Susan Warren - Point Of No Return

He’d felt more comfortable in his Snow White costume.

“Just tell me where you’re—we’re—going, please.”

“The market,” she said without looking at him.

The market. Okay. He cataloged the changes in Tbilisi as he followed her down the street. The smell—dust, car exhaust, the slightest whiff of grilled lamb—all seemed familiar. He didn’t recognize, however, the red and blue vendor kiosks selling ice cream and candy, the electric beat of European bands banging from boom boxes. Traffic hummed and horns blared, motors coughing out black smoke from Russian-made vehicles—Ladas and Zhigulis, he supposed—but also Japanese imports and even German Volkswagens. It all evidenced a new capitalism, not the Georgia he’d remembered.

Of course, when he’d been sneaking around Georgia, it had been in the hills, back when the Russians occupied the offices in the ornate buildings in downtown Tbilisi, back when his government decided that a little revolutionary thinking might help take down communism. His stomach churned as he pondered the fact that the seeds he’d sown over two decades ago still wreaked havoc in the country today. Back then, he’d believed he was arming freedom. Oh, hindsight.

A woman, her head covered, holding her toddler daughter in her lap as she sat on the grimy sidewalk, held out a hand to him as he passed by. He couldn’t meet her eyes as he dropped a lari into her grip. Just ten feet away, yet another woman, this one much younger, huddled under her veils in the alcove of a Soviet-era building peering at him with huge brown eyes.

Carissa.

He inhaled so sharply that Mae glanced at him.

Of course it wasn’t Carissa. Couldn’t be. But memory had sharp claws and it knew how to make him bleed.

If not cost him his life, this time around.

Maybe he should have called Wick and the rest of Stryker International instead of packing his duffel and hopping on a transport without so much as a check-in. His team would show up at the office and read the hastily scrawled, “Off on a private trip. Be back soon.” And since he hadn’t taken a day off since he’d started Stryker International, those cryptic words would have the opposite of the intended effect, igniting speculation, if not an all-out manhunt. Starting with a phone call to his partner, Vicktor Shubnikov.

With some more rotten luck, Vicktor would mention it to his wife, Gracie, who would immediately think of her former roomie, Mae, and probably follow up with a phone call to Seattle. To which she’d get no answer.

How long, really, would it take his team to figure out he’d headed to Georgia, scrounge up a plane and stir an already-simmering mess to full boil?

Clearly, Chet had needed more coffee and a few moments to think before running off after trouble.

Trouble who seemed to be outdistancing him de spite his near run. Sheesh, Mae had long legs. “Slow down.”

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