The Sleeper by Herzog Saul

Author:Herzog, Saul [Herzog, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781990251023
Amazon: B08VHGKR2Y
Goodreads: 56953264
Publisher: AuthorContact
Published: 2021-08-30T07:00:00+00:00

52

Lance drove late into the night and, when he got tired, pulled into a gas station. He needed coffee and went inside the store, which was pretty well stocked. He filled a paper cup with something that had been brewed many hours earlier and grimaced when he tasted it.

“You got anything hotter than this?” he said to the clerk.

The kid behind the counter shook his head, and Lance paid him, prepaid for a tank of gas, and went back outside. As he filled the car, he leaned on the hood and sipped the coffee, if that was what it was, and let the cold night air clear his head. There were no other cars at the station—none on the road. The sky overhead was very clear, and the cold air around the moon created a halo of refracted, crystalline light.

Lance was thinking about something Roth had said back at the Old Hamlet. He’d said that Laurel and Tatyana were walking headlong into a trap, and that it was a trap of Roth’s own making. He refused to go into more detail but said that if it paid off, it would be worth the sacrifice.

“Even Laurel and Tatyana’s lives?” Lance said.

Roth simply nodded his head.

Lance couldn’t believe it—giving them up so flippantly, like a general looking at a map, waving away lives like they were so many pieces on a chessboard.

“How can you do that?” he said.

“It’s my job.”

“To get your own people killed?”

“Sometimes.”

They locked eyes, and Lance said, “You listen to me very carefully, Levi. If something happens to them because of your plotting, if either of them dies….”

Roth raised a hand to stop him. “I know, Lance. I know.”

“I swear to God.”

“I know, Lance,” Roth said again. “Why do you think I’m here talking to you?”

Lance couldn’t figure him out. The detonation over the Arctic was directly tied to Project Oppenheimer, the Kremlin’s terrifying new superweapons program. The lead scientist of that entire program, a man named Sacha Gazinsky, was trying desperately to defect to the American side.

The Russians were trying to kill him, of course, but Laurel and Tatyana were more than up to the task of bringing him in alive. Or at least, they should have been.

“Why is this green agent, Ada Hudson, bringing in the scientist?” Lance said.

“She’s all we had.”

“Bullshit,” Lance said. “You had Tatyana.”

“Tatyana was … indisposed.”

“Indisposed? What does that mean?”

“It’s complicated.”

Lance eyed Roth carefully. “You double-crossed her, didn’t you?” he said. “You double-crossed both of them. Stabbed them in the back.”

“You can’t win a war without taking on casualties,” Roth said.

“And that’s all they are?” Lance said. “Casualties in a war?”

Lance could already see the storm brewing. Whatever Roth had done, whatever he was plotting, would creep closer and closer to Laurel and Tatyana until eventually they passed into its gravitational pull, like the event horizon of a black hole, and get sucked in.

Sacha Gazinsky was dead, gunned down in the open at the train station in Edinburgh, and the agent with him, a green recruit fresh out of Langley, was so out of her depth she was lucky to still be alive.

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