The Complete Night Stalkers 5E Stories

Chapter 2

2

It felt as if Alisa had been undercover her entire life. First from the ruling government of the Prime Minister turned dictator and now from the Russians. Their recent annexation of Crimea had made her job a hundred times more dangerous and she stayed because she didn’t know what else to do. She was trapped between the Russian SVR, their version of the CIA, who would ruin her day if her role was ever discovered, and the CIA itself with their promises of safe passage out…if she could just hold on a while longer and find out about whatever was next on their never-ending list.

Then Sergey of the SVR had taken a sudden interest in her, more than just trying to bed her. He began dropping by her desk at work, or just happening to run into her when she was out at a club.

Knowing she’d reached her limit, she’d finally convinced the CIA that it was time to honor their commitment and send in an extraction team as she had no way of escaping on her own.

For twenty hours she’d cowered in fear, dodging shadows and afraid at each moment that she’d be taken into custody and never see daylight again. Just as she was preparing to leave and work her slow way to the extraction rendezvous—a journey that would take half the night—a knock had sounded on her door.

Instead a phalanx of guards, there had been only Sergey. He had offered to “protect” her in exchange for certain “services.” She didn’t need to watch where his eyes remained fixed to know what services he was interested in and didn’t care to guess how brief a respite from prison his protection would offer should she consent.

Then Sergey had made the mistake—fatal as it turned out—of tapping his briefcase and saying he had a report he would turn in if she did not agree.

She had read the report while Sergey quietly sank to the bottom of Pivdenna Bay. He had gotten only a few facts right, but two of them were completely damning—they also told her who among her informants must be a double agent for the SVR, as that part of the report was too accurate. When she found the thumb drive in his pants pocket, with a copy of the report on it, she decided that Sergey was definitely arrogant enough to have left no form of “Open this file if I do not return” at the office.

Just in case, Alisa would have to die tonight along with the ever-so-surprised Sergey. Irina (still a top-twenty name among Ukrainian women) would be born tomorrow with fresh papers and a new address. She had deep connections in both the “renegade terrorist” Ukrainian camp and the Russian “our special forces Spetsnaz aren’t really here” camp (to which Sergey had belonged).

If Sergey had truly kept everything to himself, then there was only one person who still could expose her, Lesia Melnyk. Lesia was General Vlad Kozlov’s mistress and worked in the same department as Alisa. She had been Alisa’s first friend in a long time and the betrayal cut deep.

Alisa decided that except for Lesia she was safe enough. Her thinking was that with Sergey’s demise and his report gone, an identity change should be enough to protect her. She could stay and continue running her other contacts, so she called off the extraction.

The other reason to stay was as unprofessional as hell and she didn’t care. Lesia was her supposed best friend and the first person she’d turned, or thought she had. Alisa wanted revenge—badly.

Alisa put the thumb drive in her pocket. A glance around the apartment hurt so much. She wanted to take everything and could take nothing. She slipped her parents’ photo in her pocket, tossed the paper copy of Sergey’s report along with a couple recent copies of Pravda on top of her stove, set the burners on high, and left quickly.

By the time she had walked a block away, her one-bedroom kvartira (rather than kvartyra as Sevastopol was no longer a Ukrainian city but rather a Russian one) was on fire. When she glanced back two blocks later, it was engulfed and flames were streaming out the windows. She wore a dead man’s clothes, which weren’t a bad fit except for being very tight across the chest even without a bra (it would have helped if Sergey had worked out more in life), and had her long blond hair tucked up into a worker’s cap. The May weather was too warm for a ushanka fur hat. She’d liked that hat and hated to leave it behind in the flames.

For three nameless hours, she slouched her way across the city and back. No longer Alisa and not yet Irina, she watched carefully for a tail.

After that she sat for an hour in the back of Zeppelin Club. It was Friday night and the work-week crowd was blowing out as desperately as they could. The loud Euro pop was predictably awful though the “exotic” female dancers managed to not look too bored. Her stool at a small table along the far side of the stage allowed her to watch the entrance between the dancers’ bare legs and other body parts as they arched and writhed. It was hard to believe, but perhaps Sergey really had been dumb enough to confront a foreign agent without a backup.

She spent another hour drinking at a shadowed table in a porn club, the favorite of one of her contacts, but gave up around four a.m. while the party was still rolling hard (pun intended). She staggered her way back past Alisa’s apartment. The fire brigade had been and gone. The burned shell would reveal nothing that would arouse suspicions except for its no-longer-existent renter’s failure to return. No one waited in the shadows looking for a woman with long blond hair and serious curves. And certainly not for a drunken man staggering homeward.

She hadn’t meant to drink as much as she did, though it was the leading national pastime. That, and griping about the brutal Russians or the lazy Ukrainians—depending on who you were drinking with: the noble Ukrainians or the world-conquering Russians. But the nerves had gotten to her. She’d made it through the Russian invasion of Crimea more calmly than facing exposure by Sergey. Had he been just one tiny bit less interested in her breasts, she’d probably be screaming in an SVR torture cell at the moment.

And if she’d been one bit less angry at Lesia Melnyk, she’d have climbed on the damned helicopter and been safe by now. But the anger had grown rather than abating. The alcohol buffered none of the emotions ripping at her.

She leaned her head against the door of the safe house, just three streets over from her burned-out apartment, and struggled to catch her breath. Her hands were shaky as she reached for her keys.

Purse, where was her purse?

No, dressed as a man now.

Pants pocket.

Key in door, the soft click of the lock.

And at the same moment a soft sound behind her, then a jabbing pressure in the middle of her back.

“Medlenno,” a voice commanded in Russian. Slowly indeed.