Shadow Pass Read Free Page A

this.
    “Nobody disturbs me when I am eating!” growled Nagorski, lifting the young man up onto the tips of his toes. “Nobody survives that kind of stupidity!”
    Kirov nodded towards a black car, its engine running, pulled up at the curbside. “He is waiting, Comrade Nagorski.”
    Nagorski glanced over his shoulder. He noticed the shape of someone sitting in the backseat. He could not make out a face. Then he turned back to the young man. “Who are you?” he asked.
    “My name is Kirov. Major Kirov.”
    “Major?” Nagorski let go of him suddenly. “Why didn’t you say so?” Now he stood back and brushed at Kirov’s crumpled lapel. “We might have avoided this unpleasantness.” He strode across to the car and climbed into the rear seat.
    Major Kirov got in behind the wheel.
    Nagorski settled back into his seat. Only then did he look at the person sitting beside him. “You!” he shouted.
    “Good afternoon,” said Pekkala.
    “Oh, shit,” replied Colonel Nagorski.
    I NSPECTOR P EKKALA WAS A TALL, POWERFUL-LOOKING MAN WITH broad shoulders and slightly narrowed eyes the color of mahogany.He had been born in Lappeenranta, Finland, at a time when it was still a Russian colony. His mother was a Laplander, from Rovaniemi in the north.
    At the age of eighteen, on the wishes of his father, Pekkala traveled to Petrograd in order to enlist in the Tsar’s elite Finnish Legion. There, early in his training, he had been singled out by the Tsar for duty as his own Special Investigator. It was a position which had never existed before and which would one day give Pekkala powers considered unimaginable before the Tsar chose to create them.
    In preparation for this, he was given over to the police, then to the State Police—the Gendarmerie—and after that to the Tsar’s Secret Police, who were known as the Okhrana. In those long months, doors were opened to him which few men even knew existed. At the completion of Pekkala’s training, the Tsar presented to him the only badge of office he would ever wear—a heavy gold disk, as wide as the length of his little finger. Across the center was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disk, and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large round emerald. Together, these elements formed the unmistakable shape of an eye. Pekkala never forgot the first time he held the disk in his hand, the way he had traced his fingertip over the eye, feeling the smooth bump of the jewel, like a blind man reading braille.
    It was because of this badge that Pekkala became known as the Emerald Eye. The public knew little else about him. His photograph could not be published or even taken. In the absence of facts, legends grew up around Pekkala, including rumors that he was not human, but rather was some demon conjured into life through the black arts of an arctic shaman.
    Throughout his years of service, Pekkala answered only to the Tsar. In that time he learned the secrets of an empire, and whenthat empire fell, and those who shared the secrets had taken them to their graves, Pekkala was surprised to find himself still breathing.
    Captured during the Revolution, he was sent to the Siberian labor camp of Borodok, where he tried to forget the world he’d left behind.
    But the world he’d left behind did not forget him.
    After seven years in the forest of Krasnagolyana, during which time he lived more like a wild animal than a man, Pekkala was brought back to Moscow on the orders of Stalin himself.
    Since then, maintaining an uneasy truce with his former enemies, Pekkala had continued in his role as Special Investigator.
    D EEP BENEATH THE STREETS OF M OSCOW , C OLONEL R OLAN N AGORSKI sat on a metal chair in a cramped cell of the Lubyanka prison. The walls were painted white. A single lightbulb, protected by a dusty metal cage, lit the room.
    Nagorski had taken off his jacket and hung it on the