As soon as we walk in our apartment, I’m ready to pack. But our suitcases sit on the elegant handmade bedspread. I hurry to check — they’re full.
Did they come in here while we were at the embassy? I riffle through my clothes.
“You said to pack,” Danny says from behind me.
“Oh.” I stop mid-shuffle. “Right.” Jumping to conclusions. I laugh at myself. Still, I need to get ready. I dig out my nicest pair of pants and both skirts I brought. “Do you have a travel sewing kit?” (Eagle Scout. He’s prepared.)
“Always mend before a mission?” Danny plops onto the bedspread and digs in his bag.
“Sort of.” I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out some of the equipment Jim and Noah provided: a lock pick set, actual picks plus improvised and repurposed tools (and yes, there’s a use for bobby pins in lock picking, but probably not the one you’re picturing). “I need to sew these into my clothes.”
He raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t comment further, surrendering the plastic sewing case. I make quick work of the stitches, and by the time Danny heads to the bathroom for our toiletries, I’m onto my next prep step. I go to an ornate side table drawer filled with scattered odds and ends. Cautiously amused, Danny leans against the bathroom doorway to watch me. I grab a handful of small items and arrange them on the cream-colored tabletop. I pick up the first object (a thimble) like I’m examining it, switch it to my other hand, then set it down. Next, I lift the second thing (a stubby pencil) inspect it and put it back.
“Interested in Sylvie’s junk drawer?” Danny asks.
“Fascinated.” I move the third item, a standard six-sided die, to my other hand before I snap up the fourth thing, an expired Paris Visite transit pass. “Should we finish packing?”
“I guess.”
I return the pass to the table and look up. Danny studies me. Yeah, too slow. I drop the die on the tabletop and rearrange the things to repeat the routine. This time, I keep the pencil.
Gotta do it again. I take the die again. Almost there; almost fast enough. One more time. As soon as the pass touches down, I pivot and start across the room. When Danny takes stock of the table, I slide the die into my pocket.
“Are we playing a game?” Danny asks.
“No, why?”
He nods toward the table. “The die’s missing.”
Dang. Still too slow. I take it out of my pocket. “Ever do magic tricks as a kid?”
“Did you?”
“My brothers did.”
His squint still seems skeptical. “So you’ll never reveal your secrets?”
“It’s not magic. Sleight of hand.”
He goes to his suitcase and pulls out three or four USB drives. (They’re multiplying.) Seems like he’s been keeping careful track of these things these last few weeks — since one of his was stolen. “Let’s try that with something more practical.”
I roll the die over my palm. Is he asking to learn a magic trick, or . . . more? “Why?”
Danny shrugs. “Could be useful?”
I’m not buying the casual act. I observe him for another minute, as if he has a reason to lie. I believe him — I do — but I don’t want him to need even something as boring as these skills.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “If you don’t want to show me—”
“No, I can show you, but . . . maybe we should leave this to me?”
He contemplates me a long second. I’d need something better than a real-life decoder ring to decipher that expression. (Not to mention the fact we discontinued those rings decades ago.) The tension stretches out.
I need Danny. He’s the thing that keeps me sane in the spy life, the wilderness of mirrors. But I’m supposed to keep him far from that life. Have I made a serious mistake?
I wheel away and change the subject abruptly. “Did you bring any warmer clothes?” We’ve already been briefed on current climate conditions in Rostov-on-Don: roughly the same as the weather back home, and a little colder than Paris.
“I’ll survive,” he says. He slides his USB drives back into his suitcase and stays where he is, across the room. Not daring to come closer. “Are we planning on stealing something?”
“Not planning on it, but—”
“How does that make you better than him?”
I don’t have to ask which “him” he means. Fyodor Timofeyev. The man who stole his plans — the man I had to kill to protect Danny. I muster the courage to approach Danny, because I can’t answer his question above a whisper. “Maybe I’m not. I don’t remember saying I was.”
“I understand he broke the law—”
“We’re about to break the law. Day one, lesson one at the Agency: spying is illegal in every country of the world.” I search his eyes: normally warm, now worried. I can barely breathe my next words. “Do you know what you’re getting into?”
I mean what he’s getting into accepting this assignment — no, not an assignment; they can’t assign civilians anything. But in the silence spinning between us, Danny looks away, subconsciously rubbing his wedding ring.
A metal band just as solid cinches around my stomach. Aside from a crappy family history of happy, lasting marriages, I work in a job with a divorce rate of approximately 163%.
I turn to the side table, yank the drawer open harder than I mean to, and brush all the practice props back inside. But the nervous energy doesn’t dissipate, and I’m pacing the little apartment, finally settling on stuffing the tool-laced clothes back in my suitcase.
The only thing left to pack is the thing I’m dreading most. I ease off my engagement ring and wedding bands, three rows of channel-set diamonds that we haven’t had time to solder together. I couldn’t wear them no matter what my cover ID was — CIA officers always travel “alone” — but I’m not ready to give them up.
“Hey.” Danny’s hands land on my waist. I glance over my shoulder at him. “It’s your job. I might not like it, but I get it.”
“Thanks.” Even I can tell my grin’s weak.
“You all right?”
I open my fingers to reveal my rings in my palm.
“Guess I should get used to that,” he says.
“I hate that idea.”
Danny takes my rings and pushes the suitcases out of the way. We sit on the bedspread. He twirls one wedding band between his thumb and index finger.
“I can wear them till tonight.” I offer my finger. It already feels . . . naked.
Danny holds my hand. I stare at my bare finger next to the band on his, aircraft-grade titanium with a carbon fiber inlay (pretty sure he married me and not aerospace).
It’s only been a few seconds, but that’s long enough. “You planning to put that ring back on me?”
Danny lifts my left hand to replace my first wedding band. “Worried?”
My gut does a double backflip, but my cocky grin is self-mocking. “Hey, it’s me.”
“So yes? Perpetually?”
I elbow-nudge him, though he isn’t wrong. “Danny, if I didn’t think I could handle this, we wouldn’t be doing it.”
He frowns at me for a long second, and I mentally backpedal. What did I say wrong? Danny focuses on sliding my engagement ring and my second wedding band on.
“Hey,” I say, leaning down to his line of sight. “Who’s playing sullen now?”
He shakes off the sadness. “Sorry. You said you could handle this.”
“Well, yeah, I hope so.”
“Not ‘we.’”
I’m not sure it’s the pronoun choice bugging Danny. “Of course ‘we.’ I’m not leaving you after I fought so hard to go with you.”
He nods, staring at the tufted headboard instead of me. “Sure about this?”
“So far I have a perfect 100% mission survival rate.”
Danny meets my gaze, a challenge in his eyes. “What a coincidence. So do I.”
I smile at his joke and lean in to kiss him, sliding my arms a
round his neck. At the last second, I realize the challenge hasn’t faded, like it would if he were joking.
But Danny kisses me back without hesitation, and I push away every thought but enjoying the last minutes of our honeymoon.
The taxi rolls up to the airport, and I assess the glowing building. I don’t think we realized it, but the minute we accepted the mission, our honeymoon was over. I’m already in operational mode: thinking in Russian, checking for surveillance every fifty feet, running through Moscow Rules, readying for this test.
I’ve been a CIA officer (we don’t use the term “agent” for ourselves) for four years, but Canada pales in comparison to Russia. Though the Cold War’s long over, Russia’s still an important operational area. And maybe my biggest challenge yet.
Danny gets out of the cab and helps me out. I’ve done all I can to debrief him. If I’m honest, the nerves dancing in every major organ aren’t just for his sake — they’re for mine.
I’ve faced off with foreign intelligence, recruited high value targets, even taken down a traitor, and still it feels I have to do this to prove I have what it takes as a CIA officer.
As if I’ll ever stop proving myself. Ever stop striving.
Danny and I check in at the counter, and he gets his changed itinerary. My tickets still fly to Ottawa (apparently thirty-six hours away). I scan the crowds out of habit.
Man, I hope Lori’s up to this.
Once we’re past security, we have twenty minutes before I have to spring into action. The gates to Moscow and New York are nowhere near one another, so we grab snacks from an airport café and linger between our destinations until our muffins are long gone.
“Have a good trip,” I say, slightly louder than I would in real life. “Show ’em how to aerospace.”
Danny almost laughs. “Travel safe,” he says before he plants a kiss on my forehead. “Rakastan sinua,” he says softly.
“Hyvä,” I whisper back, praising his punctuation. (Finnish for “good.”) “Ja minä sinuakin, ikuisesti.”
“You’d better,” he finishes, back to English for the part someone else might hear. (Also, we’ve exhausted his Finnish vocabulary.)
It’s much easier to leave my husband of less than two weeks knowing I’ll see him tomorrow, but I’m definitely not saying no to his slow goodbye kiss. A distinct perk of honeymooning in Paris: nobody’s offended if you’re in love.
He pulls back. “Better go.”
“Yeah.” I clamp down on the inward wince at leaving him. After one last kiss, I slip away, glancing back for surveillance. Danny’s the only one watching, so I give him a little wave.
Halfway through the terminal, I find my real destination: a women’s bathroom. And it’s crowded. Good thing we’ve planned for that contingency. I join the queue waiting for a stall, puffing out a bored breath. I monitor the slow-moving line, willing a redhead in a red jacket to appear.
Finally, when I’m nearly to the front, she joins us.
Action time. I’m next in line, and I take a stall. Off with my black jacket and aviator sunglasses (cliché, maybe, but they hide more of my face). Out of my jeans, revealing black slacks underneath. Trade out my worn-in sneakers for shiny black flats. I hoist my carry-on onto the rack above the toilet.
The costume change doesn’t take long, and I’m repacked well before Lori’s ready. After what feels like forever, black patent flats pass by my door, then back again. I wait until she’s clear before I throw open the door. “Désolée, désolée,” I apologize. (Probably marking myself as a tourist, but half the people in the airport are foreigners, right?)
Another woman in line starts forward and my lungs clench — but Lori backtracks to slide in the stall first. The other woman scowls and troops back to the line. I deliberately scrub my hands, including under the nails, still mostly manicured (at my mother’s insistence) from my wedding.
I take the same care drying my hands, then examine my makeup in the long mirrors. We have to keep this up while the line clears out, but I’m not sure how much more I can delay when I finally glimpse the right stall door swinging open. Lori, with a long dark braid, jeans, sneakers and my black jacket and aviators, strides out to the sinks.
“Pardonez-moi?” she approaches me. “Est-ce la vôtre?” She rolls my carry-on to me like she found the bag I “forgot.”
“Ah, oui, merci.” I scan the line, the women leaving the stalls — nobody should see Lori went in a redhead and came out a brunette. I duck around a corner into the bathroom’s mirrored alcove and open my bag. As planned, Lori added regular and black diplomatic passports and her boarding pass for a direct flight to Rostov-on-Don to the rest of my supplies: a red wig and gorgeous red coat. I pull on the wig cap and wig, making quick adjustments in the mirror. There’s enough time to secure it with a dozen hairpins. I finger-comb the strands into place, arranging the long bangs to the right, as close to Lori’s asymmetric cut as possible (which she eventually confessed was designed specifically for this mission). With the long red coat, I’m suited up to be somebody else.
I walked in the bathroom Talia, but I walk out Lori Dolman.
It’s been a long time since I flew undercover internationally, but since we’re already past security, the hard part won’t come until we hit Russian customs. I’ve got some strange stuff in my bags to (not) declare — and that’s just what we were comfortable with me flying in. It doesn’t count the things I’ll retrieve or buy in Rostov (or the tools too small to set off metal detectors, sewn into the lining of my pants and Lori’s jacket).
I’m ten feet from the bathroom when the first obstacle grabs me by the arm — literally. I whirl around to find Lori. “Mademoiselle, avez-vous vu un alliance dans les toilettes?”
Did I see a ring? Oh. Crap. I forgot to exchange a key item: my rings. Lori asked if I’d seen one in the bathroom. Decent cover, and definitely something I can work with. I lead the way back to the bathroom where we made the switch.
“We shouldn’t have contact,” I murmur, though it’s my fault she’s had to track me down. I pretend to hunt around the sink. When I bend down to search the tile floor underneath, I tug my rings off. “Voilà!” I hold them aloft, then press them into her hands. “Try not to lose them again.” My eyes are twice as serious as my tone.
Lori nods and slides the rings onto her middle finger — they’re too big for her ring finger, and that’s the closest we can get to secure. I’m not losing those.
I give Lori some lead time, scrubbing my hands again after touching the floor. (Public bathrooms in Europe? Yeeeah.) Once I’m sure she’s clear, I rush out of the bathroom. I reach my gate on time and trot to the tarmac for my tiny plane without any problems — until my phone vibrates. I check my phone. A text. From Danny.
Lori says Zverev emailed. Wants to see us when we get in.
That’s fast. Don’t recognize the name from the company profile. Who is he?
Dunno. The guy I’m meeting at Shcherbakov.
Which makes him our target. Hope you said yes. Gotta go. I scan the tarmac as I close in on our little jet. A couple others are headed this way. I navigate to the secret CIA app better than a factory reset. Once it’s wiped, I remove the SIM card.
Almost done — now to make this look good. At the bottom of the stairs to the plane, I drop the phone and it skitters underneath. Although the wand waver dude beckons for me to come away, I chase it. Seems like you can never destroy a phone when you want to (though if it falls a mere foot at home, it’s ruined). This time I’m in luck: spider-web cracks cover the touchscreen. I leave the phone where it is and hurry to the stairs.
Inside the plane, I slide the SIM card into a mini battery pack in my pocket. It emits a barely noticeable buzz, and the SIM card is erased, reformatted, and short circuited. (Or something like that. Do I look like a tech guy?)
I’ve severed the last link on me to Talia Reynolds. Even my luggage is labeled with Lori’s name.
My bags are
only the beginning. When I land, I’ll have six hours to reacquaint myself with Rostov, procure my last provisions and scope out Shcherbakov. Granted, an actual building penetration would take months to plan, but preparation might as well be my middle name. (More fitting than Rosalie, for sure.)
Six hours to prep. Then Danny arrives in Rostov, and the real challenge starts.
Russia’s colder than I remember (which is saying a lot). I huff out a fogbank as I hoof it to the gates of the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin. The white towers topped with gold onion domes and Orthodox crosses feel so familiar, like coming home.
You know how you can never come home again? Yeah, it’s not the same. I have to remind myself I don’t need to find my missionary companion or approach people to share the gospel, though the pressure already hangs over me. Serving as a missionary was hard work.
This mission could be much harder. And it starts now, by finding my contact here.
At the cathedral gates, I drape my fashionable scarf over my head, a requirement for women in Orthodox churches. The sweet smoky scent of incense hits me as soon as I walk through the doors. Once my vision adjusts to the dim lighting, I glance up at the gold-tinted icons — paintings of Christ, Mary and the saints. My favorite, Our Lady of Kazan, gazes out with her Mona Lisa smile in that “iconic” Russian style.
The morning services will begin soon, and the cathedral’s busy with worshipers attending to the various icons, praying, lighting candles, kissing pictures. It’s so different from Mormon services that it was hard not to stare when I visited before. But today I observe disinterestedly before I take my place in the women’s side of the pews, where other worshipers stand waiting.
My Agency liaison in the city should be here. I’ve already checked in at my hotel and reacquainted myself with major landmarks. Now I need to touch base and ask a quick favor.
Spy Another Day Box Set: Three full-length novels: I, Spy; Spy for a Spy; and Tomorrow We Spy (Spy Another Day clean romantic suspense trilogy) Page 60
