The Throwaway

by Michael Moreci

  “Turn around,” Mark said, his voice sounding like a worn-out record crackling against the quiet of the moment.

  Gregori swiveled his chair around. His impassive face revealed nothing.

  Mark took a step closer and pushed his gun forward, sure to call attention to its presence. “Why?” Mark asked. “Why did you do this to me?”

  Gregori sighed. “You are a persistent one. You should be in a shallow grave by now. But here you are.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Mark snarled.

  “I ran a counterterrorism program a few years ago in Paris,” Gregori said, his voice gruff. “We pinpointed our target to a small hotel just outside the city, and I ordered a team to move on the location. Shoot to kill, as you Americans say.

  “My men went in, and the intel was good. But there was a maid, doing her rounds later than she normally did. Unfortunately, the maid became a casualty.”

  “And that’s what I am,” Mark sneered, “some casualty to a greater good?”

  “To us, yes.”

  Mark took another step forward and cocked the hammer. “Bull. Shit.”

  Gregori eyed the gun then darted his eyes to Mark, studying him. He opened his mouth to speak, but Mark didn’t give him the chance.

  “Your life or mine. I’m not compromising on getting what I want—just ask Viktor.”

  Gregori nodded, chewing the inside of his mouth; Mark could almost hear the gears churning inside his mind, examining every angle, every path that would lead him out of this situation. But Mark knew the upper hand was his, and nothing could change that. While he never meant to kill Viktor, he wouldn’t hesitate to unload all the bullets he had into Gregori’s chest. This situation was binary: Mark wanted one thing from Gregori, and Gregori was a dead man if he didn’t provide it.

  “What good will it do you?” Gregori asked. “The Americans, they branded you a traitor, sent an assassin to murder you. Do you really think you can go back?”

  “That’s for me to worry about. Now tell me why—tell me how this happened. My patience is in short supply.”

  Gregori stood and, reflexively, Mark took a step back. “You are nothing, Mark Strain. You know that as well as I do. But we positioned you to look like you were something. Like you were a spy. A traitor.”

  Mark shook his head and exhaled sharply. “We both know that. Nothing about that is news. What I need to know is why you picked me—and how I can clear my name with the truth.”

  “The FBI was getting close to discovering a well-placed agent of ours, so we fed them a fake. We fed them you. We activated Ania and Viktor, making them look like they answered to you, like you were the ringleader of a cell of Russian spies. But everything, all of it—it was just a charade to keep our asset safe and, more important, hidden. And it worked.”

  Mark studied Gregori’s face, paying close attention to the cadence of his words. Both his expressions and inflections were emotionless. He didn’t reveal a thing he didn’t want to. Still, Mark knew there was more. He hadn’t come this far to be told what he’d already figured out for himself.

  “Who’s Sergei Vishny? Who is he really?” Mark asked. For the first time, Gregori’s face twitched.

  “What do you know about Sergei Vishny?” Gregori asked, his lip upturning into a snarl.

  “I know he doesn’t exist. Not anymore. My guess? You tracked him down, killed him, and assumed his identity. You used his name to invest in contracts that you and your partner could control—like the Verge deal. Now tell me who it is. Who’s your American partner?”

  Gregori smiled, sardonically. “You are gifted at exceeding expectations. But you’ll never be entrusted with the identity of one of our most prized agents.”

  “Because I’ll know who it is,” Mark said.

  As Mark processed the situation, Gregori began pacing a tight counterclockwise circle. Mark followed, staying across from him at all times. He knew time was running out.

  “Who is it?” Mark asked as he and Gregori continued their mirrored paces. Only now, he trained the gun right on Gregori. He was done playing games. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  Gregori stopped pacing, and his smile widened. “Like I said, you exceed expectations. Which is impressive, but it also makes you a nuisance.

  “But the trouble you’ve caused—it ends. Now.”

  Mark, a flutter of panic rising within him, stayed focused on Gregori and saw his eyes—almost imperceptibly—dart off to the side. Mark turned, and he realized he was positioned, thanks to Gregori’s maneuvering, directly in front of the cabin’s lone window. Mark’s heart jumped. Through the warped and clouded glass, he spotted one of the guards a split second before he lit the cabin up in a hail of gunfire.

  Mark dove for the floor a second after Gregori, barely avoiding the bullets that shredded the room. The window’s glass shattered and wood splintered and erupted as the gunfire was unleashed, seemingly without discretion, from outside the cabin. Mark screamed as he covered his head, a scream of fear and frustration. One last bit of information—the identity of the real spy—was all he needed to get everything back that’d been taken from him. And with Gregori on his stomach just a few feet away from him, he couldn’t be any closer to it.

  Mark had to think fast. He only had a few precious moments before the guards rushed the cabin, and given the circumstances, he had no way of making Gregori talk in that time. But then it dawned on him—maybe he didn’t need Gregori to talk at all.

  The second there was a break in the onslaught, Mark leapt to his feet and ran across the room. He grabbed Gregori’s laptop—which was untouched by the assault—and slammed it shut. As he turned to leave, he was met by Gregori, who was charging right at him. Grabbing the computer, he instantly knew, was the best thing he could have done.

  Mark responded quickly, sidestepping Gregori and pulling him into a choke hold with a nearly effortless movement. Gregori was old, old and slow, and Mark’s sharpened reflexes gave him an overpowering advantage.

  “You’ll never get out of here alive,” Gregori spat.

  Over the man’s shoulder, Mark saw the knob on the front door twist. “We’ll see about that,” Mark said, and shoved Gregori forward. Timed perfectly, the old spy stumbled toward the door just as it opened. The last thing Mark saw before he turned to run was Gregori’s body flailing like it was a marionette as it was riddled with bullets.

  Mark charged down the hall, throwing his weight into the back door so it burst open without him having to so much as stutter in his frantic pace. The guard yelled something in Russian, and Mark knew he and his partner would be in pursuit.

  Dawn was encroaching, and Mark could feel the increasing warmth in the air. As he ran forward, his feet kicking up the thick snow with every step, Mark knew that every direction led to the same place.

  The frozen lake.

  He reached the glistening white shore and paused. There was no telling the integrity of the lake’s surface, particularly if it could hold his weight or not. But a quick glance over his shoulder, seeing the guards closing in on his position, smothered his fears of plunging into fatally cold waters.

  Mark stepped onto the lake like walking onto a tightrope. With every step he took, he entered into the thick fog that hovered over the surface. Murmurs chased him, the hushed tones of the guards as they took the same steps over deadly terrain. Mark looked back, but couldn’t see beyond the fog staring him in the face. The guards were there, pursuing, but their whereabouts were as uncertain as the lake’s opposite shore.

  Suddenly, the sound of bullets erupted, tearing through the air. Mark nearly dropped to the ice but thought better of it. The guards had to be spraying, hoping to get lucky, and for the sake of his survival, Mark had to assume, sooner or later, they would. Aiming the gun over his shoulder, Mark fired off a few rounds of his own—not with the expectation that he’d hit anyone, but he knew he couldn’t let the guards get comfortable.

  It only took him two pulls of his trigger to realize
the mistake he’d made:

  He’d given his position away.

  For a few breathless moments, Mark walked slower than ever while his eyes scanned the impenetrable fog around him. He considered making a run for the shore, but he hardly had time to bring the thought to conclusion. A pair of arms reached through the mist—Mark spotted them just out of the corner of his eye—and grabbed him, hard, around his neck and chest. Mark gasped, but his voice was hardly an audible pitch as it squeezed out of his constricted throat.

  The guard tightened his grip. Mark’s efforts to squirm his way free were futile, and as the guard called out in Russian—signaling for his partner, no doubt—Mark knew he had to do something. Gripping Gregori’s laptop tight, he brought his gun around to his side, trying to aim it; the guard responded by squeezing Mark’s throat even harder and used his other hand to knock the gun out of Mark’s hand. He heard the gun skitter across the ice as it disappeared into the fog.

  The guard called again, and Mark remembered what separated him from his captor. What separated him from anyone he encountered:

  Mark had nothing to lose; he’d rather die than be taken back alive.

  That’s when he started stomping his feet on the ice.

  Nothing happened on his first few attempts, but by the fourth stomp, Mark felt the ice begin to crack. He heard the splintering of the frozen water, and he continued to stomp. Harder. Faster. The guard tightened his grip around Mark and began throttling him, admonishing him in Russian. Ordering him to stop, Mark guessed, but he didn’t care. He continued to pound his feet against the ice, and the guard’s yells were soon silenced when the icy surface collapsed beneath them both.

  They plunged into the water, water so cold it was painful to the touch. As Mark fell, he reached out with both arms and managed to catch an unbroken chunk of ice in front of him; the computer smashed to the ice nearby, and Mark could only pray it hadn’t broken. The real estate he snagged was enough to hold him above the surface from the waist up, but he was sinking fast. During the fall, the guard had lost his grip on Mark’s chest but somehow managed to grab onto Mark’s legs. He could feel the guard gripping him around his knees, desperately trying to claw his way up. Mark could only imagine how unbearable it was to be submerged in the deadly water, but he didn’t care; he kicked his legs as much as he could against the guard’s weight, trying to break himself free. The guard refused to relent.

  As he kept his legs moving, Mark worked on pulling himself out of the water. His body was too heavy, though, with the weight of the guard tied to him like an anchor. Mark managed to throw a few inches of his frozen lower torso out of the water only to be pulled back down as the guard thrashed against his own creeping death. Mark’s grip on the ice nearly failed; the ice itself, buckling under the pressure of Mark’s and the guard’s combined weight, was ready to give. Mark felt the strain throughout his body, the pain of his lower half intensifying the longer it was submerged in the water. And just when he felt he couldn’t carry both his weight and the guard’s, Mark felt lighter. The guard, finally, let go. For a moment, Mark envisioned what it would be like to be trapped beneath the surface, the cold and the darkness overwhelming him until, finally, his body simply quit. In his final moments, all the world would go black before, lifeless, he drifted to the lake’s depths, never to be found again.

  As Mark pulled his body back onto the ice, inch by excruciating inch, he all at once felt release. Mark stumbled back to his feet. His legs struggled to support his weight, and his joints were stiff and weak. He knew it would be impossible for him to get anywhere fast. But that limitation worked in direct opposition with his most immediate necessity, which was to get the hell off the lake. The other guard would be on him any moment, and he was in no condition to offer any resistance.

  Mark grabbed Gregori’s laptop and trudged forward. His legs felt like they were on the brink of giving out with every step he fought to take. Gunfire sounded, the bullets cracking through the air all around him. Mark dove to the frozen surface, feeling it give below his weight. More bullets screamed overhead, and Mark lay flat on his belly, covering his head with his hands. This guard had learned from his partner; trying to capture Mark was a mistake that wouldn’t be made twice.

  There was a pause in the assault. Mark swiveled his head around, but as expected, saw nothing. The only way out was forward, and Mark had to keep moving. Military-crawling, he pulled his frozen bottom extremities across the ice. He only made it a few paces when he saw a shadowy shape straight ahead of him. His gun. Mark hurried, fiercely dragging his body toward the weapon. Behind him, he heard ragged breathing and footsteps. Approaching fast.

  He had no fight in him; he could barely move from the waist down. He got lucky once, a stroke of luck that almost buried him beneath a ceiling of ice. He couldn’t expect to have fortune smile on him twice. The gun was his only chance.

  Forgetting his pain, denying his immobility, Mark planted his right foot onto the ice; his thigh burned with the strain, and the searing pain only doubled—Mark swore a muscle tore in half, somewhere in his leg—as he pushed off his foot, diving for the gun. The labored breathing was closing in on him, practically huffing in his ear. Mark reached out and grabbed the gun; it nearly fumbled out of his grip as the joints in his hands proved to be as stiff as his legs. But Mark gripped the handle, gripped it tight. He rolled onto his belly, firing the moment he was facing forward. He pulled the trigger again and again until all that was left was a dry clicking sound.

  Mark saw nothing in front of him, heard nothing except the sound of his own shallow breathing. For a moment—brief and terrifying—Mark waited for the guard to pounce from the fog and deliver a single bullet right between his eyes. Freezing, lost in the middle of rural Russia with no idea how to get out, part of him wanted that. A small part, the part that was exhausted, the part that was in agonizing pain, the part that was beginning to lose hope. Mark resisted, propping his weight on his elbow as he tried to get up. If the guard was coming, and if this was where Mark made his last stand, he’d at least do it on his feet.

  But Mark didn’t have time to pull himself up. A shadow lumbered toward him, and he recoiled. But Mark noticed the shadow’s stumbling gait, moving like a drunk lost in the night. The shadow materialized into the shape of a man, his features gaining clarity with each step he took until, finally, he was standing over Mark. Incrementally, Mark had been easing away from the guard, but then he noticed the absent, vacant look in the man’s eyes. Though he had his automatic rifle strapped over his arm, his hands were pressed against his abdomen. Blood gushed over his fingers, pouring out of the gunshot wounds that’d pierced his stomach. The guard dropped down on all fours, his lips quivering as if to say something, then he collapsed onto his side. Mark remained still, staring into the man’s lifeless eyes.

  With no small amount of exertion and pain, Mark got to his feet. He grunted and grimaced with every small ounce of pressure applied to his lower half, but the alternative—doing nothing, staying put—was worse. He pried the automatic rifle off the guard’s shoulder, slinging it over his own, tightened his grip on Gregori’s laptop, and headed off toward the shore. Mark Strain disappeared into the fog.

  * * *

  When he stepped out of the woods, the road he found looked identical to the one he’d come in on, but he knew that couldn’t be right. He’d traveled so far from Gregori’s cabin, and in the opposite direction from which he’d come. This road wasn’t the one he needed—the one where he’d find his car, assuming Russian agents hadn’t already hauled it away. Mark had trudged his way through a dense forest chewed bare by the merciless teeth of winter, willing his body to stay upright and moving ahead. One step at a time, he forced himself to keep going.

  Mark limped his way to the north, which he assumed was away from the cabin. If the FSB wasn’t already on the scene, they would be soon, and they’d be scouring the area for him. There was little he could do if found, but he didn’t have to make his enemy’s job any e
asier by heading toward them. His only hope was to stumble upon some form of civilization—a gas station, a house, anything—or barring that, cross paths with a soul kind enough to pick up a hitchhiker who looked as beaten and bloodied as Mark knew he must. The odds of finding either, Mark recognized, were incredibly bad.

  As he came to a sharp bend in the road, he thought to shuffle across the street where the roadside tree coverage was thicker; in the event of an FSB search party, Mark could at least dive into the brush and hope to go by undetected. But just as he was about to dash across the street, a black SUV skidded in front of his path, cutting him off in midstride.

  Mark froze as the driver’s-side door swung open, and a woman leapt out.

  “Mark Strain,” the assassin said as she took brisk, determined steps toward Mark. Mark shuffled back, but he was too slow to even try to escape. The assassin raised her gun and brought it down hard on Mark’s head. “You’re a dead man” were the last words Mark heard before his world went black.

  PART THREE

  26

  Mark woke to sunlight shimmering in his eyes. It took a good amount of time for them to focus with the hazy daylight dancing across his pupils; it took just as much time for his thoughts to return to coherency. Mark squinted, bringing into view rows and rows of evergreens, painted white with snow. He lifted his groggy head and studied the world, covered in white, as he cruised past it. He closed his eyes; the motion of the passing landscape made him feel nauseous. In the darkness, images flashed before him in bits and pieces. Ania, dying in his arms. Being chased over the ice. Falling into the water. Freezing. Running—running for his life. Mark fought to remember, but it was like he was still looking at the world through the fog he’d just escaped. He strained his mind, trying to remember. He’d fought his way off the frozen lake; he’d reached the road. He could almost feel the bitter pain in the lower half of his body as he begged his legs to last long enough to get back to his car. But he hadn’t made it. There was a car, and it sliced right in front of his path. The Russians? Mark pictured Gregori, but that wasn’t right. This person was going to kill Mark, he heard her voice in his head. And then it came to him: