~ ~ ~
Sergei leaned against the wall as he answered the open call from inside the house, and confirmed that there was no news to report from his end. The latest in a long string of non-events, a routine weeknight in the boonies, in a shithole of a country, living amongst barbarians. He really hated his time in Chechnya and was anxiously anticipating the group’s departure at the end of the week. The boss moved around a fair amount, and they’d been told that their next posting would be in Malta, in the Mediterranean, for a month. That was more like it.
He was fumbling in his jacket pocket for a cigarette when the PSS slug blew through his skull, fragmenting on impact and sending several chunks of lead shredding through his cerebrum. He never knew he was dying; he’d merely stopped being alive, his stay on the planet ended before his body hit the cold stone slabs.
Jet ran full speed for the back door, knowing that she only had seconds to plunge the house into darkness. She’d affixed a small charge to the cabling that carried electricity to the villa – she depressed the remote trigger a few moments after she squirted the contents of a small canister into the lock, which dissolved with a smoking hiss. A muffled crack from beyond the wall preceded the power going off and the lights shutting down, and then four seconds later, the backup generator kicked on – just long enough for her to wrench the door open, slip inside and punch in the alarm code without the camera capturing her.
The first interior guard fell to her throwing knife, his blood gurgling in a froth as he groped for the slim handle that had suddenly appeared in the side of his throat. She was able to catch him and break his fall just as he tumbled forward, and she lowered him gently to the carpet, leaving the knife in place, his eyes losing focus during his death rattle.
Jet crept to the two bedrooms that had been identified as the guard quarters and slipped a plastic tube over a nipple on one end of the first canister before sliding it under the door and emptying the contents into the room. She repeated the process at the second room and listened for any sounds. The floor creaked upstairs, near the office that adjoined the master quarters. Someone was up there, awake. Maybe the guard, maybe the target.
Every sense in her body was on alert, trying to isolate any clues that would give away the final bodyguard’s position. Perhaps he was in the security center off the kitchen – the little study that the detail had set up to use for monitoring the surveillance equipment. That would be the most likely place.
She crept down the main hall and past the empty living room, her steps muffled by the carpet as well as the rubber soles of her boots – Doc Martens knockoffs that were all the rage in Moscow, and spuriously crafted in China, the Shangri-La of piracy. When she reached the study, she swung into the doorway with her pistol at the ready and was greeted by an empty room.
A door opened down the hall, and a man stepped out holding a magazine – Maxim, she noted as she fired a shot through his eye. This last guard hadn’t even taken his weapon with him into the bathroom. Not that it would have mattered, but it indicated how sloppy the security team had grown from years of inactivity and relative safety.
Jet heard another creak from upstairs as the dead man slid down the wall, leaving a ragged smear of blood. She was already at the stairs by the time gravity had finished with him.