State of Emergency

CHAPTER 29


A hollow pit of exhaustion settled over Aleksandra’s stomach by the time she rolled her sleeping bag out on the low bed shoved back under the angled eaves of the second-floor bedroom. It had taken another hour after they’d left Zamora’s to gather her gear and make their way back up the hill to Captain Quinn’s flat. She’d smiled inside when he’d given her his room and moved his own sleeping bag to the sagging couch downstairs. He was an American white knight—skilled in the brutal arts of violence, but all manners and kindness when it came to women. Her FSB instructors had taught courses about such men—how to manipulate their good intentions and innate trust of womanhood to leverage a proper end to the mission or even turn them as Russian assets.

Still, there was something about this Jericho Quinn’s earnest demeanor that gave Aleksandra pause. It reminded her of Mikhail when she’d first met him. The thought made the pit in her stomach worse.

Dead on her feet with abject mental and physical fatigue, she moved to the small window at the foot of the bed. She leaned against the cool glass with her forehead and looked out over the flickering lights from Dakar city a few blocks away. Her breath threw small patches of fog against the window. Chewing on what was left of her sorry fingernails, she repeated the solemn oath she’d made the night she’d heard Mikhail Ivanovich Polzin had been murdered. “Somewhere out there is the man who killed you. I will find him and kill him, Misha. I swear it. And no one, no matter how kind or earnest, will get in my way.”