FORTY-FIVE

She had no intention of letting it get down to close work, but Sung Kim wasn’t about to get beat because of a lack of preparation.

Sitting at a plain wooden table in the cellar of her modest safe house—an unfinished brick and drywall basement that ran the length of the house—she started with her favorite handgun. The flat-black nine-millimeter Beretta 92G Elite had the best features of the more famous Brigadier model, but Sung Kim preferred the serrated surface of the fast-cycling semiautomatic’s front and rear slides. The sure grip of the serrations provided the lightning-quick racking of the action that could mean the difference between living and dying. But most of all she liked the removable sights. She wouldn’t need the sights for hand-to-hand combat, and if the Nakamura job came down to looking into the prime minister’s eyes when she killed him, there wouldn’t be an instant to spare. When seconds mattered, there wasn’t anything worse than snagging a weapon on your clothing.

Sung Kim had considered a bigger weapon, of course; you could never have too much firepower. But the only real option in her gun vault was the Heckler and Koch MP7A1, and the stubby machine pistol newly adopted by the German KSK was too big to be concealed. She could get it into the ammunition bunker beforehand, that wouldn’t be a problem, but she’d have to carry it the rest of the way, and she couldn’t walk around the farm with a sprayer like that. Besides, if she got into a shootout with Nakamura’s bodyguards, no amount of power would help. She was every bit as good as they were, but they’d have guns just as big, and against their numbers she wouldn’t have a chance.

She slid forward in her chair and reached for the unloaded Beretta, lifted it gently—a professional never allowed a fine weapon to slide across the wooden surface of a table—and set it on a rag in front of her, a red rag impregnated with the sharply alcoholic tang of Hoppe’s Gun Cleaner. She reached into the gray metal toolbox to her left and pulled out a set of Allen wrenches, selected the right size, and used the wrench to remove the front sight first, then the Novak-type rear sight. Sung Kim hefted the weapon, enjoying its clean look without the sights. She raised it and dry-fired several times. The G configuration—so important in combat—enabled the hammer lever to return to the ready-to-fire position the instant she pulled the trigger, another speed advantage whose value could not be minimized. Then, finally, Sung Kim smiled.

If worse came to worst, her weapon would be just as prepared as she was.