Chapter 2: Iași

He crossed the Romanian border at 0520, through a livestock passage south of Ungheni where the fence had been propped open with a split timber for the last four years. The fixer who'd put him onto the passage in 2019 was dead, but the information wasn't.

Cole moved through low scrub with Kowalski's sidearm at his right thigh, Wren's sat-phone in his inside left, and one hundred and forty dollars in Romanian lei retrieved from Reeves's ankle wallet. The lei was for the border crossing. Reeves had always carried operational currency in multiple denominations. It was a habit Cole had argued against twice and then stopped arguing against.

He reached the road on the Romanian side at 0607. There was a truck stop three kilometers west—he'd clocked it on the approach transit two days ago, filed it as a secondary option. He walked the three kilometers in forty minutes, keeping to the road's soft shoulder, which was unlit and smelled of agricultural runoff.

The truck stop had a canteen open at this hour. He ordered coffee and a bread roll from a woman who looked at him the way people in border regions learned to look at strangers—briefly, thoroughly, and then not at all. He sat in the corner with his back to the wall and spent twenty minutes warming his hands around the cup and watching the entrance.

At 0710 he used the canteen's landline to make a call to a number in Iași.

The number rang three times. Then: "Sandu's."

"Sandu," Cole said, in Romanian. "It's Barrow." The name he'd used with Sandu for six years. "I need a sit-down."

A pause. "When."

"Today."

"I'm in Iași until noon."

"I'll be there."

He hitched a ride with a refrigerated transport truck leaving the stop at 0730. The driver was hauling dairy to Iași and didn't care about passengers as long as they sat in the cab and kept quiet. Cole kept quiet. He watched the flatland scroll past and ran the call log numbers through his memory again—the Langley exchange, the fourteen-digit string, the specific prefix block. He didn't write anything down.

The flatland between the border and Iași was the same flatland that covered most of this country—broad and low and unpretty, fields of corn stubble and sunflower wreckage left over from the harvest, the occasional cluster of buildings that looked like they'd stopped being repaired in 1985 and hadn't started again. The sky was white from horizon to horizon with the particular Romanian autumn overcast that wasn't quite fog. The truck's heater worked in the sense that it ran—not in the sense that it was warm. Cole put his hands in his jacket pockets and let the cold register without doing anything about it. Cold was useful. It kept you awake and it kept you focused on the next hour rather than anything further out than that.

Sandu Preda operated out of a repair garage on the south side of Iași, near the rail yards. The garage repaired motorcycles, technically. What it actually repaired was the documentation problems of people moving through the region without institutional support. Cole had used him twice before—once to move an asset who'd spooked at the exfil site, once to acquire a clean vehicle registration for a surveillance op that ran long. Both transactions had been clean and reasonably priced.

He arrived at the garage at 1040. Sandu met him in the workshop with a look that lasted slightly longer than usual.

"You look like you came through the ground," Sandu said, in Romanian.

"Close enough."

They went to the back office. Sandu produced a bottle and two glasses. Cole put his hand over his glass. Sandu poured his own and left the bottle.

"What do you need?"

Cole told him—partial version, operational details only. Documentation for a new transit identity, enough to reach Prague. Cash advance against his current account—he kept funds with Sandu for this purpose, running balance, updated when he could access the channel. A prepaid phone.

Sandu wrote numbers on a pad while Cole talked, then put the pen down. "There's a complication."

Cole waited.

"Yesterday morning a watch notice went up on a transit alias I know you've used. Barrow's clean—you've never moved Barrow through here and I don't think they have the network coverage to trace it this far east. But the other name."

Cole knew which other name. The Agency alias. The one on four years of documentation and mission infrastructure. "What channel."

"Came through Bucharest. But the origination stamp—" Sandu paused. He was old enough in this trade to know that hesitation was its own kind of information. "My contact said it came from Langley's CI center. Not the field station."

"How long ago."

"Yesterday morning. Call it sixteen hours after you would have—" Sandu stopped. Reconsidered. "Early. Fast. That's all I'll say."

Cole said nothing for a moment. He was running the arithmetic. A BOLO generated from the Counter-Intelligence center at Langley, not from the field. A field BOLO went through the Chief of Station. It took eight to twelve hours to process, longer if the CoS was managing competing priorities. A CI-center BOLO went directly from a senior official's office with authorization codes that bypassed the field entirely.

Someone with senior access had pushed this within hours of the Moldova strike.

Someone who already knew the result before any field report could have reached them.

"The transit papers," Cole said. "Two days."

Sandu nodded. "I can do tomorrow afternoon."

"Tomorrow morning."

Sandu looked at him. "Morning," he agreed.

Cole accepted the prepaid phone Sandu pulled from a desk drawer and paid for it from the lei. Sandu gave him the address of a room above a hardware store two streets over, run by a cousin who didn't ask for documentation. Cole went to the room, cleaned the wound behind his ear with water from the bathroom tap, and lay down on the narrow bed with his boots on and the sidearm under his forearm.

The room above the hardware store was narrow and smelled of turpentine from the shop below. There was a window over the alley. He checked the lock—a simple latch, functional—and left it latched. He put the sidearm on the floor between his right hand and the wall, within reach but not visible from the doorway if the door opened unexpectedly. Then he lay down.

He did not sleep. He reconstructed the timeline in the dark—the strike, the sat-phone, the Langley number, the BOLO generated from CI's center by a senior official, within hours.

The field office would have taken twelve hours minimum to know Cole was still alive. Whoever pushed the BOLO hadn't needed to know. They'd pushed it on a decision, not a confirmation.

Outside, a tram ground past on the tracks two blocks over. Cole tracked the sound until it faded, then started over from the beginning.

The Langley exchange had a specific prefix block used by two divisions. Counter-Intelligence was one of them. He ran the number again. The prefix narrowed it further—it wasn't the main CI floor. It was a suite-level extension.

Senior official. MERIDIAN-adjacent or above. Access to CI function. Fast enough to move within hours of the strike.

He didn't have a name yet. He had the shape of a name.

Outside the window, the gray was lightening to something that passed for morning in this part of the country. Cole looked at the water stain on the ceiling and noted that it was shaped like nothing in particular, and waited.