Zhukov's Dogs (5 page)

“Painless, too,” I replied.

Gully laughed loudly and gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit, please.”

I shook my head and told him, “I’ve got a debriefing in ten minutes, sir. I can’t stay long.”

Usually when Gully wanted to meet with me, it was to talk about how things in the Y.I.D. were going or to ask about the latest gossip going around the building. This time, he looked more serious, the sort of look he reserved for intimidating younger dogs or poker games.

“I’ll make this quick then. You’re almost eighteen now, Zhukov, and… It was decided this morning that you’re to be reassigned to the Special Operations Regiment as soon as you get back from Seattle. You’ll be acting XO of Alpha Battalion, serving as Major under Lieutenant Colonel Moretti.”

Any feeling which might have once existed below my neck vanished. I stood by the door, numb, staring at Gully as though he’d just made the most crude and perverse joke in history. All at once, adrenaline washed over me. My body surged back to life, and I laughed like a fool.

The stern front Gully had been putting on dissolved into a proud smile. “Congratulations, my boy. You deserve it.”

“Thanks,” I said breathlessly, bowing my head and rubbing the back of my neck with another chuckle. I looked at the folders under my arm, my meeting with Aiden wedging its way back into my mind. The entire reason I was getting promoted was because I was a good dog. I took on every mission assigned to me and carried out my duties expertly. Why, then, was I having so much trouble wrapping my mind around this one?

7 Empire Builder Train—Spokane, WA
Tuesday, November 10th, 2076—7:07 a.m.

ack when I was just a private, starry-eyed and eager to climb higher and higher, I would grimace when handed a boring survey mission. Now, as I dozed in my business class seat on a shaky train speeding toward a cold, underground slum, all I could think about was how I wished this was nothing more than a simple survey without the glaring hand of The Council looming in the background.

For discretion’s sake, I’d traded my Y.I.D. suit and tie for a black, woolen coat, a dull maroon sweater, and old pair of comfortable jeans usually reserved for rare days off. Even buried in my coat, my nose tucked into the stupidly-bright red, argyle scarf Aiden got me, I could see my breath coming out in small clouds.

Climate controlled cabin. Yeah right,
I thought, reaching a hand up to fiddle with my hair. Last night, I’d cut off two inches to further reduce the risk of being recognized, or rather one of Aiden’s many girlfriends, who was going to beauty school, cut off two inches. It was uneven, messily layered, and completely untamable. It also left my ears and the back of my neck exposed to the cold I hated so much. Aiden dubbed the look “Wolverine-in-training.” At least, I thought that was what he slurred across the bar at the top of his lungs.

“Are you finished with that paper?” a sweet voice asked.

Poof. Aiden, bad haircut, and last night were all gone. I looked up with a reflexive smile. She was a stunning little thing, all wrapped up in a white pea coat, black legging-clad legs poking out from underneath like two thin twigs. Light golden curls pooled over her shoulders and down her small chest, a gray feather extension hidden amongst the curls along the right side of her porcelain-pale face. She smiled at me brightly, her dry lips cracking along the edges, just as mine did in this climate.

“Yeah, it’s all yours,” I said, sitting upright and grabbing the newspaper off the table attached to the seat in front of me. Truthfully, I wasn’t finished with it. I hadn’t even started reading it. Who could say no to someone like her, though?

The petite girl reached out, her chilly, bony fingers brushing against mine as they closed around the paper. She lingered in the aisle, staring at me for a moment, then with the slightest hint of a giggle, she took the paper, turned, and sat in the row of chairs across from mine. She nestled herself into the corner, formed by the seat and the wall of the cabin, and tucked her feet underneath her, a smile toying on her lips as she turned her attention to the paper.

Other than the two of us, there were only five passengers in the cabin, spread out and consisting of an elderly couple, a snoring man in a suit, and two other teenagers sitting by themselves a few rows away. There was plenty of space for her to find a quiet row of her own, and yet, she seemed to have deliberately situated herself across from me.

Discreet as she might’ve thought she was, I felt her eyes on me. The second I met them, color flooded her cheeks, and she forced her stare back to the newspaper. I chuckled. She fought the smile, face bright red.

I knew how this sort of game worked and decided I wanted to play. I scooted into the aisle seat, leaned on the armrest, and introduced myself. “I’m Nik.”

“Anya,” she replied, a smile breaking through as she folded the newspaper up and turned her full attention toward me. The sweetness in her voice made me feel about five times warmer.

“Where are you going?” I asked her.

Anya pointed toward the front of the train cabin like her destination was just up ahead. “Seattle. You?”

And like that, the game was over. I’d been hoping she’d get off on one of the stops before Seattle, but she was going to the city itself. I never went into a mission with baggage. Even if our relationship was strictly sexual, no emotions attached, Anya would still be a loose end in Seattle I did not want to have to keep track of.

“Same.” I sighed as I got to my feet. Anya scooted further into the corner, like she thought I was getting up to move to the seat next to her. Instead, I walked down the aisle toward the restrooms at the end of the train car.

In the closet-sized bathroom, I checked my phone, Anya already pushed out of my mind. A text notification from Aiden reminded me I needed to switch out the memory card in the back. I had two, one for covert missions like this and one for everyday use.

When I opened the text from Aiden, I saw a gritty picture of him in a bar with a scantily-dressed girl on each arm. All three of them wore cowboy hats, and the two girls planted kisses on Aiden’s puffed out cheeks. The caption read:
Meet my new assistants!
I shook my head. From the look of it, neither one of the girls could spell assistant correctly.

Shortly after I turned fourteen, everything began to change. Dance lessons, poetry, charm classes, and a busty private French instructor named Desiree were added to the usual curriculum. All the training proved to be more helpful on the job than off. Anything resembling a stable love life for a government dog was considered a liability. Not like there was time to maintain a normal relationship in our line of work, anyway. I’d tried and failed plenty of times.

I swapped the memory cards in my phone, altering names in the contact list and blocking out all numbers which weren’t necessary for the mission. As I waited for the phone to power up, I leaned toward the mirror over the sink and studied my eyes. Normally they were two different colors, a rare mutation making one green and the other brown. On missions, though, I was required to wear a brown contact in my right eye.

My phone beeped to life. I stuffed it into my back pocket, gave a quick and pointless attempt at fixing my hair, and opened the door. Just as I stepped into the aisle, someone slammed, hard, into me. Caught off guard and unable to keep my footing, we both fell against the doorframe. An ambush. I seized the boy by his shoulders and shoved him off, sending him staggering into the row of seats across the aisle.

The scrawny boy glared up at me, clad in a loose pair of dark jeans and a gray coat. A blond mess of short hair poked out haphazardly from underneath his hood. Gray eyes glared up at me. In the split second before he turned and bolted through the door at the end of the aisle, I recognized his hateful, gray-eyed stare. It was the same one which had glowered at me over the Orange County Police letter board in my file.

Two train attendants plowed past me, shouting after the boy. There was no time to think, not with one of my primary targets so close. I ran after the attendants into the next car, void of passengers, and saw the boy had been cornered by a third attendant.

Charging at the one closest to me, I tackled him around the waist. We bowled into the attendant in front of him and sent all three of us to the floor. I unhooked the belt around my waist, ripped it out of its loops, and used it to quickly bind the hands of the attendant I’d tackled. The one underneath him struggled to writhe his way out as I got to my feet.

I glanced up to check on how the cornered boy was fairing, only to see he’d already managed to knock out his adversary and was hauling the body into the adjoined cargo car. I grabbed one of the wrists of the unbound attendant scrambling to his knees, twisted it around behind him, and slammed my knee into his spine. Snatching a fistful of hair with my other hand, I forced his body back to the floor. He opened his mouth to call for help just as I yanked his head up and smashed it hard against the wood. One hit was all it took to knock the attendant out, and I swiftly reached back to do the same to his partner.

When I looked up to face the boy again, I expected to find him watching on curiously. He was gone, though. I was alone in an unoccupied car with two, unconscious attendants at my feet. The door to the cargo car stood ajar. A message from my new friend.
Come get me.

I went over the lies planned in my head and grabbed the collars of each attendants’ uniform. With little regard for how their bodies scraped across the floor, I hauled them into the dimly-lit cargo car. The third attendant, the one the boy had knocked out, lay sprawled near the door.

I lingered in the square of light cast by the doorway. There weren’t a lot of places to hide, and I didn’t want to wait around for too long. I was a good liar, but it would be hard to explain three unconscious bodies.

“Hey, is anyone back here?” I called out after I dropped the two attendants. “I’m here to help. Peter Cook sent me.”

Peter Cook was the snitch for Seattle—an otherwise ordinary, well-liked bakery owner hired to keep an ear to the ground and help maintain the cover story for my mission. Special Forces often paid substantial amounts of money to buy one or two people’s discretion when they didn’t have a mole already placed in the city.

The revolutionary emerged from behind a stack of metal crates halfway across the cabin. He had one hand behind his back as if to indicate he was armed. For a long, stoic moment, he just stared at me. I flashed a smile and showed him my empty hands to let him know I was unarmed and meant no harm.

“Cook?” he asked, sounding a bit winded.

“Old family friend,” I told him. “Said you guys could use a hand.”

“And so you came running to the rescue?” He looked me up and down again and shook his head with an unimpressed scoff. If he knew how quickly I could kill him if I wanted, he probably wouldn’t laugh.

His attitude would take some getting used to, especially if I remembered his sparse profile sheet correctly. According to the file I’d been given, this brat was the ringleader of the group I was supposed to collect data on. “It’s Valery, right?”