Kristina Varjan drove a beater Dodge sedan she’d bought off a lot in College Park. It had a shimmy in the front end and almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, so she kept on at one mile under the speed limit, heading up I-95 toward Atlantic City, New Jersey, and an Airbnb apartment she’d rented online.
Varjan had cut her hair shorter, spiked it, and bleached the tips blond. She’d changed into skinny jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket, and a long-sleeved Sex Pistols T-shirt. Her makeup was heavy on the mascara. She’d pierced her own nose the night before, and her upper right lip and tongue too.
When she glanced at herself in the rearview, she looked nothing like Martina Rodoni, the fashionable European in for a week of sightseeing. Now she was Elena Wolfe, rebellious nonconformist over from Great Britain to play a few games.
Varjan shifted. She was sick of sitting, especially in this seat. She’d sat in it for almost two days, watching the Happy Pines Motel from well down the street.
She’d almost quit her surveillance the evening before, tried to tell herself that thirty-six hours watching her back trail was enough, that she’d been wrong, that she hadn’t seen the CIA op she’d fought with in Istanbul standing in the line for security at Dulles only minutes after her own arrival in the U.S.
Take off, Varjan had thought. You’re good. Get your game on. Leave everything else behind you.
Varjan had almost driven to the Happy Pines to retrieve the bomb, check out, and carry on with her more pressing plans. But some difficult voice in her head insisted she’d been spotted and that she needed to keep up her vigil.
The difficult voice had proved to be the right one.
What happened then had been reflexive, nothing she could have controlled. She hadn’t meant to blow the bomb unless that CIA agent, Edith, was with them. But then that guy who’d answered the phone, he’d known her real name.
He called me Kristina, Kristina Varjan.
The very words made Varjan feel exposed and angry, made her want to lash out. She preferred to go through life playing roles, only rarely showing her true self to anyone and never using her given name in any context.
But that man had known her. He’d used her real name!
And then it had been reflexive. Uncontrollable. She’d set off the bomb.
Varjan understood she needed to inform Piotr, or whatever his real name was, and explain the situation.
However, maybe the less he knew, the better. Given the contracts he’d assigned her the day before, she understood that any weakness would likely change their arrangement and make her a target for elimination at some point in the near future.
That was too complicated. That was just too much to handle while trying to execute multiple plays as fast as possible.
No, Varjan decided as she passed the exit for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area. She’d keep her employer in the dark, get the jobs done, collect, and then vanish once and for all.