Much unhappiness has come into this world because of things left unsaid. This is a difficult truth to accept for a woman who's learned the best way to stay alive is to say nothing -- at least nothing true. Her sister understands this much, though she would not swear that she truly understands Irina. She doesn't think anybody ever has understood her, or ever will.
Silence is Irina's shield, her armor, her sword. Katya sympathizes with this, even envies it. She thinks her sister holds onto her silence because it is the only thing the world will never have the power to take away. Irina doesn't let herself feel the pain of what she's lost -- or, at any rate, has become very good at not letting it show. But sometimes Katya's heart is torn thinking of all her little sister has lost.
Yes, torn -- like paper, like rags, like anything insubstantial, cast-aside. Katya feels it beating within her chest, imagines the fragile tissues fluttering like rosepetals with every pulse. She's watched a man's heart stop before, so she knows what a heart looks like when it's been destroyed -- a shivering thing, shrouded in a lace of vessels, fading from the color of blood to the color of death. That's what it sometimes feels like when she thinks about Irina, and Sydney, and Jack.
Other times, when she thinks about Jack, it isn't pain for her sister she feels. But that's what Katya prefers to dwell on. Pain is sometimes the better alternative.
**
From a few things Jack said, Katya knows he imagines her as a close confidante of Irina's, someone who spends time with her, knows her secrets. Of course, there is no such creature, and even if Irina does someday let her guard down that much, Katya will not be the one to inherit the role.
No, she sees Irina three or four times a year; that's been their standard practice for a decade. Katya has considered asking Irina about it, but why? That would be the same as saying that she wants things to change, and she's not at all sure that she does. Both Katya's resentment and her love flourish with distance, and she needs both emotions to survive.
Today is their first visit for this year, the first in four months. It's February, so Katya had been hoping for an e-mail summoning her to Miami, or Rio, or Capetown. Instead, she's shivering on a street corner in Glasgow, staring at the cathedral just to have something to do. The church is still black with soot from the Industrial Revolution; the stained-glass windows would be splendid if any light shone through them, but the sky above is gray and heavy, caught in indecision between snow and rain.
"You've cut your hair." Irina says as she strolls to Katya's side. She's wearing a heavy parka, old boots, an unflattering hat; she means for nobody to look twice at her today. With her face, that's difficult.
"I got tired of the weight," Katya answers. She herself is wearing black leather, as usual. People may look twice at her at their peril.
"I know the feeling."
They walk on together, away from the cathedral, toward Thanatopolis -- Glasgow's great city of the dead. Graves stretch across the hills, the tombstones crumbling with age. Celtic crosses and statues of angels stand vigil over those otherwise forgotten. Sometimes even these have lost their names to rain and time, and bear only mute witness.
"Why didn't we allow Jack to kill Sloane?" The "we" is a polite fiction between the two of them; Katya knows who required permission and who denied it.
"We still need Sloane." Irina's eyes meet hers for the first time, and Katya can see that if Irina has closed herself off from her own pain, she can still feel for her sister. "Not for much longer. I promise."
"You began promising me that fifteen years ago."
"We've never been as close to victory as we are right now." Katya feels her sister's hand brush her arm, so quickly and so lightly it might be accidental -- if Irina did anything by accident, which she doesn't. "If we only wanted Sloane's death, yes, we might have had that long ago. But we need more. We need his destruction. To destroy a man -- that takes time."
Katya has watched the tapes of Emily Sloane's murder over and over again, the quick pop of blood spattering into the air. She has enlarged the images until the blood becomes pixelated, Emily's corpse a jumble of squares. It tides her over. "You're right, of course. The satisfaction will be greater for the waiting."
Does Sloane perhaps have tapes of the bombing? The Alliance's surveillance capabilites were still evolving in 1989, but Katya has learned at painful cost not to underestimate Sloane's reach. But no. If he ever had such tapes, he wouldn't have kept them; the work he did that day did't satisfy any emotional need. He may not even have noticed. In the roll of the dead who trace their murders to Arvin Sloane, the names of a music teacher and a little girl probably don't stand out. At the time, Sloane didn't recognize the family connection; they were merely collateral damage. Katya knows how it goes.
"What did you make of Jack?"
Katya has her answer ready. "Smart. He's let himself believe too much in the CIA's delusions of power, but if he ever goes independent, he'll be a force to contend with. Beyond that --" She steals a glance at her sister and, for the first time that day, smiles. "Within an hour, I liked him as much as I've ever liked anyone. I called him family when I left, and I meant it." Everything she says is entirely true, without being the entire truth.
"You weren't to tell him about our connection." Irina's steps falter slightly -- but the fact that they falter at all is a danger sign. "My instructions were explicit."
"I didn't tell him. He guessed. That's when I started liking him."
When her sister smiles, Katya can tell that Jack's deduction is as impressive to Irina as it was to her. "He's done his homework."
"He knows about Elena, too. No doubt he expects her to come calling at his door any day now."
"I think we'll leave that to you for the time being."
"Not to you?" If there is one thing Katya's completely certain of, it's the power of Jack's longing for Irina. If there are two things she's certain of, the second is Irina's longing for Jack.
The winter wind whips around them, making each sister the eye of her own hurricane. Katya envies Irina her ugly hat. Irina says only, "Someday. But not now."
On one level, that works to Katya's advantage, but it's not a level she particularly wants to contemplate. Admitting that she wants Jack would mean admitting that she can still want other human beings -- and Katya's aversion to such a confession is as strong as Irina's.
She nearly breaks right then; she is only an instant from grabbing Irina's shoulders and shaking her with all her strength. Go talk to your husband! she imagines herself screaming. She can hear the words in the wind: Tell him what you're planning! Tell him that you love him! Tell him whatever you have to tell him to make him less lonely, less distrustful -- less likely to look to someone else, least of all me.
For once, Irina, tell the truth and don't be afraid.
Katya says nothing. Irina explains what they're doing next, though she doesn't explain why. When they reach the top of the hill, Irina turns back without a word. They never say goodbye -- a superstition, perhaps. Katya doesn't watch her go, just keeps walking toward the river, in the cold.
**
The two elder Derevko sisters have only lived together once since childhood, for six months in 1982.
Irina sailed through her debriefing effortlessly, so far as Katya could tell; they were kept apart at first, but rumors spread quickly through the KGB, far more so than their superiors would've liked to think. Irina's work had been successful, her loyalty unswerving, her methods brilliant. They saw each other for the first time in ten years at an agency gathering in her honor; in front of all the officers, they hugged and laughed. There were toasts with Champagne. Irina held her glass up, receiving tribute like a queen.
They'd been home an hour before Irina collapsed.
For the next few months, Katya was nurse to an invalid. Irina lay in bed for hours, for days. She wouldn't wash. She wouldn't eat. She cried until she couldn't cry anymore, and then she lay quiet like a dead thing. Katya preferred the crying; pain is sometimes the better alternative.
Late at night, Irina would sometimes talk. With words, she painted pictures for Katya: of Sydney, her little feet spinning as she rode her tricycle down the sidewalk. Of California, beaches lined with sand as soft and white as flour. And of Jack, with his broad hands and gentle laugh and unquestioning love. Katya would hold her for hours while the words poured out.
She was frightened sometimes -- not just for Irina, but for herself. Was this what falling in love did to you? If so, perhaps it was just as well she'd avoided the experience thus far. (This was a full year before she met Tomas, a year and a day before he began spending money he couldn't afford to send Katya yellow roses. Symbols of joy, he said.)
In time, Irina healed. She moved out and moved on. They left the KGB together after Perestroika, and have worked together every since. But Irina doesn't spill out the truth anymore -- not to Katya, not to anyone. Most of her scars don't show, and those that do reveal nothing about the wounds that caused them.
**
Tomas' hair was wild. Beethoven's hair, he declared, ruffling it so that it would stand up even more.
He knew that Katya's work was dangerous; wisely, he never asked her a single question about it. He was happy to love her, to teach the children to play bells and woodblocks, to spend more time at home with Raina once she was born. Elena once teased Katya that she had a wife, not a husband; Katya rather liked the idea.
Romance was something he cultivated. Katya had never known she craved that in her life until he brought it to her in wineglasses and hidden notes and the folds of yellow roses. The more brutal her work became -- the more dangerous Irina's efforts grew -- the more Katya needed her family.
Not that he was perfect: Tomas could be lazy, even sulky. He wasn't as adventurous in bed as Katya would've liked. And when they fought, they fought like devils. She likes to call to mind some of his most venomous insults from time to time; it keeps her from worshipping the dead.
Raina, though -- Raina was three years old, an angel with coal-black curls. There is no darkness there to defend Katya from her memory.
Long ago, Katya burned all the keepsakes she had of her lost family, save for one snapshot of Tomas holding the newborn Raina. Katya carries that one with her at all times, and in the last seconds before Sloane dies, she hopes to show it to him.
**
Even without a calendar, Katya would know that today is Friday the 13th. Irina said the vault would be difficult to reach; she didn't mention that Katya would have to shinny across a 8-inch-wide metal beam to reach it. This isn't unusual, but Katya thinks it might need to become so, as she painstakingly makes her way across, trying not to stare at the bare concrete floor some 40 feet below. Really, she's getting too old for this.
Katya's instincts haven't aged, though; once she's in position she gets into the vault, then into the safe, as quickly as ever. The Rambaldi text, crumbling and golden, is linen-soft against her fingertips as she slides it into a protective satchel and puts that across her back. You need bare hands for such work, but Katya removes all traces of fingerprints with her leopard-print scarf. No matter what else she has become, Katya has become a very good thief.
Then she thinks of Jack, and their kiss, and other opportunities for larceny.
Jack's too lonely, too uncertain of Irina's intentions, to resist a truly excellent safecracker. Nobody would ever be able to steal his love for Irina, but his body and perhaps even his loyalty could be hers for a time. When Katya closes the safe again, she hears the tumblers spinning in the lock like the fluttering of a heartbeat.
But she won't truly pursue him; she'll banter and flirt and maybe even kiss, but such play is the beginning and end of it. Katya's always known this, even when Jack was in her arms. It isn't Jack she really wants, attractive though he is, as strongly as their shared loneliness echoes for each other. She wants a loving husband, a beautiful daughter: the shining life she might have had. But because she knows what it is to lose that life -- both through Irina's past and her own -- she'll never put Irina through that kind of pain.
So why put herself through it? she wonders, as she makes her way back across the beam. The satchel with the Rambaldi text slides across her back, making her stop for a moment -- but it's all right, and she keeps going, making her way outside. No alarms go off. Within another five minutes, she's strolling down a Paris boulevard, taking her time.
Why let herself feel something for Jack? When the person they both love most will always be Irina, no matter how long Irina keeps her silence? Why endure the hard edge of longing for a man she'll never have?
Katya frowns as the passes a florist's shop, bursting with sprays of roses. The romantic decorations annoy her; don't these people know it's Friday the 13th?
But then she realizes -- today is Friday the 13th. Tomorrow will be Valentine's Day.
She runs into the florist's before she can change her mind. Yes, yellow roses. Yes, four dozen. No, no card. Jack will think they're from Irina, or he'll think they're part of an insidious plot, or he'll throw them out as some delivery mistake. She suspects he's not one for flowers. But Jack's reaction isn't important, really. Katya only needs to know that she can still see the beauty in these roses, and that she can still send them, and that it doesn't matter in the slightest what happens next.
THE END