Extreme Faction by Trevor Scott Read Free Book Online

ankles, looking Jake up and down.
    â€œI’m sorry if I scared you,” she said. “I tried knocking, but there was no answer. So I let myself in. I could hear the water running.”
    Let herself in? It had been late when he got in. Had he forgotten to lock the door? He didn’t think so, but it was possible. “I’m sorry I almost hit you. It’s just—”
    She raised a hand. “It’s my fault. A bath is a sacred place. I shouldn’t have come.” She started for the door.
    â€œWait.” Jake closed the door. “Why are you here?”
    She hesitated. “I thought we’d have breakfast. Talk. Get to know each other better.”
    Standing in his underwear, Jake felt a chill across his body. He studied her large, round eyes, those moist lips, her perfect body. “Let’s talk in the other room,” he said.
    She agreed and they both went into the main room, her taking the chair by the mirror, and Jake sitting at the head of the bed nearest the pillow with the Makarov. He wasn’t sure why. He had no reason not to trust Chavva, other than the fact that she was so mysterious and had been the last person to actually touch Yuri Tvchenko before his death. Besides him, of course.
    Jake slipped a T-shirt over his head, cutting the chill. He waited for her to say something, staring right at her, taking in every square inch of her.
    Finally she said, “That was terrible last night... Tvchenko’s death.”
    She looked visibly disturbed, as if she would cry, or had cried over the man’s death.
    â€œWere you two friends?”
    She shook her head. “No. But it was a horrible way to die. The twitching.” She shuddered.
    Jake had seen so many people die, perhaps he was a bit too familiar. Too insensitive. Maybe that’s why Chavva had disappeared after the man collapsed.
    â€œIt must have been worse for you,” she said. “Him falling into your arms like that. Did he say anything before he died? Did he know he was dying?”
    He thought about that. He hadn’t even considered how Tvchenko had felt. How would it feel knowing you were dying? Jake had been shot before. Once, when he was grazed in the head, he had felt as though he were floating from the ground, and imagined himself rising to heaven. If such a place even existed, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be heading in that direction. He wondered about others he had seen die, or having died recently. The worst of all had been in Halabja. With those people, mostly innocent civilians, whose only crime was having been born a Kurd, he could read their contorted faces. There was the mother who had searched for her fifteen-year-old daughter, and collapsed in the street gazing upward to Allah. What had she done? Jake found himself staring at Chavva.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said, thinking of her questions again. “I’m not sure what he was thinking. I guess he must have known he was dying, but assumed it was a heart attack or something.”
    â€œHe didn’t say anything to you?”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe ask you for help.”
    â€œWhy would he ask me for help? A stranger.”
    â€œI thought you said you knew him.”
    That was strange. They hadn’t even discussed Tvchenko. “We had met years ago,” Jake said. “But I’m sure Tvchenko didn’t even remember me.” Jake was rubbing the cut on his right hand where the scientist had passed that single word, Halabja, scribbled on a tiny note.
    â€œHow’d you hurt your hand?”
    â€œWhat?” He looked at his hand and thought quickly. “I cut myself yesterday on a metal railing heading down to the Catacombs,” he lied. He had been to the vast expanse of tunnels on the outskirts of the city, nearly a thousand kilometers in all, while working out of Odessa with the Air Force. They were dark and dreary places quarried in the