Mistress

Chapter 79

Suddenly finding myself forced to economize, I stay at the cheapest hotel I can find. You know it’s a cheap hotel when the bathroom’s down the hall. When “air-conditioning” consists of waving your hand in front of your face. When you can hear the guy in the next room rolling over in bed. When “room service” means they loan you a flyswatter. When the telephone is in the lobby instead of on the nightstand. When there isn’t a nightstand.

But I’ve seen the sun rise another day. That in itself is a major victory.

With the few remaining minutes on one of my three remaining prepaid phones, I make the call and set up an appointment. They tell me I’ll have to wait until after lunch, so I have some time to kill. I should probably hide in the hotel room, but it’s so crappy that I think I’ll take my chances on the open streets.

Or at least in a coffee shop, where I pull my baseball cap low and nurse a small coffee and pick at a blueberry muffin. I grab a Post that someone left on the next table over and go to the headlines. I’ve missed being a reporter and vastly prefer it to fugitive life. The pay’s better and nobody tries to kill you.

“Shit!” I yell when I see the lead story above the fold: RUSSIAN LEADER ESCAPES ASSASSIN’S BULLET.

I quickly whip through the article. Russian prime minister Yuri Mereyedev narrowly escaped assassination last night when a man opened fire on him while he was speaking at a rally outside Moscow. Russian police captured a man who is believed to have ties to-surprise, surprise-the Georgian secret police. The US State Department is said to be “closely monitoring” the situation.

I throw down the newspaper. Andrei Bogomolov anticipated this very thing. A terrorist attack, he predicted, that would be blamed on the Republic of Georgia. This is close enough. Certainly close enough for provocation’s sake.

Russia is moving closer to an invasion of her southern neighbor. The plan to reconstruct the old Soviet empire is already under way.