At six p.m., Kristina Varjan got out the carbon knife Pablo Cruz had given her and slid it up her sleeve, then she slipped through a throng of people packing a long, wide concrete hallway.
The assassin barely noticed them. She was focused. Prepared.
“Coming from the southwest,” she said, her voice picked up by and transmitted from the sensitive Bluetooth mike taped to her throat and hidden beneath her shirt.
“Coming from northwest,” Cruz said over a small earbud.
“Cutting east to west,” Dana Potter said. “I’ll approach up the near staircase.”
“Muscle?” Varjan said.
“Unseen,” Potter said. “But I’m sure it’s there.”
“No blood if possible,” Cruz said.
Varjan did not reply. She’d spotted a woman coming at her through the crowd. She was looking at her phone with a worried scowl on her face and had a VIP pass hanging around her neck on a lanyard.
Putting on sunglasses, Varjan looked down at the VIP pass she held and felt confident. She climbed stairs to a higher floor and ran into a security guard at the top who was looking at his phone. She smiled, then held out her VIP pass.
“The lanyard broke,” she said, acting embarrassed.
The guard appeared bored, waved her on, and went back to staring at his phone. Varjan went around him into a long hallway and saw Cruz coming at her from the far end, also wearing a VIP pass.
Between them stood a big white guy with a military haircut and military bearing. He was leaning with his back to a door. She noted a gun bulge, chest-high, under the suit jacket.
The muscle’s head swiveled, took them both in.
Varjan went by a staircase to her right, saw in her peripheral vision that Potter, the Canadian assassin, was climbing with a VIP badge around his neck.
She smeared an easy smile across her face and acted a little tipsy as she ambled to the security guy.
“This where the VIP bash is at?” she asked shyly.
“No, ma’am.”
“That right?” Cruz said, also acting like he’d had a few. “I was told this was the place too.”
“Me three,” Potter said behind her.
The bodyguard seemed relaxed, in control, not bothered by them or the odd outfits they wore.
“Well, I’m Philip Stapleton, director of security for Victorious, and I can tell you there’s no party up here. Yet.”
“Yet?” Varjan said, lifting her VIP pass to show him as she slid closer.
“So we’re early?” Cruz said.
The question distracted Stapleton just long enough for Varjan to spring at him and get the blade of the carbon knife up against the side of his neck, right under the jawbone and across his carotid.
“One wrong move, and I’ll bleed you right here,” Varjan whispered.
Cruz came in beside them, took the pistol from Stapleton’s chest holster.
“Open the door now,” Varjan said.
Cruz set the muzzle of the guard’s pistol against his temple. “Your call.”
“It’s coded,” the guard said. But he gave them the number.
Potter keyed the code into the pad by the door. They heard the door lock click open. Knife blade still tight to Stapleton’s jaw, Varjan pushed him through. The other two assassins followed her, stepping inside fast.
“Nobody move,” Varjan said to the people in the room as Cruz kicked the door shut behind him. “Or this man dies.”