Page 72 of Gryphon

“Which means?”

He closed his eyes against the pain.

“I’m a dead woman if anyone finds out that I know.”

Unable to look her in the face, he nodded, then shrugged. “No. Probably only interrogation for you.” For himself? That one-and-done bullet to the brain.

“And my family?”

He looked at her face in the bit of streetlight reflected off the ceiling. Pavle couldn’t tell if she’d wish them in trouble or not.

“Okay, you’re right. It’s a stupid question and I don’t care.”

Elene had a vision that focused solely on the future. It had become his favorite part of her. He spent hours dwelling on the past. How many times had he wished he’d been too drunk to write that memo to Chief Kancheli? Or that he had become a rock and roll drummer getting stoned with cute groupies rather than his role as Chief K’s right-hand man. Trapped, now by his own words, into perpetrating a heinous attack on a friendly country?

After her brief week out of his life, Elene never mentioned her family again until this moment. Each time he asked, she shrugged him off and looked sad. He’d stopped asking.

“Pavle.”

He nodded to show that he was listening.

“You’re smart. You’re too smart to get caught up in this when it comes apart. And you know it’s going to come apart.”

That gave him pause. This wasn’t America with all of its leaks made by stupid people who wanted to show off to the media or their online gaming group.

Georgia operated differently. Chaotic restructurings, including the destruction and refounding of entire intelligence agencies, had shaken the country repeatedly since her 1991 independence from the Soviet Union.

If someone caught the Georgian Intelligence Service attacking Sweden, it would destroy the country’s chances at membership in the EU and NATO. Then they’d be on their own when Russia tired of Ukraine’s hard soil and turned their attention south again as they had in 2008.

Or perhaps the country’s leaders would keep their hands clean, placing all blame on the GIS as a rogue agency. They’d gut the entire Georgian Intelligence Service—perhaps literally in his and Kancheli’s case.

No, Kancheli would have thought of that; he’d survived every purge since independence over thirty years ago.

He would…

What would he do? Pavle tried to focus, tried to pretend he was the one sitting in the lofty perch atop the GIS building with his back to the prettiest view in Tbilisi as a display of his power.

He would…

Pavle swore. “I woke up on a left leg.”

“What? What is it, Pavle?” Elene’s voice had tightened into a croak of worry at his idiom about having a truly bad day. Kancheli was Seven Fridays in a week’s worth of bad.

“If you’re right about it coming apart, Kancheli will have foreseen that. One guess who would take the fall.”

“At least we’d be buried together,” her soft laugh didn’t sound resigned…or angry.

It was—

“So how do you save us, Pavle?”

—hopeful?

Save them? He had no idea.

56

“We’ve been attacking Sweden?”

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