Enjoy this free excerpt from Comoros Moon

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Balkan Goodbye

 

 

The window was propped open with a suitcase and let in the sounds and smells of late afternoon in Belgrade. A hot breeze wafted across Alec Pierce’s hairless chest. It carried with it the creak of an axle, the backfire of a bus, the distant toot of a tugboat on the Danube.

     Cigarette smoke drifted from a Styrofoam cup. A half-eaten sandwich lay on a newspaper. A phony mustache lay flattened between the pages of a Balkan history.

     A young woman straddled Alec on the bed. She locked her sleek legs around his torso with the firmness of a dancer.

     She whispered a throaty command. “Take me for a ride.”

     Her Slavic expletives, clipped word endings and bedroom vocabulary drew Alec further into her mystique.

     “Take me all the way.”

     He picked out the gist of her heavily accented muttering and lent a gringo response. It might not have been standard love talk, but her body squirmed with delight.

     Water gushed up pipes running inside the walls of his rented flat.

     Dragana broke into laughter. Her large eyes drew into an oriental shape and regained their youth.

     The two bodies twisted in bed. His angular frame glistened with perspiration, and her muscular limbs became tangled in the sheets. They laughed deliriously, and Alec tried to ignore the thump and scrape of their bed against the wall.

     After a quiet interval, she propped up on an elbow. “Sasha, I have news for you.”

     “Tell me.” He looked over at her.

     “Your brother is back in town.”

     He returned his gaze to the ceiling. His mind ran through a catalogue of people like a drawer of index cards each with another face he remembered from Langley. He recalled CIA specialists for all sorts of purposes: bugging, stealing, seducing, photographing, bombing and impersonating. But there was only one reason for Mick to come back. To prevent him from accomplishing his unauthorized goal.

     “You know what you have to do,” she said firmly.

     He nodded. It would have been nice to see his brother, but not after the way Mick had abandoned him in Srebrenica. Not after Alec had spent two years on the run in Bosnia, ingratiated himself with the militias, killed peacekeepers and worked his way up the mafia hierarchy, all with a singular purpose: to infiltrate the Presidential Palace and bring justice to the Butcher of the Balkans.

     He would eliminate anyone who got in his way.

     Except his brother.

Excerpt from Comoros Moon

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