Vengeance (SSU Trilogy Book 1) by Vanessa Kier Page B

joining Kerberos.
    Mark would kidnap the girl away from Andros if necessary to reel in Paterson and get the chip. But first he’d try it alone.
    The dull thump of a headache began to pulse behind Mark’s eyes. “I can handle it, sir. I won’t fail.”
    “Be sure of it.”
    #
    Kai Paterson let himself into his cramped, one-room apartment in a worn down, working class Moscow neighborhood. No matter the time of day, the place always smelled of cabbage soup and garlic from his neighbors’ kitchens. Still, he preferred that to the cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes he’d endured waiting hours in bars for his quarry to show up.
    He lifted his keys to the hook by the door, dismayed to find his hand trembling with earthquake ferocity. Damn. Between the shakes and this bone-deep cold, he couldn’t deny it any longer.
    The malaria was back.
    Although the shaking wasn’t one-hundred percent due to illness, was it? Tonight he’d come too damn close to being picked up in that alley. And it hadn’t been just Alvarez’s men. There had been at least two Russian agents and one American.
    He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. After two years, it seemed his luck was finally running out. The run of bad fortune had started last month, when he’d tracked one of his parents’ killers into the jungles of Indonesia. He’d been captured by a local warlord and spent ten days of hell in the man’s prison before being freed by a government raid.
    He’d been out-of-his head with malaria and so weak from daily beatings he couldn’t even sit up. The following three days in the hospital were a blur of foreign voices and feverish dreams. When his head had finally cleared, he’d known that as an American, he was no more than a pawn in the regional political games, his life in danger no matter who had possession of him.
    The minute he could walk without dizziness sending him to his knees, he’d matched the Indonesian names on his medical chart to medication labels, taken as many bottles as he could carry, and fled.
    Now he pulled out two different packets of pills, grabbed one of each and chased them down with some water. He had no idea if the dosage or timing was correct. His Indonesian wasn’t fluent enough to understand the complicated medical language. But the pills seemed to help, and he was desperate not to be bedridden.
    Not yet. He hadn’t completed his mission.
    Kai gulped the rest of his water and kicked off his shoes. The floor was cold, but he didn’t bother turning on the ancient heating system. He rubbed his eyes, wishing he was on a beach in the Caribbean with nothing more pressing on his mind than the decision to swim or nap.
    The return of the malaria was just the latest in his string of bad luck. Last week he’d ripped the last pair of colored contacts he used to hide his damnably distinctive amber eyes. When he’d finally located a shop that could order him a new set, they’d told him the lenses would take at least seven days to arrive.
    He should have given up and left Moscow then. But the few times he’d worked here in the past he’d been in disguise, and the manhunt that had been so fierce right after the attack on his family had died down, so he’d taken a chance that no one would recognize him.
    But somehow, someone had recognized him. The men in the alley were proof of that.
    Which meant he was running out of time.
    Kai toyed with the idea of making some tea in his tiny kitchen, but even the thought exhausted him. Instead, he lay down on the thin mattress on the floor. He wrapped a blanket around his body and prayed for his teeth to stop chattering.
    A door slammed downstairs, accompanied by an angry bellow. He tensed, then slowly relaxed when there was no creak of footsteps on the rickety stairs. No one had followed him home tonight, he was sure of it. He’d taken twice as many precautions as usual.
    He pulled the blanket closer against a new wave of chills. Staying here was a risk he’d