Prologue
Wes
Christmas Eve
It wasn'tthe worst of times but this sure as shit wasn't the best of times.
In the best column, I was listing the nun's habit I nicked out of a countryside convent last night. No one fucked with nuns. Most people avoided eye contact with them altogether. Bad memories of wooden rulers and forced recitation of multiplication tables. This vestment was keeping me off the radar and doing a sensational job of concealing both my beard and my injuries.
The convent also yielded a pair of granny glasses, tattered scarves, and a small purse loaded with supplies to treat my injuries. Gauze, alcohol swabs, antibacterial ointment, an old bottle of penicillin, a sewing kit, and a pair of needle-nose pliers.
That was where the best column ended.
As far as the worst of times went, getting shot was at the top of the list. There was a bullet lodged in my flank and I'd been bleeding, slow and steady, for hours. A cold sweat covered my body, my heart was wobbling in my chest, and I could only see straight if I squinted. That was fucking unpleasant but my only objective was getting to the port.
I'd spent the night on the run, zigzagging and backtracking to shake the secret police from my tail, and didn't have the time to dig that son of a bitch out of my soft tissue. There was also the matter of my broken arm and the electrical current burns on my legs but I could manage those. The gunshot wound though, that thing was going to turn septic in a hot minute.
If those issues weren't enough to earn the distinction of Really Fucking Bad, I had a few more lined up. My CIA handlers had no idea where I was. I hadn't seen my partner Veronica in two weeks, and I suspected she was dead or close to it. My local liaisons were dead, both executed in front of me.
A hostile foreign government had discovered that I'd been spying on them for a wee bit of time. The same hostile foreign government was pissed that I didn't fold under their charming interrogation techniques. I could only imagine they regarded my exit from their off-book detention facility—and all the guards I took out in the process—as an unwanted aggravation.
Based on the activity I'd observed as I made my way north toward the Barents Sea, that government had dispatched entire armies to root me out. They intended to find me and make an international example. Regardless of whether they succeeded at nailing my nuts to the wall, they would also plan some prime-time retaliation.
I went on squinting at the road ahead, breathing slowly and worrying the rosary beads between my fingers to displace some of the pain streaking through my body. If I could get to the port, I could get home.
I walked with purpose, careful to keep my eyes down and my steps confident. I was playing the part of a local, one who wouldn't normally draw the attention of the heavily armed law enforcement agents on every corner.
It wasn't supposed to go down this way. I figured that was how all agents prefaced their debriefs of operations gone bad. I wouldn't know. My operations never went bad.
Until now.
I'd been working this assignment for almost two years. Two years of cohabitation and marital bliss with awoman. Even if that woman was also a highly skilled operative, it was one hell of a long-running hetero con. Two years of chipping away at Moscow's society circles, playing the part of the eccentric antiquities dealer who also trafficked in weapons of war. Two years of planting seeds and watching them germinate.
There was no reason for this operation to fall apart weeks before we were due to get out of town. Our work was airtight and the information we'd gathered was solid gold. There were bumps in the road, for sure, but that was the way with every hop. This hop had been one of the good ones. Difficult, exhausting, grueling—but one of the good ones, until I woke up in a dirt-floored dungeon with my hands and feet shackled to an ancient stone wall.
I stifled a laugh at that. My father liked to say that if you thought an operation was going well, you weren't paying attention.
I had paid attention. I knew this operation, every corner and seam of it.
If I made it home, I was certain he'd tell me I hadn't.
For the first time in my fucking life, I wanted to hear my father tell me I was wrong. I wanted to make it back to the States and I wanted him to take apart this mission and point out my flaws.
A large family came around the corner, and I spared them a warm glance. "God be with you," I said in Russian, affecting my most provincial accent. Nuns didn't rock the upper-crust city accent I'd employed during my time here.
They nodded, mumbling the blessing back to me. I hunched into my habit, hoping to obscure some of my height. Nuns weren't six three.
My thumb and forefinger rolled to another bead as the bone-on-bone pain radiated up my arm and into my shoulder. I was furious about that. The motherfucker who broke it didn't know what the hell he was doing. He just wailed on me with a lead pipe as if that was going to yield any actionable information. Talk about amateur hour. I needed the use of both arms right now, and I didn't have it because some foot soldier with anger issues didn't like it when I told him his mother was bad in bed.
I pressed the pad of my thumb into a rosary bead as a gust of nausea threatened to knock me over. I continued walking, my gaze trained on the stories-high cargo ships and cranes looming tall over Kola Bay. I was almost there, and breathed a small sigh of relief.
A liquefied natural gas tanker was leaving from Murmansk this morning, one with a crew that knew how to look the other way for the right price. The tanker was set to sail around Scandinavia to the Atlantic, and make several stops along the east coast of North America. If I could get on that tanker, I could send word to my handlers. They needed to pull their operatives out of the country and turn down the volume on current assignments, and prepare for the disproportionate response headed their way.
I picked up my pace as I marched through the rows and lanes of shipping containers. Unsurprisingly, I was the only nun in sight, a spectacle in a sea of metal and machinery. The roughnecks and longshoremen eyed me as I passed, and I offered the sign of the cross in response. Something about that gesture, coupled with my rosary beads and exaggerated hunch, earned tolerant nods from the men.
When I reached the far edge of the port, I lifted my arm in greeting to the quartermaster. He eyed me with an appropriate amount of suspicion as I moved toward him. From the habit's deep pockets, I retrieved a small coin purse. It was lined with enough cash to ensure passage to North America, and a little more to keep the questions at a minimum.
No, I hadn't robbed the convent. Even spies had standards. Most of the cash was courtesy of the secret police I took down on my way out of their black site last night. At the off chance the bills were tagged and traceable, I turned them over in small towns throughout the region. Now, all the money was clean and I was a matter of steps away from surviving the worst of this ordeal.
