Mission Critical

Zoya glared at him, and her face reddened. Under her shirt her stress hives positively glowed.

“Why did you come, Zoya?” Zakharov asked.

“I am here, Father, to provide you with the intelligence you need to make a reasonable decision.”

“Go on.”

“They will be here soon, and they will end your operation, destroy your plans.”

Zakharov seemed completely unfazed by this, which confused his daughter.

“And even if you do make it out of here, do you really think there’s any way in hell you are going to get a crop duster within half a mile of Castle Enrick? Won talked. They’ve already put snipers on the roof. They’ve already got helos in the air circling for ten miles. Attack jets ready to swoop down from twenty thousand feet. You’re done.”

“So you came to ask me to just go quietly off into the sunset? To concede defeat and forget it?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she said, “I learned something else last night. You lied to me. The British didn’t kill Feodor, Father. You did, by your foolishness.”

General Zakharov made no reaction to the charge.

“Am I wrong?”

The big bearded man sat there quietly for several more seconds. Finally he said, “Feo was the fool, Zoya. Not me. I invited him to the UK during a short break from his studies. I had doubts he’d come at all; our relationship had been . . . fractured for some time. But he agreed. A colleague of mine gave him a small case of chocolate bars, a gift for me. You know, and Feo knew, that I’ve always loved Alenka chocolate. Better than this Cadbury shit the English seem to be addicted to. The case was all packaged up neatly, and my colleague told him to be sure I received the entire box. But you know Feo. He held a grudge against me, did little passive-aggressive things to spite me all the time.”

Zoya said, “He held a grudge because you were hard on him. You tried to turn him into something he was not. The only thing that kept Feo from running away, or slitting your throat in your sleep, was that I came along; you saw that you could train me, you could turn me into what you wanted Feo to be. You were just as hard on me; the difference was that I had the drive, the desire, that he did not possess. That was not his fault.

“You hated that you didn’t have the son who would honor you by following in your footsteps, so you settled for your daughter.”

Zakharov looked out the window at the misty morning. “You simplify twenty years of our family.”

“It wasn’t simple,” she said. “But . . . Feo. You should have left him out of this life. He wasn’t like us. He wasn’t evil.”

“Evil? You think we are evil?”

Zoya nodded softly and looked at the floor. “It’s in our blood, Papa. You . . . Mother . . . me.” She looked back up at him. “But this. What you are doing here. It’s wrong, it’s for the wrong reasons, and it won’t even succeed. Please, let’s leave together. We can leave the country somehow, go wherever you want. Even back to Russia. I’ll give up my life if I can stop you from doing this.”

Zakharov looked at his watch, and Zoya noted the action. He said, “You’re absolutely right, I should have left Feo out of all this. Because he was unskilled when it came to the simple task of bringing me my polonium. He came to see me at my house in Knightsbridge and, when I asked for the chocolate, he handed me a handful of loose bars. He told me he ate one of them on the plane. There were ten bars, and four were secretly marked to indicate that they contained the isotope inside the triple-wrapped lead foil. He ate one of the four.”

Zoya’s face reddened more and tears filled her eyes. She had loved her brother more than life itself, and she still did.

“So,” Zakharov said with a wave of his hand. “Feodor Feodorovich was more than just incompetent, he was bloody unlucky.”

“He was untrained.”

Zakharov shouted, his first show of real anger. “What bloody training do you need to carry a fucking box of chocolates on a fucking airplane?”

Zoya looked at her hands a moment, then back at her father, her face suddenly a guise of malevolence. Without warning she lunged at him, over the table, her hands grasping for his throat. The two mercenaries behind her were slow to react because her action came without warning, but they finally dove onto her and tackled her off the table and to the wooden floor, pressing her hundred-forty-pound frame hard under the weight of two two-hundred-pound men, each covered in thirty-five pounds of guns and body armor and gear.

Fox and Hines rushed into the room now. The Englishman grabbed Zoya by her hair and yanked her up and away from the two Russian mercs, her feet leaving the ground. As he shoved her hard against the kitchen counter, she reached for a butcher knife in a block there, but a gunshot froze her as well as everyone else in the room.

Zoya looked back over her shoulder. He father stood by the table with a small Makarov pistol in his hand. He had fired into the ceiling, and now he pointed the weapon at his daughter.

“It doesn’t have to end like this. But if you don’t stand down, it will end. For you. Right here, right now.”

He looked to Hines, who stepped up to the brunette, and he grabbed her by the back of the neck.

Zakharov said, “British Intelligence forced my hand when they killed your mother. Do I regret using my son in my operation to exact revenge? Of course I do. Every day of my life. But I am not to blame for his death. It was the British who put me in England with retaliation on my mind . . . they are the culprits, and today, finally, they will pay for what they’ve done. The entire Five Eyes will pay.”

Zoya snorted an angry laugh. “The sky above the castle is a no-fly zone. Your crop duster will be obliterated.”

Still Zoya realized her father seemed unconcerned about this. He said, “We will be leaving soon, before your friends arrive. I’ve lost visibility about what the Americans are doing—my man on the inside of the CIA has been captured—but my contacts in British law enforcement and the police will alert me the moment any movement to conduct an operation against me has begun.”

Zoya suddenly realized her father had miscalculated. Hanley was using one team from Ground Branch and two Poison Apple assets. As far as she knew he was not in contact with British or Scottish authorities at all about the attack he had planned, so there was no way her father’s contacts could warn him when it was on the way.

She didn’t reveal any of this. Instead she just repeated herself. “Your plane will never make it to its target.”

When she said this her father holstered his gun under his jacket and turned for the door. “It doesn’t have to, darling. If you think we told Dr. Won the full scope and breadth of our plan, then you underestimate your father’s intelligence. She designed and built the weapon, but I alone wrote the plan for my retributive strike.”