Six months ago...
The cab's shock absorbers were shot to hell, and every pothole sent a fresh spike of agony through Troy Armstrong's shoulder. He pressed his good hand against the wound, feeling the heat radiating through the makeshift bandage. Fever was setting in. Not good.
Through the grimy partition, he watched the city slide by: bodega awnings, fire escapes hung with laundry, clusters of people huddled on stoops despite the late hour. Normal people living normal lives. The kind of life he'd given up twelve years ago when he joined the Agency.
Three ex-cops were dead. The thought looped endlessly like a song he couldn't shake. All of them with families. All of them thinking this was just another job, easy money for a few weeks of legwork.
Troy had known better. Should've known better.
It had been four years since the explosion in a warehouse outside the Georgian city of Rustavi. Four years since Alexa and her entire unit died in what the official report called 'structural failure of compromised ordnance.
But ordnance didn't fail like that, not when handled by the Agency's best special operations team. And structural failures didn't conveniently happen right after a black bag operation targeting a Russian smuggling network.
Four years of trying to convince himself that he could let it go. Four years of trying to drown the memories in bottom-shelf bourbon and whatever pills he could get his hands on. And two years since the Agency had finally forced him out, suggesting he take early retirement.
Alexa had been his wife once. Before that, she'd been his commanding officer back when he was still running ops in the field. They'd managed to keep the relationship quiet for almost two years before someone upstairs found out. The Agency gave them a choice: end the marriage or end the partnership. They'd chosen divorce. Filed the papers, signed everything, stayed professional.
It worked for about six months.
Then Alexa got promoted to lead her own team, and Troy got kicked upstairs to a desk job. Senior Special Agent in charge of operations support for Eastern Europe and Asia. Warsaw, then Bucharest, then Istanbul. Coordinating missions instead of running them. Pushing papers instead of pushing the line.
He'd told himself it was fine. Told himself the extra money was worth it. Told himself he didn't mind watching Alexa lead missions without him, didn't mind seeing her name on operation reports, didn't mind coordinating logistics while she was out there doing the real work.
He'd minded. God, he'd minded.
And then she was gone. Her whole team, gone. Six operators with decades of combined experience, reduced to a crater and a closed case file in less than seventy-two hours.
The Agency's investigation had been a joke. Two days of asking questions, three days of writing reports, and then a neat little bow tied around the whole thing: accidental detonation due to equipment degradation. Case closed. Next.
Troy had tried to push back. Had tried to demand a real investigation. Had tried to make someone, anyone, see that the numbers didn't add up, that the timeline was wrong, that Alexa's team didn't make those kinds of mistakes.
That's when the drinking really started.
Two years ago, they'd suggested he take early retirement. For his health, they'd said. For his own good. Take the pension, take the benefits, take the hint, and disappear.
He'd taken the deal because the alternative was a medical discharge and a psych eval that would've ended with him in a VA hospital somewhere, doped up and docile.
But retirement hadn't stopped the questions. Hadn't stopped the nightmares. Hadn't stopped him from digging.
Then, three weeks ago, a name surfaced in a conversation he'd overheard at a Russian expat bar in Brighton Beach: Nikoli Kozlov. A Cold War relic who'd survived the collapse of the Soviet Union by pivoting from GRU Colonel to arms dealer. A man who'd sold everything from AKs to anti-aircraft systems to whoever had the money. A man, Troy's section had tracked across half of Eastern Europe, before Alexa's unit provided the information that led to his death in a car bombing in Minsk.
Except Nikoli Kozlov was very much alive and apparently living somewhere in New Jersey under a new name.
And if Kozlov was alive, if someone had faked his death and smuggled him into the country with a new identity, then maybe, just maybe, the explosion outside Rustavi hadn't been an accident either.
The laptop bag dug into his good shoulder. The USB drive pressed against his chest like a talisman in his front pocket. On that drive was everything he'd been able to gather over the past three weeks. Photos, documents, transaction records. Evidence that Kozlov was alive. Evidence that he was protected. Evidence that someone high up had made it all possible.
Not enough to prove who. Not enough to prove why. But enough to ask the right questions.
Enough to get three good men killed.
The cab lurched to a stop. Troy looked out the window at a stretch of Brooklyn he'd hoped never to see again. The kind of neighborhood where the neon signs buzzed and flickered, where women in too-little clothing leaned against lampposts, and where every third storefront was a motel that rented rooms by the hour.
"Here's good," Troy said, his voice rougher than he intended.
The driver, a middle-aged Jamaican guy with graying dreads, glanced in the rearview mirror. His eyes went to Troy's shoulder, then to the backseat upholstery.
"That's blood, mon," he said quietly.
"Yeah."
"That's gonna be a problem for me. You understand?"
Troy pulled out his wallet, counted out the fare plus three hundred extra. Slid it through the gap in the partition. "For the cleaning."
The driver took the bills, folded them carefully. He'd been doing this long enough to know when not to ask questions. "You need a hospital."
Troy shook his head. Too many questions at a hospital. Too much paperwork. Too much risk. "What I need is for you to forget you ever saw me."
A long pause. The driver's fingers drummed on the steering wheel. Outside, a siren wailed past, heading somewhere else, toward someone else's emergency.
"Another two hundred," the driver said. His voice was lower, more careful. "Then I never seen you. Never been to this block tonight."
Troy counted out the rest of his cash. "Deal."
The driver pocketed the money and met Troy's eyes in the mirror one last time. "Whatever you mixed up in, brada, be careful. I won't talk, but this city don't forget nothin, and it don't forgive neither."
"I'll keep that in mind."
Troy climbed out, biting back a groan as the movement pulled at his shoulder. The cab's taillights disappeared around the corner, and he was alone with the sound of distant music, shouting from an open window somewhere above, the smell of garbage and exhaust.
He walked three blocks before the shaking forced him to stop and lean against a brick wall. The Percocet bottle in his jacket had maybe four pills left. He dry-swallowed two of them and waited for the edges of the world to soften.
The motel he chose was called the Starlight, though half the letters on the sign were burned out. It looked like every other rathole on the strip. Cracked parking lot, barred windows on the first floor, air conditioning units hanging precariously from upper windows.
Inside, the lobby smelled like old cigarettes and industrial cleaner fighting a losing battle. A kid sat behind bulletproof glass, maybe early twenties, absorbed in his phone. He had earbuds in and didn't look up when Troy approached.
Troy knocked on the glass.
The kid pulled out one earbud. "Yeah?"
"Need a room."
"Seventy bucks. Cash only."
"Fine."
The transaction took less than thirty seconds. The kid took the money without counting it, pulled out a physical key, not even a keycard, from a pegboard behind him, and slid it under the glass. "3B. Third floor. Stairs are around back. Checkout's at eleven." He was already putting his earbud back in before he finished talking. The kid didn't ask for ID, a credit card, or even a name.
The stairs creaked under Troy's weight. The hallway carpet was the color of old mustard and had stains he didn't want to think about. Someone was arguing in Spanish behind one door. Behind another, a TV blared an infomercial about kitchen knives that could cut through anything.
The room itself was exactly what he'd expected, a double bed with a comforter that had seen better decades, a TV bolted to the dresser, and a bathroom the size of a closet. But the door had a deadbolt and a chain lock, and the window overlooked the fire escape.
Good enough.
Troy dropped his laptop bag on the bed and headed straight for the bathroom. The fluorescent light flickered twice before staying on, buzzing like an angry insect. The mirror showed him what he already knew: he looked like hell. Pale, sweating, eyes glassy with fever. His shirt was stuck to him with dried blood and sweat.
The bullet had gone through, which was the only reason he wasn't already dead. Entry wound in the front of his shoulder, exit wound in the back. He'd packed both with gauze and wrapped them tight, but the bandages were soaked through now, and the skin around the wounds was angry red and hot to the touch.
Infection. Definitely an infection.
Troy dug through his bag for the first aid kit and the bottle of Jim Beam he always carried. Field medicine: clean it with alcohol, inside and out. After using hot water and hand soap to clean the surrounding skin as best he could. He unscrewed the bourbon, took a long pull, then poured the rest over his shoulder.
The pain was white-hot and immediate. He grabbed the sink to keep from going down, breathing through his teeth until the worst of it passed.
Fresh bandages. His hands shaking as he wrapped them. More Percocet, down to his last two pills now. He chased them with the last swallow of bourbon that clung to the bottom of the bottle.
The bathroom mirror had fogged up from the hot water and his ragged breathing. Troy wiped his hand across it, clearing a space, and stared at his reflection. Then, without really thinking about it, he lifted one finger and wrote two words in the condensation under his face: DEAD MAN.
The letters dripped slowly down the mirror.
It wasn't fear exactly. He'd made peace with dying a long time ago, somewhere between Warsaw and a safehouse in Bucharest that the Agency pretended never existed. What bothered him was the thought of dying for nothing. Of the USB drive ending up in an evidence locker somewhere, or worse, back in the hands of whoever had orchestrated the cover-up.
He needed insurance. Needed someone who could do something with this if, when, he didn't walk out of here.
The problem was trust. Troy had spent twelve years learning that trust got you killed. Trust got you transferred. Trust got you divorced and demoted and drinking alone in shitty bars.
But he was out of options.
Back in the bedroom, Troy set up his laptop, an old satellite-connected beast from his field days, the kind that could bounce a signal through three continents and make it untraceable. He plugged in the USB drive and stared at the files.
The evidence, not enough to prove everything, but enough to point in the right direction. Enough for someone who knew what they were looking at.
The question was: who could he trust with this?
Not family, he barely had any left, and they wouldn't know what to do with classified intelligence anyway. Not the cops; Johnson, Martinez, and Rivera had been cops, and look where that got them. Not the media; too easy to discredit, too easy to bury. Not anyone still inside the Agency; that was how you ended up with two bullets in the back and a suicide ruling.
He needed someone who understood how the game was played. Someone who'd been in the shit and come out the other side. Someone outside the system who couldn't be bought or scared off.
The problem was, most of the people who fit that description were dead. Buried in Rustavi alongside Alexa.
Troy's hand hovered over the keyboard. A name surfaced in his mind, floating up through the haze of pain and pills and fever. Someone who'd been there when it happened. Someone who'd walked away from the Agency after Rustavi, medically discharged instead of pushed out like he had been for asking too many questions.
Someone Alexa had taken under her wing after the divorce. Who she'd mentored. And mentioned getting close to.
Troy had watched it happen in real time through operation reports and briefing notes. Watched Alexa specifically request this guy for her team, mission after mission. And Alexa had known. Had probably enjoyed it.
If Troy was being honest with himself. She'd always had a twisted sense of humor, always liked getting under his skin. Had probably gotten a kick out of mentioning it whenever they'd crossed paths at headquarters. Just professional courtesy, Troy. Just building a good team. Nothing personal.
Everything with Alexa had been personal.
But the guy had integrity. Troy had seen it in the field reports; the kind of guy who still believed that they were the good guys, in a world where there were only bad guys, and worst guys. The kind who didn't cut corners, didn't leave people behind. The kind that Alexa loved. The kind of man that he had once been.
But if anyone would want answers as badly as Troy did, if anyone would be willing to burn it all down to get justice for Alexa and the others, it was him. After all, he had been there when it happened. He'd been injured in the blast but managed to survive. Alexa had dug her hooks into him just as deeply as she had with Troy.
So he opened a new email and started typing.
He kept it simple. No dramatics. No apologies. Just enough to make sure the guy opened the attachments.
The subject line practically wrote itself: By the time you read this, I will already be dead.
The rest was up to him now.
Troy hit send. The email disappeared into the ether, bouncing through servers across three continents before it would land in an inbox somewhere in the States.
He closed the laptop and lay back on the bed, staring at the water-stained ceiling. His shoulder throbbed in time with his heartbeat. The Percocet was finally kicking in, wrapping everything in cotton wool.
Through the thin walls, he could hear the couple next door starting up again, the headboard banging rhythmically against the wall. Someone laughed outside. A car door slammed.
Life continued on without him.
Troy Armstrong closed his eyes and waited for whatever came next.