She stayed to the shadows on the edge of the woods. They provided good cover, were familiar, comforting. They were also cool and didn’t make her sweat as much in the wool blanket she’d cut a poncho slit into and wore in order to break up her heat signature.

From her vantage point, she could see the children in the field. Only children could be so brave, so oblivious to it all, running about in the open like that. An adult was pulling soccer balls out of a bag as the children lined up.

Suddenly, the back of her neck tingled, a sixth sense telling her that something wasn’t right. She heard it before she saw it. It was one of the new electric versions. Lightweight and cheap, but largely autonomous, able to pick up and track human signatures on its own. A shot of adrenaline, almost like an electric shock, pushed through the handful of calmers she’d taken that morning. Her pores opened up and she began to sweat profusely.

At first, she thought it would track her, but then the drone locked in on the children in the open field. She focused on the child closest to her, a little boy around six years old. He didn’t notice the drone at first. It stalked him, just thirty feet in the air, hovering at the corner of the field and then slowly moving closer until it was right above him. Then, finally, he saw it.

Her jaws clenched, locking, teeth pressing hard against each other. She wanted to run out there. But she couldn’t. Every instinct told her not to move.

The little boy was now running, the other children following him, all screaming. As fast as they were running, the drone easily kept pace.

She knew she shouldn’t stay there in the woods. She should be out there, among them, doing something. But she couldn’t. Her body wouldn’t let her move.

The drone pulled ahead of the running children and then stopped and raised a few yards to get a better shot. It steadied, fixing its position, as the children continued to run, screaming as loud as they could.

She felt cold. In the space of just a few seconds, she’d sweated through her clothes underneath the wool blanket; the rough fabric was starting to absorb the wet and stick to her. Damn it, get your ass out there, she could hear her old drill instructor screaming. But she couldn’t move.

She closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch it all anymore. Her head began to pound, the noise of the children screaming combining with the drone’s rotors. Then it was all drowned out by the dull roar of white noise that began to build in her eardrums, the blood rushing in. She couldn’t move.

And then she felt it. Conan opened her eyes and saw the little boy. Her little boy. Liam was standing there, holding her hand, squeezing it, tears in his eyes.

“Mommy, please won’t you come play with us? You said you’d try this time.”

Markov shook the snow from his thick jacket’s shoulders. As he began to peel off his layers of fur and wool, he caught a whiff of butter and onions. The widow upstairs cooked nonstop. For whom, he did not know. She clearly did not eat it; she was an elderly little wisp of a woman

The smell made him feel trapped in the small apartment. The main living space contained only a heavy pine chair, a matching footstool, and a cabinet that against the wall. With only enough room for him to read and pace, it was a retreat in both meanings of the term.

They had acknowledged his effort in Hawaii with a medal and then had made it clear that the episode was best forgotten by all, the various old alliances no longer seeming so wise after the coup had toppled the old spy. He’d traded the medal at the flea market for a 130-year-old book of Mikhail Lermontov’s poems, including “Death of the Poet,” about Pushkin’s demise, and told his bosses he would like to be discharged so he could become a policeman. They thought it was a joke at first. The pay is terrible. Nobody is good for bribes anymore. You’ll have to drive a dented Lada, and even the little kids will throw rocks at you. Better that than strutting around the Alpha Group compound like an old cock with tattered feathers and nothing to do. Three months later, he walked out into a cold Moscow evening with a badge and an ID identifying him as a junior-grade detective on the city police force. It meant a life of small apartments filled with the smell of neighbors’ cooking, but also a constant supply of mysteries that made life worth living.

The thin wooden door shuddered as a fist pounded on it three times. Barely a second passed, and the door visibly flexed inward again from another round of pounding.

His first instinct was to draw the SIG Sauer pistol in the cracked leather holster on his left side. But then he thought of the old woman cooking upstairs and the tumbling children across the hall. He wasn’t going to go out with his last act on earth being the death of some innocent from a stray round fired through a flimsy door.

Markov knelt, staying just outside the door frame, and drew the serrated five-inch boot knife he carried in a sheath at his ankle. Old habits die hard. He paused in a crouch, noticing the snow on his boots melting at his feet. The fist hammered the door again. Before it could finish the rest of the three-knock pattern its owner was so enamored of, Markov flung open the door and seized the extended hand. He twisted the arm and spun his own body, throwing the man onto his back in the middle of the room. A quick look in the hallway. Empty. And so Markov gently closed the door behind him and locked it.

The man on the floor wore a helmet and bulky protective gear. Still on his back, he reached out with his hands up, heavy padded gloves with carbon knuckles pointing at the ceiling in surrender. Motorcycle gauntlets, not military issue. His dark blue jacket and pants were covered with a spider-web pattern of reflective segments and pads at the elbows and knees. The uniform that Markov saw buzzing past him on the streets every day.

“Delivery,” said the RusGlobal Delivery courier, almost in a whimper.

“You know you’re going to get yourself killed with a knock like that,” said Markov.

Markov flipped the knife in his left hand, concealing the point along the length of his forearm. He offered his right hand to the man, who was really a wide-eyed boy, likely not even twenty years old.

“I hate Moscow,” the courier said as he swung a satchel across his chest and pulled out a padded silver nylon envelope covered with the company’s angular black double-headed-eagle logo. The courier tossed it to him, and Markov unlocked the door and let him out.

Markov set the package on the scuffed hardwood floor and knelt before the envelope. He poked at it with the knife tip. He leaned over it and listened. Then he simply sat with it and waited. After a few dozen deep breaths, he lifted it up and slightly bent the stiff envelope.

With the knife now lying alongside the package, he carefully positioned his phone and held it steady for fifteen seconds. The phone’s signal didn’t waver, meaning no interference from active circuitry inside. It could still be chem, bio, or even radiological. Yes, a slow death that last way that would be classically Russian. At least the manner in which he died would help reveal the sender.

He sliced the knife through the envelope along its long edge. If you wore white gloves all the time, then all you’d get was clean fingernails when you finally put your pistol to your own temple, he thought.

Inside was another package: a slightly smaller cardboard envelope with a FedEx logo on it. Its origin showed it had gone through the shipping hub in Abu Dhabi.

With the tip of the knife, he carefully slit the cardboard envelope open along its longest edge, listening for a click or a hiss of a switch.

Another package. This one was an inch smaller and only slightly thinner. This FedEx envelope had an American flag covering one entire side of it, as was the company’s practice these days, and on the other side was the faint LED display of the tracking tag. He activated it and it showed the package had journeyed from Honolulu to Abu Dhabi.