Page 2 of Code Name: Harbor

A second hand pins my right wrist against my own collarbone before I can get the camera up to swing it as a weapon. That doesn’t stop me from thrashing though, my heartbeat slamming against my rib cage with fear.

“What are you doing here?” The man’s voice is low, clearly Russian.

“Photography,” I manage to squeak out, hoping to sound like a dimwitted woman. “Night work. Long exposure. That old dock on the channel was perfect in the moonlight. That’s all.”

“But you took pictures of more than just the dock, no?” he inquires with menace.

And then he’s dragging me again. Through the brush, along a switchback and down onto the dock, where the other men turn in surprise.

“Who’s that, Sergei?” one of them asks, also with a Russian accent.

“A woman I find hiding in the bushes with a camera,” he says, and then releases his hold on me. He then shoves me hard in the back and I stumble forward several feet before I right myself.

One of the other men approaches me. “Do you have identification?” he demands.

“In my truck.”

“Where is truck?” he asks, his accent heavier with deeper rolling R’s.

“Up the access road, about a quarter mile.”

He smiles, and it’s not friendly. “Who do you work for?”

“Nobody. I’m freelance.”

“What is your name?”

“Sarah Klein. I’m just a photographer, I swear,” I say, real panic lacing my words. “I’m entering a nighttime photography contest. I was just photographing the dock.”

The men exchange glances.

“I mean… yeah, I saw the boat come up,” I babble, hoping something good pops out. “And yeah… the women, so I just assumed… hey, party boat. Know what I mean? I didn’t take pictures of that, though.”

Lame, Josie.

So lame.

The man pulls a gun from inside his jacket and it’s clear he doesn’t believe me. He grabs my arm and presses the barrel of his pistol into my lower back.

“Mikhail… we should not leave her in the channel,” the man says to the others. “Current goes south. Body might come up off Whidbey by morning.”

“Weight her,” one of them suggests.

I’m struck by the fact that they’re not whispering or lowering their voices. They’re talking about killing me like they’re discussing tomorrow’s forecast.

I’ve been a Jameson agent for only three months. Before that, I was an NSA analyst for six years. Prior to that, I was a graduate student. Before that, I was a kid taking apart computers in my father’s study and putting them back together while he timed me with a stopwatch. None of those previous lives nor the training I received in the NSA or at Jameson have prepared me for this very real scenario of standing on a dock in the dead of night while three men decide whether to weigh down my body before they put it in the water.

What prepared me is who my father is, and the small fact that very early he taught me a rule about being outnumbered.

The rule is don’t be there to have those odds realized.

I take it all in and get my analytical mind spinning. One man is six feet in front of me. Another eight feet to his left and looking at his phone screen. The one who caught me on the bluff is ten feet to the right, his gun holstered. The other men are at the van. The dock edge is four feet behind me and the water below is a twelve-foot drop into frigid, inky blackness.

The odds are not good, but they’re better than waiting for the bullet to my brain. I lash out with my leg, kicking one man to the anterior portion of his knee, causing it to buckle with an accompanying scream of pain.

I’m running before he hits the wooden boards of the deck.

Two long strides, Russian men swearing behind me, and I launch into the darkness, executing a clean dive into the water at full speed.