Page 5
T he car smells like blood and cigarettes.
My blood, Volkov's cigarettes. We're twenty miles outside whatever Eastern Bloc shithole we just shot our way out of, and I'm watching the unfamiliar countryside blur past like a fever dream—all skeletal trees and Soviet-era power lines silhouetted against a sky the color of a fresh bruise.
"You look like death fucked a corpse and had ugly baby," Volkov observes, flicking ash out the cracked window. The winter air slices in, sharp enough to make my eyes water. Or maybe that's just the adrenaline crash finally hitting.
"And you look like the undertaker who dressed the body," I shoot back, pressing a wadded t-shirt against my reopened thigh wound. The fabric's already soaked through, warm and sticky against my palm. "Where the hell are we going?"
"Secondary location. Less comfortable, more secure." He takes a hard right onto a road that barely qualifies as one—more like a suggestion of gravel scattered over mud. The car's suspension screams in protest.
My stomach lurches as we hit another pothole. Pain throbs in time with my heartbeat, a full-body percussion of hurt. "You know, most men just offer dinner and a movie after sex. Not a firefight and a getaway car."
Volkov's mouth twitches—the closest thing to a smile his face seems capable of producing. "You seemed bored with conventional men. That is why you fuck strangers in club bathrooms, yes? Why you let husband believe ridiculous lies?"
"Stay out of my marriage, Volkov."
"Marriage." He spits the word like it's rotten meat. "Is arrangement of convenience. Like most things in people's life."
The observation cuts closer than I want to admit.
I glare out the window, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a response.
The sky's getting lighter, that peculiar pre-dawn gray that makes everything look slightly unreal, slightly apocalyptic.
Somewhere in the hazy distance, a factory belches black smoke into the already filthy air.
Home sweet Eastern Europe.
My fingers find the pendant that should be around my neck—the poison failsafe Killion gave me—before remembering it's gone. Probably removed while I was unconscious in Volkov's safehouse. One less escape hatch if this all goes to shit.
If I truly made the wrong choice by ditching Killion.
"We're being followed," I observe, catching the flicker of headlights in the side mirror. The same ones for the past ten minutes, keeping precise distance.
Volkov doesn't even check. "Yes."
"And you're not concerned because...?"
"Because is Mikhail." He glances at me, those cold eyes assessing how much I need to know. "Insurance policy. In case Killion put tracker in you."
I straighten, suddenly alert. "What are you talking about?"
"Standard Dollhouse protocol." He gestures vaguely at my body. "Subcutaneous tracking implant. Usually shoulder blade or lower back. Primitive but effective. Mikhail has signal jammer, creates electronic noise. Buys time."
I resist the urge to claw at my own skin, to search for the foreign object potentially buried in my flesh. Just another violation to add to the list. "And you didn't think to mention this earlier?"
He shrugs. "You did not ask."
"And you wanted Killion to track me," I surmised, feeling like meat all over again.
"Yes." He doesn't bother denying it. At least there's that. "Was test."
"I'm getting real tired of being used as bait," I grumble, shooting Volkov a dirty look. "If you've got a hard-on for Killion, you ought to figure that shit out on your own. Leave me out of it."
"Not hard-on," Volkov returns with a curled lip. "Not anymore."
Oh, the plot thickens. I want to ask more on that score but it probably wasn't the time to start delving into the dark and kinky spaces formerly occupied by Volkov and Killian.
But I'll put a pin in it for later.
I close my eyes, counting backward from ten before I put a bullet in his face. "Okay, so we have temporary cover. How long before they track us the old-fashioned way? Bribes, informants, facial recognition?"
"Long enough." He taps ash from his cigarette with mechanical precision. "We have what they do not."
"Which is?"
"Direction," Volkov says simply. "They hunt blindly. We hunt with purpose."
We turn onto an even narrower road, this one little more than tire tracks through scrubby forest. Pine branches scrape against the car's roof like skeletal fingers, leaving trails in the early morning condensation.
After another fifteen minutes of kidney-punishing terrain, a structure materializes from the mist—not the relative luxury of the previous safehouse, but a squat concrete bunker that looks like a Soviet architectural wet dream circa 1962.
"Please tell me that's just a scenic lookout point and not where we're staying."
"Cold War relic," Volkov says, something like fondness in his voice. "KGB listening post, abandoned after Berlin Wall fell. Now personal project."
The car stops, engine ticking as it cools. Behind us, a battered Lada pulls in—Mikhail, I presume. The man who emerges is built like a refrigerator with a beard, all muscle and scar tissue wrapped in a canvas jacket that's seen better decades.
The bunker's interior is a shock after its grim exterior—not comfortable by any stretch, but humming with technology that belongs in a spy thriller, not this Communist-era tomb.
Monitors line one wall, servers stacked in climate-controlled cases, satellite equipment that looks cobbled together from military surplus and custom-built components.
"What the hell is all this?" I ask, taking in the electronic wonderland.
"Hobby," Volkov says, dropping his tactical bag on a metal table that's seen better days. He moves to a complex-looking setup of monitors and begins typing rapidly. "In my line of work, information is more valuable than bullets."
Mikhail grunts something in Russian, then disappears into what I assume is a supply room, returning with a first aid kit that looks better stocked than most emergency rooms.
"Take off pants," he orders in a voice like gravel being crushed. "Need to clean wound before infection sets."
I raise an eyebrow. "What, no dinner first?"
He gives me a look that suggests humor died in his world around the same time as Stalin. I sigh and drop my blood-crusted pants, wincing as dried fabric tears away from half-congealed scabs.
While Mikhail works on my leg with the gentle touch of a butcher deboning a cow, Volkov hunches over his equipment, fingers flying across keyboards, eyes scanning data streams that make no sense to me.
The tech looks like what would happen if Radio Shack fucked the NSA and had a baby with developmental issues—part cutting-edge, part jury-rigged, all deadly serious.
"What exactly are you doing?" I ask through clenched teeth as Mikhail irrigates my wound with something that feels like liquid fire.
"Intercepting Harlow's communications," Volkov replies without looking up. "Man is creature of habit. Uses same encryption, same channels. Amateur."
"The Director of a black ops agency is an amateur?"
Volkov makes a sound that might be a laugh in someone with an actual soul. "Harlow is bureaucrat with gun. Dangerous, yes. But predictable."
The device he's manipulating looks like the bastard child of a satellite phone and a circuit board that exploded. Wires spill from its guts, connected to three different monitors and what appears to be a modified signal amplifier. Whatever it is, it's clearly not standard issue.
"That doesn't look like something you can buy at Best Buy," I observe.
"SVR prototype. Improved with personal modifications." His fingers don't pause their rhythm on the keyboard. "Can isolate encrypted communications using signature recognition algorithms. Harlow has distinctive digital footprint. Like fingerprint, but for electronic transmissions."
"You stole Russian spy tech?"
"Not steal. Appropriate. After they tried to kill me." He glances up, eyes glittering with dark amusement. "Russian government and I have... complicated relationship."
"Don't we all," I mutter, hissing as Mikhail begins stitching my thigh with the sensitivity of a longshoreman.
The bunker's generators hum beneath the electronic chirps and beeps of Volkov's equipment.
Outside, dawn has broken fully, pale sunlight filtering through narrow windows set high in the concrete walls.
I try to make sense of the maps and data streams flickering across the primary monitor, but it's like reading hieroglyphics written by a drunk alien.
Suddenly, Volkov straightens, eyes narrowing at a particular set of data scrolling across his screen. "Interesting."
"Care to share with the class?"
He beckons me over, pointing to what looks like an intercepted message—strings of code and fragments of text. "Harlow is moving assets to secondary location. Black Sea facility." His finger traces a pattern across the screen. "Evacuation protocol. Full data purge scheduled."
"Which means?"
"He's destroying evidence. Covering tracks." Volkov's expression darkens. "And moving something valuable. Something he calls 'Vahnya Initiative.'"
That name again. The one that made Killion flinch.
"What the hell is Vahnya?" I demand.
Volkov's eyes meet mine, something almost like emotion flickering in their depths.
"Not what. Who." He taps a command, and a grainy photograph appears on screen—a woman, beautiful in that severe Eastern European way, with eyes that could drill into your soul and cheekbones sharp enough to slice bread. "Vahnya was my wife."
The admission drops like a grenade between us. I stare at the photograph, at this ghost from his past, and suddenly the layers of history between him and Killion take on new dimensions.
"Was?"