Flashpoint by David Archer

Author:David Archer [Archer, David & Banner, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Colonel Alexandrina Vitsin twisted her thin lips into something that should have been a smile, but wasn’t. It was a complicated expression made of resentment and hatred leavened by satisfaction. The satisfaction came largely from the memory of making the whore weep. She had come into the office smug and cocky. “I have made many officers smile,” she had said, “even generals. I am sure I can make you smile too.”

She had been right about that, at least. She had made her smile, but at the cost of her own tears. She’d be sitting on soft cushions for the next couple of weeks, that was for sure. Colonel Vitsin barked a hard, cruel laugh into the silence of her dark office as she remembered the raw, pink cheeks. The girl had been limping and sobbing when she paid her.

“You will remember me,” Vitsin had told her as she handed over the cash. “No man, no general, ever made such an impression on you, or paid you so well. Am I right?”

The girl had nodded. “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

She had glimpsed the dark side, she had not liked it and she had fled. That was what Alexandrina Vitsin liked. She liked when they were young and fresh, she liked when the saw the darkness approaching and panicked, and she liked when they fled. Then she gave them money, lots of money, to help them flee. She was intelligent enough to know that she was projecting, trying to save her own soul by proxy, and she also knew that her own soul was beyond salvation. But when she saw them, young and blonde, with flushed pink cheeks, wet with tears, hurrying away clutching their money, swearing secretly that they would never return, for a moment, just for a moment, she felt something like peace, a hiatus in her habitual hatred of all humans.

As the image of the raw, pink buttocks faded from her memory, she bent her mind instead to the telephone call she had just received from Dr. Elena Montijano, professor of English philology at the University of Malaga.

“He told me he could not call you. He told me he was afraid they suspected him. He told me about a man they call Nero.”

That had made the colonel sit up and pay attention. Nero, the name that had come to her from here and from there, that seemed to filter through from some suspected agency beneath and beyond the Central Intelligence Agency; an agency that lurked in the shadows.

“Nero? What did he tell you about Nero?”

“He said that Nero had a special department within the CIA. Nobody knew exactly what the department did, but it was somehow connected with the NSA.”

This much Colonel Vitsin knew or suspected already. Montijano went on.

“He said he feared that Nero had sent him here to Spain as a trap, and so he was afraid to communicate directly with you.”

“What made him think this?”

“There was an agent whom he believed was from Central Intelligence who met him from the airport.

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