Beyond Suspicion

He put his arm around her, and they started back to the office. “This is a good move for you. An important step. I can feel it.”

With each footfall, the briefcase seemed to get heavier in her hand. “I feel it, too,” she said.

52

•

Katrina was crouched low behind the driver’s seat of a Volkswagen Jetta, waiting. The floor mats smelled of spilled beers, and the upholstery bore telltale burn marks of many a dropped joint. She was dressed entirely in black, and with a push of a button the green numbers on her wristwatch glowed in the darkness.

One-fifty A.M., just ten minutes till the end of Theo’s bartending shift at Sparky’s.

Laughter in the parking lot forced her closer to the floor. A typical ending to another “Ladies’ Night,” a totally drunk chick and three horny guys offering to drive her home. Their home. It was almost enough to make Katrina jump from the car and spring for cab fare, but she didn’t dare give herself away.

She had a job to do.

From her very first meeting with Vladimir, she’d decided that if it ever came down to a situation of either her or someone else, someone else would get it. But she’d always thought that the “someone else” would be another mob guy. She hadn’t figured on someone like Theo.

A rumbling noise rolled across the parking lot. Katrina could feel the vibration in the floor board. A moment later, diesel fumes were seeping in through the small opening in the passenger side window. She lifted her head just enough to see a huge tractor trailer parked two spaces down. The motor was ru

The fumes thickened, and she could almost taste the soot in her mouth. A dizzying sensation buzzed through her brain. The noise, the odor, the steady vibration-it all had her desperate for a breath of fresh air, but she forced herself to stay put. The very act of telling herself to tough it out and stay alert was eerily reminiscent of her life in Prague, not the beautiful old city as a whole but the noisy textile mill where she’d worked more than a decade earlier.

Back when her name was Elena, not Katrina.

There, in an old factory that still bore the scars of Hitler’s bombs, the oldest machines ran on diesel fuel, not electricity. The engines were right outside the windows, and even in the dead of winter, enough fumes seeped in through cracks and crevices to give Katrina and her Cuban coworkers chronic coughs, headaches, and dizzy spells. It was just one more hazard in a fourteen-hour workday, six days a week. Katrina had often pushed herself to the verge of blacking out, but the fear of falling perilously onto one of the giant looms around her kept her on her feet. Safety guards and emergency shut-offs were nonexistent, and the machines were unforgiving. Hers was one of the newer ones, about thirty years old. The one beside her was much older, predating the Second World War and constantly breaking down. Each minute, countless meters of thread fed through the giant moving arms. At that rate, you didn’t want to be anywhere near one of those dinosaurs when it popped, and you could only hope to find the energy to duck when a loosened bolt or broken hunk of metal came flying out like shrapnel.

Katrina had prayed for the safety of her coworkers, but she also thanked the Lord that she wasn’t the poor soul working one of those man-eaters. Years later, she still felt guilty about that. One nightmare, in particular, still haunted her. Never would she forget what happened on that cold night in January when machine number eight turned against its master, when her name was still Elena.

•

A loud pop rattled the factory windows, rising above the steady drone of machinery. Instinctively, Elena dived to the floor. One by one, the machines shut down like falling dominoes. A wave of silence fell over the factory, save for the pathetic screams and groans emerging from somewhere behind machine number eight, a tortured soul with a frighteningly familiar voice.

Elena raced across the factory, pushed her way through the small gathering of workers around the accident, and then gasped at the sight. “Beatriz!”

She and her best friend Beatriz had joined Castro’s Eastern Bloc work program together, with plans to defect at the first opportunity. Each had pledged never to leave without the other.

Elena went to her, but Beatriz lay motionless on her side, a thick pool of blood encircling her head. She checked the pulse and found none. She tried to roll Beatriz onto her back, then froze. The left side of her face was gone. A sharp hunk of metal protruded from her shattered eye socket.

“My God, Beatriz!”

The ensuing moments were a blur, her own cries of anguish merging with the memory of Beatriz’s painful screams. Tears flowed, and words came in incoherent spurts. Beatriz never moved. Kneeling at her side, Elena lowered her head and sobbed, only to be ripped away by a team of men with a stretcher.

“It’s too late for that,” she heard someone say. But the men rolled the body onto the stretcher anyway, then hurried for the exit.

Elena followed right behind them, through a maze of machinery, passing one stu

In her heart she knew that this was the last she’d see of Beatriz.

She couldn’t move. It was well below freezing, but she was oblivious to the elements. Half a block away she spotted a police car parked at the curb. It seemed like a sign, Beatriz whisked away in an ambulance right past the police. It was time for someone in a position of authority to see the deplorable conditions they worked under.

On impulse, she ran down the icy sidewalk and knocked on the passenger-side window. The officer rolled down the window and said something she didn’t understand.

“Come see,” she said, but her command of the language was still very basic. “The factory. Come see.”

He gave her a confused look. His reply was completely unintelligible, a dialect she’d never heard before. She’d learned Russian as a schoolgirl in Cuba, but there was surprisingly little crossover to Czech.

“What are you doing, girl?”

She turned and saw her foreman. He was a stocky, muscular man with extraordinarily bad teeth for someone as young as he was.

“Leave me alone. I want him to see what happened.”

He said something to the cop that made him laugh. Then he grabbed Elena by the arm and started back toward the factory.

“Let go of me!”

“Are you stupid? The police can’t help you.”

“Then I’ll talk to someone else.”

“Yes, I know you will. We’re going to see the boss man right now.” His grip tightened on her arm till it hurt. He took her down a dark alley that ran alongside the factory. The pavers were frozen over with spilled sludge and dirty run-off from the roofs, and about every third step her feet slipped out from under her. At the end of the alley were two glowing orange dots, which finally revealed themselves as the taillights of a Renault.

Her foreman opened the door, shoved Elena in the back seat, climbed in beside her, and closed the door. The motor was ru

“This is her,” said the foreman.

“Hello, Elena,” the driver said.