The Hunted

The cobblestones beneath her boots threatened to send her tumbling if she wasn’t careful. Her ankle twisted slightly as she reached the end of the alley and turned right, heading down a broader street lined by dark storefronts. She kept low and repeatedly glanced over her shoulder.

Napoleon had fought one of his epic battles in Montereau-Fault-Yonne, and so it seemed she, too, might engage in a battle to the death. She had never imagined herself dying on the streets of a small French town. She’d always assumed the Russian government would catch up to her, throw her in a Siberian prison, torture her for months, and then, one night, her cell would fill with light, and there would be Nikolai, standing there, welcoming her to heaven. They would be together, finally… and forever.

Before their marriage he’d been assigned to treat the workers cleaning up the 70-MWe and 90-MWe pressurized-water training reactors in Paldiski, Estonia. He had been fresh out of medical school and had attended to her own brother Dimitri, who had suffered radiation poisoning while constructing the two-story concrete sarcophagus that now encased the two reactors. Officials and administrators had been grossly negligent, and the Snow Maiden had lost her brother first… her husband two years later, a delayed victim of the contamination.

At the moment Nikolai died, the true Snow Maiden had been born.

While standing at Nikolai’s funeral, she had vowed revenge. She’d kept her husband’s name to honor his work in the service of others and had set her sights on the GRU, the organization with the most power and freedom to move throughout the country and exact her revenge where and when she could. But first she would work her icy tendrils throughout the entire organization so that she could eventually choke them once and for all.

Thus, she clambered her way up the intelligence ladder with a vengeance, becoming one of the most effective and lethal officers the GRU had ever fielded. Her martial arts skills and marksmanship were awe-inspiring, as evidenced by the looks on her colleagues’ faces when she competed against them. Her reputation grew, and she was eventually recruited by General Sergei Izotov himself to work missions on behalf of the director and the president.

She’d been asked to work alongside another man, Colonel Pavel Doletskaya, and together they had coordinated several attacks on selected European Federation targets, mostly information gathering and a few assassinations.

On the day she’d been promoted to colonel, she’d been called into Director Izotov’s office, where he’d told her she was one of the most brilliant and trusted GRU officers in the history of the organization.

That remark was met by her shrug. “Is there something you need, sir?”

He’d gone on to say that a security leak involving Doletskaya had been exposed and that the Euros had alerted the Americans. Izotov needed her to go underground by staging her own death with the GRU’s help. She would need to erase herself from the organization — all in the name of restoring the motherland to greatness.

Would she take the mission? Of course. By going underground she could more efficiently destroy the entire Russian Federation. They’d helped her set the fire in her apartment, plant the body, and even Doletskaya, with whom she’d been having an affair, was not privy to the plan. Izotov became her mentor from that point on, a father figure… and even a lover for a short time, though none of these men could ever replace Nikolai.

As part of her new mission, she’d forged a relationship with the Green Brigade Transnational because the Russians liked to use them as fall guys for certain operations against Europe and the United States. It was painfully simple to set up these fools, and they enjoyed claiming responsibility for acts that were, in truth, perpetrated by Russian or Russian-backed forces.

She had even made Izotov believe to the bitter end that she was with them, until she was able to blackmail him and the rest of the federation with some nukes in Canada. But then her other brother, Mikhail, had gone down with his submarine, Romanov, before he was able to help. That her plan had fallen apart didn’t matter. She was still free and still working for her new employers, whose goals were similar to her own. There was, however, no rest for the weary, no walking without checking your back.

The Snow Maiden learned that Izotov had hired Heinrich Haussler, agent of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (the German Federal Intelligence Service), to capture her, since most of their own best spies had failed (and been killed by her). Haussler was a double agent, and the Snow Maiden knew him well. If anyone could capture her, it was probably him. He was a crafty bastard who made few mistakes, so she was beginning to believe that these fools after her now were not working for him. The attack was too sloppy.

She dropped into the next alcove, finding herself huddled against the closed door of a bakery, and removed the small infrared camera from her coat pocket. She carried the credit-card-sized device wherever she went. Point and click and you had a picture of your environment with the heat sources illuminated. Forward-looking infrared radar in your pocket.

The second man was coming straight down the road, toward her, and she had to gamble that he hadn’t seen her duck out of sight.

She pocketed the camera, waited, heard his footfalls grow louder, then braced herself.

Just as he passed, she balanced herself on one hand, slid out her right leg, swung it around, and made contact with his ankles, her leg like a blade cutting him down.

As he dropped, she reached up and put a round in his gluteus maximus. He screamed, landed on his gut, and was about to roll over and fire when she dropped the gun, and, with both hands pushed up, she leapt on him, knocking him onto his back and latching both hands onto his wrist to release his weapon. She dug her nails into his skin and quickly pried free his gun, which clattered to the sidewalk. She shoved him back, grabbed the second gun, and trained it on him.

In Russian, she asked, “How is Vox these days? Or should I ask, who is Vox these days?”

The guy was panting through his balaclava. She tore it off and sighed.

She knew this guy. He wasn’t working for Haussler. His name was Thor, and he was a member of the Green Brigade Transnational.

The attack might have been sloppy, but they’d come dangerously close and were getting better. She’d no idea they were on her back, and perhaps she was the one getting sloppy. How the hell had they found her? Haussler had contacts, resources… what did they have—

Unless Izotov had also employed them to catch her and they had access to the GRU’s databases? This development wasn’t good. Not good at all.

The guy raised his hands. “Nice girl,” he purred in Russian.

She put a bullet between his eyes. His head bounced off the pavement. She stood, stole a look around the street, then hustled off toward the taxi.

Within two minutes she reached the still-idling vehicle, tore the dead driver out of his seat, hopped in, and was about to throw the car in gear when her phone rang. She checked the screen: It was Patti. She had to take it. They spoke in English.

“Can I call you back?” she asked.

“You have two minutes.”

“I’ve got a little problem right now.”

“So do we. Two minutes.”

She hung up and drove off, eventually heading north up Quai des Bordes along the river. She would continue northwest toward the airport.

Dr. Merpati “Patti” Sukarnoputri was an Indonesian physician and deputy director-general of the World Health Organization, United Nations, Geneva.

Patti was also a member of the Ganjin (pronounced gahn-jeen), the group that now employed the Snow Maiden.

Much of the Snow Maiden’s knowledge of the Ganjin was sketchy, and her efforts to learn more about the group drew serious threats. She had concluded, though, that they were composed of a handful of academics and business professionals whose primary goal was to manipulate the superior powers during this time of war in an effort to benefit the People’s Republic of China. Whether the Chinese government was aware of or endorsed their efforts remained to be seen, but the Ganjin paid the Snow Maiden quite handsomely so that by the time she was forty she would never have to work again. She would get out of the espionage business. She would continue donating money to cancer research and work with children afflicted with the disease. But she would not do this until she saw the federation — and all of its evil — seize up like an old man in cardiac arrest and then… flatline.