Enjoy this free sample of my upcoming historical thriller The Deepest Cut

Prologue

It’s 1982.

The U. S. And the Soviet Union prosecute a silent struggle for ideological supremacy between Capitalism and Communism. To keep the horror of all out thermonuclear war at bay, the combatants do their dirtiest deeds under cover of darkness, with full deniability. Rather than soldiers and armies, the battles are fought by spies and special forces in clashes than never see the light of a newspaper article.

They call it the Cold War, but in trouble spots around the world it flares dangerously hot.

Chapter One

Marco Villarta was dead. Murdered. And Clara’s pistol had been used to kill him.

She stood wrapped in darkness on a street in Panama City’s Terraplén district. Every passing second upped the danger of being caught. At three-thirty in the morning, revelers coming home late from the clubs or workers whose shift started early could pass her at any moment, and the longer she stood there looking at Marco’s body, the greater the risk.

Even so, Clara Verona wasted precious seconds staring. Marco was dead. Her mission had probably died with him.

Night wrapped her in anonymity for now, but not for long. When the sun rose, it would reveal a woman with blonde hair in a ponytail, brown eyes, skin that tanned easily here in the tropics, and the lean physical fitness of someone who used her muscles for a living. Long ago, the Verona family earned their money on a fishing boat, and Clara had grown up helping her father with it.

Around her, the rain tapered off, leaving only sprinkles. The streets mumbled and groaned as they woke up. Her jeans and loose blouse felt damp against her skin; her hair clung to her scalp.

The warbling tone of sirens sounded in the distance, a sign that the time for staring was over. Clara scooped up the 9mm Makarov pistol lying beside her dead contact. It was the standard-issue sidearm of the Soviet military. She’d been issued it when she’d been given this assignment. Discovering it missing from her room was what had brought her out here tonight. She’d found her pistol, and found far worse besides.

The gun was obviously intended to be discovered with the dead body. No sense letting her enemies’ scheme go as planned, whoever the enemies were, so she recovered it. Clara flicked the safety on, then shoved the weapon mostly inside the pocket of her jeans.

Something had gone wrong—badly wrong. A simple assignment to infiltrate the Communist Revolutionary Front had just turned deadly, and Clara suspected she was going to need that pistol. Whoever had killed Marco couldn’t possibly have any good intentions toward her, or toward her mission.

In Terraplén the buzz of people grew as dawn drew inexorably nearer. Poverty was the norm here, and the foot traffic consisted largely of service industry workers coming home after the bars closed. Dock workers and laborers made up the rest. Ramshackle two-story buildings bordered tiny, cramped streets. Only a short distance from her location, unfortunately, sat the headquarters of the Guardia Nacionale, or National Guard, Panama’s combined military and police.

Which, of course, meant they were quick to respond to the scene of the murders. A police car pulled into the narrow street behind her, visible only because of its flashing sirens, cutting off one of the two choices of escape routes. A voice shouted “Usted queda detenida!” at her.

That was the Spanish version of “You’re under arrest,” but Clara paid it no mind. She took off sprinting like a bolt of lightning.

She rounded the corner in front of her just before a second police car could cut it off. She immediately took another turn and cornered again, but the sound of racing footsteps behind her would not go away. Sirens wailed all around her. Shouts of “Detenida!” echoed off the buildings.

Clara had been very well trained in police procedure, and she knew that the police would swamp the streets with officers until they caught the suspect. It was a standard practice worldwide.

Her training also included the fact that the National Guard of Panama, awash in a culture of corruption that sank down from the top, had far different ideas of due process than cops in America. Getting caught was not an option, so she ran faster. But the footfalls behind her got louder, accompanied by more shouts of “Usted queda detenida!”

She whipped around a corner. In the fraction of a second she was out of view of the cops, instead of sprinting on, she pressed her back to the wall of the building and waited. She drew her pistol back out of her pocket. Seconds later a green-uniformed officer rounded the edge of the structure looking for her, gun in hand.

He failed to check his six, and that was all the advantage Clara needed.  She put the Makarov to his temple.

He froze without her having to say anything, and the moonlight offered her a picture of her victim. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tall. Muscular. And men just looked good in uniforms, it was a fact of life. If she had met him in a bar back home, she might have let him buy her a drink.

But they were not in a bar, and they were not back home.

She said, “Call them off or die.”

Any American who heard her speak would have said the words came out in perfect Spanish. Of course, the cop was not American; Clara had no doubt that he could identify her Cuban accent. In a way that worked in her favor.

“There are a dozen of us chasing you,” he growled back. “You can’t kill us all, that gun doesn’t have enough bullets. Reinforcements will be here any second.”

“Not if you call them off. Your radio. Use it. Move slowly, so I don’t do anything to ruin this little moment we’re having here.”

Just because they weren’t in a bar back home didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little entertainment, after all.

In reality, though, Clara sincerely hoped she didn’t have to shoot this man. The situation was bad already. Killing a law enforcement officer would make it far worse.

Sadly, the cop seemed to know that too. “Go ahead. Shoot me. The gunshot will just draw the others faster.”

If you’ve got a gun, pull the trigger.

Her old instructor’s words whispered in her memory, but Clara decided not to follow his advice. Not this time.

Rendering a human being unconscious is far harder than most people think. Not long ago, a very good instructor taught her how to do this, but then advised her never to try it. To be done successfully, the key is to impart a sudden motion to the skull that causes the brain to jostle back and forth inside it.

She said, “If we meet again, try to remember that I didn’t kill you when I could have.”

Then Clara shifted her pistol to her left hand, whipped it out of the way and drove her right fist with maximum possible force into the man’s temple, just as they taught her at the Farm. The cop crumpled to the ground. She dashed away into the night.