Mission Critical
Zoya found herself so utterly confused right now. A sniper had killed the men holding her, of this she was certain. But what was completely unclear was why. Zoya knew she didn’t have a single friend, or even an ally, on planet Earth at the moment.
Why had someone helped her?
Just then, a laser pointer marked a spot in red on the paneling to her right. Zoya ducked down quickly, thinking gunfire would surely follow. There was no shooting. The light shook back and forth, as if to get her attention, and flicked on and off several times. It then very slowly began panning to the left along the wall.
Zoya cocked her head in puzzlement.
This mysterious sniper just kept getting weirder.
The light continued panning, past the blood-splattered wall, until it finally stopped on a painting halfway across the room. It then traced up the side of the frame, stopped, and began blinking on and off again, then drawing a circle around a small area.
And then it hit her. Somehow Zoya knew this was where the safe was hidden, and the sniper wanted her to find it.
Who? Why?
She stood slowly from behind the desk, facing the window, looking at an ornate Edwardian-style office building across the street. After a moment she caught a quick flash of red as the laser panned back over to the wall near her. She couldn’t see the origin of the beam but could tell it was just slightly higher than her position, perhaps on the roof.
The red dot moved back to the painting and remained there.
Zoya walked over to her Walther on the floor, reholstered it, then moved across the office, her eyes still on the window, her mind still not completely certain that this shooter wasn’t going to target her, as well. But when she arrived at the painting the laser moved away again, far to the left, and remained in position there, totally stationary near the door to the office.
She realized the sniper had propped his weapon on something and was leaving his laser designator on to show her he was not pointing the gun her way.
This went a long way towards giving her the comfort to turn her back to the window, and when she did, she felt around behind the picture frame and found the latch. She swung the painting back on its hinges, revealing the safe.
She looked back over her shoulder, out the window.
* * *
• • •
Court watched from in his dark hide under the painter’s tarp, only fifty yards away. His gun was stabilized on his backpack so he didn’t even have to touch it, and he held the ten-power binos to his eyes so he could watch Zoya more closely. The lights were on in the office, so he left the night vision function off.
She turned around and looked back over her shoulder at the window. Through the magnification Court felt like he was right in front of her face. He saw the sweat on her brow, her dark eyes peering hard into the night, and then he saw her soft lips as her mouth moved.
Thank you, she seemed to say, and then she turned back to the safe, pulling out a set of earphones from her hip bag as she did so.
Court’s heart was already banging against his rib cage. First seeing her, then engaging the men the instant before they killed her, and now her show of gratitude about what he’d just done, it was almost more than his cardiovascular system could handle.
As he processed his emotions, he felt his earpiece vibrate. He watched Zoya’s back as she worked on the combination, and he tapped the device. “Go for Violator.”
“Sitrep.” There was unmistakable rage in Brewer’s voice.
“Zoya’s safe. Three attackers are down and dead. Two more escaped.”
“What the hell happened?”
Court sat up now, turned off the laser on the rifle next to him, hefted it, and folded it up. As he slid it back into his case, he said, “Would you believe spontaneous combustion?”
His handler was furious, as Court had expected. “You engaged the men trying to detain a rogue asset? She was a loose end, not one of us! Whose side are you on?”
“That’s yet to be determined. I’m a good company man, but I couldn’t watch them kill her.”
It was quiet for a moment, and then Brewer said, “Of course not. I understand, Courtland. I’m sorry.”
Court knew she was only being conciliatory as some sort of a manipulation tactic. She never called him by his real name, and her faux empathy wasn’t very well pulled off, because virtually nobody had called him Courtland since his mom died.
Brewer switched back to business mode, just as Court expected. “Now . . . can you get over there and into that safe?”
“I don’t have to get into the safe. Zoya is working on it right now, and it looks like she knows what she’s doing.”
Brewer’s softening tone disappeared in an instant. “How the hell does that help us? She’s not working for Langley.”
“I’m going to ask her for it when she gets out of there.”
“You planning on getting a room at the Hyatt to get reacquainted first?”
Court just sighed. “Violator out.” He tapped his earpiece and put it in his pocket.
Whatever happened for the rest of the night, he sure as shit didn’t want it happening with Suzanne Brewer yapping into his ear.
* * *
• • •
Zoya Zakharova took four minutes to get through the steel door, but once she did she found herself in what looked like a medium-sized bank vault. It was ten feet wide and fourteen feet deep, with shelves and drawers all up and down the walls, and a table in the middle of the room.
On the table she saw money bound and stacked like it was newspaper, euros and dollars, mostly; jewelry in glass containers, a row of watches that looked like they each must have cost more than what Zoya made in a year back when she had steady work.
She saw file cabinets and contracts stacked one upon the other in the unlocked drawers, bearer bonds, and satchels full of travel documents and passports.
It was a mother lode of supplies and loot for either an intelligence organization or an organized crime firm of some sort; Zoya could not determine which.
Looking around, unsure what to make of it all, she began scanning the locking mechanisms used on a single horizontal panel built into the wall. Most of the cabinets were unlocked or didn’t even have doors on them. Obviously Cassidy considered the vault door itself the only necessary deterrent for all this loot and compromising material. But the panel on the far wall—Zoya assumed it covered a pull-out drawer—had been secured with a heavy key lock, and this she found interesting. It seemed whatever was inside, Cassidy wanted to keep it even more secure than the rest of the items in the vault. She stepped up to the panel immediately and took the lock-picking tools she’d procured from Gorik Shulga’s SVR equipment cache.