at both, but he didn’t imagine the odds would be in his favor if he kicked in the front door of that building across the street with guns blazing.
Finesse was his only shot at this.
Normally he would have contacted Brewer, but he realized there was nothing she could do for him now but complain about his decision to let Zakharov escape. No, recovering Zoya wasn’t one of his assigned tasks, so the last thing he wanted to do right now was update Brewer on his plan to bail on the mission to attempt to achieve a non-mission-critical objective.
She would disallow it, he told himself, and he would do it anyhow, so why trouble her with a phone call?
Court would go it alone. He’d been going it alone for a long time, after all.
* * *
• • •
Minutes later he stood at street level, alongside the target building, just steps away from the down ramp to the underground garage. Brewer had tried to call him, but he hadn’t answered, so she’d texted him that his backup was ten minutes out. He thought about waiting, but he didn’t know who she would be sending, and didn’t know what she had told the other asset about Zoya.
The last thing he wanted was some asshole coming in here and breaking up his rescue mission because it didn’t look anything like what Brewer told him his job was.
He took the ramp down to the parking garage. Finesse, not force, he reminded himself.
At the bottom of the garage was a barricade to prevent cars from entering, but Court simply stepped around it and moved deeper under the building. He found a door to a stairwell, picked it in seconds, then slipped inside silently.
Almost immediately he detected a presence one floor above him on the stairs. A shuffling of footsteps. He drew his 9-millimeter and screwed on the Gemtech silencer, then began moving slowly upwards.
* * *
• • •
Zoya Zakharova knew she was being sent back to Russia the second her door opened and she saw the men. Fox was there, as was Hines, but they had been joined by four tattooed, rough-looking, square-jawed types, armed with HK MP5K short-barreled, folded-stock submachine guns. She had not been tied or blindfolded, but there was still no way for her to escape at present. Fox spoke to her in Russian and told her to come out into the hall.
She was led towards the elevator, while Fox and Hines walked silently behind her and the gunmen. The rhythmic echoes of footsteps in the big university building’s hallways reverberated, and the elevator down loomed closer with every step.
She wondered if there was anything she could have said to her father that would have prevented him from shipping her back to Russia where, despite his assurances, she knew she faced certain death. She could have begged him, pleaded for a chance to work with him, but her pride prevented it.
She was going to die in a gulag or be assassinated walking to the grocery if she didn’t find a way to get away from these men before she was handed over to SVR.
As the group approached the elevator, it surprised everyone when it dinged to indicate a car arriving on the floor. The armed men stopped and looked back to Fox, and Fox immediately reached for his radio to see who was coming.
The doors began to open, and everyone reached for their weapons. Hines moved in front of Fox, pushing the smaller man back.
“The girl,” Fox said, and the Englishman grabbed Zoya by her shirt and yanked her onto her heels and back behind him, as well.
As the door opened, the carnage was immediately apparent. Two dead men were lying one on top of the other on the floor of the car. Blood splattered the walls and drenched the carpet below them.
Zoya recognized both men as Bratva soldiers who had been guarding the stairwell and the elevator when she’d arrived.
“What the fuck?” one of the Bratva men said, his MP5K up at his shoulder and scanning left and right. The men around him did the same. No one advanced on the elevator, and soon the door closed again.
Fox brought the radio to his mouth and ordered all the men still alive in the building to be on the lookout. He sent three of the five men who had been guarding Janice Won downstairs to immediately head to the rear stairwell to meet this group on the top floor. They would descend the