- 1 -
Dushanbe, Tajikistan Present day
THAT DAY ARTEMIS APHRODITE PROCTER WOUND UP IN THE PENALTY BOX.
She awoke to darkness and the air clouded with a strange musk, teeth chattering like a clockwork toy. Her eyelids were heavy, reluctant to open. Hardwood chilled her skin. Procter blinked through a spray of her curly black hair across the floor of a room she did not know.
Then footfalls and a hairy-knuckled hand gently lifted forelocks of hair from her face. A man knelt and waved.
“Good morning, Artemis,” he said in cheerful Russian.
Her mind swam and churned, thoughts lost in the murk. She took in the room. A table. Two chairs by a window. Her pineapple-print panties rumpled on the floor. A drained bottle of vodka tipped on its side, halo of someone else’s purple lipstick along the rim.
She sat up against a couch, stark-naked and cold. The Russian went to an armchair by the window. He lit a cigarette. She bent her knees into her chest and shut her eyes because the room was spinning.
“Quite the night,” said the Russian. “I have seen things no man should ever see.” Click of the tongue. “You monstrous little woman.” “Who are you?” Procter said, also in Russian. Her eyes were still shut—light brought rotation, tilting.
“Anton,” he said.
After a minute she hobbled to her feet and looked around for her clothes. Other than the panties, she saw only her leather jacket and muddy Reeboks. And it struck her that there was a hole blown clean through her memory, pure black since ordering drinks last night. She’d been with a Russian developmental, a Moscow party boy with access to heavier hitters: the Kremlin, the security services. And he was either dead or in on this. Probably both.
As her vision steadied, Procter could make out the morning bustle on Rudaki through the window. A light rain pattered on the glass. The table in front of Anton was spread with platters of food, cups, and glasses for the morning hundred grams, the sto gramm, of vodka.
Procter struggled into the Reeboks and panties, twice nearly losing her balance, and then paused for a breath before starting on the jacket. She felt along the front and discovered the pockets emptied of her phone, keys, and switchblade. Then she flopped into the chair across from the Russian.
Anton chuckled. “Artemis Aphrodite Procter. CIA Chief of Station. Underpaid civil servant. And, according to my sources, yet again bypassed for promotion to the Senior Intelligence Service. Quite the fall from Amman to a backwater like Dushanbe. And all due to unspecified discretions.”
“My discretions,” Procter said, “were quite specific.”
Anton clapped his hairy hands and laughed with the cigarette pinned in his teeth. “Yes, the good Procter. Sexual wanderlust. A deviant with certain . . .” He fixed her with a grave stare. “Appetites.”
“And hands wet with Russian blood,” she said.
A shadow fell over his eyes. He stubbed his cigarette into a brass ashtray and began to pick at his plate of selyodka, pickled herring with potatoes and onions.
A liter of yeasty horse milk sweated in a glass bottle. Russkies had done their research. Though more of a Kazakh or Kyrgyz delicacy, when granted the rare privilege in Tajik Dushanbe, Procter partook of the horse milk. But when Anton poured her a cup, she dumped it on the floor.
The Russian snickered and stepped over the slithering white stream to collect a buff-colored folder from the sofa. He handed it to Procter and returned to his food. “We have many more photos, of course. This is merely a teaser. There were a few of you facedown, for example, but I don’t think you’ll see them in there. I must say, though, I am curious about the tattoos. And why nine of them? I am sure the stories are riveting. Anyhow, go on, have a look.” He took a bite of fish.
Procter flipped through a stack of nude photos snapped while she’d been drugged. Some were quite imaginative. Artistic, even. Two or three were nearly perfect: the lighting, the energy, the intimate angles, these appropriately captured what Procter considered to be the animal spirits of her sexual id. Others were banal and garish: unworthy of trade in even the seediest flesh market. Procter, stranger to shame, found not a one embarrassing. Her tits, she thought, looked pretty good across the board. She tossed the folder into the puddle of horse milk. “Go fuck yourself.”
Anton lit another cigarette. “Artemis, please. If you don’t cooperate, well, then these unfortunate pictures will be posted online. And we will out you as CIA.”
“You’re going to do that anyway, Anton. Aren’t you? Now, where are my damn pants?” The world had stopped gyrating. Slowly, she got up and began wandering around the room.
“You’ll be sent home, Artemis. Another black stain on your career.”
“Your pitch sucks. Whole point of this is to send me home. You’re after me because I like working Russians. You want me gone. In any case, you should invest in a better photographer, because some of those”—she jabbed a finger at the milk-sopped folder—“are terrible. My answer is this: Fuck you. I’m leaving now to report this to Langley and the ambassador. Say, better idea. How about instead of writing up a cable that makes you look like a dumbass, why don’t you spy for me? What do you say to that?”
Anton cast a jet of smoke across the food. “Screw off, Artemis.”
Procter was smiling. “I guess we understand each other. Now, where are my pants?”
She tossed a few couch cushions to the floor in a vain search. Pretty worked up about the missing jeans. A breach of the rules, she thought. Unprofessional. Nasty. She turned the place upside down for a few minutes while Anton smoked. Had they actually tossed out her pants?
“Come on, Anton. It’s cold and I’m a decent woman. Can’t roll out of here in pineapple panties and a leather jacket.” She stood over him, arms akimbo, while he burned down his cigarette. His chuckle at the word decentsent dark fantasies cartwheeling through her mind.
“Artemis, think of your Station. If you go home, they will have no Chief. And I hear a colleague of yours recently departed. Unfortunate medical situation.”
Two months earlier, Procter’s Deputy Chief of Station and his family had awoken in their apartment with vertigo and headaches. Wife went blind in one eye. Russian directed-energy attack, Procter suspected. Microwaves that fried your fucking brain.
Anton was smiling and examining her bare legs.
Procter was scowling and examining Anton’s pants. A siren was ringing through her skull.
Then Procter had her hand down on the drained vodka bottle and she’d shattered it against the table for a nice length of jagged neck, and before Anton could duck she’d slashed him across the cheek and packed the glass into the meat of his left shoulder and it just stuck there, purple-glossed rim pointing square at the ceiling.
Anton howled, tried to stand and pull out the glass, but she kicked him in the chest and he fell back into the chair. A run of blood washed down his cheek. She punched his nose, again, a third time, until she heard a sweet wet crunch and a ragged moan escaped his lips. Then she snatched the milk bottle from the table and broke it over his skull. His head slumped, the milk and blood mingling into pink braids.
Procter overturned the table and smashed it into the wall and harvested a splintered leg to churn Anton’s left kneecap into mush. After a batch of strikes, light filtered through her rage blackout and she tossed the table leg aside and smacked his cheek to wake him up. He did not.
“Anton,” she said, “wake up. I got a skosh carried away. Anton, can you hear me?” A few finger-snaps in front of his face. “Anton?”
Two fingers to his neck. She felt a pulse.
Never thought she’d be happy for a live Russian intel officer, but praise god.
Then she looked around the wrecked room and out the window and wondered if he had partners or a team watching on cameras. She shimmied off his pants and slipped them on herself and told the unconscious Russian, “Serves you right for ditching my jeans.”
He was much taller and wider, so she rolled up the pant legs about a foot and cinched the belt tight as it would go. The folder of nude photos disappeared into her jacket. Then she pulled it back out, rifling through until she found the one: A nice shot showcasing her flexibility and rugged femininity. Her quiet fucking strength. Crumpling the photo into a ball, she shoved it into Anton’s underpants. Then she was out the door.
THE DAY CONTINUED ITS UNRAVELING. AT THE EMBASSY THERE WAS Astruggle session with the prick ambassador. She sent a cable recounting the ordeal and received a nasty gram response from the Director and the Langley mandarins. Then a clipped conversation with Deputy Director Bradley, words and tone evoking the reassurances whispered to a beloved dog moments before it is euthanized.
Dinnertime: The pictures appeared on several burner websites, the links amplified by Russian bot accounts across social media platforms. They also outed Procter as COS Dushanbe.
The formal cable recalling her to Langley arrived later that evening. End of tour: Get on the first flight out in the morning. Support officers would shutter her apartment and ship her belongings to Virginia. The assault had violated a bevy of Tajik laws and, more importantly, raised the specter of Russian kinetic retaliation for hospitalizing what CIA had since learned was a senior intelligence officer dispatched from Moscow. Doctors expected the Russian to recover, said a memo from a Tajik liaison officer who overshared with CIA for cash. But Anton would have residuals: namely a patchwork of scars, a permanent limp from Procter’s knee work, and, courtesy of a bottle of horse milk, the ever-present specter of diminished mental capacity. A few intrepid Station officers organized a hasty send-off for the Chief, complete with an improperly stenciled cake. (We will miss you, Chef.)
When the Station had cleared out for the evening, Procter shut down her computer and put the hard drive in the safe. There was little to pack: her sterile office boasted no family photos, no Me Wall of gifts and trinkets, no art. No decorations of any kind. Her one indulgence was a baseball bat autographed by every member of the 1997 Cleveland Indians World Series team: Procter’s secret managerial recipe for boosting Station productivity. In Damascus she’d kept a shotgun in her office, but in Amman there’d been complaints, and now she had the bat. She carried it around; she glanced longingly in its direction during morning ops meetings; it leaned against the wall in a corner, visible during video calls with headquarters.
Procter swung the bat in a lazy arc through her office’s recycled air. She couldn’t stay in Dushanbe, she knew that, but she despised the headquarters hive, humming with crawlies hungrier for doughnuts than the fruits of espionage. What a pig of a day.
She brought the bat down on the particle board table in her office. A seam appeared. Then again, and it cracked, and she kept at it until the table was kindling and she was good and sweaty. She flicked off her office lights. Bat on her shoulder, she began locking up the Station.
Headquarters, lord almighty. But what else could be done with Procter, an impulsive reprobate and also a well-respected Chief and operator with years of experience in the foreign field?
She was in the Penalty Box. A two-year headquarters stint under close supervision. Once that was completed to satisfaction, she might one day run a Station again. Because she was competent, not a fuckup who couldn’t run ops, Deputy Director Bradley had hinted he would find something important for her. Procter checked to be sure there was no paper on the desks. She confirmed the safes were shut. Then she spun the lock on Dushanbe Station’s thick metal door for the last time.
- 2 -
Langley
JET-LAGGED THE MORNING AFTER HER ARRIVAL STATESIDE, EARSringing with exhaustion, Procter waited to meet with Ed Bradley, the CIA Deputy Director. Procter sat on one of the couches outside his office on the Seventh Floor. The waiting room had been decorated by a government procurement catalogue: all the furniture in dark faux-wood, slightly chipped or peeling or torn. A lightly stained coffee table was littered with magazines. As in all waiting rooms everywhere, for all time, the reading material, like the furniture, had long expired.
When she was finally permitted entry, Bradley was at his desk hunched over the MLP, a printer-sized secure phone linking the fourteen national security principals. A button for the Director, the National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, of Defense, and on and on. His office had large windows overlooking the trees shouldering the Potomac: now bright with gold, red, and orange. Bradley was six-foot-two, a former linebacker at the University of Texas and a legendary case officer who had retired after serving as Chief of the old Near East Division. A new Director had asked him to return as Deputy. He and Procter went back decades.
The Me Wall behind Bradley’s desk was mostly bare, just as she remembered. But on the credenza sat pictures of his wife and daughters, along with a few gifts from special friends. Procter recognized a twisted metal scrap from when she’d helped blow off the door of a Mitsubishi Pajero in downtown Damascus a hundred years ago. And affixed to the wall were Bradley’s favorites—a neutralized missile system gifted for leading the Stinger program against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and, more recently, a Javelin for covert action work in Ukraine against the Russians.
Procter shuffled toward a chair downrange of the launchers while Bradley reviewed the three-by-five index card that held his daily calendar. A disgusted gaze shifted between the card and the MLP, as if he could not stomach his next task. The card disappeared into his pocket when he looked up and saw her. He gave her a thin smile.
“Another century,” she said wistfully, staring at the launchers. “Another bailout for the Russian zinc coffin industry. That which is done shall be done, and all that. Amen.”
Bradley said amen and gave her a big hug. “Artemis, how are you holding up?”
“Peachy, Ed.”
He made a face. “I’m sorry. Goddamn Russians.”
“We should put that on a T-shirt around here.”
“Are you getting what you need? Docs and psychologists are saying—”
She put up a hand. “I’m in the Penalty Box, I get it. But don’t bench me. I’m fine, I just need a job. Something to do.”
“You really should rest.”
“And do what, exactly?”
“I’d say make sure you’re actually fine. Get your head straight.” “Ed, come on. We’ve known each other for more than twenty years. That ship has sailed.”
“I’m concerned about you, Artemis.”
A flicker of sadness traced Bradley’s stoic mask, but it washed away when Procter made a wet noise.
“You’re getting mushy in your golden years, Ed. Good grief. I told you, I’m fine. If you want me to not be fine, then go right ahead and put old Artemis on four months of administrative leave so I can drink myself to death in the Reston Town Center. That what you want? Cops calling you at home because I’m ripping tequila shots and screaming about CIA in the parking lot?”
“The Director wanted to fire you. Said he would have if this were a normal organization.”
“A normal organization would never employ me. Now, have the Russkies lodged a protest?”
“Not a peep yet.”
“And what are we thinking on the response?”
Bradley looked away. Pumped his fist into a ball.
“Jeez, Ed. Really? Nothing? Russians drugged me. Took a bunch of nudie pictures. They hit my Deputy with a directed-energy attack.”
“That investigation is still ongoing, Artemis.”
“We did an analysis proving wet-work teams arrived in Dushanbe three days before it happened.”
“And I agree with that analysis. I am merely saying that the investigation is ongoing. And that the White House has so far been reluctant to back aggressive retaliatory options.”
Procter groaned. “If we do nothing, Russians keep poking. They are barbarians without limits or morals, Ed. It’s how they operate. And this is not about me. For the past ten years or so we’ve all watched Putin poke and prod and generally fuck with CIA and the United States with complete impunity. He crosses lines, we do nothing. He invades Georgia. He carves up Ukraine, stirs up a low-grade insurgency, then properly invades and commits a fuck-ton of war crimes. He shuts down power grids. He’s noodling around inside our grid, planning for god knows what . . .”
Bradley put up a gentle hand, which Procter barreled through. “He’s lit us up by waves of cyber and ransomware attacks. His ghouls have poisoned and murdered people all over the world: in the UK, Bulgaria, hell, even here in Washington. They tried to orchestrate a coup in Montenegro. Fucking Montenegro, Ed! The Russians physically attacked our officers in Moscow. The fucking Director of the FSB punched one of them in the head! In the head, Ed, after his arrest! Their militias shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Russkies paid bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers. They have fucked with our heads on social media here at home. They have scrambled the brains of dozens of CIA officers with directed-energy weapons. And, yes, they drugged me and took pictures of my knobs. And none of it”—she cleared her throat— “has resulted in more than a hand-slap. We’ve got to start drawing bright fucking lines that the cockroach in the Kremlin will not cross.”
“I agree with you, Artemis, one hundred percent,” Bradley said. “I’m on your team.”
“I want to be in the game,” Procter said. “And I hear there is a vacancy, the new backroom shop running all the spooky Russia ops. Moscow X.”
“The Moscow X job? Artemis, the Director is not a fan of yours, not after—”
“The unpleasantness in Amman. And now Dushanbe.”
“Right. The unpleasantness makes you a hard sell.”
“Where else do you want to put me, then?”
Bradley looked up at the launchers. “I do want you working Russia.” “Well, then sell it.”
THE FALL MORNING WAS UNUSUALLY HOT AND WET WHEN PROCTERcrossed the parking lot of the Original Headquarters Building. The Langley clock-punching crowd coursed around her like water. A two-year sentence in this prison camp, she thought, unbelievable. The upside was that if Bradley could convince the Director to give her the Moscow X job, she’d have a better shot at wrecking Russkies from Langley than just about anywhere. And she had so many beautiful ideas for how to fuck the Russians. She motored her Prius out of the compound toward the Vienna Inn, the dive bar that had hosted countless happy hours, ops celebrations, promotions, and even an Irish wake or two following funerals for Agency comrades. Procter planned to bed down there for a two-, maybe three-day bender.
Procter sped through northern Virginia, titillated by a lurid vision of chaos in Moscow set to the rich melody of Swan Lake. Had she been a religious woman, Procter might have believed the hand of God had painted it on her mind. She didn’t really know what to think about God, but she figured that by this point any reasonable deity would have a bone to pick with the Kremlin. After all they’d done, God wasn’t going to stop her from running a solid op sticking it to the Russkies.
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