Shortly after the Spetsnaz left, the rain let up and I had all my things packed into a briefcase, ready to check out of the hotel room.

But of course, there was the situation of the card I was left with, and the strange number it had next to the word ‘Paradise’.

As a HIVE agent, the right thing to do was to report the entire incident to my overseer. Major Donn was an interesting man, he often fed me information at strange times in the middle of the night and had the audacity to leave out intel that I would eventually figure out by myself.

To make it even, I think I'll about reporting my little situation later since I had a lot to consider first, but for now It was time to leave.

I checked over my room over once more, like I was searching for a loose screw. I didn't want to leave behind anything once I checked out, and I was feeling paranoid about bugs the Spetsnaz might have put around the room.

And that’s when I noticed it, a file of documents shoved underneath my hotel pillows. It was by chance that I caught the distinct beige colour of the folder peeking out from the end of the sheets, like it had been carefully placed there in that manner, especially for me.

So the Spetnaz had left me something.

I dashed over to it, leaving my briefcase at the foot of the bed quickly to inspect my findings.

It wasn’t a coincidence that I found the document just before I left, it had a ‘farewell present’ feel to it that I couldn’t look past.

I had to find out what was inside.

When I flicked it open I couldn't make out the details I was scanning through at first, everything was cryptically written instructions language I wasn't familiar with.

Then a picture slipped out from between the papers, and that’s when it all clicked together.

It was a picture of Sigma, saluting the American flag. Except he was younger and was wearing the cadet’s khaki coloured uniform we all were issued with for graduation day in the OSS.

This must have been his graduation picture.

Me being me, I couldn’t let go of it between my shaking hands. Sigma had no facial hair in this picture, and his eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen. Even if the photo was a little on the black and white side, I could tell from the look in his eyes that he had not seen death on the battlefield just yet.

Sigma had been innocent once. It was hard to consider something like that when his reputation was built on impossible odds.

Though it was refreshing to see.

Something in me wanted to cherish the picture, hold it close to my heart and pretend that romance was real and that I was capable of a normal thing like love.

I was twenty when I first started to develop inappropriate feelings for this man, now I’m twenty-six and I couldn’t get over him.

That was what love was like, right?

Though if I tried drawing up a profile of Sigma, I’d probably be able to throw in a few details of his physical appearance and the way he carried himself during a mission. Everything else about him … I could not confirm, even if I tried. I barely knew the truth about Sigma, or had the capacity to discover it unless I went AWOL and did a little digging.

All I really had was my fairy tale propaganda fed to me in the OSS by Kraken and the other cadets.

How pathetic.

At least with this cryptic dossier in my lap, I could finally learn something that was real about him.

Not who his parents were, or what his favourite food was. But what he accomplished with his life and how he did it.

Sigma was a man first after all, a nobody, and then he became a legend, and what I had in my lap was the truth of this legend.

I looked out the open window, it was almost midday. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to just take an hour or less out to decrypt and read through the files before I vacated the room completely.

Everything in the dossier was in English, though it wasn’t written up in the standard OSS formats, however, from what I could detect it seemed to be of Russian origin.

Did the KGB, that being the Russian secret intelligence and state security, have an entire file on Sigma? I wouldn’t be surprised, Sigma allegedly had a hand in many important roles over time.

I found a brief timeline of the missions Sigma undertook over his entire service to America, many of them left unreported or simply so classified to be recorded on paper.

He’s been in the field since he was eighteen years old, equipped with unofficial training they called ‘Machiavellian STGY’. I’ve never seen that term in the books before, it must have been some sort of top secret bullshit they never tell people like me.

And I must admit, I was a little jealous.

Then I came across the mission Sigma took before retiring, it appeared to be related to an operation in Austria. What he was doing there was rather vague, but judging from my own intuition, his presence in Austria in 1936 shouldn’t have happened in the first place, considering that America had no business putting their own military personnel there.

Undercover intervention most likely.

Well, whatever happened in Austria clearly made Sigma ‘retire’ until I met him in Congo. That much was obvious.

Or maybe his so called retirement was just another tale they told us in the OSS.

Now it was time for me to make a decision …

Do I inform HIVE about the the Spetsnaz that left an entire dossier of Sigma on my hotel bed? Or do I call the number on the card called Peace.

The hotel telephone sat innocently on the bedside table, a thin layer of dust settled upon it. My fingers were twitching, like some school girl about to call her classmate crush.

You can guess what I stupidly did next.