Jet

  ~ ~ ~

  Arkadi’s stomach was in knots. Something was wrong. The power had gone off, and since it had come back on he hadn’t seen anyone patrolling outside. But more unusual was that he could make out a few faint lights from other buildings across the field at the surrounding farms. The nocturnal blackouts so far had always darkened everything, not just his compound.

  He keyed the two-way radio he used to communicate with his security men and murmured a demand for them to call in. He released the button and waited for a response that never came.

  It was always possible they hadn’t heard. But he wasn’t in the business of assuming the best about anything. His gut said he was in danger.

  Arkadi moved to his desk and extracted a pistol from the center drawer – a SIG 225R – then tiptoed to the office door, listening intently for any sounds. He was working up the adrenaline to swing it open when the window burst inward and a black-clad form rolled toward him. He pivoted, bringing the gun around, but a blinding flash of pain spiked up his leg from where Jet’s razor-sharp combat knife had sliced his Achilles tendon. His leg buckled and he screamed as he pulled the trigger, but the shot missed, and the pain transferred to his stomach. He dropped the pistol on the floor as he gazed down to see Jet’s masked face staring up at him, her knife plunged to the hilt in his abdomen. She rose to her feet, gripping the knife and holding him upright, then sliced up into his heart as she’d been trained to do in countless hours of close quarter combat exercises.

  Arkadi’s eyes opened in shock from the rapid exsanguination, but also with his last living thought – the realization that his assassin was a woman. His lips stretched taut and a gurgle choked in his throat as he tried in vain to say something, and then everything went black, and he crumpled to the ground, the knife still buried in his chest.

  Jet bent down and felt Arkadi’s throat for a pulse, and then after confirming he was dead, pulled a cell phone from her pocket and snapped a photo of the body, his face clearly visible. She thumbed the phone’s buttons with the hand that wasn’t covered in blood and sent it as an e-mail attachment to a blind, single-use address, then slid the cell back into her black pants.

  The assignment complete, her priority shifted to getting clear of the compound and out of the country as soon as possible. By the time the bodies were discovered, she would be long gone, and the attack would be attributed to warring criminal factions fighting for territory.

  She didn’t know exactly who the target was, or what he had done to deserve his fate. She almost never did. That wasn’t her job. All she knew was that he was to be dispatched with extreme prejudice, and it had been deemed important enough to mount an expensive, complicated mission in an area of the world far from home. And now, whatever threat he posed was finished. End of story.

  She wiped the bloody gore off her black-gloved hand, leaving a streak on the thick white carpet, then scooped up the SIG from where the target had dropped it and stepped cautiously through the doorway.

  The other guards were out cold. The gas would keep them that way for at least six hours, so they posed no danger to her. Not that she would have hesitated to terminate them all, but there was no reason to, and she wasn’t gratuitous. She valued efficiency, and the killings tonight had been necessary in order to reach the objective. Nothing more.

  Back at the car, she stripped off her clothes and dropped them into a trash bag, along with the backpack and the weapons, and donned a muted sweater and jeans before tossing the sack into the back and closing the hatchback. She slid behind the wheel and started the motor, then paused to study her face in the rearview mirror. In the pale wash of moonlight, she could make out a few flecks of dried blood on the bridge of her nose, which she wiped off with a tissue wetted with saliva. The eyes that looked back at her were calm and flat, divulging nothing, giving no hint of what she had just done. As she put the car in gear, she thought about what Ariel had said to her in the early days. He’d complimented her, praising her as the perfect operative after a particularly difficult mission she’d carried out flawlessly.

  Perfect. She was, she supposed. But what he didn’t realize was that the engine that drove her was fueled by a volatile combination of anger, hate and despair. Every time she carried out a mission, she felt pride at being the best. The rest of it – the killing, the personal danger, the flirting with death while dancing on a razor’s edge – was immaterial. And part of her hated it, she realized – a sudden revelation that explained why she felt so empty inside even after a successful operation. Somewhere deep down in her core she hated herself and those who had made her this way, who had created a cold, calculating killing machine for their own selfish purposes.

  A solitary tear rolled down her cheek as she pulled down the little road to the larger highway that would lead her to the contact point. She would abandon the car to be sanitized by another operative and take a flight from Grozny to Moscow, where she would disappear, only surfacing when she was needed again. In that forlorn tear was concentrated all the anguish and loathing that a lifetime of hardship had forged, a monument to a life without a future or a past.

  Only today.

  And today, she’d done her job. As usual. As expected.

  As always.