THIRTY-FIVE

The knock at the door of suite 401 came just after nine. Anya and Inna both stood up from the table next to the kitchen island where they had been working at their laptops, and they both pulled pistols from their purses: a Heckler & Koch VP9SK subcompact for Anya, and a not dissimilar HK P30SK for Inna.

Before they went to the door, Anya tapped a button on her computer that showed her the hotel camera view from right outside her door.

A second later both women sighed and resecured their firearms, and Inna headed to let her team leader in.

Anya kept looking at the real-time image on her screen. “He can barely stand.”

When Maksim Akulov entered a moment later, he walked utterly erect, his chin up, the knot of his blue tie only a touch off-kilter.

It was a put-on, Inna could tell. Maksim couldn’t hide his drunken stagger from her, even if Anya hadn’t already seen it for herself on the screen.

Inna had been through this so many times before.

The smell of vodka came through his skin as he passed by her. Anya Bolichova pulled a chair out for him at the table where she was working, but he passed this up, as well, in favor of the ornate couch against the wall. Here he plopped down heavily, then made a show of smoothing the part in his bushy reddish-brown hair.

“Where’s Sem?”

“He has the eye,” Sorokina answered.

Maksim acted like he was taking in this information, but Inna figured he was just fighting a little dizzy spell, hoping to keep down everything he’d consumed in the hours he’d been missing. Finally, he righted himself and asked, “Target disposition?”

“She’s having dinner with another employee of the company she works for. Downstairs, outdoor café. Semyon is at the bar inside, but he’s got an angle.”

Maksim pulled himself back up to his feet, surprising both women in the room. “Ponial.” Got it, he said, and he started for the door.

Both Bolichova and Sorokina grabbed him by the arms, and they led him back to the sofa. He didn’t fight them. “Not tonight,” Sorokina said as he sat back down.

She knew Maksim would become especially volatile if she didn’t phrase her next words carefully. “We see a much better opportunity ahead. I hope you will agree.”

He put his elbows on the back of the sofa. “Okay, what’s the plan?”

Inna said, “Tonight, once she returns to her room. I will go speak with her. I’ll be unarmed, she’ll have a weapon, but she won’t shoot me. Not here.”

Maksim leaned his head back on the cushions. “Fine. It’s your neck. And when she refuses your offer of surrender?”

“I tell her she has forty-eight hours to reconsider.”

“We aren’t giving her forty-eight—”

Inna interrupted. “Of course we aren’t. I just don’t want her running out the door five minutes after I leave. My plan is room service, tomorrow morning. Like we did in D.C.”

The Russian assassin seemed to take this all in, but he did not respond. Sorokina thought that this might be among the top five drunken episodes she’d ever witnessed. It was certainly no Crete. At least tonight Maksim had been able to stagger into the room and ask a couple of questions; in Crete they’d moved him as if they were transporting a body for most of a morning until he could be roused.

Nevertheless, right now, he was filthy, stinking drunk.

With a flash of her eyes to her young subordinate, Inna passed along a message to Anya that said, Give us a minute.

Anya understood; she walked to the table and grabbed her purse. “I’m going downstairs to give Semyon some arm candy.”

When Bolichova was gone, he turned his face to Inna. “Shto?” What? He could tell she wanted to talk in private.

“You are a disgrace.”

“I can go tonight. When she returns to her room, after you make contact. Anya can pop the lock and I can—”

“Nyet, Maksim. You can kick off your shoes and lie there on the couch. That’s all you can do. Anything else, and you’ll fuck it up.”

Akulov raised his eyebrows. After a long staring contest, he said, “You’ve no right to speak to me like—”

“I told you we needed to take care on this one. But you are circling the drain so fast you can’t even listen to me. Zoya, or her people, whoever they are, will kill you. And though that might please you greatly, Anya, Semyon, and I don’t want to be part of the collateral damage.”

He leaned forward and rubbed his face in his hands for several seconds, a feeble attempt to recover enough to have this conversation. “What do you want me to say?” His chest heaved a dramatic sigh. “I thought I just needed a job to get my mind right. That’s always worked in the past. But not anymore.” He shrugged. “Now . . . I just don’t give a shit.”

“Then tell headquarters. There is no shame in arriving at the sunset of your career. It’s coming for us all.”

“There is nothing beyond this!” he shouted. “As you say, I am circling the drain. Going faster and faster.” He rubbed his hands through his hair and fished for a cigarette in his jacket. “But I don’t know what happens when I actually get flushed.”

He looked, to Inna Sorokina, like an utterly beaten man. His eyes welled up, from either tears or whatever ungodly amount of drink he’d consumed that afternoon and evening. She sat down in front of him, prepared to speak to him in a tender voice, to tell him he had a future after he left his work behind. He could become an artist or a mailman or anything he set his damaged and twisted mind to.

But then she stopped herself. No. Inna was here to do a job, and she couldn’t do it alone. Maksim, when fit, was one of the best in the world at this. She had to find a way to rally him, one last time, to deal with Zoya Zakharova.

She slapped him hard on the face, knocking the unlit cigarette from his mouth. “You are an embarrassment to Russia! You are an embarrassment to the Bratva.”

His face contorted in fury. “I could have you arrested for—”

“You aren’t going to do anything! You won’t even remember this in the morning! You have become less than worthless; you have become a liability. Go to sleep, fool, we don’t need you.”

She stood and turned away, walked past the dining room table.

He called out after her. He had, finally, a hint of passion in his voice. “You don’t think I can do it anymore? Is that it?”

She sniffed out an angry laugh. “Just look at you.”

Maksim stood slowly, rubbed his eyes again. Finally he said, “Where, in this suite, is our target?”

The blonde did not understand. “Shto?”

“Point me to my target.” When she looked at him uncomprehendingly, he said, “Something over there in the kitchen, maybe? On the other side of the room. Is that her?” He pointed to a large basket of fruit left by management on the kitchen island. Beyond it on the counter was a coffee maker, next to which a kilo bag of ground espresso sat.

“There she is.”

Maksim turned away on his heel dramatically, facing the balcony, and then he wobbled a little from the momentum of his spin.

“What are you going to—” Sorokina began to ask, but Maksim spoke over her.

“The grapefruit on top. That is Sirena’s head.”

Inna was positioned between her assassin and the fruit behind her. Quickly, she understood; she took a step to the right as Akulov spun back around, his coat flying up in the process. Almost too fast for her to see the movement, he reached into his belt on his hip, drew a flat-black metal knife, and flung it hard underhanded with a snap of both his wrist and his elbow. It sailed half a meter to the left of Inna’s chest and over to the island with such momentum she couldn’t track it, then sliced into the large pink grapefruit in the basket.

But the knife wasn’t finished. It didn’t come to rest in the fruit, it simply gouged it, then tumbled wildly across the kitchen, juice and pulp exploding into the air in its wake, until the knife finally buried itself into the bag of espresso grounds, bursting the bag and sending a black haze all over the kitchen.

Maksim fought obvious dizziness; he held his hands out away from his body to steady himself, then sat back on the couch, a look of smug satisfaction behind his bleary eyes.

Inna glared at him.

He found his cigarette and lit it. “Target destroyed.”

“Along with the collateral damage,” Sorokina replied softly. “Go to sleep. I will wake you at five a.m. and start pouring whatever’s left of that espresso down your throat.”

He kicked his feet up on the couch and closed his eyes; he hadn’t even taken off his crumpled jacket or removed his tie. “Fine. No one moves without me. You understand that, right?”

“Ya ponimayu.” I understand.

She began turning off lights in the living room. She started to leave, but then she stepped back to him. “Give us the old Maksim, just one last time. When Sirena is gone, you can kill yourself with booze and pills, just don’t kill yourself by doing a poor job here in Berlin. Your nation is counting on you.”

He didn’t respond, and after a few seconds she could hear him snoring.