by Kat Smith
Altman lifted his chin and sat back with a satisfied look on his face. “No one gets by me. I was careful, and I’ll say it one last time. I was not tailed.”
Payton rolled a pen between her fingers. She wanted him to think she was uncertain, even nervous. “Tell me more about this man.” She looked down at her notepad. “Christopher Bryzgalova.” She looked up. “Did I pronounce that correct?”
Altman scratched his chin. “Yeah, that’s right.” He cast a look at the mirrored window. “Look, things were getting hot the last few weeks. I was focused on getting out of that shithole, and Christopher wasn’t really an asset. He was more of an associate.”
“When and where did you meet him?”
Altman winked his left eye closed and looked up at the ceiling in thought. “Three months ago, give or take. He’s just some schmuck I met in a coffeeshop. We’d meet for coffee a few days a week. When things got hot, I told him I had to lay low and asked if he knew a good place where I could hide out for a few days.”
Payton made notes as he spoke. “You revealed your cover?”
“Fuck no, lady. I told him a bookie was after me, that I needed to lay low, let things cool off.”
“I see.” She nodded. “That’s when he offered his house in Makhachkala out of the goodness of his heart.” She looked up and directly into his eyes. “To you, a stranger. Someone he’d known for only three months.”
Altman shrugged. “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Did Christopher know anything about your ties to the radical group?”
He smirked at her. “Hell no. I busted my balls for over six months to infiltrate that group.”
“And did you ever wonder why?”
He leaned his chair back and sucked on the toothpick. “Why what?”
“Why it took six months to get into the group?” She tilted her head and looked at him. “I mean, in my experience, radical groups aren’t extremely picky about their members. Most just want warm bodies to do the grunt work. Did it ever occur to you that they…Christopher… actually tagged you as a CIA agent and pulled you in to see how much you knew?”
The chair dropped back to the floor. Altman’s gaze flicked between Payton and the mirrored window. He didn’t answer.
She saw a frown of worry on his face. “Tell me, in detail, exactly how you met him.”
Sweat glistened on his forehead. “I told you, at a coffeeshop. It was crowded that day; I snagged the last table. He came in, got a coffee, and asked if he could sit in the empty chair to read his paper. We started talking.”
“He was Russian?”
He laughed. “Most people in Moscow are Russian.” He paused. “He had a heavy Russian accent, but now that you mention it, he didn’t look like a typical Russian.” She scratched his chin. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was maybe European. Could even pass as an American.”
She inhaled a frustrated breath. “But you don’t know better, do you?”
“Huh?” He gave her a confused look.
“You don’t know for sure that he is, in fact, Russian.”
He stared at her, unsure how to respond.
“I’m going to have you work with a sketch artist.” She made a note to push that errand to Vaughn.
He shrugged. “Sure, but it’s a waste of time. He was only a schmuck I had coffee with a few times.”
Even though there was a camera in the corner capturing every word, Payton wrote on her notepad. She’d found it made the interview less rigid and gave her a few extra seconds to ponder his answers. “Did you ever go to his house, meet any of his friends?”
“No.” He was in defense mode now, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Did you get a phone number? Email address?”
Altman was getting antsy. “No,” he barked. He hesitated, then drummed a finger on the table. “Wait, yes. Yes. I was shopping around for a cheap car. He had one…sent me a few photos…emailed them to me.”
She pushed the notepad over to him. “Write down his email address.” Now we’re getting somewhere, Payton thought. “Did you buy it, the car?”
He wrote down the email address Christopher had given him and shoved the notepad across the table. “Yes. It was the vehicle I used…” His lowered to almost a whisper. “…to drive to Makhachkala.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Fuck.”
Payton sat back. “You didn’t check for trackers.” It wasn’t a question. “When did he send the photos to you?”
Altman was shaken. “Hell, I don’t remember.”
Payton pressed him. “A week ago? A month? When?”
“I don’t know. It was like a month ago. What difference does it make?”
“I can trace his email address.” She had what she needed, didn’t see any need for fake pleasantries. Her tone turned dark, threatening even. “If you’re a religious man, Mr. Altman, I suggest you pray. This may be the only thing that saves your sorry ass.”
He gave her a questioning look. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
She stood, gathered her files, and walked to the door. “I’m either going to be your guardian angel or your worst fucking nightmare.”
She walked out and left him sitting alone with his contemptible guilt.
Chapter Nine
Devan still didn’t quite understand how she’d survived the fall. Her skin had been ripped and torn as she fell through the thick stand of prickly spruce trees. The flexible limbs had bowed and given way as she fell, dumping her onto the next level down. She’d tumbled and twisted as she fell and bounced off the limbs until her vest snagged on a broken branch.
She’d swung twenty feet in the air and bit back the agonizing pain when the lone rebel had walked directly beneath her and knelt, waiting for the police to leave. She knew if a single drop of blood dripped on him, she’d be an easy kill. She bit a gash in her lip to stop from screaming and rammed her finger into the bullet wound on her leg to plug the river of blood.
After the rebel had gone and the neighborhood fell quiet, Devan twisted until the branch released its hold on her vest and she dropped with a reverberating thud to the ground. The forest floor, made soft from decades of decaying foliage and recent rain, was her saving grace and eased her fall, but she’d still broken her leg. The pain had torn through her like a saber, and she passed out on the wet soggy forest floor.
When she woke, daylight filtered through the trees. It had taken hours, but she’d managed to pull herself to the back edge of the fence and waited until Teona left for work. She forced the pain away and scaled the fence, saw her own dried blood smeared on the concrete blocks from the night before, and finally made it inside the house. She’d only been in the bedroom for about an hour or so before Teona came home.
She must have passed out earlier when the woman entered because when Devan opened her eyes, she was naked with only a sheet covering her battered and torn body. The dark-eyed woman was focused and gently cleaning the bullet wound on her leg. “I don’t remember your name.”
Teona looked up casually as if the sight of someone in her house with a gunshot wound was a daily occurrence. “Teona.” She turned her attention back to Devan’s leg. Devan jerked when she cut away a flap of dead skin. “You no move.”
Devan winced and felt the gash in her lip split open. Dirt and blood had mixed to create a crusty plug that had stopped the bleeding in her leg. Otherwise, someone would have found her rotting body amongst the trees in a few days. She tried to lift her head. “How bad?”
The nurse remained focused on the wound. “Broken arm, ribs, leg. Leg is very bad.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“Burned clothes. Too dangerous.” She tipped her head to the dresser in the corner. “Clean clothes.”
Devan twisted her head and looked around the room. She felt a panic rise. “Where are my weapons?”
“Under bed.” She glanced up. “In my house.” She resumed dressing the wounds. “How you were wounded?”
Devan draped her good arm over her head. “I fell out of a tree.”
Teona’s head snapped up, and those eerily dark eyes pinned her with a hard look. Devan winced when she’d put a bit too much muscle in her effort to press the bandage over her wound. She tilted her head and smirked. “Tree did not shoot you.”
Devan found her deadpan response funny. She chuckled and immediately grabbed her side when the broken ribs shifted and dug into muscle. “Very funny. No. That came before I fell out of the tree.”
“Soldier lady. You are shot, fall out of tree, break bones.” At Devan’s nod, she just looked at her sadly. “Very not good.”
“Where is the computer that was on that desk?”
Teona frowned. “Police maybe took.”
“I need to get to a phone.” Devan gasped when she tried to sit up.
A firm hand pressed her back into the mattress. “I tell you, no phone. You broke, remember.”
“Can you drive me?”
“Too dangerous. Police will see you.” She tossed a wad of bloody gauze into a plastic bag and removed the bloody latex gloves. “Doctor will come soon.”
Devan clutched Teona’s arm. “No, no one can know I’m here.”
Teona gave Devan’s hand a pat. “He is friend, will help you.” She opened a bottle and shook out two capsules, then did the same with another bottle and held out her hand to Devan. “Take.”
“No drugs.” Devan pushed her hand away.
Teona picked up a glass of water. “You want help, yes?” When Devan nodded, she held out the pills again. “Take. It will help with infection.” The side of her mouth lifted in a smile. “I cannot help if you dead.”
Devan nodded, took the offered pills, and swallowed them without further protest.
“You need food. I make soup.” She walked out.
Devan lay in the bed, trying to think of a way to get in touch with her team. They had to still be in Vaziani, she thought. If she could only find a way to contact them in the next few hours, they could come back. Her eyelids began to get heavy, and the room began to spin. Teona had slipped her pain pills, damn it. The last thing she saw before she fell asleep was Teona leaning against the bedroom door, arms crossed against her waist, watching her lying defenseless in a strange bed, in a hostile country halfway across the world from the only people she trusted. The only people she needed.
Payton had ripped out all the stops. Twenty NSA analysts, some of the world’s best cyber sleuths, were convened in a large conference room. Alex’s absence was noticeable around the office and had been the subject of coffee bar chat sessions. They all fell silent and straightened in their seats when Payton stepped into the room. Her patience had been uncharacteristically short, and she’d been on a rampage the last few days barking orders at every turn. They all knew it had something to do with the classified mission Alex had joined, but no one was brave enough to ask.
Payton didn’t bother with pleasantries. “Last week, in a joint mission with the CIA, NSA, ICC, and the Army, a compromised CIA operative was rescued during a classified operation in the southern town of Makhachkala, Russia.” She noticed a few brows raised and the low hum of murmurs.
“About a month ago, an email was sent to this CIA operative, and in that email was a photo of a vehicle parked on a street somewhere in or around Moscow. I need to identify the street, a building, anything that will help us identify the location of that vehicle.”
She handed a stack of papers to the analyst on her right. “Take one and pass them on. This is information we’ve been able to gather from the operative that I can share about the owner of that email address. He identified himself as Russian, but as you can see from the sketch, he looks European, possibly American. He goes by the name Christopher Bryzgalova, which is most likely an alias.
“You’ll see an email address in the information provided. It’s probably dead by now, but dig it up and get me any and all emails ever sent or received to and from that account. I also want a second-level search and details on any and all associated email addresses. Dig into your sources and find that man and his associates.”
Vincent spoke up for the team. “We’re on it, Director.”
She nodded her assent. “Vincent, take the lead and split up the workload as you see fit.” She finally dropped into a chair. “Once you have that, dig deeper. Cross-reference any email addresses to those popping up in the data dump Vincent is compiling.”
“That may take a while, Director. We already have—”
Payton waved him down. “This is priority one. Take extra shifts, whatever you need. I’ll deal with the OT.” She stood and gathered her files. “We lost someone on that mission, and we are goddamned going to find out who’s responsible.”
Hushed murmurs rounded the table. Vincent spoke for the group. “Director,” Vincent hesitantly asked, “is Alex okay?”
Payton stopped and silently castigated herself. They probably thought Alex was the one they lost. She laid the files back on the table. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to… Alex is on leave for the next couple of weeks.” She looked around the room at her analysts. “While the ICC goals were successful, the exfil of the operative was…complicated. A former colleague, who was also a very good friend, was lost during the mission. Add to that, the loss of Parker just a few days prior to the mission, and…I’m sure you understand.”
Heads bobbed in agreement around the table. Vincent stood and looked around. “Please send her our condolences, Director.” He scanned the somber faces around the table. “You heard the director. Let’s get moving.” He gave Payton a quick nod as the team filed out of the conference room.
When the room was empty, Payton closed her eyes and sat in the quiet for a few minutes to settle. Her patience was shot, things at home were tense, and the only solace she found was her work. But she knew she’d have to pull her head out of the sand and deal with the realities of life, love, and loss very soon.
Teona led an older man into the bedroom. He stood with a perpetual hump on his back from years of standing over a table in the operating theater. He scowled when he saw Devan and turned to speak harshly to Teona in his native Russian language.
Teona listened and stepped to the bedside. “This is Dr. Orlov. He wants to know why you come to Makhachkala.”
Devan looked directly at the doctor when she answered. “I am not here to hurt anyone.”
He nodded and pursed his lips when Teona translated.
“Please help me.” Devan was desperate.
Teona turned to Devan. “He will help. I tell him you saved my life.”
When the doctor set a worn medical bag on the bed, opened it, retrieved a syringe, and a vial of clear liquid, Devan held up her hand and shook her head. “No drugs.”
The process of communicating was slow as Teona translated the conversation. “Must set arm and leg, remove bullet from leg. It is for pain.”
Devan was adamant. “No drugs.”
The doctor shrugged and stepped forward to examine her arm. He placed a hand above and below the break, paused, and gave her one last chance.
Devan shook her head. “Do it.”
When he jerked the bones back into alignment, she cried out in agonizing pain and promptly passed out.
Unaffected, the doctor then moved to examine her lower leg. He was certain it was broken but couldn’t be sure without an X-ray. He suggested that Teona try to get her hands on a brace.
He then turned his attention to the wound on the same leg. He tore the dressing off and looked angrily at Teona when he saw it was a bullet wound. They debated back and forth for several minutes until he finally gave a sour grunt and turned back to his patient.
The bullet wound high on her thigh looked infected. Teona held Devan’s good hand in her own and watched the doctor closely. She reckoned it would be a good learning experience. The doctor retrieved forceps from his bag and crudely dug the slug from deep within the muscle of Devan’s leg.
Even though she was unconscio
us, Devan released a moan that made Teona cringe. She gently stroked Devan’s hand as the doctor packed and bandaged the wound.
When he was finished, he dug a syringe and two vials of drugs from his bag. Teona held up a hand to stop him, but he ignored her protests and gruffly ordered her to roll Devan onto her side. What he was doing might not be legal or even ethical, but he was a doctor and he would treat the wounds, as well as the pain. She could be pissed with him later, he didn’t care. He bent and plunged the drugs into Devan’s hip.
Chapter Ten
Alex was drenched from rain and sweat as she ran the track at UMD, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was, as she’d explained to Devan, on autopilot. Her feet kicked up water as she stretched through one stride after another. The only thing she saw were the memories playing over in her mind.
The night Devan found her at the track. Devan is propped above her, smiling in the pre-dawn light filtering through the window. She feels a flutter in her heart, a flutter only Devan can provoke. Oh, how she’d missed her voice… her laugh… her smile… her scent, that essence that was Devan, the love of her life.
Devan lowers her head, captures her lips in a slow tender kiss that sends her heart into overdrive. Oh, how she had missed this. When she’d hungered for more, Devan turned her head and whispered in her ear, “Slow.” Devan lightly bit her earlobe. “Slow, the way I’m going to make love to you.”
The way Devan looks into her eyes as those talented fingers feather along her jaw, down her neck, and beyond tells her that the love they shared, the love they thought they’d lost, still survived. It is a deep, perpetual burn that can never be extinguished.