Cliff Ryder - Black Widow

She glanced at Taburova sitting astride the horse. Every inch of him looked like a warrior, a man used to living in the moment between life and death. His right hand never strayed from the pistol at his hip.

Finally, as the silence between them stretched long and thin, Ajza replaced the pin in the grenade, released Achmed and stood tall. She fully expected a fusillade of bullets to tear through her body and was surprised when they didn't. She almost let out a sigh of relief, but it took everything she had to remain standing on quaking legs.

"Toss the grenade aside," Taburova ordered.

Accepting her fate, Ajza did. She stood with her hands cuffed before her.

Achmed scrambled for his lost knife.

"Do not pick up that weapon," Taburova ordered.

Cursing, Achmed pulled his hand away from the knife.

"You have the keys to her cuffs?" Taburova asked.

"Yes," Achmed said.

"Release her."

Achmed reached inside his pants and took out the key Ivan had given him. He opened Ajza's cuffs. "Do not think this is over," he whispered between gritted teeth. "If you don't die quickly as a Black Widow, I will find you and kill you."

Ajza believed the man, but she refused to acknowledge him.

"Come to me," Taburova ordered now, his gaze on Ajza.

Slowly Ajza walked toward the warrior.

Taburova drew himself up in his saddle and addressed the rest of the slavers. "These women are given to me from God. I am his holy redeemer of their souls. I bring them the vengeance their hearts cry out for, and I open the doors of heaven for them. You will not break God's trust in me."

Achmed and his men said nothing.

"You act as my emissaries while gathering these women from the homes that will not harbor them," Taburova went on. "When no one else will have them, I take them and give them lives with purpose and power. You may not harm these women — or the others I give sanctuary to — in any way. Is this understood?"

It was a pretty speech, Ajza thought. Under other, more desirable circumstances, she would have thought it melodramatic. She knew it wasn't true.

The slavers nodded and grumbled quietly.

Without warning, Taburova pulled the pistol from his holster and shot Achmed in the head. The harsh crack made the horse jump a little and Ajza draw back. As the slaver dropped, Taburova held his weapon on the other slavers as a dozen men stepped from the shadows.

"Is this understood?" Taburova demanded again.

"Yes, master." This time there was no mistaking the answer.

New York

Muting the warring feelings inside her, Kate watched the footage of Ajza's showdown with the slaver again. Due to the night, they hadn't been able to positively identify the man who had ridden the horse up into the mountainous terrain and confronted Ajza, but her gut told her who he was.

"We're close to Taburova," Jake said.

"Or, depending on how you choose to look at it, he's close to us," Kate replied. "I'm not ready to put money on the table yet."

"I think Ajza played it smart." Jake sipped his coffee. He was referring to the way she'd gotten the drop on the slaver who attacked her.

"She got lucky. If the man on horseback hadn't arrived and the situation hadn't gone the way it did…"

"She'd have been forced to try her luck in the brush," Jake said. "If it had come to that, I think she still would have walked away."

Kate massaged the back of her neck and wished that the headache plaguing her would pass. "Entry into the Black Widow camp was supposed to be low profile. This isn't low profile."

"The trafficker didn't give her a lot of choices out there. Would you have played the hand any different?"

Kate thought about her answer only briefly. "No. She didn't have a choice. But the ideal insertion would have been to slip into the Black Widow camp without making any waves."

"That was a long shot."

"With the pressure Taburova's got coming down on him, the effort and expense he's gone to in order to get those weapons — which we still haven't found — Taburova's not got a lot of time to micromanage his operations. It was dumb luck that he was at the pickup tonight. If that was him."

"He should have dropped Ajza right along with Achmed," Jake said. "I would have. She was holding a live grenade and wasn't in my camp."

"Taburova didn't kill Ajza because somewhere inside that black heart of his, he's still a believer. Not a wild-eyed fanatic who likes to wave a weapon around and declare his country's freedom. He cuts corners, kills innocents and takes no prisoners, but that's what everybody does when they're in it to win. Look at us."

"What about us?"

"We're believers, too. The system doesn't work all the time without us. So we're the hard cases the governments can call on to handle the dirty jobs that need doing. Without any glory getting handed out. Without any protection other than what we're smart enough to arrange for ourselves," Kate said.

"I'd like to think we're different than Taburova," Jake said.

"Then think that way. That kind of thinking is what usually separates us from them."

"So what do you think Taburova saw in Ajza? Why didn't he just blow her away?" Jake asked.

"He saw in her the same things he wants to see in himself."

"He has a cause."

"You make him sound like a hero," Kate said, letting a little irritation into her words.

Jake shrugged. "At one time, this guy probably was a hero. No John Wayne, mind you, but a man other men could look up to. But somewhere along the way, he threw away the rulebook." He paused. "No matter what, Kate, you don't send women you've beaten and drugged into submission into cities to blow up civilians. Without freedom to live and grow in large communities, people can't learn to understand, change and compromise. Living in fear won't let them do that. We're here to remove that fear. However we have to. That's what makes us different from Taburova and the other people Room 59 has gone after. We bend, fracture and break rules, but we don't completely throw the rulebook out the door. And we're accountable for our actions."

Kate knew that was true.

"The thing that really bugs you is that if that was Taburova out there on that mountain, he just saved Ajza's life."

"She saved her own life," Kate replied.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Jake grinned.

The bad people weren't always completely bad. Kate knew that. It was one of the first lessons she'd learned as a young CIA agent. The people she'd gone up against were a lot like her, but just different enough that they were enemies.

"Good guys and bad guys," Jake said. "A lot of times it's like that Red Light, Green Light game we played as kids. It just depends on where you are when the clock stops." He nodded toward the wall screen. "Right now we've got to stop that weapons shipment. And maybe punch Taburova's ticket, too. He's running those Black Widow camps, Kate. There's no getting around that."

"I know."

"What's the Russian guy doing?" Jake asked.

"Prokhorov? He's doing what we always do when we can't think of anything else. He's following the money. He's turned up a lead to someone who's supposed to bring the American weapons into Chechnya."

"Let's hope he finds something quick," Jake said. "Ajza's situation in that Black Widow camp is going to deteriorate pretty quickly."

Kate turned her thoughts back to making the mission work. Luck came, good and bad, and she had to make the most of whichever it was. When agents were in this deep, there were no guarantees they'd get back out again.

Moscow

Sergei stood in the shadows of the Hotel Ukrainia and wondered what life would be like if he could afford such a place on a regular basis. Would he change? Or would the world just be more accessible?