“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” rose the cry. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
The thing had no real shape. It was a shadow that roiled and twisted, lunging out with amorphous pseudopods and whiskery feelers and clacking claws.
Valen screamed as he ran, and the scream filled the hotel room. No one came to investigate, though. He was aware of how bad and how loud his nightmares had become over the last year, and he often booked a corner suite and slept in whatever standard bed, foldout, or couch was farthest from a connecting wall. Music blasted all night from his iPad, and that was directed at the door to the hallway.
He slept without his hearing aid, and so his own desperate cries never woke him. Nor did the shrieks of the ghosts he had created with every person he killed.
The night crawled on and he ran through his dreams and the sheets knotted like snakes around his naked thighs.
And then the dream ended with a touch. Bang. All of the horrors, gone. The submarine, the darkness, the capering shadows. Gone. He snapped awake, one hand darting blindly under the pillow for the small automatic he always slept with, the other whip ping to block any attack. The pistol was not under his pillow; his scrabbling fingers felt nothing at all.
He froze and peered into the gloom. A figure stood above him, but as he turned it moved back. Valen blinked his eyes clear and the shadow shapes from his dream organized themselves into a human shape. A woman’s shape, of that there was absolutely no doubt. There was also no doubt that she held a gun in one hand. His gun.
The woman leaned over and turned on the bedside light, and smiled. Then she dropped the magazine from the pistol, ejected the round from the chamber, caught it with a deft dart of her hand, and set the component parts on the bedside table. She did not speak because she knew he could not hear without his device. So, in silence she stood up and walked slowly, like a hunting cat, to the foot of the bed. She was very tall, with the strong shoulders and the muscle tone of the competitive skier she’d been twenty years ago.
Valen kept blinking until his eyes were clear as he fished for his hearing aid and put it on.
“Gadyuka,” he murmured. “What are you doing here?”
Gadyuka — the viper — smiled as she slowly unbuttoned her sheer blouse. She was in no hurry, but the deliberate movement of her long fingers pulled Valen the rest of the way out of the dream and very much into the now. Beneath the blouse was a pink underwire bra with a subtle paisley print of pink, orange, and yellow with lace trim, a satin bow in the front, and rhinestones in the center of the bow. It was more persuasively feminine than anything Valen had assumed she would wear. But then again, what kind of bras do stone killers wear? She unclasped the bra and let it fall, revealing full breasts the color of snow. Then she slid down the zipper on the hip of her smoke-gray skirt and let it fall, too. Her underwear was a medium bubblegum pink, with lace trim on legs and waist.
“What are you doing?” he said, his words slurred with sleep, surprise, and confusion.
“Maybe you’re dreaming,” she said.
“But…,” he began, but she shook her head, and that was the last of the conversation between them.
Valen licked his lips. His pulse was still rapid from the nightmare, but now it beat even harder. Her nipples were a subtle shade of pink, and hard, with the areolas pebbled from the cool air in the room. She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her panties and pulled them down, revealing a trimmed pubic bush only a shade darker than the white-blond of her long hair.
She was aggressively, unbearably, mercilessly female, and Valen felt himself grow hard while also physically diminishing in her presence. He was a tough man, a killer and a fighter, and was regarded as dangerous by nearly everyone, but he knew that he was not a match for this Russian viper. She was so completely in command of herself that she seemed to crackle with energy and vitality.
When she climbed into bed it was she who took him. And she took him as many times as she wanted.
Hours later, Valen Oruraka lay totally spent, which shook out to feeling fully alive and yet near death. He was greased with sweat and covered with scratches and bites and the heady scent of her. His breathing was bad and his heart felt like a nuclear reactor on overload. The bed was a wreck. Some of the room was a wreck. He was a disaster.
Gadyuka sat up in bed, the damp sheets across her lap, breasts bare in the morning light, as she rolled a joint with great care, licked it, smoothed it, and put it between her full lips. Then she lit it and took two deep hits, held them in her lungs for a long time, and exhaled high into the air.
“Why are you here?” he croaked.
“Do I need a reason?” she asked, speaking in Russian with a Pomor accent. He knew that she was from the north, but that was all. Valen once considered doing some research on her but gave it up as likely a suicidal hobby. People he feared were afraid of Gadyuka, so he feared her, too.
It was like that with the people they worked for, as well. All of the Novyy Sovetskiy senior committee members were inflexible and unforgiving when it came to matters of security. Errors simply could not be allowed and so there were ten times as many safeguards as with any other plan in the history of modern warfare. There was only one punishment for breaking the rules. One punishment with no hope of repeal, parole, or pardon. That was only common sense.
He struggled to sit up. “You don’t walk across the street without a good damn reason. So what do you want?”
“I’m here to give you a job. Everyone is pleased with how you handled the recovery near Hawaii. That was as much a test as it was necessary to the goals of the Party. Now it’s time for you to tackle a much bigger project, and you will do it well because I told the senior members that you would.”
He looked at her naked body and cocked an eyebrow. “So… what? Are you my graduation present?”
“Hardly,” she snorted. “No, it’s a personal policy thing with me. I don’t fuck minions.”
“You lost me.…”
“Did you ever see that American movie Meet the Parents? Robert De Niro tells his daughter’s boyfriend that he’s now in the ‘circle of trust.’ Remember that? Well, welcome to my circle of trust.”
“Um… thanks? And, what does that mean, exactly?”
“It means life is about to get more interesting, Valen. In Star Wars—the original one, I mean — Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke that he’s just taken his first step in a larger world.”
“I didn’t know you were a movie buff.”
“I am. And it’s one of the things I’ll miss most about America once it’s gone.”
Valen flinched. “Gone?”
“Well, when it is no longer the bloated whore that it is.”
“Wishful thinking. Even after the election tampering and e-mail hacking and all that, they’re still the biggest gorilla in the jungle.”
Her smile was enigmatic. “That,” she said, “is why I’m here, lapochka.”
CHAPTER THREE
The president of the United States sat at the head of the table and smiled at the men gathered around him. The Joint Chiefs; Admiral Lucas Murphy, the White House chief of staff; several top advisors; Jennifer VanOwen, the president’s science advisor; and a few close friends to whom he had granted this highest level of security. Most of them looked attentive and mildly surprised since there was no active crisis.