Deep Cover (Part 1 of a Series)

Those of us who were in Bakhchisaray for what is now referred to euphemistically as the Copithorne Incident had a hard time getting over what happened that summer. Despite the best efforts of the team to penetrate темно паника, almost a year had passed before we even established a few low-level contacts. The group is comparable, to make a pop culture reference, to Keyser Soze… nobody ever knows anyone who’s in the group or who worked directly for them, or if they do, aren’t exactly forthcoming with any information about them. All of us had cleared the psychological impact assessment tests that the agency subjected us to after Bakhchisaray, and I was selected by Jennings for a deep cover mission.

We still weren’t sure how темно паника ferreted out Copithorne, but he hadn’t been in the Ukraine long before the call for an extraction came. He had failed to report in several times, and it was generally assumed that he had slipped up in this regard and thus ended up dead. Knowing Copithorne as I did, I thought this was total bullshit, especially since they seemed to know our extraction team was coming as well. But Jennings didn’t subscribe to my theory, and felt that deep cover was the best method for gathering intel on the group.

Rather than attempt to infiltrate an unknown organization, the idea was to plant me inside an organization that we believed to be working against темно паника. To that end I found my way into the BryanskTriad, a smuggling operation run by three brothers. They work along the Russian/Ukranian/Byelorussian borders, moving whatever needs to be moved between Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Having been vouched for by a scoundrel, I started my tour loading crates onto boxcars while railroad officials were being paid to look the other way. Per the agreement of my hiring, I didn’t make a ruble in my first weeks of employ. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes forward, slept in the barren, one room apartment they provided me on the third floor above a restaurant they owned, and took my meals only when the restaurant was closed. Both the food and the service were terrible.

A month or so into the operation, I was sitting in the restaurant, idly pushing food back and forth across my plate with a fork, when a man named Ilya came and sat down across from me. I’d seen him around several times before, and knew him to be a Person of Importance, but we had never even made eye contact, let along spoken. He folded his hands, leaned forward slightly, and stared at me intently. He opened his mouth to speak.

I was about to go deeper.