to kill.”
“If it comes down to it, I doubt that.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, Gorik, Utkin had a gun to my head and I still managed to kill him. And now I have a gun pointed at your head. Want to see if you’re faster than a speeding bullet? Oleg wasn’t.”
Shulga offered no protest. Instead he sat down in front of the Russian woman with the small pistol pointed at him.
Zoya said, “I always liked you. You were one of the good ones. Slower-witted than many of the others, but sweeter.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Thanks . . . I guess,” he said.
“I would feel terrible if there were some misunderstanding now and I had to shoot you.”
“And I might even feel worse.”
Zoya smiled. Repeated, “I always liked you.”
“Not enough to let me get that black dress off you that night in Venice, as I recall.”
Now Zoya gave a tired little laugh. “You were drunk, and we were in the middle of an operation. Under different circumstances, you might have succeeded.”
“What do you want?”
“Stuff.”
“Stuff? What stuff?”
“Tools, gear, kit, supplies.”
“You are out of SVR. Why would I give you anything from the London cache?”
“I would have thought the answer to be obvious.” She waved the gun back and forth in front of her face.
Shulga said, “Oh. Right. Killing two SVR officers won’t get you into much more hot water than killing just one.”
“Exactly. Listen, I know you have three forty-foot sea containers of cached SVR weapons and other gear here on your warehouse floor. You and I are going to walk down there, I’m going to take a few items, and then I’m going to leave. At that point, you have three choices. Either you alter some paperwork to make the equipment disappear, or you make it look like you were robbed overnight by some unknown subject, or you tell SVR your security was shit, Sirena the burned dead officer got the drop on you, and then you outfitted her with enough equipment to conduct an intelligence operation.”
Gorik’s face turned gray.
“Yeah,” Zoya said. “You get the picture, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Sirena. You’re crazy. You always were off in your own little world. Motivated by something other than our nation. Some . . . some desire to make your dead father proud. Well . . . I don’t think he’d be so proud of you now.”
Zoya did not respond.
“So . . . who are you working for?”
“If I were working for anyone, I wouldn’t be here stealing equipment from you, would I? I have a personal interest in a delicate situation, and I need to figure some things out on my own.”
“With guns and knives and bombs?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got bombs?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Kidding. I’ll need a pistol and ammunition. A couple of fixed-blade knives. But what I really need is surveillance tech, climbing gear, audio equipment for safe cracking, that sort of thing. You can lose that sort of equipment and cover for it.”
“I can’t cover for a lost gun,” he said flatly.
“Give me one of your local purchases. One you haven’t logged with Yasenevo.”
He made a face. “What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Gorik. We came up the ranks together, until you topped out at thirty. I’m sure you remember I used to run foreign caches at the beginning of my career. I know how the game is played. You have official equipment, and you have unofficial equipment, black market shit in case you need to pass it out to a proxy. Give me one of those guns, the rest of the gear I ask for, and you can paper over this entire day.”
Gorik just eyed her for a long time. “What do I get in return?”
Zoya rolled her eyes. “Again, dummy, I’m pointing a gun at you. You get to live.” She added, “Doubt you’d have ever figured out how to get my dress off if I let you try back in Venice.”
* * *
• • •
Twenty-five minutes later Zoya Zakharova left Gateway Shipping and Air Freight with a backpack on her back and a second, smaller backpack strapped around her front. Gorik was back in his office, and Zoya put the odds at fifty-fifty as to whether he was already on the phone to Moscow.
She hoped he wouldn’t make that call, of course, but to tip the scales in her favor if he did, she decided she would speed up her work even more here in London. She’d go