“One room,” Tasha said as she passed Marands across the counter to the clerk.

The clerk took the money and nodded. “Any luggage this evening?”

“No. Lost on the flight in,” she growled.

“I’m sorry, madam.”

She offered him a tight, humorless smile and a nod. “Our bags are probably still in Kiev,” she said, her Russian accent thick. She snatched the key from the clerk and spoke to Dan in Russian. She knew he didn’t speak Russian, but he fell into step with her as she strode past.

“You speak Russian?” he asked quietly as the elevator took them to their floor.

“Yeah. My mother is Russian, which is why the CIA recruited me. I speak Russian with both a southern and northern accent.”

They entered their room and shut the door. The Orkut Grand was a much more upscale hotel than the Vispin. In addition to its polished marble floors and thick carpeting, it had modern electronic locks. The moment the door clicked shut, she leaned against it. The sadness returned to her face. “I need to report in,” she said after a moment.

The SAT phones were power hogs so she plugged it in to charge it, then dialed ‘The University.’ The phone was encrypted so they didn’t have to worry about anyone intercepting the call and listening in.

“University of Miami. How may I help you?” the pleasant woman answered.

“Lancaster,” Tasha said, giving the code word so the woman would know she wasn’t speaking under duress. Without it, a caller would get the runaround and never know they were speaking to the NSA headquarters. “Let me speak to the deputy on duty.”

“Standby.”

“This is Deputy-Director Castalon.”

She cut to the chase. “Our cover is blown.”

“How?”

“Don’t know, but Derrick Long and Rich Tesley are dead.”

“Dammit. Where are you now?”

“Safe. I had backup documents, but we need to come in.”

There was a pause. “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no?’” Dan demanded. “Didn’t you hear what Tasha said? We’re fucked!”

“Is that Tech-Sergeant Thames?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

“Good to finally speak with you, Thames. I heard what she said, but this is a priority mission.”

“I don’t give a shit. We’re no longer combat ready.”

“There is no one else, Thames. You’re our only assets on the ground.”

“We’ve lost half our team!”

“I realize that, but you know the importance of this mission. I’m sorry about your men, but the mission continues. Any idea how their cover was blown so quickly?”

Dan looked at Tasha and she shook her head. “No, sir.”

“Is your cover intact?”

“I believe so,” Tasha said. “Dan and I are posing as a husband and wife from Kiev.”

“Good. We have no confirmation that the Griffins are in Orkut, but all evidence is pointing there. According to the lab assistants, it will take years to modify the virus, but if the Griffins transfer the knowledge to others, the research can continue in their absence. The lab assistant is confident the doctors won’t willingly help, and he thought they could stall for a few weeks before anyone noticed, but they can’t stall forever. It’s imperative we get them out of there as soon as possible, before anyone realizes what they’re doing.”

“Understood,” Tasha said, holding Dan’s eyes. Nobody could stand up to torture forever, and they would eventually break and do what Kangka demanded.

“We’ve tasked a satellite to look for signs the lab isn’t in Talish, but there are a lot of small villages, any one of which could potentially be the one Kangka is using. It’s going to take time. I’ll be straight with you, Lancaster. You and Dan are our best hope for finding the Griffins.”

Dan snarled, stood, and stomped away from the bed.

“We’ll do our best, Deputy-Director,” she said softly.

“You get off on this shit, don’t you?” Dan snarled when Tasha hung up.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit! The sneaking around, playing spy. Two of my friends are dead, and you’re over there having a fucking orgasm because you get to play Jane Bond.”

“Fuck you, you arrogant asshole. Derrick and Rich were my friends, too. You think you’re the only one who cares they’re dead?” she yelled, so mad she wanted to take a swing at him.

“I don’t know. Am I? You were sitting up and begging a minute ago when that guy was on the phone.”

“We have a fucking job to do.”

“Yeah, and part of that is not leaving anyone behind. We need to claim the bodies and get them shipped home to their families.”

“Do you have a fucking death wish? Are you sure those women didn’t finger us? I’m not. They only sent two because Kangka didn’t know about us, but the women saw us sitting with Derrick and Rich. If we show up at the morgue, we may end up on a slab next to them.”

Dan glared at her. “This is fucked up.”

“You think I don’t know that? But if we don’t get the Griffins out and destroy their research, then Derrick and Rich will have died for nothing.”

“Fuck,” he snarled. “This is all my fault.”

“How is it your fault?”

“I should have known.”

“You did. You tried to warn me, but I blew you off.” She stared at him a moment. “How did you know?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know, but I had this gut feeling.”

She sat down hard on the edge of the bed and looked at him, her eyes sad. “It’s not your fault. It’s my fault for not listening to you. It’s my fault because I should have seen whatever it was that set your alarm bells off. It’s Derrick and Rich’s fault. They were probably fingered the moment they leaned on that guy. There is plenty of fault to go around, but none of it is yours.”

“I should have—”

“Stop it,” she snapped. “You did. I didn’t listen.” She looked at him. “I never listen. I think I’m so smart, so fucking clever. Now it has cost me. Again.”

“Again?” he asked.

“Yeah, again.”

“What?”

She shook her head, not wanting to tell him, then decided he, of all people, had a right to know. “I was a field agent about three years ago. Because of my Russian, I was running assets for the CIA in Moscow. My cover was as a translator in the American Embassy. One of our assets called his marker. He’d agreed to provide us information on the condition we would get him and his family out of Russia and into the United States. He was in the Russian Navy, an adjutant to one of the admirals. He had access to a lot of classified information on the Russian’s submarine fleet.”

She looked at him. Some of the tenseness was leaving his body.

“I made a dead drop with forged documents for him and his family to travel under. They were to travel to Odessa, in the Ukraine, where they would use the documents to catch a ferry to Istanbul. From there, we would pick them up and smuggle them into the United States. I don’t know if they followed me, or they suspected and followed him, but the Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, the GRU, picked him up.”

“GRU? That’s what replaced the KGB?” Dan asked.

“The GRU is the Russian foreign military intelligence, kind of like our Defense Intelligence Agency. Anyway, they picked him up and squeezed him. He broke. He didn’t have my cover, but using the information he gave them, several of our agents were compromised. One of them was…” She paused and gathered her courage. “One of them was Roger Pateron. He worked assets in St. Petersburg. When they came for him, he tried to escape and was killed. We were...together…when I could slip away and join him.”

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded as she stared at the floor. “Yeah. Worse, the asset and his entire family simply…disappeared.” She glanced up at him. “That hit me hard. Roger was a good man. I should have known better than to get close to someone, but I was so sure I wouldn’t get caught. And I didn’t, but Roger paid the price for my arrogance. Just like the asset. Just like Derrick and Rich.”

He sat down beside her. “It wasn’t your fault. If the Russians knew who you were, you probably wouldn’t be here right now.”

She looked at him. “That’s what everyone keeps telling me, but are you sure? I’m not. I transferred out of field work after that and became an analyst.”

“The asset, what was his name?”

She smiled grimly. “That’s the bitch of it. I don’t even know. I didn’t want to know. We only knew each other by our code names, so if something happened, we couldn’t compromise each other. He was Argus, the thousand-eyed monster from Greek mythology, and I was Lamia, the seductive vampiress.” She looked down again, unable to meet his eyes. “Fitting, huh? He was merely a tool for me to use, and I got him and his family killed.” Her face twisted and she gasped. “And now, it’s happened again. You tried to warn me,” she whimpered, “but I ignored you.” She looked at him as tears ran down her cheeks. “If I’d listened, maybe Derrick and Rich would still be alive.”

His lips thinned and he pulled her to his shoulder. She couldn’t bear the guilt anymore. The guilt of Argus, of Roger, of the other four nameless agents who had been arrested or killed, and now of Derrick and Rich. The guilt was beginning to overwhelm her. She’d gotten his friends—her friends—killed because of her own arrogance, and he offered her comfort. She tried to gather herself and pushed at him. She didn’t deserve comfort, but he held her firm, his hand going to the back of her head and holding her to his shoulder.

She pushed at him again, and again he resisted and the dam broke. Her arms went around him as she sobbed into his shoulder. He said nothing, but his touch was like a balm on an open wound.

“You couldn’t have known,” he whispered. “There was no way to know.”

“You knew,” she gasped, pulling him tight as another wave of wracking sobs rolled over her.

He said nothing else, simply holding her until her tears subsided. She sat up, sniffed, and wiped at her eyes.

“You couldn’t have known,” he said again, holding her face and looking into her eyes. “Not with Argus, not with Derrick or Rich.”

She sniffed again. “Yet somehow, you did.” She watched as his eyes clouded a moment before he focused on her again.

“I didn’t know. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have given up so easily.”

“Then what was it?”

He shook his head. “A feeling, nothing more.”

She wanted to feel his touch, to have him hold her and make the pain go away, but he was withdrawing again. Despite his words, she knew Derrick and Rich were dead because of her. Everyone she became close to got killed because of her.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked.

She swallowed hard. She couldn’t think. “I don’t know.”

“We need clothes.”

She nodded, her mind starting to work. The mission. Focus on the mission. “Yes, clothes. We’ll go shopping tomorrow.”

“Do we have money?”

“Plenty.” She pulled bills from her back pocket and peeled off a couple dozen thousand Marand notes, pressing them into his hand before returning the rest to her pocket. “That’s about five-thousand dollars. We also need to change our appearance.”

“What else?”

He was pushing her past her grief, forcing her to think. “Passports,” she said, pulled three from her pants pocket, flipped them open, and returned one to its place. She handed one to Dan. “Tear that up,” she ordered as she began ripping the pages out of the other.

He flipped open the Russian passport and looked at it before his eyes returned to hers. He clearly understood what that meant, that she expected to live while one or more of them died. The two passports were duplicates of Dan’s, but with Derrick and Rich’s photo. Once the pages were torn into small bits, she flushed the scraps down the toilet. She could feel the exhaustion overtaking her as the last of the scraps of paper disappeared.

She looked at him and could feel her loss trying to take her again. “We should get some rest.”

“Yeah. I’ll take the chair.”

She could feel the tears threatening. “I’d like you to come to bed with me.”

He watched her a moment then looked away. “You sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

She nodded and stepped out of the bathroom before he saw her tears. Despite his words earlier, he blamed her for the loss of his friends.

She lay down on the bed, still fully clothed, with her back to the bathroom as silent tears crept down her cheeks. When this was over, she was done with field work forever. She would quit the agency before she’d allow another person to be killed because of her mistake.

She heard a thump and a scrape. She glanced over her shoulder as Dan moved both chairs in front of the door. One he placed with its back against the door, the other he placed facing the first. He sat down and shuffled low, his feet in the other chair forming a makeshift bed. He became still, holding his weapon on his chest.

Neither said anything as she clicked out the light.

Sleep was a long time coming as she replayed the events in the bar. She ran it over and over again in her mind. There was nothing. No suspicious bulge in the women’s clutch, no printing of a weapon on their tight dresses. Nothing. They had to have been carrying inside their thighs, right against their crotches, or their clutches had to have been specially constructed to conceal a weapon. So how had Dan known?

Tears leaked out of her eyes again. Worse, she had been lying in her bed naked, listening to Derrick fucking the woman in the next room while she pleased herself. She’d heard the two soft pops of a silenced weapon and knew immediately what the sound was. She had barely rolled out of bed and was going for her gun when the bitch had burst into her room, the useless door locks giving her quick and easy entrance. She hadn’t had time to reach her weapon and draw it from its holster. She had only one chance, and she’d taken it. She’d gotten inside before the assassin could put a bullet into her and taken her down with her bare hands. Dan was still fully clothed, but he had seen her, and he had to know what she’d been doing as his friends were killed.

Dan whimpered in the darkness. She rolled over and listened a moment. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, but he was mumbling and occasionally twitching.

“No,” he cried softly.

Her lips thinned. He was dreaming about Derrick and Rich, and the guilt washed over her again. He continued to mumble and jerk, and she remembered he had a gun in his hand. If he flinched and his finger was on the trigger, that would draw attention they didn’t need at best, and he could injure or kill himself at worst.

Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room, so she crept from the bed and crouched beside him. “Dan,” she hissed. He didn’t wake, so she touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Dan!”

He leapt from the chair, causing her to squeak in surprise as she fell to her ass, his weapon coming up as he searched for targets, his eyes wide and his breath shallow and fast. She didn’t move or make a sound, waiting for him to come out of the dream as the weapon traversed the room quickly. There was little doubt that if she stood up, he would shoot her. After a moment, the terror on his face drained away and the weapon lowered. Then he saw her. His weapon popped up and pointed straight at her, then lowered when he recognized her.

“Jesus! I almost shot you,” he hissed.

“You were having a nightmare. I was afraid you were going to squeeze the trigger,” she said as she slowly rose. “You okay?”

He let his breath out slowly. “Yeah.”

“You were dreaming of Rich and Derrick?”

He looked at her with that same haunted look she’d seen several times before. “No.”

His answer surprised her.

They stood, staring at each other a moment. “I’m okay now,” he said as he returned to his chair, but this time he placed the weapon at his side and removed his hand.

She continued to watch him a moment, then returned to the bed. She lay in the quiet darkness, replaying the bar in her mind, and wondered what haunted Dan’s dreams if not the death of his friends until sleep finally took her.