Broken | Lucas North - Spooks/MI5 Story [Featured]

Chapter 21

When she first awoke after being shot, she remembered hearing Mikhael and an older woman talking in the room. Alexa had kept her eyes shut, ignoring the pain in her throat from the feeding tube that had kept her nourished for almost two weeks. She knew she wasn't in a hospital but a small room with only the barest of furnishings. Medical equipment that appeared dated surrounded her but no matter how old they were, she realized that they had kept her alive.

From listening to them that morning, she learned that she'd been asleep for two weeks, as the woman preferred to describe her state, and that the fever had finally abated. She heard them talk about the search for the hard drive and that it had not been found, not even in the hiding places that Mikhael had taught her.

It took Alexa a few more days to finally remember what she had done - the whittling of the wood just days before, and its hasty painted strokes, remembering how she'd replaced the original baby matryoshka doll with the one she had created.

It was the one gift that Mikhael had given her when she first met him in Paris at the outdoor market, when she ran into him while she had been with her friends. He'd simply stared at her then and together with her friends, they had laughed at him but she was flattered. When he saw her admiring a shop with Russian trinkets, he purchased the most expensive matryoshka doll he could find among his inventory, the same one he'd noticed her inquiring about.

It was the only thing she had managed to keep with her through her whole ordeal after Mikhael kidnapped her on orders of Arkady, and she suspected that Mikhael had intended it that way. It had been his gift to her before they both ended up in hell.

He had never suspected that it would contain the one thing he had been searching for the entire time, even after he himself handed it to Alexa as she got into the van that would take her to Demodovo airport and then home. Yet for some reason, Mikhael did know, Alexa thought. He knew because he gave her the activation phrase telling her that it was time to hand it over to British security services.

It was time to let it go.

Alexa opened the medicine cabinet and took a nail file from the shelf. She pressed the tip of the knife on a painted button on the front of the doll, turning the metal so that it poked into the wood.

Outside, she realized that it was deathly quiet. "Shit," she breathed, quickly working on finding the seam in the wood, the one she herself had made.

Suddenly Lucas was banging on the door. "Open the door, Alex," he demanded. When she didn't answer, he pounded on the door again.

Alexa twisted the nail file one more time, wedging it into the crack that had formed the first time she'd pushed the tip through the painted button. Her hands shook as she managed to finally crack the wood. But just as the baby matryoshka finally yielded its treasure, the door burst open and Lucas rushed towards her, grabbing her hands and dragging her to the living room. This time, Alexa did not fight him as Lucas pried her hands open.

The plastic case contained the computer thumb drive, just as she had last seen it nine years earlier. Lucas broke open the plastic case and the thumb drive dropped onto his palm.

"Is this what Mikhael was talking about on the ship? 'Because they wished to see too far before them, backward they look, and backward make their way,'" Lucas demanded. "Is this what it's all about, Alex? The bomb, the sniper," he looked at the flat around him. "Even this flat you've got under the name Dimitri Ilyakov, the name I used when I found you in Moscow nine years ago? Is it because of this?"

He brought the thumb drive in front of her.

Alexa stared at him. She grabbed the thumb drive from his hand but Lucas pulled his arm away, grabbing her arm with another as she winced in pain.