Vostok | August 19, 2011 | 07:30
The first thing was warmth. Real warmth, the kind that had a source — wood smoke and the heat of a contained fire, not the ambient approximation of temperature that came from tactical gear doing its job in hostile conditions.
Alen opened his eyes at the ceiling of rough-hewn logs and understood, before he understood anything else, that he was alive. This was not a comfortable understanding. Alive meant assessment. He began it immediately, because this was what he did, because it was the only available response to waking up somewhere he had not chosen to be.
Ribs: tender but healed. The fractures were complete — no remaining instability. Left arm: full range of motion. The lung that had been compromised in the Dveri facility eighteen months ago and had been managed since: clear. He breathed deeply to confirm this and it was confirmed.
He sat up. The motion sent a bolt of something through his lower back — residual muscular protest from the river impact, not structural — and he absorbed it and swung his legs off the cot.
His hands were in front of him. He looked at them for a moment. He had waited, in whatever the fog of the past eleven days had been, for the gray cracking of the skin that the C-Virus produced in subjects whose cellular architecture it could successfully rewrite. He had not known, going into the cargo car, whether his resistance would be sufficient. He had known it might not be. He had gone anyway because the alternative was to surface with incomplete data, and incomplete data was not something he could act on.
The hands were his hands. Unmarked.
He stood. He found the wall. He walked into the main room.
The old woman at the fire did not turn around when he came in, which meant she had heard him wake — the boards, probably, or the specific quality of sound that a person in motion produced versus a person at rest. She was stirring something that smelled of meat and root vegetables and that his body communicated a strong opinion about.
"You are awake," she said, in Russian that had a regional quality he associated with pre-Soviet dialectal patterns. "Sit down before you fall down. You haven't eaten anything real in eleven days."
He sat on the stool she indicated. She set a bowl in front of him. He ate — not quickly, because the body after sustained fever needed reintroduction rather than flooding, but steadily, working through the bowl with the systematic attention he brought to anything that required doing correctly.
He looked at the wall. A hand-drawn calendar. A red circle.
"August nineteenth," he said.
"Yes."
"I was unconscious for eleven days."
"You were fighting something," she said. "Whatever it was, you won." She sat across from him, her hands folded in her lap, and looked at him with the specific directness of someone who has been waiting a while and has decided the waiting is over. "My granddaughter found you. The river brought you here."
"The river carried me here," he said. "There's a difference."
She almost smiled. "You are a precise man."
"My gear," he said.
She pointed to the chest in the corner. He went to it and opened it.
The MP7 was there, cleaned and oiled by someone who knew enough to do it correctly. The comms unit. The knife. And the waterproof pouch that he had carried in the inner pocket of the tactical vest since 2003, which contained the documentation and currency that he had prepared for a contingency exactly like this one — the contingency where Alen Richard had to stop existing.
He opened the pouch. Counted the currency. Checked the passport.
John Michael Kane. Canadian. Architect.
A cover identity built eight years ago with the specific care of someone who understood that the day you needed a prepared identity was not the day you had time to build one. He had told no one about it. Not Holloway, not Briggs, not Hunnigan. It was the only completely private document he had ever maintained.
He closed the pouch.
If he returned to any structure now — CIA, MI6, any of the channels he had operated through for the past nine years — Simmons would know within hours. The Valkyrie designation was either officially dead or officially missing, and either status made him a liability rather than an asset to anyone who had to operate within a structure Simmons touched. Which was every structure that mattered.
He turned to Baba Anya.
"You saved my life," he said.
"The river saved you," she said. "I kept you warm. Those are different things, as you said." She looked at him steadily. "You are a man who was left for dead by someone."
"Yes."
"Then don't go back to them," she said. "Go forward."
He looked at her. She had the quality of someone who had said exactly what needed to be said and was comfortable with whether it was received.
He thought about what going forward meant, now. He thought about Hunnigan watching the footage. About the off-book message he had sent her four hours before the operation, which she would have. About what she would do with it.
He thought about Simmons, who had wanted to know what Alen was, and who had now confirmed it, and who would be incorporating that confirmation into whatever came next.
He thought about the locket, which was in the waterproof pouch — he had transferred it there before the operation, which was what he always did when the operational profile included water risk. He took it out now and held it for a moment. Half a circle of gold with a name on the inside.
Going forward.
"Thank you," he said again, and meant it precisely, which was how he meant things.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Chapter Thirty-Eight follows...