The Milestone Protocol Ernest Dempsey (best short novels of all time .txt) 📖

probably at home by their fires or in front of televisions, snuggled up on the couch watching a late show. More, she figured, were cozy in their beds.

She blinked wearily and realized how tired she really was from all the travel and from the long conversation with Miyamoto and her father. The information they’d given her was staggering, to say the least. None of it was easy to swallow.

She still had difficulty grasping the fact that she and her father were part of an ancient order of Shinobi who’d branched away from the main faction. The information swirled in her head, as it had for the last several hours.

A yawn forced its way out of her mouth, and she cupped her hand over her face out of habit. Shaking off the weariness, she sat up straighter and leaned toward the wheel. How long had she gone without a good night’s sleep? She thought back to the night before, the last several nights, and shook off that possibility of blame. Adriana always slept well at her father’s estate. There truly was no place like home, and whenever she went back to the manor outside of Madrid, it felt like the walls wrapped their arms around her and held her close.

Another round of fatigue crept up on her, as it had before when driving late at night. She remembered when she was younger, a time in her life when she never felt tired behind the wheel. Back then, she could drive for hours into the earliest parts of the morning without batting an eye. Age, she assumed, was catching up to her.

She fought off that thought, telling herself she was still plenty young. Only in her late thirties, Adriana still considered herself to be in her prime.

Keeping to the right lane except to pass slower drivers, she took deep breaths every now and then when she sensed her breathing growing shallow, monotonous, sleep-rhythmic. Fifteen minutes away from her destination, she looked out the windows at the lights of Stockholm. Adriana imagined the colorful homes, shops, and cafés painted in bright reds, yellows, blues, and greens. She’d walked the promenades between the high-steeple churches on a few occasions. It was a lovely city, full of warm, friendly people. Adriana had considered moving there more than once, or at the very least establishing another residence, but her time was limited, and she was already stretched so thin she almost never had the chance to visit her Nevada mountain home.

At night, none of the buildings shone with the vibrant colors that sunlight unleashed. Instead, everything was dark, save for the streetlights and windows twinkling in the night.

A sudden movement behind her caught her attention. Two lights shifted from the left lane behind a car she’d passed minutes before. The passing vehicle accelerated quickly and then merged in behind Adriana.

She shifted a little to wake herself up, but she didn’t panic. Adriana never panicked. There were times, of course, during her adventures when she’d been filled with concern or been worried to the point of almost becoming irrational, but her lifetime of training had solved that issue.

Her heartbeat remained steady as she kept her eyes flashing back and forth between the road ahead and the car behind. The city began to fade out the window. The darkness of the countryside took over. Stars twinkled brighter with every passing second.

The car behind her, however, didn’t change. They remained a safe distance behind, probably four car lengths, and never wavered.

Adriana knew that was a problem.

The other driver had seemed eager to get around the slower vehicle, but not Adriana. She knew exactly what to do next. Killing the cruise control, she allowed her rental car to slow down by five kilometers per hour. She kept a keen eye on the driver trailing her to see if that would instigate a pass from them, or if they would simply slow down and stay in line.

Her suspicions proved correct when the other driver likewise slowed, matching her speed. She knew that her move would tip her hand in less than a minute when the other driver realized she’d slowed down on purpose. So, she sped back up again, this time accelerating to a speed five kilometers per hour faster than her original speed.

Again, the tail increased and matched her pace, staying right around four to five car lengths behind her.

Adriana swallowed hard and ground her front teeth. Great, she thought. How did I pick up a tail? Who even knows I’m here right now?

The list of people with the correct answer to that question was a short one, and she didn’t like the names appearing on it—one being her father, another Miyamoto. But was there another way to find out where she was? As far as the airport officials knew, she was not Adriana Villa. They likely wouldn’t even know about her true identity, save for a previous trip when she’d used it. Her collection of false papers and passports were updated regularly to make certain she kept her profile as low as humanly possible.

When she met Sean, he’d immediately understood her need for such clandestine tactics, even though she wasn’t part of an international agency as he had been in his previous life. He’d used aliases many times during his missions with Axis, but when Sean left the agency to join the IAA, he left all those identities behind. Or most of them, at least.

Diego Villa had impressed upon her at an early age that trust was a luxury, not a privilege or a right. For her to trust someone with the truth could mean her undoing. Throughout most of her life—indeed, all of her adult life—Adriana had dipped in and out of foreign countries while going by names created from thin air, as far as she knew. It had been beyond habitual. It became normal for her. Only later in life had she realized that her normal was far different.

But it was that sense of normal, those instincts