The King by Steven James

Author:Steven James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

38

From his hotel balcony Valkyrie stared out across the nighttime DC skyline, with the Washington Monument rising into prominence against the dark sky. The city’s building height restrictions made the skyline not nearly as magnificent as New York City’s, but still, with all the symbols of freedom, it was just as memorable.

At one time, Valkyries were worshipped as goddesses in Norse mythology. They were the ones who chose who would live and who would die on the battlefields. Eventually, the stories morphed, as myths do, and Valkyries became known as seductive spirits who lived in Valhalla and served fallen battle heroes.

No, he did not think of himself as a deity or as some type of alluring or servile spirit. However, since the day he’d emerged, he had thought of himself as the one who had the duty to determine who would live and who would enter eternity.

Tomorrow evening Keith and Vanessa would be arriving from India. They didn’t yet know that he was in the States, but they would find out. He had a meeting planned with them before the drugs entered the country’s secure supply chain.

Well, the supply chain that was supposed to be secure.

So now, DC.

The Washington Monument rising regally into the night.

Here was the center of democracy in the world, the beacon of freedom, the convergence of all that he had fought against while he was still working for the GRU. The Cold War was long over, but Russia’s network of spies, and his homeland’s interest in the politics and policies of Washington, had remained the same.

However, over this last year his heart had turned against Mother Russia. Her concerns were no longer his. In fact, these days he had no master directing his life. None, that is, except his past, which, in a way, dictated everything, shaped who he was and how he had become the determiner of life and death.

His past, his choices, had transformed him.

The day last May when his wife, Tatiana, died.

No, not died. Was murdered.

Before he’d ever identified himself as Valkyrie, he’d been known by his given name, Alexei Chekov, and had been in the business of cleaning up messes no one else wanted to dirty their hands with. Sometimes that involved taking the life of another person, a job he had never enjoyed, but one that he did, out of duty to his homeland, when called upon to act.

And he did his job well.

But then something happened that changed things forever.

Last May he’d argued with Tatiana, told her words he would always regret, words that would always ring like a terrible death knell through his mind, the sharp, most painful lie of all: telling her that he did not love her and never wanted to see her again.

Then, later that same day, he found her body, with a single bullet hole in her forehead staring at him like a dark, unblinking third eye.

She’d only just been killed and the blood wasn’t done seeping from the back of her head across the sheets of the bed.

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