They sat beside each other on hard plastic chairs in front of a decaying wooden table in a room bathed in shadows and cigarette smoke. There were no windows, no vents, and only one door. A single dusty light bulb hung from the ceiling, its glow barely doing any justice to the nearly pitch black room.
Alanna Roberts and her brother Dmitri faced the two Russian men in front of them with cold, hard, undeterred stares. They both knew what they were up against, and didn’t budge. Each had training to diffuse the situation, but right now it was useless. There was a hint in the air that they had been discovered.
Alanna ran her hand through her flaming red hair as the sweat trickled down her brow. There was no way she would let these guys stare her down. She looked over at her brother, who seemed as cool as a cucumber. She didn’t know how he was able to stay so calm in such a tense situation, but somehow his coolness helped her gradually regain her strength.
She swallowed hard when she heard the door behind her creak open and the ominous footsteps of another presence walk down the stuffy hallway to the confined room. She looked over at her brother again, hoping to find some strength to hold on to, but instead, she saw fear in his deep brown Spanish eyes.
‘Like Mom’s,’ Alanna thought for a moment before realizing that a large, over weight man had taken a seat across from them.
The man stared at the two of them with tense slate blue eyes outlined in blood red veins that seemed to pulsate as his anger grew towards them.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he angrily asked in his native Russian tongue as he shoved a stack of photos towards them.
Alanna and Dmitri looked at the photos then at each other. The photos showed the two exchanging case sensitive information with their CIA superiors in a supposedly secret location. ‘Shit,’ she thought. ‘We’ve been caught.’
“Are you working for the CIA?” the fat man asked, rather yelled, at them.
They exchanged glances again trying to figure out a way to make him believe that they weren’t. Both gave him a cold hard stare back as his fist slammed onto the wooden table, splintering it even further in its decaying state. Alanna jumped at the loud crash, but didn’t for one second let down her guard. She could see the two men had left the table and were behind them, ready at a moments notice to take orders from their boss to kill her and her brother.
With a single wave of his hand, the fat man dismissed himself from the meeting, and the other two Russians took over what should have been finished by now. Alanna heard the door slam and one of them men put an arm around her neck. She could feel her breath catch for a moment, afraid that she wouldn’t be able to get out of this hold, but soon realized her strength was far more superior to his.
She stood up, her quickness startling the man, loosening his grip. Her elbow slammed into his jaw, knocking him off her. He stumbled to the ground and began to get up, but her foot soon lodged itself in his abdomen, paralyzing him further. Alanna looked over at Dmitri as he struggled with the other Russian. With a swift kick to the groin, he was down for the count. She and Dmitri rushed out of the room and began running down the corridor looking for an exit from this horrible place before the fat man’s other henchmen caught them.
Dmitri grabbed Alanna’s hand and dragged her along with him towards a light in the hallway. Just as they approached their exit, another set of Russians appeared before them. One grabbed Alanna by the arm and pulled her away from Dmitri. She struggled with his grasp as she was dragged further and further away from her brother into the darkness of another hallway.
The man grunted as she struggled with him, but Alanna had the upper hand. She raised herself up over his head and slammed him onto the hard concrete. She quickly jumped away from him just in case he recovered. His large body slowly raised itself off the ground, and his piercing eyes stared at her in the darkness. She smiled evilly, her eyes shining and her teeth bared, then slammed her fist into his face, knocking him back down where he belonged.
Alanna began running back towards the hall that she and her brother had been separated in, but soon found it empty without a trace of anyone being there. ‘God, I hope he made it out of there,’ she thought to herself as she ran out the door into the street. Just as she looked behind her, she saw three more Russian men running after her. ‘Will they ever leave me the fuck alone?’ she asked herself as she picked up her already hurried pace.
“Get back here, you bitch!” the men yelled in Russian at her as she rounded a corner.
“Come and catch me!” she screamed back, galloping down the wide-open street. Alanna looked back again to find that one of the Russians had drawn a gun and was pointing it right at her back. She quickly rounded another corner, her mind racing as her feet led her to somewhere she could loose them. She heard a gunshot and the chipping of thick red brick behind her.
“Fuck!” Alanna shrieked as her heart beat faster. This was no longer a simple game of hide and seek. Her moves meant life and death out here in the open. She ran for the nearest corner and braced herself for what she would find behind it. Another street, this time, crowded.
Alanna breath a sigh of relief, but it was short lived. Looking back, she saw the three gunmen still barreling towards her. Unknowingly, she kept running through the crowd with her head turned back towards the Russians. Just as she was about to look in front of her, she hit something, hard.