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“If we were married, and you were divorcing me, how much money would you ask for?”

 

Lenya smirked. “Oh, maybe a hundred thousand.”

 

Felix chuckled. “That little?”

 

Lenya nodded. “Just enough for the professionally forged signature on your will and a hitman skilled enough to make it look like a heart attack. I’d inherit the rest.”

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                                                   ***

Marx knew that everything was money just as Freud knew that everything was sex and cocaine was a miracle drug that could cure all ills but instead nearly killed him. To those two idiots, that’s all there is. To Lenya, money—and sex— made it easier to survive and to burn through legal tender such as Overstolz cigarettes without enjoying it had to be a cardinal sin.

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                                                 ***​

“No doubt,” said Peter as he stood up and glared right at the pen camera on the yacht lounge bar counter and through the screen of Lenya’s phone right at Lenya, causing a sinking death in her chest as her heart raced. “Arkady, turn Malta upside down and shake it until you find me the Narwhal. I want her in fucking pieces fed to sharks in Balluta Bay by sundown.”

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                                                 ***

Markus shook his head. “You can’t have it both ways, Lenya. The Firm offered you full-time protected employment and you turned it down out of some kind of… wounded pride. You chose not to be one of us. You chose only to be useful to us.”

 

“And you chose to only see me as useful.”

 

“This is about Stasi,” said Markus, glancing away from her with a sigh. “How could I betray a fellow poor soul born from the same dark womb?”

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                                                  ***

She glared at him. “Your country is a boy king disgracing his father’s throne and bungling it all away. A flash in the pan.”

 

Hondo’s smile evaporated and he leaned toward her, shoving his index finger in her face. “And your country is an old degenerate gambler who already lost two world wars and the house and his kids’ college savings and the shirt off his back and is still sitting there at the casino asking his Russian friend to stake him. Learn from your estranged brother and get clean, get straight. That is, if you want anybody to show up to your funeral. Take your damn cigarette.”

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                                               ***

Whoever did this was a ghost trying not to see the Grim Reaper. Lenya would hang on to the bottom of a car for a thousand miles to stab these fuckers in the front—not the back—and watch the soul leave their eyes. Real vicious, real cunning. Real fucking hinterfotzig. Hardball gangster speed chess.

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                                              ***

“Who were they? Friends of yours?”

 

“No,” Lenya lied.

 

Riva narrowed her eyes at Lenya. “Okay, but they were policemen or spies or… private eyes like you?”

 

Lenya exhaled smoke. “Nobody’s like me.”

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                                             ***

“Lenya, what the hell are you really trying to accomplish here? Politicians have been taking bribes and stealing government funds since the first time one caveman clubbed another caveman and said now I’m in charge. People have been clapping and voting for liars who tell them what they want to hear since ancient Greece. Is it really so evil to grab these weasels by the balls behind closed doors and organize them on behalf of much more patient and rational moneyed interests? Lenya, at no point in human history have these types of secret networks not played a crucial role in world affairs. In democracies, communist regimes, fascist regimes, monarchies. Doesn’t matter. There are always hidden adults in the room.”

 

Lenya laughed. “Adults? These idiots have done nothing but run Western civilization into the ground for the last 30 years. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is worse off save for a tiny clique of billionaires and they’re about to be the worst off of all if they’re not careful. That is, if they don’t get every single one of us killed, including themselves, with a nuclear World War Three they’ve pushed us right to the fucking brink of in two different spots simultaneous. Big changes are long overdue and they better not let the door hit them on the way out.”

 

Markus stared right into her eyes. “You’re not thinking this through. And I’m certainly no threat to you. Not with your information H-bomb lurking out there. I really mean what I’m telling you. Don’t let yourself crack under the pressure you’ve been under. It’s not too late to come down from the ledge, Lenya. Think of me as a fireman with a ladder here to help one lost little ex-Stasi kitty down from a tree.”

 

“The only thing you’re here to help is yourself,” said Lenya. She pulled her Glock 45 out of her suitcase, pointed it right at Markus’s forehead, and took the safety off. “So help yourself and get the fuck out of my way.”

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                                              ***

“I have if you haven’t,” said the Owl. “It’s politicians doing what politicians do best and that’s make money disappear. Siren is kleptocracy on a biblical scale. It makes the Nazarbayev regime of Kazakhstan and the collapse of the Soviet Union look like nuns on a picnic."

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                                              ***

Ilsa smirked at Lenya. “I guess you’ll have to use your charm to get them back at it.”

 

Lenya arched an eyebrow at Ilsa. “Charm? Try again. This isn’t recruitment. Agent running is about control.”

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                                              ***

"Bottom line—Brunner Group is a hall of mirrors and Peter Brunner is the deranged carnival clown at the center of it all. You’ve seen pictures of the guy. He looks like a hobgoblin with stringy hair sticking out all over the place over his mostly bald head. Zombie-level dead eyes behind those big, stupid glasses. Hard to believe he’s kin to Ilsa. Ilsa needs to own Brunner Group so she can clean it up like Brunner Suisse. Plus, be a hell of a lot richer. And in helping her do it, you can help put the shitheads who killed Orell and your little kitty in an eight by ten cell… or maybe even in boxes six feet closer to Hell. Key is the Liechtenstein foundations. The only place I can’t penetrate. Orell could, but he’s dead. Can you?”

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                                                 ***

The Owl glanced up and to the left in thought. “Oh… it’s a power struggle of sorts. Money’s a big factor. Peter Brunner and his silent partners have committed crimes serious enough to have their assets frozen by the relevant authorities if we can get enough evidence out there. Financial evidence. We’ll need more bank sources than even I’ve got. Computer hackers, maybe. We need their bank statements, transaction histories, transfers to other accounts. Not just their names and Brunner Group holdings. This is an asset trace, Lenya. Then we leak it to the press and create public pressure for law enforcement to investigate and prosecute and get the judge to freeze their assets. But before the judge can land his gavel, we go to the perpetrators first, the men mixed up with Orell’s killer… and what do we say?”

 

Lenya smirked. “You’re gonna need somebody to hide your money.”

 

The Owl opened his eyes wide enough to flash the whites above his green-yellow irises and shoved his index finger in Lenya’s face. “Perfecto! Somebody professional. Somebody invisible. To hide it before the cops get it. Somebody like you and me, Narwhal. And what do we do when we hide it for them?” The Owl outstretched both of his palms face down toward Lenya and then pulled them back with a grin. “We take it! We give most of it to my client, but we each keep a… very generous taste. Do you get it?”                  

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                                                ***

​“They told me you can be a little… blunt,” said Gruber. “Scrappy, even.”

 

“I’m a mean kitty,” said Lenya. “I scratch. They must have told you I was in prison. Recently.”

 

“Right,” said Gruber. “They did. But they also told me… forgive me and please don’t shoot the messenger, but your husband… he… They told me you were open about it. About the circumstances of his death. Is it true? That you… killed him?”

 

Lenya took a drag and then a deep breath. “Depends on what your definition of killed is.”

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                                                    ***

Through the speaker of Father Matos’ burner phone, the Djinn screamed in English, “It is absolutely astounding to me that you have treated and continue to treat the most powerful people on earth with such flippant disregard! The hubris in you to think that you can fuck with us!”

 

Lenya smirked. “I’m surprised you guys thought you could fuck with me. You must not have asked around."

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                                                      ***

​And never forget—knowledge is power. It is human nature to hoard power. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that knowledge is similarly hoarded. The information handed out so easily to all of us by major news outlets isn’t knowledge, wisdom, or truth. Instead, it is a narrative those more powerful than us want us to believe to keep us less powerful. The quest for truth is a never-ending fight. Never give up, never relent!

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                                                       ***

"Prison. You wanna know what Papa says about it?”

 

“What?” said Lenya in Russian before taking her own drag.

 

“He says when you get out of prison, you look in the eyes of your lover, your family, you friends… and all you see for the rest of your life is a stranger… staring back at another stranger.” Riva sighed. “Is that what you see with me?”

 

“No,” said Lenya.

 

“Good,” said Riva. She chuckled and grinned. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been in prison, too. Still a kindred spirit.”

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                                                   ***

“Right.” Ciaran shook Lenya’s hand and waved a farewell. “Good luck.”

 

Lenya laughed. “Luck. Never had it, never needed it.”

 

Ciaran chuckled. “Of course. Silly me. You’ll come out on top.”

 

“Always do,” said Lenya. “And it’s never easy.”

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                                                   ***

“Stasi,” she said. “Right after my tradecraft course finished and I was about to be fielded, a senior officer named Karl Katsch called me into his office. He started droning on and on about something mundane and then, right in the middle of it, he pulled a hunting knife out of his desk and stabbed it into his own leg.”

 

Gruber jerked his head back and widened his eyes. “Wow…”

 

Lenya nodded. “I wasn’t told in advance, by design, that he had a prosthetic leg so of course he felt no pain and didn’t flinch. He wanted to see if I’d flinch. I didn’t and he was stunned. He told me then that his leg was a fake and that he couldn’t believe that any woman, especially one as pretty as I was back then, would be tough enough and cold enough and ready enough not to flinch on the fly like that. He told me he had objected to the idea of Stasi training a woman as a case officer, not a snitch or a honey trap but a case officer, and if I flinched when he stabbed the knife in his leg like even most male recruits did, then he’d fire me. But I didn’t and he didn’t. Quickly, I was his favorite.”

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