Far From Ordinary Read online

  Far from Ordinary

  M. James Murray

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael James Murray

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  Cover design by Scott Murray

  Printed in Canada

  First Printing 2018

  ISBN 9781724108753

  To Taylor and Scott.

  To Ashley, for helping me find the courage to start on this crazy adventure.

  Chapter One

  “You’re making a huge mistake,” he said as they shoved him into the gunmetal gray prison cell. His narrow frame skidded along the cold, smooth concrete floor and his eye throbbed in pain from where the guard had struck him.

  Immediately Richard Mitey stood back up, wiped the dust from his prison-issued jumpsuit as the heavy door of the cell closed with a screech. He walked up to the door and put his hands around the thick bars. “Stop! Come back!”

  He banged against the solid steel bars until his knuckles began to bruise deep purple, then he started to yell at the top of his voice, a shrill sound which was like a tornado siren.

  Finally, a guard came back to check on him.

  “Oh thank God you’re here!” Dick said. “There’s been a mix-up. You see your friend was a bit rude and hit me when I tried to explain before –“

  The guard silenced him with an abrupt motion of his hand.

  “Hör auf mit dem Radau!” Barked the guard.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak German,” Dick said quietly. “Do you speaken zhe English?”

  Dick took the intense glare of the guard as a “no.”

  “You’ve got to help me out here, okay? Can you take a note or something? This’ll get sorted out soon enough, I’m sure. Hey, wait! Where are you going? Damn it!”

  Now, Dick didn’t usually swear, but being locked up in a prison cell by mistake seemed like an extenuating circumstance.

  He hoped that the ghost of his Mama would forgive him.

  After the guard left, Dick picked up the clamor again, beating his shoe against the bars and hollering at the top of his lungs.

  But nobody came.

  Finally, he sat down on the thin cot in the corner of the room. He could feel the criss-cross pattern of leather straps which functioned as a box spring on his back as smoothly as if the mattress hadn’t been there at all.

  Of course there weren’t bed springs.

  “Cause people would use them to shank people,” Dick guessed. He sighed deeply and laid down on the uncomfortable bed.

  How had he ever gotten himself into such a situation? Half a world away from his home, in a foreign place where people spoke a foreign language.

  Dick glanced over at the toilet, positioned dangerously close to the cot. Years of less than adequate maintenance had left brown calcium deposit rings around the bowl of the porcelain.

  He looked around, but there were no cleaning supplies to be found.

  “At least it’s just me,” he said, trying hard to look at the positives. Having to share a cell with another person would be terrible with a toilet mere feet from his bed.

  That’s how it all started, though, Dick realized, thinking of the interconnecting network of pipes under the floor. If it hadn’t been for that one night, that blocked pipe then none of this would have happened.

  Would they execute me? Dick wondered with a gulp. He couldn’t remember off the top of his head whether or not Germany still used the death penalty.

  Not that it would matter much anyway. If they wanted him dead, he would die. Simple as that.

  It wasn’t a very reassuring thought.

  Dick passed a long, spindly finger over the text emblazoned on the front of his orange jumpsuit.

  “54373. I guess that’s me, now.”

  But why? He had done nothing wrong. As far as he knew, anyway. Dick sighed. Maybe it was his fault, after all.

  It was his fault for getting in over his head, for not just going home and continuing his dull life. He should have known better than to get involved with charming secret agents and beautiful women.

  That wasn’t him, after all. All he had ever wanted was a friend.

  “You’ve got the wrong person!” He shouted to a passing guard, who didn’t even slow down in his stride.

  “I don’t even think that they speak English,” Dick said to himself sadly.

  He could still remember those faces, all looking at him, looking more like beast than man in that great hall with the heavy wooden door.

  “Deep breaths,” Dick told himself. “You’ve got to stay positive.”

  But the stress of imprisonment in a foreign country where no-one understood him was too much to take.

  Dick put his hands on his face, turned towards the wall and sobbed silently.

  Chapter Two

  One Year Earlier

  Sarah Nieminen took a deep breath to steady her nerves and checked the safety on her suppressed .22 caliber High Standard HDM/S.

  The cold Siberian air showed her breath on the wind, even though spring was right around the corner.

  It was always cold in Siberia.

  She wanted to stamp her feet to stay warm, but that was out of the question. Her target was mere feet away, and any unnecessary noise might alert the man she was hunting.

  Sarah recalled the mission dossier with near eidetic precision.

  One target. Victor Sokolov. His mug shot showed a face with robust Slavic features – a balding head, a hook nose and a perpetual shadow of stubble across his jawline.

  Five foot nine inches tall. About two hundred and fifteen pounds.

  When she had studied his features, she had noted that his eyes didn’t have any spark of cleverness behind them. This detail meant nothing, of course, as a CIA operative she’d been trained to take every threat seriously.

  But Sarah couldn’t help but think that the target which she was hunting wasn’t the ringleader of the operation, as the dossier had suggested.

  No time for that now. It was imperative that Sarah maintained her focus. She could see him now, sitting inside, not even ten feet away from her. Her feet crunched softly against the light snow as she peered through the window into the log cabin.

  He was smoking something out of a wooden pipe. The target’s eyes were bloodshot and puffy, and Sarah could smell the distinct odor of cannabis, even through the glass pane window.

  She smiled. He would be sluggish and slow. Even though the man outweighed her by nearly one hundred pounds, she was confident that she would be able to immobilize him. She had trained in hand-to-hand combat for over fifteen years, held a black belt in ju-jitsu.

  Sokolov wouldn’t be the first oversized man she’d taken down.

  She tried the doorknob slowly, quiet as a ghost. It was locked. No matter. Bending over she put her pack on the ground and took out her lock-picking kit.

  She took off her gloves and wrapped her slender, feminine fingers around the pick and got to work. It didn’t take more than a moment to hear the satisfying snickt of the lock opening.

  Sarah stole another glance through the window, tucking a strand of brown hair which had escaped from her ponytail behind her ear. Victor Sokolov hadn’t heard a thing, as far as she could tell.

  The cabin looked bare. A fire raged in the hearth in the corner of the room, and a cot was in the far corner, blankets spilling on the ground around it.

  Flexing her fingers, Sarah tugged the gloves back on and slunk towards the door.

  The damned cold.

  In actuality, the temperature wasn’t unusually cold for Siberia in early March, but Sarah’s home was in Houston
, Texas where the mercury seldom dipped below 55 Fahrenheit.

  The lithe CIA operative considered opening the heavy wood door slowly but discarded the thought immediately. The element of surprise would be vital in subduing her target so she couldn’t risk an improperly oiled hinge ruining the entire operation.

  Boots to asses, she thought as she cracked open the door a fraction of an inch and delivered a swift kick right below the doorknob.

  Victor Sokolov looked up in surprise, the pipe dangling from his lips as Sarah burst in. She pointed her handgun at the Georgian as she surveyed the other corners of the room.

  They were alone, just as the dossier had suggested.

  “Don’t move motherfucker,” she snarled. Sarah could see now the dull fascination, the look of disbelief. He probably had fantasized about a petite and pretty woman walking into the cottage, but not like this.

  She kept the barrel of the gun pointed at Victor as she back peddled to the door and closed it, locked it.

  I hope he’s not too stoned to talk.

  “Who are you?” He said. His Eastern European accent was thick, and he slurred his words as he talked.

  “Put your goddamned hands up before I blow them off,” Sarah said, cursing the errant lock of dark brown hair which had once again fallen on her face.

  The Slav complied.

  “Answer my questions and you’ll walk out of here,” she said. “Who were the weapons for?”

  “Veapons? I do not know veapons,” he said, his eyes on the long barrel of Sarah’s suppressed handgun.

  “That was a stupid answer,” Sarah said with vitriol, aiming at Victor’s foot.

  “Vait! Vait!” He cried.

  “Ten seconds,” Sarah said. She knew his type. They only responded to power. If that meant that she had to shoot him in the foot, or the knee, then so be it.

  “Five, four, three…”

  “Veapons for Black Eagle!”

  What the fuck is that?

  “Keep talking,” she said, wrapping her index finger around the trigger.

  “You don’t understand. They vill kill me.”

  “I vill not care,” Sarah responded, mocking his accent as she shook the gun slightly. She could see his bloodshot eyes, his dilated pupils staring at the barrel. “We could offer amnesty, you know. Get you to a safe house.”

  But he shut his mouth and refused to say another word.

  Sarah sighed and shot him in the foot. The silenced weapon thwooped, but she heard a crack. She’d broken a bone in his foot, most likely.

  “You bitch!” He said, his face twisted in a grimace of pain and anger.

  “Keep your goddamned hands where I can see them,” Sarah said. He was saying something in a foreign language. Georgian, most likely. She didn’t speak it, but she would put money down that he was swearing at her. “What is Black Eagle?” She repeated.

  But Sokolov, his face pale with shock, refused to say anything.

  Sarah sighed. She had anticipated that this could be an issue. Slavs were a stubborn bunch, after all. She didn’t have time to sit and wait for him to come around. The watch on her wrist beeped. Ten minutes to extraction.

  If the Slav wasn’t going to talk, she would find another way to complete the mission.

  The USB drive.

  It would be the next best thing if Sokolov refused to come with her.

  “Where is the flash drive?”

  “I do not know flash drive,” he said.

  “Chrissakes,” Sarah responded. She slid over to Victor with the grace of a cat and smashed the but of the gun against his temple. “Flash drive, now!”

  “Wery dangerous,” he said. “You vill get both of us killed.”

  “I think you’ve got more pressing problems right now, asshole,” she said, indicating at the gun pointed at his head.

  Outside the wind howled angrily. Sokolov shook his head slowly.

  He was afraid, Sarah realized. But not just of the gun pointed at his head. Whatever was on that flash drive must be important.

  “It is in drawer,” he said, pointing at a desk some ten feet away. Sarah walked over slowly, keeping her gun trained at Sokolov.

  But the moment she glanced away she saw movement in her peripherals. Quickly, with trained grace and precision, she turned, planted her feet and placed two shots into his head.

  Victor Sokolov slumped over dead, blood oozing from twin holes in his skull. On his lap, formerly hidden in the chair, was a Magnum 44. A veritable hand cannon.

  “Idiot,” she said as she rummaged through the drawer. He didn’t have to die. She’d seen the but of the gun sticking out from the couch even from outside the cottage.

  Finally, she pulled out a flash drive marked with an eagle drawn in black.

  Looking back at the dead Slav she could see a matching tattoo on his neck.

  “This must be it, then.” She pocketed the drive and gave a cursory glance around the rest of the cottage.

  Nothing else here. Her task accomplished, Sarah put her fur-lined hood over her head and walked back out into the howling Siberian darkness.

  Light burned from the cabins around her as she escaped into the wilderness undetected.

  A question burned in her mind. The dossier had indicated that Sokolov had killed over ten men. He had been an arms dealer. They didn’t get much nastier than that.

  How could a hardened man like Victor Sokolov be so afraid of them?

  What the fuck is Black Eagle?

  As Sarah Nieminen escaped to the extraction point, the pipe on Victor’s lap slowly burned out, as a small gray column of smoke drifted towards the wooden ceiling.

  Chapter Three

  Sometimes, through no fault of their own, extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. They don’t look for it, but it's unavoidable, and it’s there. Such is the case of Richard Mitey, who’s ridiculous name had merited him a lifetime of ridicule and mockery.

  Why not just change your name, you might ask? An adult Dick discovered that the cost of a name change was substantially more than he would have ever imagined, especially for someone who was laughed out of almost every job interview he’d ever had.

  It turns out that when your name resembles a prominent part of the male anatomy, there aren’t a lot of employers who take you seriously.

  More than that, it would have broken his Mama’s heart, may she rest in peace, if he had changed his name.

  “It’s yours, and you should be proud of it. You can’t change who y’are, Dickey,” He would hear her say in her southern twang from time to time in his youth.

  Dick Mitey had only held down one job in his entire life: he was a waste technician at the local sewage plant. In an unusual stroke of good fortune, his boss thought it was hilarious that someone with the name of Dick Mitey should have such a shitty job and hired him on the spot.

  It was at the waste management plant that Dick Mitey’s life changed forever.

  Dick was working the overnight shift, as always. He’d been happy to get the job since making friends had never been something that he had been able to do quickly. He had been looking forward to the forced socialization which would come with working with other people. But Josh, his boss, had promptly put him on the evening shift.

  Now Dick Mitey was not one to complain at all, but after the third year of constant late shifts, he had come in a few hours early to discuss the subject with Josh.

  “No can do Peener! The rest of the guys, they have families and shit. You wouldn’t want to take them away from their families, would you?” He asked, putting a hand through his bleached blonde hair. Dick had admitted that he did not.

  He didn’t know how many times he had asked Josh not to call him that. But every time he was ignored. Everyone else thought he was hilarious. Dick did not.

  “What about John, though? He doesn’t have a family.”

  “You didn’t hear?” Josh whispered conspiratorially, “John has been diagnosed with Genital Retraction Syndrome. He thinks his you-
know is shrinking.”

  “That sounds awful,” said Dick Mitey.

  “Yeah, so we’ll need to keep him on the day shift. For his treatments. You understand, don’t you?”

  Dick didn’t, but he said he did.