Moscow Mule (A Thom Hodges Romantic Thriller Book 1) Read online

  Moscow Mule

  by Owen Chance

  for Will, road trip reader

  Prologue

  1.

  “The moment I wake up,” the crowd of men roared as Aretha blared through the speakers. “Before I put on my makeup.” They were at Trade, a new gay bar on 14th Street in D.C.’s reimagined Logan Circle neighborhood, a bar made to look seedy, but serving Grey Goose and Diet Cokes for $8 a watered-down pour to Washington’s “it” gay crowd. Thom pulled Jason into him and the two men kissed. They were drunk, but more drunk on happiness than bad cocktails. It was June 26, 2015, and nearly all the gays in Washington—nay, across the United States—were celebrating.

  “I say a little prayer for you! Forever, and ever, you’ll stay in my heart and I will love you.” Around 11 o’clock that morning, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that states shall not infringe upon the right of same-sex couples to marry anywhere in the United States. In his opinion for the Court’s majority, Justice Kennedy wrote, “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.” Sure, Thom and Jason had their problems. Thom had taken the digital analyst post with the C.I.A., and Jason resented Thom for it, thinking his eyes might wander during the long hours out at Langley. And Thom, even if subconsciously, resented Jason’s resentment, the way he always held things over Thom’s head in passive-aggressive guilt, inviting him to parties with his D.O.J. lawyer colleagues with an obligatory and cutting, “You probably can’t come anyway, not that you’d want to.” Like every couple, they had their problems. But they were not lonely people calling out only to find no one there. And now the State recognized that calling, and promised to recognize these two men, these two federal employees, as lawfully-wed if they were to so choose.

  Thom and Jason left Trade and walked up 14th, turning west on Swann Street when they reached the diner on the corner, Ted’s Bulletin, brightly lit even at 1:30 in the morning, serving up homemade hipster pop-tarts to the drunk boys out celebrating tonight. When they reached their first floor walk-up at the corner of Swann and New Hampshire Avenue, Thom reached for the keys in his pocket. When Thom turned back to ask Jason if he had their keys, Jason was down on one knee with a single tulip plucked from their neighbor’s flowerbox.

  “Thomas Mackenzie Hodges, will you marry me?” Jason asked, grinning broadly, a smile that lit up his eyes and reminded Thom why he loved this man in the first place. As was his nervous tic, Thom broke into an endearing bout of hiccups, pulling his hand away from Jason in order to cover his mouth. Had he stopped to think about it just then, Thom might have said no. Or actually, “Maybe, *hiccup*, but not yet, *hiccup*, let’s wait another year.” But after the excitement of the day for Thom and Jason, for men and women around the country just like them, and in the humid, drunk heat of that Washington summer night, Thom said, emphatically, “Yes!” and then hiccupped a final time before Jason stood up and kissed him right there on the street in front of their house.

  2.

  Two-and-a-half years later, Thom stood behind Trey at Trey’s desk. They shared an office, one with a half-decent view of the foundation of a building being constructed ten feet from the one they currently occupied. They were analysts, trained in intelligence, sure, but the spying they did wasn’t on the streets of Dakar or in the bars of East Berlin. Rather, it was mostly from behind a computer terminal at Langley, where they sat safely sipping Starbucks coffee all day and planning happy hours for after work. But today they sat stunned. An agent had messaged in a video on the secure server. The footage was shaky, but the scene was still clear: men with burlap sacks over their heads being pushed off the tops of buildings in Kazan, Russia’s third-largest city.

  Thom and Trey looped the video again and again, watching again and again three men fall from atop a seven-story building, the crack of their bones clear as they hit the pavement below, dying quickly, though not painlessly. Along with the video, the agent sent an encrypted message, which Thom printed out and placed in a leather portfolio, which he would deliver to his boss in their afternoon briefing. It read: “Homosexuals targeted and killed by state officials. Others sent to camps in eastern territories.”

  As Thom lie in bed that night next to a snoring Jason, he stared up at the ceiling fan rotating above their bed. The whir, though off balance — they needed to replace one of the blades, which had fallen off one night when Jason threw a tumbler of scotch at fan above them during one of his more direct and hysterical outbreaks — was normally able to guide Thom to sleep. But when he closed his eyes, sleep alluded him. He could only see a man with a burlap sack over his head falling from a tall, plain building. And he could only hear the crack of the man’s skull as it hit the pavement below.

  Chapter One

  1.

  Thom pulled back the heavy brocade curtain. Yawning, he rubbed his right eye with the soft flank of his right hand and looked out on Revolution Square from the third floor of the Hotel Metropol. It was 2:47 am according to his Seiko Prospex Diver, a watch Jason had bought him two Christmases ago. A watch he only wore when Jason took him to the airport, as he had done 27 hours before, pulling into the cellphone waiting lot at Dulles International and pulling Thom’s neck until their lips pressed hard and dry and tired. They had been together in Washington for three years, one wonderful, one horrible, and one resigned. They had been married for two-and-a-half of these three years.

  Thom pulled back the heavy brocade curtain, surprised, perhaps, to see such activity at 2:49 in the morning. A garbage man emptied black metal trash cans into a bright yellow rolling bin. Two women huddled in stilettos and short fur coats near him, laughing about something Thom could not make out from here. Though he could not see them, Thom knew red-coated guards stood flanking the main gates to the Kremlin, which even at this hour buzzed with some activity, like the low-wattage florescent in the bathroom adjoining this hotel room. Thom reached down and scratched himself through black Calvin Klein briefs. When the metal band of his watch ripped out a thick black hair from his inner thigh, Thom jumped awake. It was 2:53 on a Thursday morning, and Thom didn’t know how long this assignment in Moscow would last.

  2.

  The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is 3.5 kilometers from the Hotel Metropol at Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok No. 8. Since he couldn’t sleep, and didn’t want to, Thom left the hotel at six in the morning, even though he didn’t need to report to the Embassy until nine. He walked east on Mokhovya Street through the thick fog of early spring. Past the statue of Karl Marx in Revolution Square, and past the Four Seasons with a Starbucks and Apple store now built beside it. He walked slowly to a coffeeshop his friend Trey, another gay man in the C.I.A. who was stationed in Moscow a couple of years ago, told him he had to go to. Nude Coffee & Wine was a hip spot tucked in an alley behind a hospital. Scrapped concrete walls, vintage tile floors, Danish modern furniture upon which Russian and ex-pat hipsters sipped pour-over coffees with tasting notes of sunflower or bourbon or earth. Of course Trey would send me here, Thom thought, it’s just his type of place to sit with the New York Times and cruise men of a certain class, both financial and aesthetic. It was like any number of coffeeshops that dotted Mt. Pleasant or Columbia Heights back in D.C.

  At the counter, Thom ordered “match cottage cheese with berries and caramel” (250 roubles, about four bucks) and a pour-over from Antigua, a varietal called “Summer Nude” and, at five bucks, what Thom viewed as an extravagance he could afford now, unlike the last time he drank coffee in Moscow, as a graduate student from Georgetown studying Russian for the summer and living in a muggy, not air conditioned dorm room he shared with five ot
her boys from the States or Britain. Thom slid into a booth and read a report on crop subsidies from the thick dossier his new boss’s assistant had waiting for him at the hotel last night. At 9:16, a barista lightly shook his shoulder. “Excuse me, sir. I think you fell asleep.”

  3.

  Thom rushed out of the coffeeshop and ran the four blocks to the Embassy. He wasn’t out of shape, quite the contrary, but when the fog lifts in the Moscow morning, the air is heavy and humid. In a few months, it’d feel like wading through the thick mud on the bank of the Volga River, at the beach where Trey and Thom skinny dipped that summer they lived in the dorms here. But Thom didn’t have time for a stroll down memory lane this morning. He had to run.

  By the time he reached the marine at the employee entrance gate, Thom’s forehead was slick with salty sweat. Beneath his slim cut, dark blue suit, perspiration began to soak through the armpits of his crisp white shirt, a custom-cut job Jason had given Thom for his birthday. Thom flashed his diplomatic I.D., Clearance A, and the marine waved him through. He walked through the back gardens and, upon reaching the building’s two-story glass and steel back entrance, the ambassador was there to meet him.

  “Good morning, Thomas,” Ambassador Paul Anderson smiled, “Or what’s left of the morning that is.”

  “Jet lag is worse than I remember!” Thom laughed, “I fell asleep inside a coffeeshop.”

  “Only the best for America’s Central Intelligence Agency,” Ambassador Anderson snorted, and the two old friends laughed. They hugged tightly. The ambassador was not mad. He had been one of Thom’s first supervisors back at Langley, before Anderson left the C.I.A. for State under a presidency that wanted to keep a firmer watch on Russia under the administration of President Nicholai Vasily and his right-hand man, Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov. Anderson knew the last few years had been hard on Thom personally, and he cared about his mentee, his young friend. “How’s Jason?” the ambassador asked.

  “He’s, uh, fine,” Thom deflected, “and seriously, sorry I’m late. You know it’s not like me.”

  “It’s not, but that’s okay. Walk with me to your new office so we can talk.” Instead of going up the stairs, the two men walked down to a basement, and then further down to a sub-basement. “The only ones here who know you’re C.I.A. are me and Natalie, so she knows to bring you through no matter what’s going on inside my office. Not even the Deputy knows who you are or why you’re really here.” Thom smiled at the thought of Natalie, Anderson’s personal secretary who had been a mentor to Thom as well, sharing the personal ins and outs of the C.I.A., like where to get the best coffee and who was sleeping with whom. Thom was nervous, though. Why was his presence here such a secret, he wondered? As Anderson told Thom his wife insisted they plan a welcoming party for Thom soon, he began to hum to himself, drumming out the bass line of Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By” along the hem of his suit pants with his middle and fore fingers.

  They walked down a series of cinderblock halls that all looked the same, pale green paint sterile on the walls and tacky brown tile below their feet. Left, right, right, right, left, right. Thom was good with remembering, he was an intelligence officer, after all, but he knew he’d be getting lost down here for weeks. If he was here that long. The ambassador changed the subject back to Thom’s task here, and Thom slipped back into an active state of listening. “We’ve informed the staff you’re a contracted consultant with State here to install some new networking protocols to keep our cybersecurity up-to-date. And that they should just stay out of your way.” That wouldn’t be a problem. His office was buried so deep inside this buzzing city of an office complex, between boiler rooms and filing cabinets with records dating back to the 1950s, that nobody would know he was here.

  They arrived at an unmarked door with an e-card entry. The ambassador swiped them in, then handed the card to Thom. “Let’s have dinner tonight. I have to get to a meeting with the other G-8 ambassadors, but that should give you the day to get settled in and on the network,” the ambassador said, pausing, then leaning in to give Thom a fatherly hug, “I’m glad you’re here, Thom.”

  “Thanks,” Thom answered, “Me, too, sir,” and the ambassador left.

  The office was dim and musty. Thom would need to pick up some candles after work; he was so sensitive to smells. He found a rag and some cleaning spray in the room’s lone closet, hung his jacket over the back of a chair, rolled up his sleeves, and set about spraying down every inch of desktop and floor and chair and trashcan and lamp.

  Thom pulled out two small frames from his briefcase and placed them atop his metal desk, a dinosaur that had probably been in this basement since the days of the Russian K.G.B. As if those days were far behind them. As if those days had even passed. One frame held a photo of Thom and Jason on their first vacation together. In the small print, they’re shirtless and wearing sunglasses on the stern of Jason’s family’s sailboat, smiling ear-to-ear as they did the whole week they spent down on the Chesapeake Bay outside of Williamsburg, where Jason’s father was the Dean of Law at William & Mary and his mother kept up an old estate that had been in her family since the Revolution. After family dinners, Jason would grab Thom’s hand and tell his parents, “I want to show Thom some of our land.” Jason grabbed a flashlight and they waded down into a small tidal cove, the water reflecting moonlight, refracting it into every direction. Jason stripped off his clothes, and Thom stood there, “Are there snakes here?” Thom was scared of snakes. They hid under every dusty rock and bush, it seemed, back on the ranch he grew up on outside of Amarillo in the Texas panhandle. “No, Thom. Trust me.” Though Thom knew Jason was lying, even unknowingly, he stripped out of his clothes and jumped in the water. The boys splashed and laughed and then made out beneath the rising summer moon, just like boys had done for centuries in the hidden coves of this vast estate.

  The other picture was older and over-exposed. A young Thom, probably six or seven, in the arms of his mother. They sat on the back of the old ranch pickup, a battered blue Chevrolet on which Thom, his father assured him, would learn to drive in a few years. But in the picture, Thom smiled wide enough to show three missing teeth. His mother buried her head in his scalp, obviously laughing, her right arm resting easy on the knee of her crisp blue jeans. Two years after this picture was snapped, Thom’s mother would be buried on the western ridge of the ranch, facing west towards New Mexico and Arizona and California and the Pacific, towards the sunset she would watch every night, and would watch, now, forever.

  4.

  “Come here, Tommy.”

  Thom watches his father from the cab of the pickup. He’s fifteen, and he’s asked his father to call him Thom, but his father ignores his request so many times Thom has stopped asking. At school he is Thom. On the ranch he is Tommy. Thom steps out of the pickup and walks seven yards or so along the rutted road to where his dad stands over a calf in the ditch. The calf is wheezing, struggling for breath, and its milky brown coat is matted. Flies are swarming around its head.

  “Goddamn coyotes,” Thom’s father spits. This spring calf was Thom’s favorite. Its mother had died shortly after giving birth, and so Thom bottle fed the young steer every morning and every night. “What a damn mess,” his father says, lifting the calf’s tail with the toe of his boot. The calf was dying, bleeding out from his right side and his anus, a typical move for coyotes on young calves, bite them over and over again from behind.

  Thom’s father unbuckles the Smith & Wesson pistol from his flank and hands it to his son. Thom hand shakes so hard though. Tears well in his eyes, but he holds them back. But he can’t find the pistol’s safety release.

  Thom’s father snatches the gun from Thom’s hand, spits “What a goddamn mess,” and shoots the calf pointblank in the head. As he turns to walk back to the truck, the shot reverberates through the fields of freshly planted cotton. Thom does not follow him.

  5.

  Ambassador Anderson was already sitting at a courtyard table next to a ke
rosene heater when Thom arrived at the bistro. Moscow was beginning to warm into its short spring, but the nights and mornings could be chilly. Nearby, two plainclothes bodyguards sat with tiny Bluetooth headsets in their ears. As Thom sat down, a woman in a crisp black dress poured a bit of red wine for the ambassador to twirl, sniff, and sip. Anderson considered himself a sommelier, but wine was one of the few things he actually knew little about. “Wonderful oakiness here. This will be perfect.” She poured the men two glasses, and left them to their own devices.

  “I love this place. The chef is an Australian I knew back when I was stationed in Kabul. He married a Russian and opened a restaurant. He’ll send out a few courses for us,” the ambassador explained, “I hope that’s alright.”

  “Of course,” Thom laughed, “But really, you didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”

  “Not at all! I consider you a son and it’s great to have you here. Plus,” Anderson paused, “I wanted us to have a quiet place to talk.”

  Thom told his friend about his day, cleaning out the dusty office and setting himself up on a secure network line accessible only from his laptop and on a server back at Langley. “Lord, I miss The Company,” Anderson sighed as a plate of fish topped with a beet and cabbage puree arrived, “And I’m sorry we had to put you in a dungeon down there.”

  “No, no, not at all,” Thom forked a piece of fish onto his plate, “It’s good to be out of the way.”

  “True.” The ambassador circled his fork around a dollop of thick sour cream, then cleared his throat. “Thom, I need to tell you why I asked the C.I.A. to bring you here.”