Page 65 of Smoke and Shadows

“Well, just so you know, women like grovelling,” Maia semi-whispered in his ear before Jack fell into step with herand hugged her to him, which effectively stopped Maia from following Viktor.

He snuck a look at where he had left Marissa. She was gone.

Grovelling certainly looked to be in his future.

His nephew had failedhis mission and now he was dead. Strangely, Stuart Kwon didn’t feel any sadness when he received the news. He was disappointed. AGS not being out of commission presented a problem for his plans. But the distraction of the Al-Qaeda attacks and the AGS siege diverted all agencies toward the nation’s capital, leaving the port of Baltimore wide-open for his man, Owen Reed, to smuggle successfully in the components for the SK nerve gas.

But there was a pain in his chest that went deep. A betrayal that, although he had suspected, he had not wanted to believe. His long time major-domo was the leak in his organization. Ever since AGS found McCord, Kwon finally believed his security team that the traitor was someone close to him. So he allowed his major-domo’s belongings to be bugged and he was followed everywhere.

The traitor had been communicating with Jiro Matsuda—the man who gave up his father to the CIA.

Stuart lit up a cigar as he stared out the window. The man made one last plea for him to abandon his plans of unleashing the SK nerve gas on Washington DC.

“You are not your father,” the man who had raised him since he was ten, said. “There is good in you, Stuart. I have seen it.”

His major-domo was right. He was not his father. He had no desire to unite North and South Korea. He just used the NKUF as a facade, used their people to throw off the spooks.His dreams were not idealistic, they were realistic. Money was power.

And with emotion he had not felt since the death of his sister, he ordered the execution of the one man who wanted him to be good.

12

The advantageof working for the CIA was the ease of creating cover identities. Marissa Cole vanished the moment she walked out of AGS four days ago. Her relationship with Viktor was such a mind-fuck. He said he felt things for her, but he never said he loved her. The opposite in fact. But she would admit this much, her heart was broken. Not because she was in love with him, although she suspected she was more than halfway there, but because of the way he derided the thought of being in love with her. His tone had cut her. And how appalling was it that he scorned such feelings to Maia. Marissa congratulated herself for maintaining her composure when all she wanted to do was hide under something.

Marissa threw a piece of wood into the fireplace and stoked the flames. She was holed up in a CIA safe house that only a handful of people knew about—Viktor not included. She didn’t return to her home on Dupont Circle. She used her emergency kit. Granted that most of the items were utilitarian and in no way fashion forward. What would be more appropriate than to nurse a broken heart dressed in ugly sweats and sneakers?

She texted Allison that she was going dark for a couple ofdays and had her files of Stuart Kwon transferred on the separate sector of their database server where she could tunnel in without Viktor’s analyst tracking her. Then she destroyed her phone and anything electronic on her. It was time anyway. She didn’t keep cell phones or numbers for long.

The threat of Rafiq Shadid was over, but Matsuda had divulged disturbing information; SK nerve gas may have reached the eastern shores of the United States. This was the last update she had from Allison.

Marissa had been tracking Stuart Kwon’s movements, mainly through the business and society sections of Russian newspapers, but she had not come up with any actionable information.

It was time to call Allison with her new alias, Olivia West.

Affixing a voice modifier to her phone, she waited patiently for her analyst to pick up.

“Olivia!” Allison greeted her a little too brightly. “How have you been, girl?”

“Traveling. Just came back from Moscow. Never going to Russia in the winter again,” Marissa replied.

“You got bored with those gorgeous Russian men?”

Translation: No new lead on Stuart Kwon?

“Yes. So, how have you been?” Marissa asked.

“Bored. Dead end job as a secretary.”

Translation: You better come back ASAP.

“Your forwarded mail is piling up. Dad said there’s an important package for you.”

Translation: Yeager said there’s a secure cable you really need to read.

“How’s your dad?”

“He’s fine. But he’s tired of holding your shit.”

What the fuck, Allison? Marissa thought. “Um—”

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