The apartment was as quiet as a confession booth after the sinner has gone. The only sound was the faint hum of the refrigerator, a low, constant note against the memory of the payphone’s shrill ring. Misha’s voice, tight with a fear I had never heard in a decade of back-alley deals and dead-of-night exchanges, still echoed in the space behind my eyes. Fear was a currency, and Misha Orlov was a man who was always solvent. To hear him bankrupt was an alarm bell in the dead of night.
I moved from the window overlooking the rain-swept Viennese street. There was no debate, no weighing of options. A call like that was not a request. It was a summons. I crossed the room to a heavy wooden wardrobe and pulled out a worn leather satchel. The bag was small, weighing no more than four kilograms when packed, but it held everything I needed to stop being the man who lived in this apartment and become the man who survived outside it.
My movements were economical, honed by years of sudden departures. A spare shirt, neatly folded. A roll of cash, American dollars and West German marks, held by a thick rubber band. A set of false identification papers, French, with a name I hadn't used in three years and a face that looked like a tired stranger. Each item was a tool, placed in the bag with the detached precision of a surgeon laying out his scalpels. This was the routine. The cost of doing business.
I zipped the main compartment and turned back to the room. My gaze fell on the desk, a wide expanse of dark wood that held only a lamp, a blotter, and a single, silver-framed photograph. The apartment was a testament to my nature: sparse, orderly, a place designed to be abandoned at a moment's notice. It was less a home and more a waiting room between apocalypses.
I walked to the desk, my fingers tracing the cool edge of the frame. The photograph was from another life, another war. Two men, younger and harder, stood in the blackened skeleton of a laboratory. I was on the left, my face grimed with soot. On the right was Kestrel, my partner, grinning with the wild energy of a man who had just wrestled God and thrown him for a loss. Kestrel, who was supposed to be nothing more than ash and a name in a redacted file.
I let my mind brush against the memory. It was a habit I despised, a weakness, like a man probing a healed wound to see if it still hurt. I reached back to that day, to the smell of burning chemicals and the high-pitched whine of a machine overloading. I felt for the memory, not as a story, but as a piece of architecture in my own mind.
The trauma was gone. I had seen to that myself years ago. Where the screaming terror and the searing pain of the blast should have been, there was only a smooth, clean scar of excised tissue. I could recall the facts with perfect clarity: the precise energy readings, the sequence of the overload, the shrapnel pattern of the explosion. I remembered Kestrel shouting a warning. I remembered the flash of white light. But the fear, the grief, the agony of the burns—all of it was gone. I had cut it out of myself. It was the only way to keep functioning.
This was my gift, my curse. The ability to perform surgery on my own soul, to remove the malignancies of memory and leave only the sterile facts behind. It made me ruthlessly efficient. It also made me a stranger to my own past. I had subjugated the memory, forced it into a shape I could live with. The price was a piece of myself, a hollowed-out space where a part of my history used to be.
A flicker of movement in the glass of the frame caught my eye. For a half-second, the reflection of the lamp warped, the light stuttering as if seen through a veil of heat. A low crackle, like distant static, seemed to emanate from the glass itself before it settled. Just a trick of the light. I told myself it was just a trick of the light.
I turned away from the desk, the psychic chill of the excised memory clinging to me. I went to a small chest of drawers, the only other piece of furniture in the room. I pulled open the top drawer, the scent of old wood and cedar rising to meet me. Inside, nestled amongst spare ammunition clips and a compass, was a silver flask.
It was heavy in my hand, the metal cool and solid. It was a gift from Misha, from a time when our work had felt cleaner, when the lines between the good fight and the bad one had seemed clearer. The flask was unadorned, practical, like the man who had given it to me. It was a token from a relationship that was still whole, a memory I had never needed to cut.
I ran my thumb over the smooth surface, the memory of Misha’s voice on the phone returning with sharp, unwelcome clarity. It hadn’t been the tight, controlled baritone of my handler. It had been the thin, ragged whisper of a man drowning.
“Sineus, you must come,” the voice had crackled over the line, laced with a faint hum of static that wasn't from the connection. “Something is wrong. He’s here.”
Misha never showed fear. He was a rock, a man who had faced down KGB interrogation teams and CIA budget committees with the same stony indifference. That fear in his voice was an anomaly, a variable in an equation that was supposed to be constant. It was the most terrifying sound I had heard all year.
I pocketed the flask. The cold weight of it was a small, solid anchor in a world that was starting to feel thin. I closed the drawer, the sound a dull thud in the quiet apartment. I picked up the leather satchel from the bed. My resolve was absolute. The questions could wait. A friend in that kind of trouble could not.
I took one last look around the room. A clean, empty space holding the ghosts of a past I had meticulously curated and disarmed. A museum of a life, with all the interesting exhibits locked away in the basement. I didn't know if I would be coming back. I rarely did.
I walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the hallway, the click of the lock behind me sounding final. The city was waiting, and somewhere in its wet, dark heart, a frightened man was counting on me.
I had to answer the call.
