toward the back elevators.
“Would it surprise you to learn that the names of some of the students here at Richter were aliases from the beginning?”
She hadn’t considered that possibility.
“Take yourself. Sasha Petrov.”
“I never had my father’s name.”
Linette stopped at the elevator, waved her armband over the lock, and called the lift.
“Have you ever seen your birth certificate?”
“Of course.”
“You mean the one your benefactor meant for you to have when you left Germany. The one Alice Petrov knew you needed in order to escape your father’s notice.”
The certainty Sasha felt a moment before about her birth name faded. “She lied to me.”
“She protected you. Your mother, on the other hand, wanted to outsmart your father and stupidly gave you his name.” They exited the elevator and took the stairs to the last subterranean floor.
“Then why was I not sent to him when my mother died?”
They passed the soundproof doors leading through the firing range, and around a corner.
Linette unlocked the administration room and then proceeded into yet another space, hidden behind a false wall. There was no way to see the room from the outside.
“I would appreciate that you keep this room to yourself. Very few members of the staff even know it’s here.”
“Why show me?”
Linette hesitated before crossing the threshold. “Perhaps because I feel I owe you an explanation so you can better understand why we do things the way we do here at Richter.”
Sasha followed her inside.
“These are the archives of students such as yourself. I took the liberty of pulling your dossier when you showed up yesterday. For many reasons, I cannot show you any other files than your own.” She crossed to a table and handed Sasha a folder. “The files never leave this room. There are no cameras in this room where, say, a crafty student could hack into the system and learn the secrets hidden here.”
She smiled at the crafty student reference. She opened her file. A childhood image of her on her first day at Richter stared back. “I was only nine years old.”
“Actually, you were eight.”
“But I—”
“By the time Alice Petrov enrolled you here, your birth certificate had been doctored twice. Both copies are in the file, along with the original.”
Alice Petrov had been Sasha’s benefactor at Richter and in life. Sadly, Sasha hadn’t made the connection when Alice was alive. Cancer had robbed Alice of her life, and Sasha of one of the only people on the planet who cared if she was alive or dead.
Sasha flipped through the first few pages and found them.
The first birth certificate had her name as Sasha Budanov Petrov. Mother’s name Natasha Budanov, the father’s name was left blank. Her birthday was a year off. “I’m only twenty-eight?”
“Surprise.”
The second birth certificate had her name as simply Sasha Budanov. Father’s name was marked as unknown. The third and final certificate had changed her birthday by a year.
“Alice went through a lot of work to keep Petrov from learning about me.”
“He knew about you. He just assumed you ended up as a gutter rat somewhere. Alice went through great pains to keep you out of the government system and used a series of handpicked foster homes for you before finding Richter.”
“And all those years I thought I was sent to Richter because I ran away from those homes.”
Linette sat in one of the half dozen chairs in the center of the room. “You were, in part. Only Alice needed to keep you out of the public eye and, more importantly, away from your father. I knew she was going to employ you once you left here. It was her way of keeping an eye on you.”
“She hired me to protect her son and his new wife. I failed.”
“She hired you because she could no longer keep you locked up here at Richter. She made sure you were enrolled in every possible self-defense, firearms, agility, and investigative curriculum we offered. And when she felt you’d mastered what we had, she insisted that we find new instructors and new classes. We teach computer programing, but only a few students were in the advanced class that gave you the path to the back doors of computers.”
“You taught me to hack.”
Linette ticked her tongue. “You educated yourself on that skill. We simply showed you where the door was. You chose to open it. Not that we didn’t know exactly what you were doing with your new skills.”
“My pranks.”
“Your fine-tuned skills used for mischief . . . yes.”
Sasha rested her hands on her