Page 54 of Gryphon

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Eight a.m.

Val Mills glared at the clock as she answered her phone.

Russia didn’t really wake up for business until nine a.m. Washington, DC, time. By five p.m. in Moscow, enough Russians had left work early and filtered into the bars and restaurants for her people to go to work.

As head of CIA’s Russia desk, experience had taught her that those were her best intelligence gathering points. Which meant she slept in and worked late because the Russians appeared to think three or four in the morning their time was finally the hour to get drunk enough to turn stupid.

The in-between times left her plenty of opportunity to look at all the reports generated by DC, NATO, and EU people who wouldn’t know Russia if it bit them. And foolishly trusted them until it did.

In her world, eight a.m. was early, but it rarely felt this harsh. Then she looked at the pillow beside her and decided that harsh might be a massive understatement.

Davey Willows, that new analyst on the Africa desk, lay beside her. Fifteen years her junior, or twenty, he’d brought an energy she’d long since assumed to be in her past despite her daily routine at the gym. Dance, drinks, and some serious sex had sustained them to nearly Moscow-late hours. As a woman of fifty who worked fourteen-hour days, she needed her beauty sleep. Or at least enough to function. Two hours didn’t begin to cut it.

“Uh, who is this?” She tried again to focus on the voice jabbering on the phone.

The woman stopped, then slowly repeated herself as if speaking to a numbskull. She was. Or Val wished she was as a headache began throbbing.

Holly Harper?

Normally her brain cataloged names easily, but this wasn’t one of her field operatives. One of her staffers or analysts? No.

Dulles International? Then she remembered the warrior she’d met at the airport’s Dunkin’ Donuts—now just Dunkin’ of all ridiculous corporate name changes—last April. They’d met for mere minutes, and the woman had been thoroughly intimidating. Not nasty, simply so competent that it radiated off her in waves.

“Uh, hold on.” She slid out of bed, away from the oblivious Davey Willows, and headed to her home office, only noting as she shut the door that she was naked. When was the last time she’d slept naked? More relevant, when was the last time she’d taken a significantly younger man into her bed so that she’d wanted to be naked?

There wasn’t a scrap of clothing here in her office. Not so much as a paisley bandana. The tall glass windows of her condo looked out at that new skyscraper going up in the block across the road—thankfully to the side of her view of the Potomac.

The tiers of steel and concrete were filled with construction guys.

Easily able to see where the morning sunlight poured into her curtainless office.

She retreated to the most shadowed corner.

“Holly Harper.” She said it to anchor her brain and battle the rising hangover that was the payback for the reason that so many things had happened the prior evening.

Haven’t had that much to drink in years. Was she still drunk? Didn’t matter. Haven’t consumed that much since He had decided to move on to a seventeen-year-old—one-third his age. If only he’d chosen a fifteen-year-old, I could have thrown him in jail.

Christ, was that how I ended up in bed with Davey Willows? Trying to match he-who-must-not-be-named-ever-again? Pretty much dead on the money. Does following in his footsteps make me too sad to live? Oh yeah!

“Get it together, woman.” Holly’s laugh did more to sober her up than anything else.

Val froze, wondering how much of the interior dialog she’d mumbled aloud.

“I’m trying. Trust me, I’m trying.” And quite why she was confessing that to a total stranger—

“Let’s focus on Russia…for now,” Holly’s voice teased her hard enough for it to bounce off any still alcohol-soaked neurons and plunge directly into her hungover ones.

“Russia. Right. I’m good at Russia.” Though her brain clearly remained offline.

“Have you seen the news on Sweden?”

“I thought we were talking about Russia?”

Holly sighed, then updated her on recent events. By the end of her explanation, Valentina felt painfully sober, and still very naked.

“Two questions. First, have you heard anything about this on the Russian grapevine?”

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