A Gray Llove

A Black and White Woman

In Prague and other parts of Europe, Six and Miranda ran for it. A visit with Margaret Cahill, Fitzroy's old CIA boss in London, had revealed that the data for which they were being chased was highly incriminating for the new head, Denny Carmichael. Unfortunately, this had been revealed at the cost of Cahill's own life. And Six still had no answers where Claire and Donald Fitzroy were concerned. Data on Carmichael didn't mean shit if the two people he was closest to – the two people to whom he was more than a gray man – were in danger. With Miranda's help, Six researched Claire's pacemaker serial number and finally learned where she was: Croatia.

Now Six was here, out on a hill with Miranda in armored vests swiped from two of Lloyd Hansen's mercenaries who had formerly been keeping an eye on the palace's perimeter. He nodded to Miranda in the dark, and Miranda nodded back with a wink and a shake of her rocket launcher. "Good luck," she whispered.

Six waved in acknowledgement. "Yup. Same to you." Then he pulled up the collar of his black shirt, clasped his gun close to his chest, and ran as silently as a deer across the open palace lawn.

He and Miranda had only had time to scan their quarry from afar, but luckily their opinions about the palace security turned out to be right on the nose: mercenaries on the external walls, a few mounted guns, a complement of armored cars. Beyond the first wall, though, things got a lot sparser. It was easy for Six to stroke across the stagnant moat, pick a shaded wall on the bank closest to the palace, and clamber his way up to the first window he found. He estimated it was on the second floor somewhere, which would ideally place him away from the lights of the control room on the first floor – he wondered why no one had thought to put up blackout curtains yet? – and give him a chance to search for Claire and Fitzroy. As Six clawed at the sandy stone blocks and felt for the window's lip, he had the thought that it would have really made much more sense for him to sneak in through the drainage pipes around the moat. He had no time to be thorough, though. Six had already made Claire and Fitzroy wait at least a whole day in Lloyd's company. He had to get to them as soon as possible.

Six hefted himself onto the window ledge and felt blindly forward in the dark until his hand finally found the high, skinny iron lattice which he had noted surrounded the milky white panes of the window itself. Grabbing a pistol from the harness on his chest, he lined up his strike with a feint at the glass, then flipped the pistol around and shattered the tall antique panes with the backside of his gun. The glass was still crashing forward into the room as Six leapt forward through the lattice and landed, knees bent, in the middle of a dark room.

Immediately, he knew someone was coming for him with the second sense that came from a decade of work in the shadows. Six dodged a flash of silver on his left, then one on his right, and identified them as...surgical knives? The next one flew wide, but then he felt something against the side of his cheek in the midst of a metallic breeze and realized he'd been cut there by another projectile. Six strained his eyes in the dark, barely aided by the crack of yellow light from what had to be the room's hall-facing door, and tried to get a look at who was throwing such odd weapons his way.

As if his target had had the same idea at the same time, Six only got warning by way of a hinge squeaking before he was suddenly blinded by a beam of blue LED light. Instinctively, he backed up ten paces and dodged behind a four-poster bed he had marked earlier. By touch, he checked his gun for ammunition and cocked it. Before he could emerge from cover and start firing, a voice came out of the darkness that made him freeze.

"You're CIA, aren't you?"

Six had had to plow through his share of psychoanalytical training while in the Sierra Program intensives. He knew how to read the pitch of someone's voice, the words they used, to figure out what they really meant. He didn't relax at the way the other person in the room – sounded like a woman, but he couldn't be sure – asked her question, but he judged it genuine. Still leaning against the side of the bed, he shrugged and volleyed back, "Sort of."