by James Quinn
She reached into her purse and took out a standard pair of police handcuffs and fastened one end to the sleeping Iraqi's wrist and clicked the other end to the steel-frame headrest of the bed. The snoring Iraqi was going nowhere.
She counted that he was her thirtieth target over the past few years. His crime? He had been responsible for the assassination of a group of exiled Iraqis living in Paris. One of the men's brothers, an exiled Iraqi who had turned his knowledge of the Middle East oil industry into a successful consultancy business, had paid for the Iraqi intelligence officer to be tracked while he was visiting Europe.
And that was when the bounty hunter known on the international circuit as Nikita had been hired. Find him, track him, capture him, and don't ask questions to what happens to the target after the capture. Those were Nikita's four work rules, and so far in her career they had worked pretty well. Although she guessed that this particular target wouldn't be doing any prison time. Revenge usually involved body disposal, eventually.
She sat down on the end of the bed, picked up the suite's telephone, dialled 9 for an outside line and then keyed in the contact number she had been given. The phone rang the customary three tones before it was answered by a brusque voice.
“Yes.”
“It's Nikita. The package is wrapped.”
“Problems?”
“Never,” she said.
“Of course,” laughed the voice. “Can we collect now?”
“Absolutely. Room 324. I will be waiting,” she replied.
“Good work, Nikita. Our people will be there soon.”
The call ended and she replaced the handset. She reasoned that the clean-up crew would be knocking on her door within the next thirty minutes. She looked out at the lights that poured down onto the Via del Corso. Thirty minutes, just enough time to have a glass of champagne. After avoiding the Iraqi's efforts at groping her, and then shanghaiing him, she reckoned that she'd earned it. So that's where she sat waiting, sipping her drink, watching the traffic and listening to an Iraqi spy sawing logs in his sleep.
Eunice 'Nikita' Brown had been born thirty-five years earlier in Virginia, USA. Her father had been Captain Melvin Brown of US military Intelligence, G2, and her mother, Katya, had been a nurse at a local hospital that specialised in wound care treatment for US servicemen.
Her mother's family had escaped from the Bolsheviks in 1919. They had settled in America and, from an early age, her mother had taught Eunice the Russian language. Katya always referred to her little girl as 'my pashtuka', her little cowgirl.
Eunice had been a good girl, but there had always been a wild child element in her, even from an early age. Once she hit her teenage years, she had become a fully-fledged rebel. Many a time, her father would travel into town and drag her away from the motorcycle gangs that she was hanging out with. There was no messing with his thirteen-year-old daughter, he wouldn't allow it. He loved her, but he would not tolerate her hanging out with what he considered 'James Dean wannabees'.
Not that Eunice couldn't handle herself. Hell no, her father had seen to that and made sure she could fight boys older than her. Many a boy had earned a busted nose from trying to get too fresh with Captain Brown's daughter behind the local liquor store. Eunice could certainly pack a punch. Her father said it was the flame-red hair that gave Eunice her temper.
Her greatest friend was her little brother and, even though she loved him with all her heart, Eunice knew that Stevie wasn't like other little brothers. The other kids called him a 'retard' but Eunice preferred to think of him as 'special'. He was sweet and loving and the two of them would spend endless hours lost in each other's company.
One day, Stevie had wandered off into the woods. Daddy was away and Momma had panicked when she had seen that his room was empty. Eunice had literally just stepped off the school bus when her mother had come rushing out.
“It's Stevie, its Stevie… he was in his room and now he's gone!” Her momma was frantic. The Sheriff was notified and a search party was hastily organised to find the special kid that had gone missing.
Two hours later, Eunice had had enough of sitting on her hands, waiting in her bedroom for news. She had set off in the dark with a torch and a pocket knife for emergencies, using the tracking skills that her father had taught her. She knew Stevie better than anyone, knew how he thought and how he moved. She knew his limitations – where he would go, where he wouldn't go. And, more importantly, where he liked to go when he was sad.
She had found Stevie two hours later, sitting down by the lake, rocking back and forth. He was scared and lost.
“I fell, Euney. I fell and lost my shoe,” was all he said.
She slipped an arm around him and hugged him tight, then led him back home… back to a house full of Momma's friends, the neighbours and the odd policeman. It was Eunice Brown's first 'tracker operation'.
Daddy had been away a lot. She never knew where he went, only that whenever he returned after months away, he would have a cool suntan and bring her and her brother exotic presents. Papyrus paper from the Middle East, tribal masks from Africa and Buddhist beads from… hell, somewhere.
Then one day, she and Momma received the news that Daddy wouldn't be coming home. A mission, they had been told. Missing in action behind enemy lines. Daddy was gone. Momma had hugged her and Stevie to her chest and they had all cried.
Eunice remembered the funeral well; full military honours, but with a closed casket. Whatever had happened to Daddy had been bad enough not to let his family see him one last time. She remembered the words spoken by the soldiers and the men that Daddy had worked with. War hero. Patriot. Brave man. They meant nothing to her. He was just Daddy… her Daddy. The man she loved the most.
Momma hadn't coped well at all. In fact, she had been a mess. A widow, and looking after one teenage daughter and an eight-year-old who had special needs. It had all been too much. She had had to stay at home and live off her widow's pension and then the grieving and the pain had started, followed by the drinking and the long spiral downhill into depression.
Almost a year to the day of her husband's funeral, Katya Brown had hanged herself out on the hill. It had been the place where her husband had proposed to her all those years ago.
After her mother's death, things moved fast in the life of Eunice Brown. She and Stevie went to live with their paternal grandparents on their ranch in Bedford, Virginia. It had been a healing time for both of the Brown children, made that much easier by the love of Papa and Mama Brown.
There were long summer days and nights of playing, crying, mourning and learning to live again. Stevie would always stick close to home, to his grandma, but Eunice was more adventurous and would often go out in the woods with her grandpa, where she learned to hunt, track and shoot with the old man.
Financially, the children were well taken care of thanks to their father's army pension, and while Stevie was provided with a day facility at a care home for children, Eunice was enrolled in Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Papa Brown, a retired US Deputy Marshall, got her a summer job working for a local private investigator/bail bonds firm that an old buddy of his ran. Her work was mostly office-based; after all, Virginia was no place for a young gal to be messing with criminals and hoodlums. But even there, she was smart enough to see a pattern in an offender's modus operandi and run a detailed trace, gather information from surreptitious telephone calls or run a bit of camera surveillance on a suspect's car. Papa Brown declared her a natural.
She had thrived at Randolph and graduated with a Double Major in Psychology and Classics. Still unsure as to what she wanted to do in life, and with no real direction, she applied for and was accepted into a civilian position with the recently formed Defense Intelligence Agency, working as an intelligence analyst. Up until that point, the ratio of women employees compared to men was small within the DIA, but a language skill is always a great leveller in the intelligence world.
The remit
of the DIA, unlike its civilian counterpart the Central Intelligence Agency, was to acquire useable military intelligence material for the American military.
Thanks to her fluent Russian, Eunice was soon fast-tracked to work in the US Embassy in West Berlin for the next three years. And, while much of her work was office-based translation and information analysis, it did provide Eunice Brown with two important things that would help her on her later career path. First, the DIA had enough trust in her to grant her top secret clearance, and second, it gave her a practical exercise in the working of intelligence operations. So it came as no surprise when, a year later, she moved from the military branch of government over to the civilian side of operations, namely the CIA.
After her training period at the 'Farm', the Agency's training facility in Virginia, Eunice Brown had spent the next two years on a series of European postings. In the late 1960s, the CIA was leading the way with the use of women as field agents and, while it was still frowned upon for female operatives to be at the cutting edge of things, there were still opportunities for women agents to assist with operations. But, on the whole, they were resigned to following their male counterparts around.
And then there were exceptions like Eunice Brown…
Eunice had always had that independent confidence that enabled her to handle stressful and high conflict situations; her experiences had made her one of a kind, unique.
It was in 1968 that she made her reputation within the Agency and it came in the form of one Colonel Sergei Lvov. Lvov was an old school KGB thug who had been the bane of both CIA and SIS network operations in Berlin at one time. He was a tough, no-nonsense operator whom the Agency both feared and respected. To gain the knowledge that he had would be gold dust for them.
It was inevitable, then, that the Agency would make a 'pitch' to try to recruit him. What was more remarkable was that Lvov accepted; in fact, he damned near snatched the hand off the CIA officer leading the recruitment.
“What took you so long to ask?” he grumbled. “Of course I will work for America. It is my dream.”
The CIA man thought it was Lvov's greed and taste in Western prostitutes that motivated him, rather than the inner workings of democracy.
The double-agent operation lasted for a profitable two years, until it was feared that his cover was blown and his life was in danger. The radio traffic said that the KGB spy-hunters were on the trail of a traitor in the KGB Berlin Station and the net was closing in.
The CIA wasted no time and set about implementing its emergency escape plan for Lvov. But the station personnel were stretched and time was running out. The only man capable of extracting the Russian was a good twelve hours away by plane and it was feared that it would be too late by then.
It was the Berlin Operations Base Station Chief who received a knock on his office door late at night. He had been poring over options in the Lvov extraction and so far, it wasn't looking practical. His men would stick out like a sore thumb if they tried to bring out the Russian, and the CIA officer who had direct control of the op was stuck in an airport somewhere. Fuck!
So he was surprised to see his newest Station Officer, Miss Brown, standing over him with an operational plan in her hands. She placed it carefully down onto his desk and said, in her sweetest southern twang, “Sam, I think I would like to go and bring our boy home, if that's alright with you?”
Sam, the Station Chief, had almost flung her out. Then he read Eunice Brown's operational plan and changed his mind instantly. An hour later, he had approval and the operation was a 'GO'. Eunice Brown would be the officer bringing the agent out from behind the Iron Curtain.
She had been infiltrated in under cover of darkness in classic style, armed with only her wits and several sets of false papers. She had met her contact on the East German side and had been dropped off at the proposed rendezvous – and that was the last that the CIA heard of her until two days later, when she had safely delivered her agent to a CIA safe house in Helsinki.
How she had ended up in Helsinki after being dropped off in Germany was still a mystery, and how she had completed this seemingly impossible task was, to many in the CIA, still a highly classified secret. All that the Agency handlers knew was that a very happy former KGB officer had arrived in one piece in what must have been one of the most daring extractions in the Agency's history.
“That Nikita, I love her,” cooed Sergei Lvov to his de-briefing team.
“Nikita who?” they had asked?
“The woman, the red-head. I don't know her true name but to me she will always be my Nikita,” he had said. And the codename had stuck with the love-stricken KGB man; 'Nikita' Brown, the sassy Agency officer who had gone in behind the Iron Curtain to rescue one of the CIA's best intelligence sources. Her legend was created, and she became a specialist in the Clandestine Services for tracking and extracting people from dangerous situations and environments.
Several more successful extractions of High Value Targets later, and Nikita Brown decided her time as an Operations Officer was over. There was no angst, no soul-searching; she simply recognised that being one small part of a big, cumbersome organisation like the CIA was no longer the life she wanted. Her challenges lay in a new and different direction.
There were men in her life, of course – Eunice was a beautiful, attractive woman – but none of them stayed around for long, either because they couldn't cope with the challenge of her, or because they failed to keep her interest. Maybe it was a little of both.
She decided that her career, at least, lay in the direction of the US Marshal's Service based out of the Las Vegas Field Office. If she thought the work that she had completed so far with the DIA and the CIA was tough, it was nothing compared to what the Marshals had to deal with. Eunice Brown spent three happy years hunting down criminals, tracking killers and providing close protection to her principals as part of the US Witness Protection program. She excelled at the work and even her senior officers had to acknowledge that she had an uncanny affinity for this type of work. She was a natural born hunter.
Then came the shootout that ended her career. It was a raid for a wanted felon, nothing she hadn't done a hundred times before. Like most of these things, it was a dawn bust. The felon had burst out of the rear of the house just as Eunice had been about to enter. She had taken a .45 to the gut before a fellow US Marshal had killed the man.
She had spent a month in the hospital, having nearly bled out on the day of the shooting, but the surgeons and the nurses had brought her back. The surgeon who had operated on her had declared to his staff, “That's one tough broad!”
She made some big decisions while she was confined to the hospital bed. Papa Brown, now in his nineties, had come to visit her and brought with him a stack of his old western novels and magazines to read. “Come home, Euney. It's where you belong. Come back to Virginia,” he had said, holding her hand.
She had said she would think about it. She knew that he had been on his own, rattling around on the ranch, since Mama had died several years before.
When Papa had gone, she had started to read through the old magazines and books. They were stories of the old West, of gunslingers, cowboys, bounty hunters. She read about a man named Tom Horn, who had apparently been a legend. Horn had been a soldier, cowboy, range detective and man-hunter. Eunice devoured the material over a period of two weeks. By the time she was due to be released from hospital, she knew what she was meant to do. She would do what she knew best and what she was good at. She would be the modern Tom Horn.
She resigned from the US Marshal's Service and moved back to Papa's ranch in Virginia so that they could look after each other. When Papa had passed on that summer, Eunice had moved her brother to an expensive private care facility where he would receive the best treatment. He would come and visit her during vacation time and they would spend time together at the ranch, like they had done when they were children.
But Eunice knew that she had to start getting her work life in or
der. She 'set out her shingle' and began working for herself, turning Papa's old study into a small office space for her business. A phone call here and there, and her reputation with senior CIA officers at the Agency soon ensured that 'Nikita' Brown was the go-to man-hunter and tracker in the freelance intelligence business.
She had spent six weeks tracking the Iraqi intelligence officer all over the planet. The man had obviously been on a whirlwind tour of 'friendly' spy networks, countries that were sympathetic to President Hussein's regime. So far, Eunice had spent a lot of time in the Middle East and North Africa, tracking her target. So this brief visit to Rome was obviously part of the man's rest and recuperation period… his own treat for all his hard work.
That was what she had counted on. Snatching him would have been difficult in somewhere like Tunisia or Libya; not impossible, but difficult. But here in Rome, away from an array of Arab secret services, it was a walk in the park for someone with the skills of Nikita Brown. She gathered as much information about his personality and movements as she could, before she made her approach. She had seen the type of whores that he liked, tall and coquettish, and she altered her appearance to suit the role. After that, it had been the flirtatious approach, the subtle word and the seductive murmurings that had ensnared the Iraqi.
She took a final sip of her champagne and put down the glass.
There was a gentle knock at the door. She stood and walked across the suite to open it. She knew it would be the clean-up crew disguised as hotel room cleaners. They weren't her people, not the ones she would normally have sub-contracted, and they worked directly for the client who was paying for this whole operation. Once the Iraqi had been captured and removed, her part in the whole exercise was finished.
She opened the door and stood back, aware of several dark bodies moving into the gloom of the room, each carrying items to help move the sleeping body covertly out of the hotel and into a waiting van.