Walking Dead A Novel of Suspense

by Rucka, Greg

• ISBN13: 9780553589009
• ISBN10: 0553589008
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-28
• Publisher: Bantam

Summary

In this explosive new thriller, Greg Rucka, the acclaimed author of Shooting at Midnight and Patriot Acts, sets bodyguard-turned-international-fugitive Atticus Kodiak on a one-man crusade where being willing to die for your ideals isn't enough. You have to be willing to do much worse. I will take your place in times of danger. As an ex-bodyguard, Atticus Kodiak knew the sentiment well. He'd once based his career on it. Now it could cost him more than just his livelihood-- more than even his life. For as he wakes to the sound of gunfire, the nightmare is about to begin again. Atticus knew very well that people came to a place like Kobuleti to hide. After all, that's why he and Alena Cizkova had come to the secluded Georgian town in the former U.S.S.R. But Atticus never asked his friend and neighbor Bakhar Lagidze why he was in Kobuleti or what he might be hiding from. Now it's too late. Bakhar and his family have been brutally murdered, and the thuggish local police chief has declared it a murder-suicide. Everyone-- even Alena-- seems satisfied to leave it at that. Except for Atticus. He knows what the police won't acknowledge: that one person survived the bloodbath in the Lagidze household: their fourteen-year-old daughter. And the nightmare she's about to experience will make her wish she'd died with the rest. To rescue her Atticus must enter a web that takes him from Russia to Istanbul, that stretches from Dubai to Las Vegas. But what troubles Atticus the most is that Alena-- once one of the world's most dangerous assassins and a woman who fears nothing-- is clearly terrified of what he's uncovered. And as Atticus gets closer to learning why, the closer he gets to destroying the life they have made, and each other. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Greg Rucka resides with his wife and two children in Portland, Oregon, where he is at work on his next thriller, which Bantam will publish in 2010. He is the author of nine previous novels as well as numerous graphic novels, including the Eisner Award-winning Whiteout series, soon to be a motion picture starring Kate Beckinsale.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One


People came to Kobuleti to hide. It's why we were there, and it's why Bakhar Lagidze had brought his family there, and I knew it, and I never asked him why.

I should have.


I was awake but unsure of it, my eyes suddenly open, the last whispers of dream vanishing, leaving me with no true memory, just the impression that it had been unpleasant, that I had done things of which I was not proud. Full-moon blue filtered into the bedroom, shadows swayed behind the thin curtains as long pine boughs rocked in the breeze.

Our dog, Miata, an old Doberman with no voice, was pacing at the door. I tried to focus my blurred vision on him as he turned a circle in place, raised a paw to scratch at the door, then glanced back my way. I fumbled my glasses off the nightstand and onto my nose, watched as he repeated the sequence. It had been the noise or the motion or both that had pulled me from sleep, and I knew the behavior for what it was, and it shifted me fully awake, and I put a hand on Alena's shoulder.

"Trouble," I said.

She murmured, refusing to surface.

"Wake up." I'd been speaking in Georgian. I switched to Russian. "Trouble."

I looked to the door in time to see Miata finish another circuit, this time to fix me with a plea in his eyes. Any other dog, I'd have thought he was fighting a weak bladder. I slipped out of bed, felt the hardwood immediately leech heat from my feet. There was a pistol in the nightstand drawer. I put the gun down long enough to pull on my jeans.

"What's going on?" Alena asked.

"Miata's got something."

She looked at me blearily, halfheartedly shook her head, as if unsure she was dreaming this or not. "Not the alarm?"

"I'll check. Stay here."

She was readying a pistol of her own as I left the room.


The two laptops that ran our security system lived in the linen closet beside the bathroom, on the shelf above the towels. I could feel Miata's moist breath against my bare ankles as I checked each. No alerts, nothing had been tripped. Nothing on the video. Nothing in the logs. It occurred to me that Miata was now an old dog, and maybe he really did need to take a leak, nothing more.

Then he bolted away down the hall, paws clacking on the floor. I followed more slowly and caught up with him at the back door. Together we listened to the night, and whatever it was he was hearing, I wasn't. I opened the door, and stepped out after him into the summer darkness.

The air was close to cold, chilled as it came in off the Black Sea, with threads of thin fog hanging in the trees, and it was as dead silent outside the house as it had been within. I thought about going back for a shirt, but Miata had begun cautiously trotting toward the woods that ringed our house, muzzle and ears both raised, and he clearly wasn't in a mood to wait. Two will-o'-the-wisps, dim halos, blinked at me as a car came along the road that cut through the forest in the distance. The sound of the engine followed a second later, but barely, the vehicle easily half a mile away, turning along the road that led to the Lagidze home. The light, then the sound, faded.

I followed Miata to the edge of the treeline, where it bordered our backyard, put a hand on his back to calm him. Alena and I had cut down several of the trees in the past two years to clear sight lines to the perimeter, and we still had four cords of wood split and stacked and ready to keep us warm through the coming winter.

Then I heard the shots.

This time, Miata had to follow me.


Flat run, barefoot, in the forest, in the dark, it took me almost three minutes to cover the distance, and I counted gunshots as I ran. I heard a total of fourteen more, all of them sounding as if spoken by the same weapon. An engine turned as I reached the edge of the dirt road lea

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Excerpted from Walking Dead: A Novel of Suspense by Greg Rucka
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