Chapter 37 - The Husband's Reckoning
Pier 14 was a desolate, concrete peninsula jutting into the polluted, icy waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Rusted container ships loomed against the black sky like dead leviathans.
The rain had turned into a freezing sleet that rattled against the corrugated steel walls of Warehouse 9.
I moved through the shadows like a wraith, stepping over frozen puddles without splashing, weapon raised at the low-ready. Through my thermal night-vision monocle, I picked up three heat signatures patrolling the perimeter of the slipway: two sentries armed with AK-12s, moving in an alternating figure-eight patrol pattern, and one stationary figure inside the glass watchtower.
I closed the distance on the first sentry from behind a stack of rusted steel pipe casing. At five paces, I lunged forward, sliding my left arm around his jaw while driving my combat blade up beneath the base of his skull into his brainstem. He died instantly, without a sound. I lowered his body into the shadow of the pipes, stripping his tactical radio before he hit the deck.
The watchtower guard was next. I mounted the external ladder with silent, fluid mechanics. Slipping through the catwalk door, I placed the suppressor against his temple and squeezed the trigger twice. He slumped over the radar display console.
Down on the pier, bathed in the sickly amber glow of an industrial sodium lamp, stood Richard.
He was wearing an expensive cashmere overcoat over a designer suit, holding a silver metallic briefcase handcuffed to his left wrist. He was pacing back and forth along the edge of the water, nervously checking a glowing gold wristwatch, periodically lifting a satellite phone to his ear.
"Come on, you Russian bastards," he muttered in English, his voice drifting up to me through the wet fog. "I gave you the codes. I gave you Henderson. Where is the sub?"
I stepped out of the shadow of the crane, forty feet away, lowering my assault rifle and drawing my sidearm.
"The submarine isn't coming, Richard," I said, my voice echoing off the damp concrete.
Richard jumped as if struck by lightning, spinning around on his polished Italian leather shoes. His eyes went wide with pure, unadulterated terror when he saw me standing there—covered in blood, mud, and tactical carbon, holding a suppressed pistol aimed dead at his chest.
"M-Maya?!" he stammered, backing up until his heels touched the wet edge of the drop-off into the black harbor water. "How... how are you alive? Henderson said he had you pinned in the valley!"
"General Henderson is dead," I walked forward, step by deliberate step. "His Ural burned to the ground. His men are at the bottom of the gorge. And you’re out of friends."
"Maya, listen to me!" Richard pleaded, raising his hands, his face turning the color of skim milk. "They forced me! You don't understand the pressure they put on me! When my tech firm collapsed six years ago, they bought my debt! They told me if I didn't marry you, if I didn't monitor you, they’d kill my parents!"
"Your parents died in a car crash when you were in college, Richard," I said coldly, closing the distance to fifteen feet. "I pulled your real file from Henderson’s encrypted drive. You never had a tech firm. You were recruited out of a Moscow boarding school when you were nineteen. Your real name is Mikhail Stanislav."
Richard’s face twitched. The pathetic, cowardly persona of the jobless, whining husband dissolved like salt in water. A sneer twisted his mouth.
"So you finally figured it out, *Colonel*," he mocked, standing a little taller, though his eyes darted toward the dark water behind him. "And what are you going to do? Shoot your own husband in cold blood? You’re a United States Army officer. You’re bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You have to take me in. And once I’m on trial, my lawyers will drag your family’s dirty Cold War secrets into the daylight!"
"You put a ceramic bomb in Clara’s arm, Mikhail," I whispered.
The sneer vanished from his face.
"You let an unlicensed butcher cut open my seven-year-old baby and pack thermite against her radial bone," I continued, my voice trembling with a rage so ancient and deep it felt divine. "You threw her down the stairs so they could have an excuse to stitch her up."
"It was just business, Maya—"
I fired.
The 9mm round tore through his right kneecap.
Richard let out an ear-piercing shriek, collapsing onto the concrete, clutching his shattered joint as dark blood stained his cashmere coat. "Aaargh! You crazy bitch! You shot me!"
"That was for the broken arm," I said, stepping closer.
I fired again. His left kneecap exploded in a spray of bone fragments.
His screams bounced off the water, swallowed by the roar of the freezing surf. He thrash-rolled on the wet pier, vomiting from the sheer, overwhelming agony.
May you like
"Now," I said, resting the scorching hot suppressor directly against his forehead, right between his eyes. "Give me the frequency for the auditory receiver inside Clara’s ear. Or the next bullet goes through your hip, and I kick you into the freezing bay to drown."
***
