Free Black Widow by Cliff Ryder Page B

bodyguards said.
    "Yes?"
    "Do you think that man will bring us our guns?"
    Taburova didn't hesitate in answering. "Yes. Pasternak is no fool. He's just greedy. Greed can be adjusted. More than being rich, he wants to live." He paused. "We'll get our weapons."
15
    Leicester, England
    "Ajza, you're going to grow old with that broom in your hands."
    Startled by the voice, Ajza looked up from sweeping the floor of her parents' shop.
    A slim young man about her age stood in one of the aisles. He held a soccer ball under one arm and an energy drink in the other. He wore a windbreaker over his soccer uniform.
    Ajza searched her memory for the man's name but came up empty. She hadn't really known him, and the neighborhood was large, filled with lots of families.
    "You don't remember me." The man showed her a petulant, mildly disappointed smile.
    "I do," Ajza said. His name was there at the tip of her tongue. He'd been one of Ilyas's friends. They had played sports together from childhood through their college years.
    "Razool."
    "Of course." Ajza smiled a little when she heard his name and realized it fit. Still, paranoia crept into her mind and stayed there. She hadn't seen Razool in a long time. The part of her that remained ever vigilant wondered what he was doing here now. "It has been a while," she said.
    "It has. I've been away. Boston." Razool hesitated. "That's in the United States."
    "I know where Boston is."
    "Of course you do. You were always so smart. I remember that about you. I also remember how I always saw you sweeping the floor here before and after school."
    Ajza had gotten lost in that remembering, as well. Her parents had worked hard to buy the shop in Haymarket Centre because of the location, and they'd worked the family even harder to make the business successful. She'd never really dreaded the work when she was younger, and now she was surprised at the solace it offered. It was simple work, comfortable and familiar. She didn't have to decide to trust the floor before she swept it. Nor did she have to lie to it.
    The aisles and refrigeration units offered her a familiar world that promised never to change. Only it did, of course. Ilyas would never again walk through the doors and complain about their father's to-do list; even when they'd come to visit, they were expected to help with the work.
    "I don't think I swept the floors all the time," Ajza protested.
    Razool cocked an eyebrow. "You swept the floors a lot. I used to watch you."
    The statement was meant to be flirtatious. Ajza enjoyed it for a moment, and the events of only a few days ago seemed even farther away.
    "Now I remember you even better," she said. "You were one of the layabouts my father had to run off from the store so often."
    Razool covered his heart with his energy drink. "You wound me."
    "I doubt that. So now you're laying about in Boston?"
    "I'm a professor, actually. Computer science."
    "Helping design space launches?"
    "Teaching college students to design video games. That's all they want to learn these days."
    In spite of the tension caused by her brother's absence hanging over the shop, Ajza laughed. "You came back to play football?"
    "No. I came back because my mother had heart bypass surgery."
    That sobered Ajza. So many of the faces she remembered from her childhood were older these days. And too many of them were missing. "Is your mother well?"
    "On the mend. Thank you. She'll outlive me, and through it all she'll continue to harangue me for grandchildren. Of course, she would like to see me married first, but I'm beginning to think that might be negotiable. So what about you? What are you doing?"
    "I'm a translator for an international investments broker. Financial documents." That was the cover MI-6 had provided her, and she worked at that job enough to keep it bulletproof.
    Razool grimaced. "Oh, and I acted the proper world-traveling lout, didn't I?"
    She grinned good-naturedly at his embarrassment. "Most of my work is in London.