Good idea,” Fabian says, turning back to Kate. “So, what do we do now?”

“We wait,” she says, and he lets out a long groan.

“My favorite activity.”

She gives him a small smile. “His capillary blood glucose was low when he came in so we gave him a dextrose bolus and an infusion, and we’re going to keep doing that and monitor his blood sugar. We don’t know for sure it’s insulin yet—I’m still waiting on some of the other tests coming back.”

“What for?”

“To definitively rule out things like meningitis and other poisons,” Kate’s eyes narrow. “But we’d expect to see other symptoms if any of these were the case. The fact he thought this was food poisoning is interesting. Let me go and talk to the team.”

Fabian follows her across the room. “What can I do?”

She looks back at him. “Do something about the person that did this to him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Better than sitting here brooding.” He holds up his hand and turns toward me. “Actually, Anna, we’ve got stuff to discuss.”

A shard of ice rips through me.

“About Konstantin Lebedev,” he adds.

Ugh. I don’t want Fabian or Janus doing any more crazy shit.

Fabian stretches out his hand. “Give me your phone.”

“What? Why?”

“Tracking software. I don’t know if Mila told you but there was some on her phone.”

“So,” Fabian says later, shoveling a sandwich in his mouth and talking around it. “Konstantin Lebedev. Tell me everything, Anna.”

I eye him and Janus balefully. “He’s already done this.” I gesture at Adam on the bed. “I don’t want you guys any more involved.”

“I think you’re forgetting I’ve just taken his systems down,” Fabian says, chewing. “I think we’re way beyond that. He knows you called Janus. He’s spoken to me.”

Jo arrived about an hour ago, and her eyebrows rise from where she’s sitting next to Janus.

I blow out a long breath and chew my cheek.

“Tell us about Konstantin, Anna,” Fabian repeats.

So, I fill him in on everything I told Adam. Unease prickles over the back of my neck. My original idea was just to tell Adam, to help him understand, but we’re way past that now—the horse has well and truly bolted. And as Fabian peppers me with questions, I give more and more specific answers about the conversations I can remember and how the camps worked. “I’d probably recognize some of the sponsors,” I eventually say.

“When I first looked into it, my interest was piqued because it all seemed off,” Fabian says. “But I have to say that Mr. Lebedev is very careful. It’s never discussed directly. Although I did find some slipups in what the sponsors said.”

He produces a file from his bag and places it in front of me. “What’s this?” I say, and he smiles.

“All the information I’ve gathered on his operations.”

“Paper?” I ask.

“Bizarrely, it can be more secure than a laptop nowadays.”

I flip open the first page, and Janus leans in to peer over my shoulder. There’s a photograph and detailed notes of business interests for a series of men, quite a few of whom I recognize as people I saw or who talked to me at what they called social events. The next page is covered by a hand-drawn giant spider’s web in neat sloping script.

“These are the interconnections between all the sponsors I could find involved with the Alliance Tennis Federation’s academy. It will take me some time to piece together the money flows, but on here you’ve got company shareholders and directors,” he says, tapping the pages with the pictures on. “Plus players they’ve ‘sponsored,’ who I’ve made some assumptions about given photographs I found and other cross-referenced information.”

I stare at it in wonder, my hand shaking around the map he’s drawn. “How did you put all this together?” I whisper.

“I’ve been working on it full-time since I came across his name, along with a couple of people from Janus’s business. They’ve been tracking what’s happened to all the young people.” He makes a face. “We’ve discovered three so far who have died—by suicide or murder, it’s hard to know—though whether we’d ever be able to prove that anyone else was responsible or get any real justice is another matter.”

I close my eyes. “Oh, Jesus.”

“Yeah, we need to do something,” Jo growls.

“Are you saying it’s difficult to go after Konstantin Lebedev, but we can go after these so-called sponsors?” Janus says.

“Yes. It depends on Anna really. As I’m uncovering more and more people who are connected to this in Russia, the more I think we should give it to a newspaper.”

“Like you did with the Newssource papers?” Janus says.

I glance up from the file where I’m studying a picture of a man I recognize. “You were involved in the Newssource papers?” There was a huge fallout from that in Russia.

Fabian doesn’t meet my eyes. “A bit,” he huffs, and Janus looks up at the ceiling.

“This is extraordinary,” I say. “But, Christ, releasing it, even Konstantin being aware that I’ve got something like this, would put a huge target on my back.” Unease seethes under my skin.

“Yeah, I don’t like that,” Janus says.

“Perhaps we can play a cleverer game than that,” Fabian says.

“What do you mean?” I say .

“I’d have to talk to some people, but if we set up other groups and people to do the investigating, we can get them to pull all this together. We can let them break the story.” He waves his hand over the file. “There needn’t be any connection to you, Anna.”

“How could we do that, though?” Jo says. “They’re bound to make the connection to Anna, given everything that’s happened.”

Fabian purses his lips and stares fixedly at the far wall.

“Yeah, I don’t see any way out of that,” Janus adds. “And as you said, they also know you were in his systems.”

“Well, he knows some hackers were in his system, but not who,” Fabian says, shaking his head. “I’m just a voice on a phone. When you hack into somewhere, there are thousands of systems obscuring the identity of where that comes from, and there’s almost no way of knowing who originated a hack or even if you can stop it.”

“Onion routing,” Jo murmurs.

“But yeah, taking down his systems came through Anna, and you,” Fabian adds, nodding at Janus. “They’re likely to come after Anna or her family, possibly you too, Janus.” He gets up and starts pacing around the room. “The good news is Konstantin’s not the FSB, resource and skills-wise. And I’m in his systems now, and he won’t be able to get me out of there, so we have enough leverage, even if the threat hasn’t gone away.” He waves his hand over the file. “We don’t have to make this information public just because I’ve put it together. Maybe it would be safer to let sleeping dogs lie.” He chews his lip as he stops walking. “Believe you me, there’s a lot of people out there getting away with all sorts of shit.”

Ugh. I hate that expression, let sleeping dogs lie . If I don’t expose Konstantin, he’ll continue to be a shadow over my life. He said as much. Maybe also my family, and Adam. Perhaps you can never escape your Russian roots, but you can always fight. I turn and look at Adam lying on the bed, face pale. Who’s to say Konstantin wouldn’t do something like this again? I’m in this now. Never back down from a fight: If they know you are scared, they will take advantage. What’s more, I owe it to Adam and everyone else to do what I can. Mila is wrong: It’s not about us or our tennis legacy. It’s about everyone who comes after, about all those young people. I want every sentence after my name to be how I brought down this terrible system in Russia, about how hard I fought for that.

“Fabian, let’s do it,” I say.

His eyes jerk to mine.

“Let’s give it to a newspaper,” I add. “If he comes after me, we’ll just have to deal with it. You can help us, yes?”

“More than help. Short-term at least, I can keep you safe. It’s more difficult with your family because they’re in Russia, but not impossible. I’m involved in some networks there.”

And when I look at him again I find him staring at the same spot on the wall somewhere over my head and tapping his fingers on his legs, like he’s deep in thought.