Page 53 of Unnatural Death

“… Carrie Grethen, the expat from hell …,” my husband says as I’m confronted by the image of someone who I believed was dead.

She was never gone, and he’s known it all along.

“Holy fuck,” Marino mutters.

How could Lucy not say something?

“… As violent as ever but now on a mission and with tremendous wealth and power …,” Benton is saying, and I trusted him. I trusted Lucy. I believed what I was told and have been misled.

I understand why they couldn’t share top secret information. There’s much I don’t discuss with them either. We often have little choice but to lie by omission. Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better. Had the roles been reversed, I would have found a way to warn them.

“This video was posted yesterday at sixP.M.East Coast time. Halloween, as the sun was setting,” Benton says, and Lucy’s cryptic remarks are making more sense.

You’ll be told some things, and you should. It’s time. I hear my niece’s voice in my head.

I can tell by the sound of the helicopter’s engines that she’s lifting off from the tarmac in front of the trailer. As she pulls in power, the roaring and thudding get louder and change pitch. Of course, she’s aware of what Marino and I are learning. She’s been dropping ominous hints all day and can’t feel good about any of this.

No doubt she’s known the truth from the start. That’s why she began working with New Scotland Yard and Interpol when she did. It had to do with Carrie Grethen. Attempting to track her and everything she’s involved in likely led Lucy to Huck and Brittany Manson. Carrie has continued to be Lucy’s major preoccupation, and that’s the truth of the matter.

“… A recruitment video and the first time thePrizrakhas shown herself. Let’s take a listen,” Benton says, and the video begins playing.

* * *

Dressed in a tactical jacket, cargo pants and boots, Carrie Grethen holds a submachine gun in her graceful hands. She’s facile and sinewy strong, in her early fifties and aging well. The younger woman with her carries a large metal ammo box.

Physically imposing with dyed red hair and Slavic bone structure, the younger woman wears camouflage, her affect oddly vague. Her gait is stiff and slightly jerky as if she has bad knees or a prosthetic limb. She and Carrie walk along berms on a windswept firing range in slanted sunlight, their shadows elongated on dead grass.

Then Carrie stops and turns around, staring directly into the camera. Her piercing stare runs right through me like an electrical current, my mouth dry, my heart pounding.

“… Greetings from one of my favorite places to train in the beautiful region of Yarosavl Oblast …” Carrie’s voice sounds the same but with a Russian accent, and it penetrates my soul to hear her again.

I stare at scars on her once pretty face, the deformation of her once perfectly shaped nose and ears. I can hear the long blade of a stiletto hissing out and see the look in her eyes as she strode toward me intending to end my life. Then blood was flying everywhere as I was knocked unconscious.

“… Let me give you a brief tour of what is in this area,” Carrie says in the video, her garish blond hair short with rose-gold highlights as if she’s my niece’s parody. “Who knows, you may want to visit someday and avail yourself of the very special and elite training we offer …”

I first met her at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility (ERF) on the same Quantico campus as their famed academy. Lucy was a senior at UVA, a computer genius, a magician at AI coding. I’d managed to get her an internship with the FBI and will regret it for the rest of my life.

Living in a dorm with new agents in training, she was assigned to ERF. Her supervisor was Carrie Grethen, an outside contractor twelve years her senior. Lucy had no idea what she was up against. None of us did.

“… Just over the berms and beyond the trees is Lake Nero and the majestic Cathedral of the Assumption …”

I’d be disingenuous if I said I hadn’t found Carrie impressive. Together she and my niece were creating an AI network. They were talking about quantum computing before most people had heard of it, their entanglement intensely competitive and obsessive. Carrie became a constant presence in Lucy’s FBI Academy dorm room, and I didn’t approve. But I understood the attraction.

“… Also, the whimsical Princess Frog Museum. A reminder that it’s not the Russian people who are uncivilized and brutish …”

Carrie gave me an uneasy feeling from the start, but she had a security clearance in a classified facility. She was brilliant and charming. I couldn’t possibly know she was evil. It seemed nobody did, including the very FBI personnel she worked with daily. At the time her hair was long and dark. She was statuesque and graceful, the sort to turn heads and command respect.

“… We have peaceful monasteries in the area where we are welcome to stay while we train very hard, and that is appropriate. We serve the highest of causes with the devotion of someone in a religious order …”

Benton says the original sin in all this goes back to an abusive childhood malignant with religious judgment and sexual perversion. She’s projected her self-loathing onto Lucy. Added to that is a pathological need for Carrie to possess what she can’t have. She envies Lucy and is obsessed with her. While that might make sense, I’m beyond giving a damn about the reason.

* * *

“… This is where we train the most precise snipers, the most valiant of warriors in the world …,” Carrie says on the video, and it’s as if she’s in the room with Marino and me.

Her eyes lack warmth like a reptile even as she smiles arrogantly. She seems to know something that’s amusing. I try to block out the memories of our last encounter when she came close to killing all of us while we were living in Massachusetts.

“… Today I will introduce you to a very special AR-nine rifle …”

---