Jack Mars - Recall Zero

She started backing down the drive.

“This isn’t funny!” He slammed a palm on the window. “How am I supposed to get back?”

“Your mom sounds useful,” she shouted at him through the closed window. “Try giving her a call.”

And then she drove away, down the street, with a tiny version of Greg standing in the rearview mirror with his hands on his head in disbelief. She knew she’d catch hell for that back at the academy, but in the moment she didn’t care. Because as the foreign house of her father grew smaller behind her, it felt like a weight was lifting from her shoulders. She’d gone there that day out of some sense of family, a sense of responsibility. A burden, really.

But now, she realized, if she never saw them or that house again, it would be okay. She was fine on her own. There was no closure, and there never would be. Her mother was dead, and her father was dead to her.

Karina Pavlo sat at the furthest corner of the bar, obscured by beer taps but with a clear view of the front entrance. She’d chosen a place that no one in their right mind would ever think to look for her, a seedy dive bar in the southeast quadrant of DC, not far from Bellevue. It was not the best of neighborhoods, and the day was quickly becoming dusk, but she was not concerned about petty thieves or would-be muggers. She had bigger problems than that.

Besides, she had just done some petty theft herself.

After eluding the Secret Service agent and hiding out in the bookstore for a short while, Karina risked heading back out onto the street for less than a block before ducking into a department store. Aside from the fact that she was shoeless, she was still well dressed and, holding her head high and walking confidently to avoid scrutiny, looked the part of any upper-middle-class businesswoman.

She headed straight to the women’s department and grabbed some casual clothing off the rack, items that wouldn’t draw a lot of attention. She left her skirt and blouse and blazer in the dressing room, pulled on a pair of sneakers, and walked back out a different entrance of the store without anyone looking twice at her. Two blocks later she stopped in at another store and, after pretending to browse for a few minutes, walked out with a pair of stolen sunglasses and a silk scarf that she tied over her dark hair.

Back on the street, she targeted a chubby man in a striped polo with a camera hanging around his neck. He couldn’t have been more of a tourist if he was wearing a sandwich board that said so. She bumped into him roughly as they passed, gasping and immediately apologizing. His face turned red and he opened his mouth to shout at her, until he saw that she was a slight, pretty brunette. He muttered an apology and scurried along on his way, unaware that his wallet was missing. Karina had always been quick with her hands. She did not condone stealing, but this was a time of necessity.

The wallet had a little less than a hundred dollars in cash in it. She took the money and dropped the rest of it, ID and credit cards and photos of kids, into a large blue postal box on the next corner.

Finally she took a cab east, across town, where she headed into the dive bar, its windows darkened and the place smelling like cheap beer, and took a seat at the bar and ordered a soda.

The television suspended over the beer taps was on and tuned into a news station, the current story an update on sports scores from the night prior. She sipped her soda, calming her nerves and wondering what she would do next. She couldn’t go back to the hotel; that would be a fool’s errand. Besides, there was nothing for them to find there but clothes and toiletries. She had one phone number memorized, but she was hesitant about finding a pay phone. They were getting rarer, even in the cities. The Secret Service had her cell phone, and they might be watching the pay phones.

She was considering asking the bartender to use their phone, but her contact was an international number and that might draw undue attention.

The next time Karina glanced up at the television, the story had changed. A male anchor she didn’t recognize was talking at her, and though the volume was too low to hear she could clearly see the words on the black ticker across the bottom of the screen: HARRIS AND KOZLOVSKY HOLD PRIVATE MEETING.

“ Korva ,” she sighed. Shit. Then in English: “Can you turn this up, please?”

The bartender, a Latino man with a handlebar mustache, scowled at her for a moment before turning his back to show just how blatantly he was ignoring her.

“ Zalupa ,” she muttered, an unkind curse in Ukrainian. Then she leaned over the bar, located the remote, and turned the volume up herself.

“…anonymous source inside the White House has confirmed that a private meeting was held earlier today between President Harris and Russian President Aleksandr Kozlovsky,” the anchor declared. “The two days since Kozlovsky arrived in the United States have been highly publicized and well documented, yet the notion of a closed-door meeting held in a conference room of the White House basement has many people nervously reminiscing on the events from nearly a year and a half ago.

“In response to the leak, the press secretary issued this statement, and I quote: ‘Both presidents have been under a veritable microscope these past two days, due largely to the indiscretions of their predecessors. President Harris and his guest simply wanted a brief reprieve from the limelight. The meeting in question was less than ten minutes in length, and the subject of this meeting was for each leader to become better acquainted with the other without the pressure of media presence or scrutiny. I can assure each and every person here and tuning in that there was no clandestine agenda. This was simply a closed-door conversation, and nothing more,’ end quote. When questioned further about the specifics of this meeting, the press secretary joked, ‘I wasn’t privy to details, but I believe the meeting was largely about their mutual love of scotch and dachshunds.’

“Though the true nature of the meeting remains shrouded in secrecy, we have confirmed through our anonymous source that there was only one other person present in the room with the two leaders—an interpreter. Though her identity has not been released, we have confirmed that she is female, and a native to Russia. Now the world wants to know: were the two leaders discussing drinks and dogs? Or does this unidentified female interpreter hold the answer to a question that many Americans have on their—”

The television suddenly flickered out, the screen turning black. Karina looked down sharply to see that the Latino bartender had grabbed the remote and turned it off.

She was about to call him an asshole in plain English but stopped herself. There was no point picking fights; she was supposed to be incognito. Instead she mulled over the report. The White House had not released her identity, at least not yet. They wanted to find her and silence her before she could tell anyone what she had heard. What the two presidents were planning. What Kozlovsky had asked of the American leader.

But Karina had an ace in the hole—two of them, in fact. She again absentmindedly caressed the pearl studs in her ears. Two years earlier, she had been translating for a German diplomat who had accused her of misinterpreting his words. She hadn’t, but it had almost landed her in some real trouble. So with some help from her sister and her contacts in FIS, Karina had the earrings made. Each of them contained a tiny unidirectional microphone that recorded a speaker on either side of her; together, the two earrings combined would capture any conversation that Karina interpreted. It was, of course, highly illegal, but also very handy, and since she had begun using them she hadn’t found any reason to need the recordings and subsequently deleted them.