Synopsis: The Agency has a leak and Lee and Amanda fear that permanent professional separation may be the ultimate consequence if they can’t find and plug the leak before it ruins the first joint effort of the US and Russian agricultural communities. Will they find the leak in time? And when they find it will they be able to save their family from the worst kind of betrayal?
Rating: PG 13
Author’s notes: I have worked on this story for weeks now. It came straight from my gut and soul! I must extend many thanks to Chris for her tireless BETA reading and corrections. Without her, this fiction would never have been completed. Also to Kathy, whose encouragement kept me going more than she realized. I confess that I have never really kept up with politics, much less foreign politics. If I have not kept to a realistic political timeline, I offer my sincere apologies to any who are upset by this.
Feedback: Of course! The more the better!
Timeline: May 1993
By the time she had made the circuit of the room twice she had come to the realization that he had not arrived yet. She sat at their table and waited. Each time the bell jingled over the door she checked for his entrance. After 30 minutes she began to worry. Where could he be? She checked her watch and determined to go to his apartment and see if she could locate him.
She stood and was preparing to leave when a steel-like hand clamped onto her shoulder and forced her to sit again. She gasped and raised her eyes to look at her attacker. The cold dark eyes that bored into her soul put shivers on her skin and terror into her heart. They were the eyes she thought and hoped never to see again. In fact, she had not seen them since her mother’s funeral so many years ago. She should have been to young to recall them but some things you just don’t forget. Those eyes had terrified her many nights with the reflected tales of blood and war that he seemed to lust after so. She had been sent here to escape those eyes and that cruel taunting voice. It had been her mother’s last wish and it had been granted, albeit grudgingly, by the father she had never really known. That same father had fostered the lusts in the dark soul that now stood before her.
When she left 20 minutes later, she was in such a state that she was unsure where to go or what to do. She could hear the cruel voice of her past-returned telling her what she must do to save the one person she loved most in the world. How had he known and did she really have any other option but to do as he demanded?
She would return here as he instructed. She would do as he told her to. If not, well, she wouldn’t think about that. She had no other choice.