I couldn’t do it. Sitting in my car outside of my grandfather’s massive mansion in the suburbs, I was unable to face my family. He was Ysenia’s husband.

It wasn’t because I’m ostensibly Catholic and felt some kind of moral guilt over breaking a commandment. Not at all. The last time I set foot in a church was over fifteen years ago at my aunt’s funeral. The whole organized religion thing wasn’t really for me, although I’d been thoroughly indoctrinated as a child and still had to contend with my mother’s disappointment over never going to mass. I tried to be a not-awful person and that was good enough to set my conscience at ease.

No, it wasn’t the religious or moral implications of knowing she was married (which she never mentioned) that had me paralyzed. It was the fact that her husband had come after me after all this time. There was only one reason that someone who do such a thing, and it wasn’t just anger over Ysenia’s obvious infidelity.

Ysenia was dead. She had to be. The rumors that she’d been executed for what happened aboard the ISS were either true or something equally awful must have happened to her. There was no other reason a man would come across the ocean to the other side of the world, pretend to be someone else, and try to destroy me.

When my phone rang with an unidentified number, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Ordinarily I wouldn’t answer a random call, but my brain was so frazzled by the recent revelation about Marcus/Oleg, I wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

“Hello,” I answered, “this is Nathan.”

“Hello Nathan,” a cool, vaguely familiar accented voice replied, “this is Oleg. We met before, of course, a few days ago, When I was being Marcus. But that’s past now. Given the number of helicopters currently circling and looking for me, I assume you know all about that.”

Shit. He was calling me? My blood ran cold, and distantly, I wondered if I ought to be trying to trace the call or something. My protracted silence must have prompted Oleg to speak, because he continued,

“Even if you catch me, you won’t get away with what you did to Ysenia,” Oleg’s voice was positively murderous.

“I didn’t do anything to harm Ysenia,” I felt obliged to say, “she came onto me. I had no idea she was married. Everything was consensual. Where is she?”

“Where is she?! She’s dead. Embarrassing the Russian state is punishable by execution, although that law isn’t on the books. The way I see it, you murdered her. You’ll pay for what you did. Trust me.”

The confirmation of Ysenia’s fate did nothing to improve my emotional state. It’s not like I’d ever been extremely emotionally invested in her, but I would never want something bad to happen to the woman. We were just two idiots with an excess of libido. Ysenia certainly didn’t deserve to be executed for casual sex, no matter where it happened.

“Listen Oleg,” I began, “I’m sorry that Ysenia is dead. That’s awful. But I didn’t have anything to do with that. You’re going to get yourself killed too. You need to turn yourself in and cooperate with the police-”

Oleg’s laughter through the line cut me off.

“You’re such an American,” he said, as if it were an insult and not something that I was deeply proud of, “I accepted my fate long ago, but I should have known that girl with the camera was up to no good today. Everyone you care about is going to pay for what happened to Ysenia, trust me. I just wanted to give you a call, so that when the moment comes, you’ll know it was me.”

“Stay the fuck away from Zoey!” I barked, simultaneously terrified and furious that he’d realized her part in his identification. Oleg laughed again.

“Oh, so you like the little photographer?” He said, and I swear I could hear him smirking, “That’s good information to have.”

I was going to kill this man if I could. The fact that he wanted revenge against me was understandable. Illegal and stupid, but understandable. But there was no way I could let him hurt the things I cared about. Durant Astronautics was my life. Zoey Atkinson might be my future. Neither one of them had a thing to do with Ysenia.

“Listen Oleg, you need to listen to me, you’ve got to stop this,” I managed, trying to reason with him, but the line went dead.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to get out of my car. My arms and legs felt like they were made of lead, but I was able to drag myself inside the spooky old Durant mansion and into my uncle Alexander’s study. The others were all there waiting for me.

I flopped down into the chair next to my brother, staring blankly at the ground and waiting for my elders—or David—to start talking.

“Alright,” David said to our uncles, “we’re all here. Let’s get this over with.”

“It’s like I texted,” Richard said to our assembled group, “the guy in the picture sent by Nathan is a former KGB agent named Oleg Kuznetsov. He was apparently married, or at least engaged to, Ysenia Antonova, the cosmonaut that, well, you know. The fact that he’s here now and is impersonating a minor Portuguese tennis star while dating Angelica Hunt, is definitely not a coincidence. I’ve notified The Senator already. He’s working with the FBI right now to try and catch him. This is about to blow up and is going to be in the news by evening. We need to game plan the fallout.”

“He just called me,” I announced, “apparently he wants me to know it was him. He said that Ysenia’s dead, and he blames me. Clearly, he wants revenge. The only good news is that it sounds like he’s about to get caught.”

Everyone stared at me. Although my eyes were still focused downward, I could feel the weight of their undivided attention.

“This is good,” Alexander said after a moment, and I looked up at him in surprise. He looked as unhappy as possible while still being, apparently, happy. “At least as far as I can see,” he continued, “it makes Nathan look like a victim. Nobody likes Russian spies.”

“Nobody likes adulterers either,” I replied, and Alexander shrugged his broad shoulders.

“Nobody really cares,” he said, “at least not anymore. The shock of your misdeeds up in orbit wore off a long time ago. You’ve been rehabilitated. We’ll catch the guy, he’s an evil foreign agent, everyone will hate him. Then everyone will be even more patriotic and supportive of Durant Astronautics. This is a win for us.”

“Are we sure that this will become public?” David asked, “I mean, if he’s a spy, maybe we’ll just trade him back to Russia or something. Wouldn’t that be the best case scenario?”

“They don’t want him,” Richard said with a smirk. “They’ve already disavowed him. They said he’s been off their radar for a long time and would be useless to us from an intelligence perspective. No, we get to keep this one. He might be useless from an intelligence perspective, but the guy is still in for some seriously enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“What about Ysenia?” I finally asked. “How does she fit into this?”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe Oleg about Ysenia, or maybe I just didn’t want to. Perhaps Richard’s contacts had confirmed Oleg’s story.

“She doesn’t.” Richard answered with a frown, “We still have no idea what really happened to her. She might be dead or in prison like Oleg said, obviously. She might be living the quiet life in Moscow. She might be helping Oleg right now. No one has any intel on her. The Russians, who are actually cooperating on Oleg, are still silent on her.”

“Will you delay the launch now?” David asked me, as if it was now the most obvious thing in the world.

“He can’t,” Alexander barked, “that’s the last thing we want to do.”

I nodded. Agreeing with my uncle Alexander was a rare occurrence, but today was a rare day.

“Delaying the launch would make us look weak,” I said, “we can’t just roll over and let some Russian spy fuck us over.”

“Dude,” my brother said, “he’s only trying to fuck you because you fucked his wife! Maybe think this through? He might have done all kinds of shit to your systems. He might have sabotaged the launch.”

“How?” I fired back, “We know all he got was the programming for the upcoming launch. He’s about to be locked up where he can’t do anything. I say we should stay the course.”

“Have you ever heard the word ‘hubris’?” my brother asked snidely, “It means excessive pride. That’s what you’ve got. It made you have sex with this Ysenia chick. It got you thrown out of NASA and the Air Force. It made you build this ridiculous rocket. And it’s gonna make you blow up inside it tomorrow.”

“Nathan’s right,” Alexander barked at David, “the potential benefits greatly outweigh the potential dangers of launching tomorrow. We’re in the middle of a commercial space race. It’s not going to be a tie. Someone’s going to win, and everyone else is going to lose.”

“Well forgive me for not giving a fuck about the commercial space race,” David snapped, “maybe I just want my brother to survive. We could always send a different pilot.”

“That’s all this is really about, isn’t it? You’ve been against me piloting this launch since the beginning,” I argued, trying to get David back on my side, “but can you honestly say that you think the risk is increased by this Oleg guy’s hack?”

“I don’t know,” David admitted, “but that actually supports my point. You keep doing things that are risky and dangerous because your stupid pride won’t let you stop to consider the consequences. It’s like this Zoey girl you’re dating. I’m sure she’s nice and all, but she’s a freaking gossip columnist. There’s a good chance that situation is going to backfire, and if you thought about it for two seconds, you’d know that.”

“Don’t you bring her into this,” I snarled nastily. “She’s the one that got me the photo of Oleg today. She’s the one who thought he was involved. We wouldn’t even know about any of this if it wasn’t for her.”

“Maybe that’s intentional,” David proposed, grasping at straws, “maybe she’s working with him.”

“You think Zoey is working with Oleg?” I asked, aghast, “That’s ridiculous and you’re paranoid.”

“It isn’t,” Richard said quietly, and we both turned to look at him in surprise, “Nathan, listen to me: you’re not thinking clearly, either. Zoey—whoever the hell she is—might be involved. Oleg’s hacking might make your launch more dangerous tomorrow. A dozen flying monkeys might come flying out my ass. These all might be risks worth taking, but we need to work through them methodically and unemotionally.”

I nodded. Richard was right, as usual—not about Zoey being involved, obviously that was bullshit—but about the rest. We did need to work through everything piece by piece, as painful as the thought was to me. Every detail of this situation needed to be examined in excruciating, precise detail. Acting impulsively was not the right way to approach business, let alone spaceflight. I’d been impulsive before and made a very bad decision. It hadn’t turned out very well for me at all. In fact, it seems that I was still dealing with the fallout.

It was going to be a very long meeting.