He’d left the Glock 43 back at the apartment, not wanting to be encumbered by anything strapped to his ankle while he climbed.

He took a break to eat a bag of raisins he’d brought with him, and to drink his last bottle of water. He bit into a protein bar, chewed a moment, then shoved the rest into his mouth.

He picked his binos up one last time before descending and gave one final slow scan to the building across the street when his night vision image stopped and froze on the northeast corner of the structure. There he saw a figure dressed in black, stepping over the third-floor balcony and then crouching down by the door latch there.

Where the hell did he come from?

It seemed to be some sort of a burglar, or someone with the exact same plans he had: to snoop on one of the offices inside.

This was opposite to the end of the building from where Cassidy’s office was, but there was no way he could penetrate the building now that there was some other jackass in there, potentially tripping off alarms or otherwise drawing attention to the place.

No, he’d have to sit tight and watch.

“Asshole,” he muttered as the figure opened the latch and disappeared inside the building.

* * *

• • •

Zoya Zakharova had performed a grand total of twelve minutes’ reconnaissance on the building before walking across a darkened portion of the street away from the lights of the front lobby, leaping up onto a thin iron pipe along the wall, and then pulling herself to a first-floor windowsill. From there she free-climbed up to the second story, which in Europe meant she was now three floors above the ground. It had taken her all of forty seconds, and after vaulting a balcony railing and dropping behind it, then picking a simple latch lock and slipping into what appeared to be an office break room, she squatted in the corner and listened for noises.

There was a patrol of two guards; she heard them talking as they passed, and then a stairwell door opened and she heard two pairs of feet descending. She stood and went for the door, then began skulking up the hall. She had two stories to climb, and to do it she moved towards the stairwell on the opposite side of the building from the one the guards used.

* * *

• • •

“Where are you, you stupid son of a bitch?” Court muttered to himself on the roof across the street. He continued to scan with his binos, looking through every window he could see, desperately trying to get some sort of a fix on the intruder.

While doing this he tapped his earpiece, placing a call to the one number in his phone.

Twenty seconds later he got an answer. “Brewer.”

“No chance you have someone else doing a sneak-and-peek on Cassidy’s building, is there?”

“No chance whatsoever. I assumed you could handle that by yourself. Was I overly optimistic?”

“Well, I could have, if some random dipshit didn’t just scale the side of the building and climb in through a balcony door.”

“You’re kidding. What if he’s going for the safe?”

“Then I guess I’ll smash him over the head when he gets out of there, and I’ll take whatever he took out of the safe. My concern, though, is that he fails and this makes it impossible for me to get in there until their security relaxes again.”

“Right,” Suzanne Brewer said. “What do you need?”

“Wait one,” Court said, because he scanned Cassidy’s office and saw the masked figure moving through the darkness there, staying away from the window but not out of view from someone with night vision equipment.

The figure looked over the room, began opening drawers in wooden file cabinets and thumbing through them, and then opened up a computer there on the desk.

“Shit. Subject is in Cassidy’s office. Definitely hunting for something.”

“A safe?”

“He’s rifling through the desk.”

“Keep watching and reporting what you see.”

The figure moved to a paneled wall behind the desk and began feeling around. He was thirty feet away from the painting the safe was hidden behind, and Court doubted there was any chance he’d find it.

The person in the office then went back to the file cabinet and fidgeted with his mask for a moment, lining up the eyeholes to read some papers in the file. After several seconds of this, the figure reached up and pulled the knit mask off his head.

Shoulder-length brunette hair tumbled out of the balaclava.

Court blinked in surprise. The figure was facing away from him, kneeling in front of the bottom drawer in the file cabinet, but Court put the subject’s height around five eight, and he noticed the lean frame did seem to have some feminine curves.

Was he looking at a woman?

Court said, “Brewer?”

“I’m here.”

“Uh . . . here’s a twist. The target is a—”

Just then, the person squatting turned towards the door to the office. Through Court’s night vision binos and their ten-power magnification, he could easily see the face of Zoya Zakharova and the look of alarm on it.

Court felt a muscle spasm in his low back and the burn of fresh adrenaline and dopamine in his system. He’d thought about this face in front of him nearly constantly for the past four months, told himself he’d probably never lay eyes on it again, and now the face was here, right in front of him.

And expressing imminent danger.

Brewer spoke. “I lost transmission. Do you have me, Violator?”

Court didn’t answer; he just bit his lip while he watched the former Russian operative close the file cabinet, spin around, then crawl behind the desk.

“Violator, how do you copy?”

After a long pause Court said, “The subject . . . the subject in Cassidy’s office, is identified.”

“Identified? Identified as who?”

“It’s . . . it’s Zoya.”

Clearly Brewer could not process what she was hearing. “What did you say?”

“Zoya.”

“Zakharova is . . . she’s there? In the UK?”

“In the lawyer’s office. Right now. Hiding, looks like she thinks she hears someone coming.”

Brewer said, “What the hell does any of this have to do with her?”

“Lady, don’t ask me. I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on with any of this shit. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

CHAPTER 29

   Suzanne Brewer sat at her desk on the sixth floor of CIA’s Langley Headquarters, her phone to her ear. Her eyes were closed while she tried to process the new and utterly dissonant information her agent had just passed on to her.