“I realized he was gone a few minutes later,” the minder was saying. “I knocked on the bathroom door because I was getting impatient. It couldn’t have been more than three or four minutes.”
Ekaterina didn’t doubt that. Petronella knew the cost of failure. In other circumstances, she’d feel sorry for the woman, but at the moment Ekaterina was only capable of registering stronger emotions: anger, for example. Fear.
The episode with Silas had rattled her. She admitted that. She’d killed him — in self-defense, surely, but she would not like to argue that in front of a Swiss court.
She had covered her tracks carefully. She had collected Silas at the front desk so that he wouldn’t be given a visitor’s badge and tracked electronically. As soon as the front guard went on his lunch break, she’d left the building, making sure to use her badge, so that it could be shown that she — and she would argue, Silas — had left the building then. The relieving guard hadn’t known to ask her about her guest because Silas had never signed in. By the time anyone came to ask questions, neither guard would remember who had or hadn’t been with Ekaterina on an ordinary workday, so that was all right.
There was a security camera on the main hall, which was the only tricky thing. It showed Silas coming into the building but not leaving. Still, it was simple enough for her to delete a few days’ worth of video from the hard drive and claim some sort of malfunction. She wasn’t going to pretend Silas had never come here. She was just going to pretend he’d left.
It was best for everyone if Silas simply disappeared. Men like him did and no one looked too hard to find them. All that was left of him was in the incinerator. A round of experimentation had just ended, so his remains would be mixed with that of a half-dozen monkeys and carted away at the end of the day.
Problem solved.
Until she’d gone upstairs to face this.
“I checked with the barista before I left,” Petronella was saying. “He said Mischa was using a computer.”
Ekaterina slammed her chair back and jumped to her feet. “Goddammit!” Petronella squeaked and flinched back. Then Ekaterina took a deep, controlling breath, clenching and unclenching her fists, and reminded herself that at least the minder admitted it. Hadn’t tried to lie. Ekaterina willed some of the tension out of her body.
“And?” She forced the word out through clenched teeth.
“And I convinced the barista to give it to me.”
“What? The computer?”
“Yes.”
Christ. A computer. And she was supposed to figure out what Mischa had found on it that had made him run —
“Where is the computer now?”
“I brought it to your security chief.”
Dammit. The tension ramped up again. It took another act of will to lessen it.
“All right,” Ekaterina said. “Petronella, you’re fired.”
“Dr. Kozlova, I did the best I could,” Petronella stammered. “I wasn’t expecting him to — ”
“I understand. However, your instructions were clear. Unfortunately they were also beyond your capability.”
She buzzed for a security guard. The routine was straightforward: See the employee to Human Resources, make sure she got her final paycheck and signed the severance papers, escort her off the property.
Ekaterina did not look at the tears in Petronella’s eyes. Being fired from a job for incompetence was hardly the end of the world.
A sound at the door made her look up. A tall man with a gleaming shaved head came into the office.
“Raj. This is Petronella. She is no longer in our employ.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and to Petronella, “Come along, miss,” but nicely because Ekaterina always insisted on her employees treating everyone they encountered with the utmost professionalism and politeness. Petronella opened her mouth to say something but the guard tightened his grip on her elbow and she closed her mouth and went with him.
Ekaterina watched them go. Well, it wasn’t the first time something had gone wrong. All she had to do was fix it.