"BETTER THAN KILLING EVE, BETTER THAN JAMES BOND"
-- What's it like to be the bad girls? 'Killing Eve' meets '1984' and 'The Da Vinci Code.' Helen--now a refugee girl--is recruited by the CIA & turned into an AI spy. She's helped by animal-loving gods, and enticed by a woman serial killer. -- Getting closer to Felicity, she deliberately let down her guard and allowed the woman to throw her. So when it was over at Moskva-reka, Felicity was on top of Houston pinning her down in the snow.
'I've got ninety pounds on you, Blonde, Nightingale, Muhic, whatever the fuck you're called, ' shouted Felicity.
Houston pretended to struggle.
'And it's all muscle, ' lied Felicity.
'Is it now?' Houston feigned to struggle some more, then exhaled in mock exasperation. 'You'll have to get off, I need to drink.'
Felicity reached out her gloved hand and collected some loose snow from beside Houston's head. The woman wiped a strand of the girl's black hair from her mouth, and cupped her hand over the girl's lips. 'Open up, eat this, ' she said to the girl.
As Houston started to open her lips, Hebe spoke in her head: Danger, do not allow your emotions to--. Houston cut her off: Silence, Hebe.
Houston held her lips open. It was a small thing, a moment. Opening her mouth, to allow Felicity to feed her snow. But it changed everything.
-- Blanka was haunted by memories of her young mother, in ways she could barely acknowledge. A dream of a woman plummeting from a castle window into a river consumed her waking and sleeping. It was her mother--falling from Castle Sant-Angelo--the Vatican Holy Inquisition Headquarters in Rome, into the River Tiber. Then, the dream voices chimed in. One was Bill Clinton's, President at the time. "The daughter of Admiral William Virgil Maguire, was thrown in that filthy river like so much stinking garbage," he said. "Who killed Kitty Maguire, John? MI6?" In the dream Blanka was clinging to her mother, bobbing up and down in the river, but her mind was somewhere else far away with those voices in her head. "She is my mother and she's fucking dead!" she screamed at the voices.
"It wasn't us," said another voice, "but it's complicated." Blanka recognized it as John Deutch, the Director of the CIA. Deutch kept talking, muttering almost. "It could have been the Fatima secret, we're not sure. We don't really know how big it was."
"Well, she took it to her grave," Clinton said.
Then the telescope was stripped away and Blanka was in the muddy water with her mother, desperately struggling to save her. "I won't let you die, I won't let you die," she kept repeating. She was holding her, felt the cold of her wet blue dress over her swollen pregnant belly, saw the garrote wound round her throat.
"Hart is one of the good guys," Deutch's voice continued.
"Frankenstein was one of the good guys," replied Clinton. "It's the monsters I'm worried about."
