Black And White Ops

She brushed the glass off her and looked at the alley between the buildings. There was someone in it staring at her. Through the smoke and haze, she saw the face of the man she’d talked to in the coffee shop days earlier. What the hell was he doing in the middle of the explosion? Did he have something to do with it? She saw the man who called himself “Rick” staring back at her through the cloud of smoke, but she had to get clear of the building. Monique tried to grab more of her scattered papers and staggered forward on the pavement. She was reeking of smoke and some chemical. The fire was burning nicely now, giving her plenty of heat on the ground. But she had to get away before it became worse or the building started collapsing. It was an older building that was only four floors high, but any building could fall apart when it started burning. She’d seen it happen in Philadelphia.

Monique began to feel her way to the building next to her. She had to get home before anyone identified her. She was a foreigner who had been in the vicinity of some kind of explosion. It wasn’t that long ago that Moscow had been rocked by terrorist attacks. If anyone was going to get blamed for it, it would be a foreigner of color who happened to be in the wrong place when the bomb went off. She looked around her and didn’t see anyone else she recognized. The man she had met the other day, Rick, was gone. Was this some kind of “hit” being carried out by the Russian mob? She had to get home before the police showed up and she disappeared into the bowels of the Russian penal system. She began walking down the street rapidly as more people came out to watch the fire. Maybe it was an accidental explosion and someone was working with flammable chemicals on that floor. It didn’t make any difference to her, she had to get home.

Most of her savings went into a Swiss account, so Monique wasn’t concerned about losing all the money she saved while teaching in Russia. She had a local bank account, but the cash from it was for her living expenses. She did have a special saving in her apartment that no one else knew about. With it was an airline ticket which she updated every six months. If relations between the United States and Russian Federation became real bad, which they might at any moment, she could catch a flight out and not have to worry. Her passport was stashed in the wall of her apartment too.

The apartment walls had been used as a safe before. When she found the access to it behind her bedroom closet, Monique discovered thousands of Rubles in 1940’s money. She’d left them there since trying to cash them in might arouse the wrong kind of suspicion. Besides, the person who had left them there all those years ago might come back and get them.

Her apartment was close, so it wasn’t all that much trouble to find her way through the alleys to it. She used the back approach to her apartment several times when she didn’t like the attention some drunk had given her. Russian men had a hard time understanding the word “Nyet” from a foreign woman, whom they all assumed were sl*ts. She found her street in the darkness quickly enough and walked to her building, making sure all the glass was off her just in case she ran into any of her neighbors. Monique almost yelled as a rat shot across her foot in the alley, but it had better things to do. She stayed quiet and pulled out her pass card when she approached the door. No one was waiting for her, thank God. She ran it through reader, the light flashed green and the building door unlocked. Brushing the last of the glass fragments off her coat, she went inside.

The vestibule was empty. It was a weeknight and the bars weren’t open all that late. A rowdy crowd might show up later, but for now she could be left alone. Monique made her way up the stairs; the elevator was out of service again, to her apartment. She pulled out her key and unlocked the door to it, staggering inside. So far no one had seen or heard her. She might just pull out of this thing alright, but experience had taught her to be cautious. Monique dropped the file of papers down on her dining table, next to the little nesting dolls she collected and sat down. She thought about it for a bit longer and went to the refrigerator to pull out a bottle of wine which was saved for emergencies. What she had just been through constituted an emergency. She poured herself a glass of wine and drank it down slowly.

Once the alcohol had soothed her nerves, Monique went to the television and turned it on. There were no reports of the explosion yet, but it didn’t surprise her. The official news tended to drag a little bit, but there would be an official statement in a few hours from the city government.

Since there was nothing on TV, she booted up her computer and found some local blogs and websites. In spite of the government making threats against bloggers, or because of it, she could find out all kinds of unofficial news the moment it happened. It took her two minutes to find a Russian blogger who was talking about a blast in an office building. She saw the photographs of the fire brigade working to put it out. The blogger claimed the firemen had it under control and it shouldn’t spread to any other parts of the building. No one was hurt as the office where the blast had taken place was closed for the evening, which didn’t square with the light Monique had noticed before the explosion. At least she didn’t read any reports of a dark-skinned woman fleeing the scene of the explosion. She let out a sigh of relief and shut-down the computer.

Monique was going to take a shower, but then she had another thought: what about the money she had stashed in the wall? She got up from the kitchen table and made her way back to the closet. Monique pushed aside the clothes she had hanging in there and found the small icon she’d purchase to cover the opening she’d discovered when doing some painting a few years ago. The plaster had collapsed while she was scratching off the loose paint to reveal the hidden cavity with the Rubles in it. There was enough room in the cavity after she closed it up to put her emergency money and passport into it with the updatable airline ticket.