night and get to the airport the next morning.
When the time came for him to leave his apartment building, she was sitting in her car, watching, from a half block down. He never appeared.
A million things raced through her mind. Had he overslept? Was he sick? Hungover? Had he suffered a heart attack? A stroke? What the hell was going on?
She waited for as long as she could and then gave in to the character trait that killed the cat. She had to know why the diplomat hadn’t left.
Locking her car, she walked casually up the street, pretending to be engrossed in her phone.
They had established a way to signal each other through Instagram. Based on what she could see, he hadn’t been active since they had spoken yesterday. Something was definitely up. He should have logged onto his account before doing anything else this morning. He hadn’t.
Walking past the apartment building, she kept a casual watch for anything out of the ordinary—stray figures in doorways, occupied parked cars, or anything else that might signal some sort of surveillance. She didn’t see anything. As far as she could tell, the street was clean.
Against her better instincts, and with no team to back her up, she had decided to check out his apartment.
It was an old building. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to break into. As it turned out, that hadn’t been necessary.
In their push to get to work, a stream of residents had been pouring out. None of them even bothered looking behind them to make sure the lobby door had closed and locked shut. All Sølvi had to do was stand nearby and wait. When the next person exited, she slipped inside.
The diplomat lived on the third floor. Shunning the elevator, she took the stairs, making sure to be as quiet as possible.
She could hear the sounds of a struggle coming from inside the apartment before she had even arrived at the door at the end of the hall.
While the NIS had issued her a firearm, Carl had told her to leave it in Oslo. Any weapon she carried abroad should never be traceable—and whenever possible, should always be standard issue of a foreign, hostile government. For her work in the Baltics, he had recommended several types of pistols. He had then handed her an envelope with a thousand U.S. dollars and the name of a black-market arms dealer he trusted.
Based on what the man had available at the time, she had selected a Russian-made Pistolet Besshumnyy, which translated to “Pistol Silent” in English, and was also known as a “PB” for short.
A Soviet design from the late 1960s, it was still in service and manufactured by Kalashnikov—Russia’s largest arms manufacturer. Built for the 9x18mm Makarov round, it used an integral suppressor, which consisted of two parts. This meant that the PB could be easily concealed. The pistol, with half its suppressor already attached, could be placed in one coat pocket—the remaining half in another.
It took minimal training to become adept at rapidly drawing, assembling, and firing the weapon. Sølvi had practiced the routine so many times that she could do it in her sleep. By the time she was halfway down the hall, she had already put it together.
She had never been inside the diplomat’s apartment. The handful of times they had met, it had always been in an NIS safe house on the outskirts of the Lithuanian capital. She had no way of knowing how it was laid out. If it was like most of the other apartments of its age she had seen in Vilnius, the door would open onto a corridor leading to a living room, dining room, and kitchen. Along the way, there’d be a bathroom and, likely, two bedrooms.
Stopping at the door, she steadied her breathing and listened. All she could hear were thuds and angry, muffled voices.
She would have given a year’s pay for a sack full of flashbangs. Making entry without some sort of distraction device was doubling the danger she was about to encounter. The only way this could possibly work was if she maintained the element of surprise.
Reaching down, she tried the door handle. It was locked.
Think, she said to herself.
All the old buildings, at least the nice ones like this, had an on-site superintendent. Such a person would have keys to each apartment. But by the time she found the superintendent, it could be too late. She needed to get inside that unit now. The only