Brewer said, “It’s Violator we’re talking about. He’s always got a weapon. Jenner’s team is still seventy mikes out. You can get there in twenty-five. Your job is to support Violator and capture or kill the primary target personality, but if Violator goes off mission in any respect, you need to bypass him by any means necessary and get the job done.”

Zack held on to the dashboard as the SUV bounced over the rough terrain. “And I take it you suspect that is a possibility?”

“There is a prisoner there. Zakharov’s daughter. Violator might try to recover her at the expense of the operation.”

“Here we go again,” Zack groaned. This wouldn’t be the first time he and Court Gentry had operated at cross purposes.

CHAPTER 51

   Court sat on a rooftop, five feet back from the edge, and rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t sleepy, really. He’d gotten a few hours on the train ride up from London the evening before. No, his eyes were blurry because he’d drunk another scotch on his way to Lauriston Place, pulling his motorbike over outside the pub and not even bothering to lock it up, because he was in and out of the establishment with a drink in him in well under a minute.

He could tell the alcohol was having some effect on his overall pain level. Things still hurt; most things on his body still hurt, but he was able to move around more freely now, which had been his aim.

He looked out over the street towards the target location now. It seemed like the tenth building he’d had to conduct overwatch on in the past seventy-two hours, but he was too hazy to count them all. The location appeared abandoned, just a four-story brick structure with shuttered windows and no hint of light or movement behind them. He found this odd here on the edge of the campus of the University of Edinburgh. Classes were out for the summer, mostly, but there were still quite a few students and tourists around, and the street below Court was a bustling thoroughfare all but gridlocked with double-decker buses, taxis, and private vehicles.

It wasn’t even one p.m., so Court worried he might have to hit this location during daylight with civilians potentially in the line of fire.

Whatever the hell was going on in there, he hoped it at least continued till nightfall.

Brewer called and told him the assets en route were twenty minutes out. He told her to notify them to park in a lot a quarter mile down the hill, just at the base of a long outdoor staircase that ran down a narrow close. He then instructed her to tell the driver to stay with the vehicle and vector the asset to his position.

Two men entering the large quiet building across the street would be suboptimal, Court told himself, so he still hoped the Ground Branch team en route had time to make it into the area before he had to act.

No sooner did he think this, however, than he saw a Mercedes roll out of the garage under the building. Looking through his binoculars quickly, he registered a pair of wide-chested tough-looking men in the front seat, and in the backseat was an older bearded man in a suit. Court recognized him as the man who might or might not have been Zoya’s father.

Either way, he was Court’s target.

Court had a motorcycle; he could get down to street level and catch the black Mercedes in traffic. But he didn’t move from his hide. Filled with indecision, he just glanced back and forth between the building and the luxury sedan as it moved slowly in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Zoya was not in that vehicle, of this he was certain. This meant she was likely still inside the building across the street.

The decision should have been a hard one for him to make, but in the end, it wasn’t.

He would not be leaving. His mission, right now anyway, was Zoya, Brewer’s orders be damned. But it also occurred to him that with the departure of some of the players from the scene, he had no way of knowing if others inside would be leaving soon, as well. He didn’t want to run the risk of seeing Zoya rolling out of there in the back of a truck full of Russian gangsters.

He decided to enter the building and find her.

There was a mantra his principal trainer at CIA, a man he only knew as Maurice, used to drill into him time and again. “Finesse, not force.”

Court was a master at both, but he didn’t imagine the odds would be in his favor if he kicked in the front door of that building across the street with guns blazing.

Finesse was his only shot at this.

Normally he would have contacted Brewer, but he realized there was nothing she could do for him now but complain about his decision to let Zakharov escape. No, recovering Zoya wasn’t one of his assigned tasks, so the last thing he wanted to do right now was update Brewer on his plan to bail on the mission to attempt to achieve a non-mission-critical objective.

She would disallow it, he told himself, and he would do it anyhow, so why trouble her with a phone call?

Court would go it alone. He’d been going it alone for a long time, after all.

* * *

• • •

Minutes later he stood at street level, alongside the target building, just steps away from the down ramp to the underground garage. Brewer had tried to call him, but he hadn’t answered, so she’d texted him that his backup was ten minutes out. He thought about waiting, but he didn’t know who she would be sending, and didn’t know what she had told the other asset about Zoya.

The last thing he wanted was some asshole coming in here and breaking up his rescue mission because it didn’t look anything like what Brewer told him his job was.

He took the ramp down to the parking garage. Finesse, not force, he reminded himself.

At the bottom of the garage was a barricade to prevent cars from entering, but Court simply stepped around it and moved deeper under the building. He found a door to a stairwell, picked it in seconds, then slipped inside silently.

Almost immediately he detected a presence one floor above him on the stairs. A shuffling of footsteps. He drew his 9-millimeter and screwed on the Gemtech silencer, then began moving slowly upwards.

* * *

• • •

Zoya Zakharova knew she was being sent back to Russia the second her door opened and she saw the men. Fox was there, as was Hines, but they had been joined by four tattooed, rough-looking, square-jawed types, armed with HK MP5K short-barreled, folded-stock submachine guns. She had not been tied or blindfolded, but there was still no way for her to escape at present. Fox spoke to her in Russian and told her to come out into the hall.

She was led towards the elevator, while Fox and Hines walked silently behind her and the gunmen. The rhythmic echoes of footsteps in the big university building’s hallways reverberated, and the elevator down loomed closer with every step.

She wondered if there was anything she could have said to her father that would have prevented him from shipping her back to Russia where, despite his assurances, she knew she faced certain death. She could have begged him, pleaded for a chance to work with him, but her pride prevented it.