Immaculately clad in her tailored Emirates air uniform, Maria thanked the young bellhop near the revolving front doors for bringing in her enormous rolling equipment case with the Emirates Air markings. It was one in the morning and there was no one else around the Marriott’s front entrance, save for a few cabbies smoking in the breezeway.
Feeling chatty, the bellhop commented that the case was much lighter than it looked. Predictably, he then flirted with Maria, saying something suggestive about how he might bring it up to her room himself.
Her steely blue eyes shot him a cold look that made him shrink behind his desk. She rolled the big black case back toward the elevator, her heels clicking on the marble floor.
There wasn’t much time. By morning, Maria assumed, the CIA would declare Morris-Dale MIA and be there with guns drawn. The plan had been to dope her up with scopolamine, get quick information on the meet, then spirit the CIA woman away in the large rolling case for further interrogation. After that, none of it would matter. She’d leave Morris-Dale’s body in a dumpster.
But things hadn’t gone smoothly. Maria had overestimated Morris-Dale’s size and overdosed the tranquilizer. It was supposed to immobilize her, make her malleable—not knock her out. As it was, it’d been a struggle to get her down a public hallway and into Maria’s room.
Fortunately, passersby respected the striking flight attendant’s uniform. With Maria’s perfect composure and erect bearing, other guests simply parted so the two women could pass, accepting the idea that it was someone in authority aiding a distraught civilian.
Once they were in the room, it’d taken an hour before Morris-Dale became lively enough for the scopolamine. But it had finally worked. Under the influence, the CIA woman had eventually detailed the plan for the exfil, albeit blearily. Then she’d gone completely slack, passing out. Now she was securely bound and locked away, sleeping it off.
If Maria could keep her sedated, she’d dump her in the case and wheel her to the rented van, then take her to a leased office where a more intense interrogation could unfold. She wanted more details about Rahimi, wanted to know more about the CIA network across the region. But she knew she needed to be careful with the drugs. She didn’t want the CIA woman to die before spilling all of her secrets.
Thirty floors up, Meredith came awake. She was lying on her side, a sheet of duct tape over her mouth. She was groggy, her head splitting, confused. The blockage in her mouth caused her to strain for air. She started to hyperventilate.
She shifted to her side and shuddered, struggling for lucidity. In doing so, she methodically cataloged one dreadful fact after another. Her hands were bound behind her with a zip tie. Her ankles as well. The red wig had been ripped from her head.
These realizations caused her adrenaline to surge. She felt her heart rate racing, her breath going faster, out of control. She had the sudden urge to vomit.
She’d been trained for situations like this. She started to tell herself not to panic, though she was already there. She inhaled shakily, commanding her stomach to settle, her hands to remain still. She had to think—had to get her body under control. That was what they’d always said back at the Farm.
Use the facts. Start from the beginning. How’d she get here? She remembered the blonde and the elevator, but that was about it.
She took in her surroundings. She was in a closet. A trickle of light came through the crack under the door. Patterned hotel room carpet— her hotel room, she realized. She could see the wheels of her suitcase over by the bed. The bracket where the iron should have been was empty. There were no hangers on the rail. It was all stripped.
Though she couldn’t remember much, she knew what it meant. If she didn’t get out of this, she wouldn’t live to see another sunrise. The trainers had always said that if your abductors moved you to a different location, you were dead.
She bent her knees and rolled side to side, testing the space. She realized she was in her socks. Her shoes had been removed. So had her linen shirt. She wore only her stretchy yoga pants and the tank top that had been under her shirt, a running bra under that.
There seemed to be no one else in the room, but she dared not make a sound. Focused on her breathing, she did her best to think, to take stock of things and develop a plan, like she was supposed to. It was clear she’d been searched and stripped into what she wore now. But she wondered if that really included everything.
She said a silent prayer to herself, thinking of Grace. She also thought of John, remembering the whole reason she was in this city, this room, this predicament. Whatever happened, she thought, they would be okay. Then she thought of John again. He was still in the wild, depending on her. Maybe he wouldn’t be okay.
She thought further, doing everything she could to focus. There was a chance she had a way out of this. But only if whoever had searched her had missed something. It would be her best shot. Irrationally, she paused before checking for it. If it wasn’t there, she didn’t know what she would do. Probably die.
When she was finally ready, she quietly turned toward her other side, rocking deliberately back and forth against the floor, ignoring the impulse to cry. But then she felt the pressure on her thigh she’d been hoping to feel. Though she’d been deliberately controlling her emotions, she let out a small involuntary gulp of excitement under the duct tape.
When Meredith was traveling through public airports undercover, she was unable to carry a pistol. But that didn’t mean she was defenseless; she carried things that escaped scrutiny with airport security. In the rails of her suitcase handle was a concealed knife, sheathed in lead. In her pocket she always kept a health insurance identification card. That pocket, the small flush one on the thigh of her svelte yoga pants.
She could feel it there. It was slightly thicker than a regular laminated ID card, about the size of a magnetized security pass. When properly manipulated, it separated to expose a razor blade.
Meredith breathed deeply again. Its presence let her thoughts flow more easily, a ray of hope. She sat up in the dark, her bound ankles out in front of her, her arms clasped behind her back. She could do this, she told herself.
She exhaled fully and sat on her hands. Flexible from countless hours in yoga studios, she bent at the waist, sliding her wrists along the backs of her thighs.
Yes. She would do this.
She took one more deep breath before completely deflating and bending almost in half. An inch at a time, she scooted her bound wrists under her butt, her thighs, her knees. She was so far forward that she felt her shoulders separating. With one more exhalation and backbreaking stretch, she retracted her bound ankles and, with a final grunt, slipped her wrists under her heels. She now had her bound hands in front of her.
Anxious with this first physical success, she reminded herself to control her breathing. She paused to listen. Still no sound from the other side of the door.
She slid her manacled wrists along her thigh and withdrew the ID card. She put one end of the card in her teeth, squeezed both sides with her thumbs, and pulled. It separated. She now had a razor in her hands. She bent forward and sawed her ankles free first, then held the blunt end of the razor in her teeth while she moved her wrists in a sawing motion to cut the plastic zip tie.
But just as she freed her hands, she heard an alarming beep. A lock turned. The room’s main door opened.
Meredith froze. She could see shadows of movement beneath the door. The person was coming toward the closet. Meredith silently propped herself on one knee. There’d only be one shot at this. One.
When the closet door slid open, Meredith saw the hat and veil of an Emirates flight attendant. The CIA officer sprang up and forward with a slash of the razor. She was aiming for the flight attendant’s jugular. But still disoriented from the drugs, she missed.
The blonde was quick. She stepped back and kicked Meredith, sending her into a wall. She followed this with a punch to the ribs, another to the side of her head. Meredith saw stars, felt the wind coming out of her. The blonde was turning, reaching for something under her coat.
Expecting a gun, Meredith dropped to the floor and lunged for the blonde’s ankles. She connected the blade to the rear of a bare left leg, just above a patent leather shoe. Meredith ripped the blade savagely across the Achilles tendon, then ran it straight up the exposed calf.
The blonde gasped and stumbled, but stayed upright somehow. She had a syringe in her hand. She landed it in Meredith’s shoulder blade but had to let go as she twisted away. It stayed hanging on Meredith’s back for a moment before falling free.
Meredith roared in anger, swinging the blade out and up as she rose from her crouch. This time it swept thickly across the meat of the blonde’s neck.
The Russian’s blue eyes widened. She made a ragged wailing noise that turned into a groan. She brought her hands to her throat, backing away, a look of disbelief on her face.
The gash in her neck was only a few inches wide. But it was enough. Her blood sluiced through her fingers. The animalistic growl she’d been making sputtered into a gurgle.
Shaking and out of breath, Meredith took a step back, ready to strike again, watching, her breath heaving.
But she wouldn’t need to.
The blonde’s lovely painted mouth opened and closed rhythmically as she grappled with the wound. Slowly, the life drained from those beautiful blue eyes.
A few minutes later, her lungs gasping hoarsely, Meredith forced herself to think about the mission. She searched the blonde but found little, other than the unmarked vial of drugs and a locked phone. The Russian’s tradecraft had been too sharp for anything else incriminating, other than the large empty roller case, big enough for a body. Meredith had a good sense that it had been fitted for her. She supposed the drugs were to keep her tranquilized until she could be renditioned to God knew where.
Eventually Meredith recovered her own phone, which had been buried in the blonde’s bag. Turning it on, she took a photo of the dead woman’s face. She would need that.
Slumping, she sat in a chair and fought off the urge to simply deflate, to cry, to fall to pieces as she thought about what she’d just been through. Thinking now of John, she steeled herself, looking at the dead woman in front of her. She thought about what to do next, the implications of all this. It brought a wave of anger forward, focusing her.
Not an eleven now, she thought.