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It wasn't until a week into my investigation, as I was sitting in my uncle's chair, staring at the desk, that something seemed to click.
The drawer.
The drawer Mikhail had asked me to look inside, to find a file for.
The Beeker file.
Dread was a heavy sensation, making my hands slow as they moved around the keyboard, knowing that the physical copy was gone, but that my uncle was fastidious, was anal about things.
There would be a digital copy somewhere.
After a lot of searching in files tucked inside files tucked inside files, I found it.
And all the pieces started coming together.
He'd been laundering money.
Another day of hardcore research showed me to whom, for what.
My uncle was helping fund terrorism.
I couldn't - as awful a person as he had ended up being - consider him a radical.
He'd just seen an opportunity to make some money.
And he had taken it.
No matter what evil his deeds would allow to leech into the world.
He was wrapped up with terrorists.
That was what was in the Beeker file.
That was why he had been so angry with me.
That was why my parents had needed to die before they found out and pointed fingers like the upstanding English citizens they were.
And then the worst thought came.
The ugliest of them.
That was why Mikhail wanted the file.
My first thoughts had been of him being a terrorist, using me to steal the file back, so nothing traced to him and his organization.
That was the idea I kept with me for many days, weeks, months, as I tried to piece it all together. As I gave up on physical therapy and started taking martial arts classes. As I got myself a gun, then another, and another. As I learned how to shoot them, to protect myself. As I got myself into a safer home, one with doormen and security.
Then, eventually, as I sold the bank.
It was someone else's problem.
If the terrorists still wanted an in, they would have to schmooze the new owners.
Money in the bank, a basic level of training in hand, and two legs and an arm that only ached in the bad weather, I left Armenia for good, doing my research, trying to track down a ghost.
Mikhail Osman had been a false identity, of course, but I had seen the man. I knew him intimately. I figured if I did enough searching, I could find him.
Finding my calling helping people had been mostly happenstance.
I had learned to observe and remember things, every small detail.
So I had been aware of a missing diplomat's teenaged son.
I also frequented a lot of hellholes in the world.
So when I happened into a building full of drugged-out underaged kids forced into sexual slavery, well, I knew who to call to collect their son, to break up the organization.
I'd been paid.
And had formed a sort of reputation even though it had been wholly luck.
From there, it spiraled.
Anyone who wanted someone to be found - without involving the police - started hitting me up. And while I didn't need the money, having something else to focus on while I tried to figure out who the man was that had screwed me over so royally, helped keep me sane.
It took a while to figure out that Mikhail Osman was actually Roan Adil Mikhailov - an American covert operative.
A spy.
A friggen spy.
Which was why it was so hard to track him down when I had managed to get a gullible, brainwashed English girl out of an arranged marriage in Afghanistan. With only a couple bumps and bruises to show for it.
When I got some pretty credible information of someone fitting his description, I had been on the next flight out, anger bubbling up, spilling over.
I had gotten my room across from where I was told he was staying, found myself a gun, sat at the window, and waited.
Then there he was. Hair a little longer than it had been, face more clean-shaven. But him. I expected to feel the overwhelming urge to get him in my scope, and pull the trigger, make his head explode in a burst of blood. Right there on the street.
Instead, what came in place of the rage was the grief, as fresh as it had been back in the hospital, as strong as it had been the months I had tried to recover - both body and soul.
And there it was again.
After just one look.
So I put the gun away.
I kept my distance.
I watched.
I was sure that, should I catch him doing to another woman what he had done to me, that I could summon the rage to take him out.
Maybe it had been a lot of bravado at the time, seeing as I hadn't taken a life at that point. But the certainty grew as I followed him around the world, always a few weeks - sometimes even months - behind him thanks both to jobs I couldn't just abandon in the middle and because, well, the CIA kept him pretty well hidden.
