The Sleeping Assassin

By Michelle Hamilton

Emma McCordick, a reclusive computer science teacher from Arizona, has always preferred scaling the side of a mountain to social situations. Awkward but beautiful, Emma fills her days with volunteering at the local orphanage where she was raised and dealing with her college students' exam papers. But with one phone call, her sedate and isolated life shatters, pulling her into a world of espionage, intrigue and murder. In a place where your best friend can be your enemy, Emma is unsure whom to trust until she meets Jozef. He's a mercenary and a thief, and she's an assassin for the NSA, but they must join forces in order to save their lives. They are in a race against time, terrorists and betrayals that could either ignite the roaring passion ricocheting between them or tear them apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257219766

Book preview

The Sleeping Assassin

The Sleeping

Assassin

Michelle Hamilton

Dragonfly Media Publishing

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be constructed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Dragonfly Media Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Dragonfly Media Publishing,

www.dragonfly-publishing.com

Cover photos: Prague: @iStockphoto.com/Kyryl Rudenko; Girl with gun: @iStockphoto.com/Brennan Wesley; Man: @iStockphoto.com/John DeFeo; Rock climber: @iStockphoto.com/Joe Gough; Horses: @iStockphoto.com/Holly Kuchera

First printing: September 2006

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-4303-0106-6

** To Peter **

Who continuously inspires me with his conspiracy theories,

His love for Poland and his love for me.

You’ll always be my hero.

** Special thanks **

To my sisters in all that matter: Jen, Julie, Nancy and Tracey for thoroughly reviewing my stories.

And to Jackie Wallace, who edited these words.

Chapter 1

The children are dead.

The raspy voice on the phone laughed harshly and then the line was cut.

Short gasps escaped her clenched throat as she stared blankly at the receiver, then slammed it down when the words penetrated her frightened mind. Terrified, she ran up the steps to the second floor and threw open the door to the children’s room. The beam of light from the hallway speared into the pink room and illuminated the two girls lying in their beds. But instead of the horror she anticipated, she saw that they slept soundly, the thin white sheets gently rising and falling with their breathing.

Even though the girls were safe, fear pumped through her like poison, causing her heart to rattle in her chest in time with the old dryer in the basement.

Ignoring the beat of the ancient machine, she went back to the living room. Who would make such a vile prank call— twice? Steadying her breathing, she picked up the receiver and called the operator, asking him to trace any calls. She hung up the phone.

She wiped the sweat that coated her palms on her fresh new blue jeans. Her entire focus was on the phone, daring it to ring a third time, desperately hoping it wouldn’t. Finally, the rattle of the old dryer turning on and off, on and off in the basement broke her concentration.

With the portable phone in her hand, she jogged down the basement steps, her outstretched fingers touching the door handle when the phone rang again. Dizzily, she stopped at the bottom of the dim cement landing. Taking a deep breath, the babysitter answered the phone.

It was the operator. He said the calls had originated from a second line in the house, a line the owners had installed last year in the basement.

Emma!

The scolding voice startled screams from the group of girls sitting in a half circle around the storyteller, who jumped almost a foot.

With a sheepish grin, Emma tossed her thick braid of golden hair over her shoulder as she twisted around on the rough bench to face her accuser.

We’re just having a little story-time, Jen.

Jenny, her co-leader, didn’t notice Emma’s placating smile or the wink Emma threw over her shoulder at the girls gathered around her, who smothered their giggles with the palms of their hands. What she did notice was how difficult it was to restrain the smile threatening to lift her otherwise severe frown.

That story is far too scary for eleven-year-old girls! What will Mother Superior think when these children wake screaming from nightmares tonight? Jenny huffed as she tugged her navy-blue mantle back into place.

Mother Superior was a woman not to be defied. Even though she presided over a little orphanage in the U.S. desert, she always hinted that she carried quite a bit of weight with the Church. When they were girls, the warning was enough for both Emma and Jenny to walk a straight line, thinking the religious figure meant she had a direct channel to God himself and punishment would be severe. But as they got older they understood from girls with parents that this was simply another form of the you’re-gonna-get-it-when-your-father-hears-about-this trick. Now, they simply loved and respected the woman enough to do whatever they could to please her.

Which is why Emma felt a twinge of guilt at Jenny’s words. She wouldn’t want the Mother to be angry with her, or even worse, disappointed. But in so far as the girls they watched now, they knew the real danger of discovery from their religious mother-figure lay not in the disturbed sleep of these children but in the repeating of the ghoulish tale to others, with the terrified joy that only young girls can experience, loving to scare themselves.

Besides, both Emma and Sister Jenny knew many of these orphaned girls had experienced true terrors, realities far scarier than a silly urban legend. The unofficial goal of the sisters and volunteers, like Emma, at St. Agnes School and Orphanage for Girls was to give these children a normal childhood. And what was more normal than girls spreading outrageous fiction in whispered giggles?

But Sister Jenny felt the responsibility to at least pretend she objected—to show her young charges what was proper. Tucking the flap of the golf shirt into her khaki hiking shorts, Jenny looked up and saw the expectant looks on the young girls’ faces, not to mention her childhood friend, and gave up, eagerly joining Emma and the giggling girls. She, too, loved this story.

Emma scooted over on the fallen log to make room for her friend, then turned back to the seven kids, who were waiting with apt attention for Emma to finish the wonderfully terrifying tale.

What these girls didn’t know was that for the past two years, since Emma had returned from her ten years travelling abroad, she and Jenny had been having this mock-disagreement in front of a different group of girls each month—Sister Jenny believing she knew what was best and proper for the weekend excursion of orphaned children, and Emma knowing what they really liked. Why wouldn’t she? She used to be one of them.

Emma, what happens next? The girls, including Jenny, pleaded with Emma to continue. Emma couldn’t help but laugh as she saw the eagerness on the girls’ faces.

Unable to deny her friend and the wide eyes of the girls, Emma continued with the story.

"Her heart beat as erratically as the old washing machine, clunking against the cement floor. Unable to help herself, she slowly opened the door to the basement.

There, sitting on the dryer, was a psycho killer, cordless phone in one hand, butcher’s knife in the other…

A collective gasp erupted from the group of girls as they leaned forward with eyes like saucers.

No way.

Omigosh!

Holy crap! Sorry Sister.

The last comment wrung a half smile from Emma as she caught the stern expression her friend directed at the girl.

In terrified breaths, the girls immediately rehashed the urban legend with gruesome detail, each account or ‘what if ’ more dramatic than the last.

They had a dozen questions about the story, all of them directed at Emma.

Jen, you know this story better than I do. Emma nudged the nun in the ribs with her elbow, a grin plastered to her face, making the woman with the blue headgear smile ruefully at the group of girls. Besides, you embellish much better than I.

Jenny laughed and began fielding questions from the girls. Emma stood and stretched her nimble five-foot-four frame, walking casually around the group of girls as their eager stares shifted to Jenny, giving the co-leader the stage. Listening with a half-smile tugging at her lips, Emma slowly eased out of the clearing and toward the sheer red cliff-face of the Arizona canyon where they were camped. She didn’t need to tell her co-leader where she was going—Jenny knew that Emma’s ritual at the end of each weekend camping trip with the girls was to search out a good rock wall to climb. After the first time Jenny watched Emma expertly climb a jagged cliff with terror clogging her throat, they had an unspoken agreement that at the end of each trip Jenny would take over the girls so Emma could go climb as she ached to, if only the nervous nun didn’t have to watch.

Now that the blistering heat of the Arizona sun had finally lessened, Emma evaluated the cliff face she’d been eyeing all weekend—the sharp crevasses and steep overhang. The sheer height of the rock stood stubbornly against the afternoon sunlight as she walked toward it, the mountain defiant against yet another element struggling to humble it. Emma itched to run her callused fingers over its coarse face, finding handholds in an otherwise impenetrable fortress.

Her body tense with excitement, Emma jogged the last few hundred feet over the rocky terrain, her athletic body honed from her morning runs and yoga practices. She was driven to set harsh goals for herself, to push herself both physically and mentally. But nothing compared to the moment when she faced that rock wall—heart stilling, focus sharpening, concentration unbreakable as she evaluated, mapped her moves, and finally took that first step.

This cliff was no different for Emma in how she approached it, in the way it made her feel: small but determined. Yet, it in itself was unique—the blush hues of the rock amplified by the soft orange glow of the descending sun; the way the earth rose to support the landform; the alien figures of the blooming saguaro spearing up from the sand, barrel and teddy-bear cacti spilling at its feet.

But all of it parted for the rock.

Emma slowed her jog when she reached its base. She flipped her heavy braid over her shoulder then slowly assessed her opponent. The rock appeared smooth, the task impossible. But just above her, she could see a small divot in the stone, a handhold. Then another, about four feet to the left, until she saw the entire route up the rock face displayed like a map.

A small smile of satisfaction curved her lips. She’d always considered this moment to be the most difficult: the moment when she tried to outsmart the mountain. It gave her a small sense of victory to mentally beat it. Now it was just a physical obstacle. A two-hundred-foot obstacle, Emma grinned warily, but just like any other obstacle—something to be overcome.

With her eye trained on the first handhold, Emma reached down, grabbed a handful of dry earth and absently brushed it between her palms. She nodded slightly at the mountain, as if she’d accepted its challenge. And then the battle began.

She wasn’t sure what it was that drove her to do this, to push against the laws of nature and gravity, but the desire was too compelling to ignore. Maybe it was a form of escape—from the constant press of her students back at the local university or from Ray Baker who had asked her out again, even in the face of her fourth firm but gentle refusal. Or, maybe it was to forget a past filled with an endless line of foster homes then, after earning her Masters in Computer Sciences, years of wandering the world alone.

Isolation and loneliness were feelings Emma knew well. Even when she took the job to teach computer science and came back to the first town she remembered, the one near the orphanage, she still felt somehow insulated from those around her. It was as though over the years she had added enough padding around her for protection that she only experienced light friendships and casual acquaintances. She felt she had so much to give, so much bursting inside her to share, but when the moment came to connect with another, her words came out too softly and shyly for anyone to really notice her.

In the end, the isolation was what Emma preferred. It was why she bought the little bungalow on the outskirts of Phoenix, why she hadn’t had a serious relationship with a man in the past two years. It was why she sought this rock.

Emma curled her fingers into the next dip on the cliff face, now a good sixty feet from the hard-packed desert floor below. She could feel the structure of the sandstone outcropping that held her right foot begin to crumble, so she quickly flexed her arms and shifted upward to the next position, always keeping three points of contact with the rock. From below, a passer-by would be forgiven if they looked up and thought she was just a shadow darting up the cliff.

Emma could smell the air change as she steadily climbed to around one hundred and ninety feet. To her, it was sweeter and purer than the heavy air below. She could see the ridge of the cliff wall not quite double her body length away. Emma decided on the sharp edge of a small shelf above her for her final handhold. Shifting her light weight to stretch up and to the right, Emma caught its edge, loosened her left hand from its last grip and scanned the edge above.

It was that moment of suspension that saved her.

Emma heard the ominous death rattle of the snake before she registered that the ledge where she had placed her right hand was warm and smooth to the touch. With the last of the strength in her tired legs, Emma lunged for the cliff’s edge above. A split second later, the posed rattlesnake struck the rock where her hand had just been.

Hoping desperately she hadn’t misjudged the distance, Emma reached in mid-air for the sharp edge of the crest. Her raw fingers grasped then held the stone as her body reacted to the movement, swinging wildly in free air. Her legs tangled beneath her as she swung helplessly. Instinctually, she looked down. Below her on the warm ledge, the coil of disgruntled snakes slithered, readjusting in the afternoon sunlight, and Emma counted at least ten diamond-shaped heads sticking their tongues out at her. Her focus widened, causing her to look beyond the rocky shelf, and saw that beneath the snakes there was nothing but a very long way down.

Don’t look down! She screamed the warning in her mind, desperately attempting to gain control over the vertigo that clamped onto her at the stunning depths over which she dangled. Unbidden, a man’s voice sounded in her mind. Hold on, McCordick. You’re not gonna get anywhere with that fear racing through you.

Emma didn’t know who the voice belonged to or why it calmed her, but the words slowed her erratic heartbeat and sharpened her mind.

Breathe, she ordered herself.

Struggling to find her balance, Emma closed her eyes. In her mind, she pictured the rocky outcropping of the cliff’s crest and then saw herself standing at its peak. The visualization steadied her. She knew what she had to do.

Emma opened her eyes and squinted against the dirt falling down into her face. She focused on the edge and, with her bleeding knees, slowly began to feel the rock for a toe hold. The moment stretched as Emma felt her grip on the cliff’s edge begin to weaken. Finally, she found what she was searching for —a small crack in the stone, enough to wedge her toe in.

With a quick prayer offered up to the God the nuns had tried to convince her was watching over her, Emma eased her body to the right and then swung back to the left, catching the crevasse with her left foot. Using the momentum, she pushed up with arms and legs, hoisting herself over the edge in a fluid motion.

Emma tumbled face-first into the dirt at the cliff’s crest and rolled from the edge, sucking great gasps of air into her lungs as the shock and adrenaline warred within her. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she chastised herself as the fear slowly began to ease and was replaced by annoyance. She never should have rushed that last move. She knew better than to let the excitement take over. But in the end all she could see was the final stretch, so she didn’t afford it the same contemplation she had allowed every other handhold. Emma’s thoughts tumbled over themselves in self-flagellation. Finally, as her recriminations crested then eased, the soft colours of the sky reflecting on the billowing clouds rolling in from the north calmed her, making her focus on her breathing and cherish the moment to be alive.

Thirty minutes later the sounds of early evening settled on Emma. She stretched full out on her back, easing blood into her exhausted muscles. Like every other mistake in her life, she had learned a valuable lesson from it and she acknowledged that. Taking a deep breath, Emma pushed off the ground and stood at the edge of the precipice.

The view was stunning: the sharp shadows cast by the canyon walls cut through the diffuse light from the setting sun; the green-black of the cacti standing sentinel in an ancient waterway now dry with sand; the sagebrush clustered around rock outcroppings, sheltering a jackrabbit Emma saw dart into its branches for protection. To Emma’s mind, the treacherous climb was well worth the view. She smiled as the peace of the moment filled her, then turned around and took the steep trail down the back of the mountain toward the group waiting below to go home.

Chapter 2

Hamgyong Sanmaek Mountains,

North Korea

The massive black iron beast lumbered north, curving through North Korea’s darkened mountainous forests like a snake. A relic from the Cold War, the Red Army train had been enlisted fifteen years ago by the People as a cargo vehicle to transport goods, supplies and people through the small country.

And for the leaders of North Korea, the importance they placed on those items followed that same order. This was reflected by how the train was organized. The goods such as electronics, manufactured wares and luxury items were housed in the most secure of the cars, usually in the middle of the train, cradled on either side by the less important cars.

Next came the cars of supplies, flanking the goods. This is where one would find bags of rice and grains from China and Russia, and bundled boxes of canned foods traded from the West. Although North Korea was a communist nation, there were many western societies that traded freely with the country that had only one real product for export—weapons.

Trailing along the train’s end were the least important cars—those that carried people. The wealth goods and supplies would bring to the red Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea was far more important to the rulers than the people on whose shoulders they built their nation.

The cargo transported by this train was no different than any other. The final cars were stacked with North Koreans as they travelled north from the nation’s seaside city of Kimch-aek through the small Communist country’s hinterland to Hyesan on its shared border with China.

The people inside the plodding train knew their place, but the fact that they were at the bottom-most rung bothered them little. Their cares centred around much smaller things than the political makeup of the country. For the young mother gently rocking her infant to sleep, she thought of her husband stationed in Hyesan who would be waiting to greet her at the train depot. For the older man fingering the bag of money hidden under the breast flap of his jacket, he dreamed of the joy his only son would receive from the wedding gift he would buy him. For the child tucked between his grandmother and the darkened window, his cares focused on huge ancient monsters that might lurk in the shadows of the forest, and he was both terrified and excited.

There was another on that rambling train who knew his place, and that was definitively not in the passenger car. He sat on a crate containing briefcases of hand-held radios that would eventually make its way to market in Europe, crossing China’s inner Mongolia, then the northern province of Sinkiang and finally into Kazakhstan. It would then cross Russia’s southwest peninsula and into Eastern Europe. He knew the route well, having done it five times over the past three months.

He sat in the goods car, his legs swinging lightly with the train’s movement and, like the others, thought of small cares, too. He remembered his young wife holding their first son, the joy on her face, the love in her eyes. They had been alone so he allowed her to come up to him and hand him their child, sharing that joy with him. He had felt a moment of pure hope then, thinking of the future he would provide for his son, full of possibilities. He was a fairly wealthy man, good at his trade and soon he would be able to afford a second wife to increase his prestige. But he knew he would never love another son as much as this one purely because it was his first. He remembered looking up at his wife and thinking much the same about her, with her shy eyes and long dark hair.

But that memory was from years ago and much had happened since. That night all those years ago had been a night of beginnings and endings for him. He saw the rightness of that now, even though fear still gripped him as he remembered the screaming sound of the American bombs dropping on his home in Iraq.

It was a night of endings because that was the night he watched his young wife and beloved son die under a crushing wall of stone and smoke, his town destroyed by the impersonal missiles launched by leaders half a world away. But it was also a night of beginnings because that was the moment he became another person, like so many others in his part of the world, understanding that the giant beast of the West needed to be killed. That was the night he embraced terrorism as a way to avenge the death of his family and his hope for the future.

Even though over the years he had distinguished himself as a fearless leader, making him a lieutenant in the Jihad, he had sat in this god-forsaken train car five times on top of a crate carrying a few radios but mostly plutonium in the form of suitcase bombs, ushering them into a realm that has known only hatred for too many years. This was to be the last trip. After this all their goals would soon be realized and a godless nation of murderers would finally understand what it feels like to lose the one thing that is most precious: Hope.

Chapter 3

Scottsdale,

Arizona

The rain was coming down in waves by the time Emma dropped the girls back at the orphanage, returned the van, and drove her own beat-up Volvo home. Her wipers couldn’t keep pace with the ferocious downpour from the gentle-looking storm clouds she had seen drift in earlier. Who knew something so seemingly soft and calm could hold such power? Emma mused as she pulled into the neat little driveway tucked beside her house. She opened the door of her car to the drowning scent of trumpet creepers and morning glory that were tangled along her small fence blooming wildly in the September rain.

Deciding to leave her gear in the trunk and make a mad dash into the safety of her little house, Emma flipped up the hood of her windbreaker and jumped from the car. She couldn’t help the giggles that escaped her as she valiantly attempted to avoid the mammoth puddles dotting the path to her door like landmines, only to splash in them anyway when there was no where else to jump.

Breathless but smiling, Emma gained the dry haven of her front porch. She whipped off her jacket and hung it on the wrought iron peg under the porch light, letting the excess water run off in rivulets. Even though late summer still gripped the southwest, a chill touched the damp night air, causing Emma to stifle a shiver as she unlocked the front door and went into her house.

As usual, silence was all that welcomed her home. In the pitch dark, Emma hung her keys on one of the hooks made up of a small line of puppies with tails, kicked off her shoes and toed them onto the mat to the left of the entrance way. She then padded straight back to the kitchen so she could make herself the roast beef dinner she had been fantasizing about.

After throwing the meat-based TV dinner in the microwave, Emma grabbed a chilled bottle of light beer from the fridge and headed to the bathroom for an equally anticipated shower. She could feel the muscles in her quads and triceps screaming, but she smiled anyway, knowing it was a good burn. Emma ignored a stack of end-of-quarter papers sitting on the antique walnut desk—a flea-market find—as she passed the living room and focused on the door at the end of the hall and the pleasure of wet warmth that awaited her.

With no one to notice or care, she stripped off her dirty camping clothes and left them in a heap on the black and white tiles of the bathroom floor. She then turned the shower on and let the warmth become tropical with heat and humidity.

The mist swirled around her as she turned to the small pedestal sink. She reached for her beer but stopped to watch the water condense on the clear glass of the bottle. Picking it up to take a sip, she smiled as the water pooled and ran down the length of the bottle from the warm contact of her fingers. As she raised it to her lips, her eyes caught her reflection in the round mirror. Reflected back at Emma was her now unbound blond hair, falling past her shoulders, framing her oval face and pale cornflower-blue eyes.

But what Emma saw was thick, straw-coloured hair that she usually ignored, shoulders just a bit too wide and eyes just a bit too big for her face. Nothing wrong with her neck, she supposed as she took a sip of the beer, but her jaw was a bit square and her chin a bit pointy. But she always felt they matched her nose just fine.

Emma leaned in to get a better look and, sure enough, there dancing across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose was the bane of her childhood—a fine scattered line of freckles. In the third grade, when blemishes such as freckles really mattered, Emma remembered Sister Kate had snuck her lemon juice as a remedy to combat them. But after one of the girls in her room stole the liquid from the tiny orphan, Emma decided to give up on the attempt of making herself look beautiful and instead struggled to just look presentable. Her hair was always wild, her socks uneven with holes, and there was an almost ghostly look to her thin cheeks and body. She never could see what her classmates saw—a pale girl with great pools for eyes in a face and structure too fey to be common, making her look more like a fairy princess than an orphan from St. Agnes’. But to Emma, she had always just looked homespun. Which was ironic, since she had no idea what home was or to whom she once belonged.

Emma caught the ends of her hair tickling the middle of her back and, in a silly gesture she hadn’t done since she was little, lifted it and turned slightly to her left, trying to imagine how she would look if she were famous or rich. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the thin lines of a star-shaped scar on her left shoulder blade and then to another tracing a thin white line across her right triceps. She let her hair fall as she once again faced the mirror, this time running her fingers along all the scars she could see.

Where did she get these, she wondered, not for the first time since she noticed the scars over two years ago. She had no memory of receiving them, but from their look they must have been deep. It must have been when she’d been in that car wreck in India. She repeated the suspicion to herself yet again, but it bothered her that she couldn’t pinpoint the moment when it happened.

Over the past while, Emma had discovered that her memories of her travels were only a vague series of snapshots in her mind. Parts of them seemed very real—the spicy smells of Cairo, the vibrant sights of Munich, the pulsing sounds of Rio—but whenever she tried to explore those memories, her thoughts would shift and fade and she would be left with nothing but the fragrance of the memory.

Shaking off the sensation, Emma tipped the bottle back again as she drank, then set it and the unsettling thoughts aside to have her well-earned shower.

* * * * *

National Security Agency,

Maryland

There’s been an accident.

The Director looked up from the papers on his desk at the agent who spoke. The young man knew better than to make the older agent ask for more information having