Mortal Seed

A lovely CIA spy is sent into Russia to kill her counterpart. However, things go very wrong and she is captured. The outcome triggers a bizarre series of events that no one would have expected.

Three excerpts from Mortal Seed...

On the third day, I rose early to eat breakfast in the cafeteria. It's often useful to hear the current gossip.
I wasn't disappointed.
"Putie is feeling more international pressure over his suspected killings," someone at the next table said, "Talk is that he's going to back off and opt for more prison and possibly more prisoner exchanges."
"Ya," said another lady, but with a British accent, "I'm glad I'm not in field work. Did you hear about that French spy the Ruskies just released?"
Eyes lifted to study her. I kept eating and pretending I wasn't listening.
"Well, it seems the Russians now have a new improved pig hormone... Shot that woman full of it. Four years later, they traded her for an old Soviet spy... Except..."
She hesitated to study the faces at the table.
"Except," she continued, "the poor woman weighed eight stone when she was captured and when she came back, she was thirty-three stone."
"What's a stone weigh?" someone asked.
"Fourteen pounds."
"My God!" she said, "That's four hundred sixty-two pounds."

Some hours later, the sound of the newspaper being folded penetrated my coma. As I began to regain my senses the aroma of beef stroganoff penetrated my thoughts. The newspaper continued to rattle.
Sensing that I was waking, Petr read from his paper out loud, "An unknown assailant attacked office worker, Dmitriy Zerev as he was taking his morning swim in the old People's quarry. The assailant was shot and killed by a Militia officer in training as she tried to escape. It was determined that she was an American tourist suffering from dementia. But since she had no identification, Moscow authorities had no idea who to return the body to. She was cremated and the ashes will be held pending further identification. Mister Zerev is in the qualified hands of Moscow City Clinical Hospital and is expected to make a full recovery."
He closed and folded the paper saying, "That was you. You are now officially dead."

I turned to see my reflection in the old worn mirror. I saw a person with a much larger face and huge puffy cheeks staring back at me. Immediately, my eyes locked in those chipmunk cheeks. Previously, my face had been like my figure, slender, perfectly formed and quite pretty.
"The 'pig' look," I thought in disgust and stepped back into the wall in an attempt to see the rest of me.
I managed to see the top of my bulging middle. I wasn't liking what I saw. I looked like a fat stripper who'd had breast augmentations that were way too large to be natural. What were they turning me into?