Chapter 5 - WHAT HER MOTHER HAD BEEN HIDING
Celia did not cry.
Not then.
Panic came too quickly for tears.
“What do you mean empty?”
Archer answered carefully.
“The apartment showed no sign of forced entry.”
“Her car?”
“Still there.”
“Phone?”
“On the kitchen counter.”
Celia grabbed her coat.
Stellan blocked the doorway.
“Move.”
“No.”
“My mother is missing.”
“And running blindly into a city where Grekov has people helps her how?”
“I am not staying in this house while—”
“She went willingly.”
Celia stopped.
Archer raised the phone.
“The team found a note.”
“What note?”
He read it aloud.
“Celia, I should have told you years ago. Do not look for me. I will call when I can.”
Celia stared at him.
“That’s her handwriting?”
“A photograph is coming through now.”
Archer showed her.
It was.
Her mother wrote capital R’s in a strange way, the leg dropping below the line.
Celia had copied it as a child.
“She left.”
Stellan’s voice was quiet.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“We find out.”
Celia sank into the nearest chair.
For twenty-six years, she had believed her mother’s greatest secrets were small things.
Where she hid Christmas presents.
How much pain she was actually in after dialysis.
Whether she secretly hated Celia’s father long before the divorce.
Now there was Russia.
Grekov.
A photograph.
A disappearance.
And an entire fourteen-month period someone had removed from a professional background report.
“I want Mara’s files.”
Stellan nodded.
“All of them.”
“Yes.”
“I want access to anything you have on Krasny Bereg.”
“You’ll have it.”
“And my father.”
That made Stellan pause.
Celia saw it.
“You already investigated him.”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Enough to know he didn’t meet your mother in Alaska.”
She looked away.
“Tell me.”
Stellan sat across from her.
“Thomas Rowe worked as a contract translator for a maritime insurer in Eastern Europe in the late 1990s.”
“My father spoke Russian?”
“Fluently.”
Celia laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“My father told me he knew enough Russian to order vodka.”
“He lied.”
“That seems to have been a family hobby.”
Stellan let the bitterness pass.
“He worked on claims involving Krasny Bereg.”
“And Grekov?”
“The Grekov organization used the company.”
“For what?”
“We don’t know.”
Celia looked at him.
“People like you always know.”
His expression hardened slightly.
“People like me?”
“Men who have files on everyone.”
“I have files because not knowing gets people killed.”
The answer hit differently after the attack.
Celia looked at the floor.
“What happened to my father?”
“You said you haven’t seen him in twelve years.”
“He sends birthday cards every few years. No return address.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
Archer entered carrying a tablet.
“We found your mother.”
Celia stood.
“Where?”
“Security camera at a bus terminal. She bought a ticket south.”
“South where?”
“She never boarded.”
Celia stared.
“So it was a decoy.”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone follow her?”
“Not our people.”
Stellan looked at Archer.
“Grekov?”
“Possibly.”
Archer placed the tablet on the desk.
“There’s something else.”
Security footage showed Celia’s mother entering the terminal.
Ten minutes later she walked through a side exit.
A man waited beside a dark sedan.
Celia leaned closer.
The footage was grainy.
The man turned toward the camera for one second.
Her knees almost failed.
“My father.”
Thomas Rowe.
Older.
Heavier.
Gray-haired.
But unmistakable.
The man Celia had not seen since fourteen was standing beside her mother like he had never left.
Stellan watched her carefully.
“You recognize him?”
“Yes.”
Her voice barely worked.
“My mother disappeared with my father.”
Archer said, “Voluntarily, apparently.”
“That doesn’t mean safely.”
“No.”
Celia paced.
“Why now? Why after Grekov says Omsk?”
Stellan answered.
“Because your parents know what he meant.”
Mara joined them twenty minutes later.
She carried three folders and looked exhausted.
“I found another reference.”
She opened the oldest file.
“A transfer from Krasny Bereg twenty-seven years ago.”
“Money?” Celia asked.
“Documents.”
“To whom?”
“An American consulting firm.”
Mara pointed to the name.
Rowe Strategic Language Services.
Celia sat back.
“My father’s company.”
“You knew about it?”
“He told me he translated insurance documents.”
“He did.”
Mara turned the page.
“He also translated private negotiations.”
Stellan read silently.
Then looked at Celia.
“Your parents weren’t clerks.”
“What were they?”
Mara answered softly.
“They were intermediaries.”
Celia felt ill.
“For criminals?”
“For businesses, governments, anyone who paid.”
“Including Grekov.”
“Yes.”
The room blurred for a second.
Every childhood memory rearranged itself.
Her mother’s insistence that Celia learn Russian perfectly.
Her father teaching her never to trust paraphrasing.
The arguments behind closed doors.
The year they suddenly moved from Seattle to Anchorage.
The locked metal box Celia had once found beneath her parents’ bed.
“What did they hear?”
Stellan stood.
“That’s the important question.”
Celia looked at him.
“No. The important question is why Grekov waited twenty-seven years to care.”
Mara slowly sat down.
“Maybe he didn’t.”
Everyone turned toward her.
“What?” Celia asked.
Mara searched through the papers.
“I assumed the payments to the internal mole started recently.”
“They didn’t?”
“No.”
She turned the laptop around.
Financial records filled the screen.
“Calder received his first unexplained transfer eight years ago.”
Stellan’s face changed.
Eight years.
Long before the current port negotiation.
Long before Mara.
Long before Celia.
“So Grekov planted Calder years ago,” Archer said.
Mara shook her head.
“Or somebody else did.”
Celia stared at the screen.
There were coded payments.
Dates.
Amounts.
Then she noticed one line.
A sender designation.
T.R.
Her breath stopped.
“No.”
Stellan leaned closer.
Celia pointed.
“That’s my father’s initials.”
Nobody spoke.
She stood.
“My father paid Calder?”
“We don’t know that,” Stellan said.
“His initials are right there.”
“Initials are not proof.”
“Coming from the man who had me investigated before breakfast, that’s surprisingly generous.”
Stellan ignored the remark.
“There’s another possibility.”
“What?”
“He was paying Calder to watch someone.”
“Who?”
Stellan looked at her.
“Me.”
Celia stared.
“Why would my father care about you eight years ago?”
Stellan was silent.
And Celia suddenly understood.
He knew.
Again.
“What happened eight years ago?”
Stellan walked to the fireplace.
When he finally spoke, his voice had changed.
“My father died.”
Celia knew that.
Everyone knew that.
Alexander Varo had been found dead after a late-night car accident on a mountain road.
The police called it weather-related.
The newspapers called it suspicious.
Stellan had inherited everything at thirty-one.
Mara looked from the records to Stellan.
“You think Thomas Rowe knew something?”
Stellan turned.
“My father believed Grekov arranged the death of my older brother two years earlier.”
Celia had not known Stellan had a brother.
“He began investigating Grekov privately.”
“And then your father died too,” Celia said.
“Yes.”
Celia looked at the initials on the screen.
Thomas Rowe.
Her father.
Stellan’s father.
Grekov.
Calder.
The threads were not meeting by accident.
Suddenly Archer’s phone buzzed.
He read the message.
Then went very still.
Stellan noticed.
“What?”
Archer looked at Celia first.
“We received an email.”
“From who?”
“Thomas Rowe.”
Celia’s pulse stopped.
May you like
Archer read the subject line aloud.
FOR MY DAUGHTER ONLY.
