Red Star Rising

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Charlie Muffin decided it was a toss-up between the British embassy’s third secretary or the Russian Foreign Ministry official who’d be the first to throw up or simply faint. Or messily do both, not necessarily in any order. Charlie didn’t feel that good himself. It had been a busy, largely sleepless forty-eight hours since his emergency London assigning, and he’d never liked mortuaries anyway. The unease wasn’t helped by a mortuary assistant four autopsy tables away, munching a meat-overflowing sandwich. The grayness of the sandwich filling matched the color of the surrounding corpses, including that of the man around whom they were grouped.

From the size of the entry wound in the base of the skull, Charlie calculated the bullet was from a Russian-manufactured 9mm Makarov, its tip cut into a dum-dum cross to flatten on initial impact in order to take away on exit the entire face, including both jawbones. The fingertips on the right hand had individually been burned away, either by acid or heat. The pathologist, a fat, dough-faced man who hadn’t been introduced by name, declared the amputation of the left arm to have been a surgical operation, carried out several years earlier. “But not particularly well,” he added, professionally critical. “A hurried job.”

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