he took out of the safe. My concern, though, is that he fails and this makes it impossible for me to get in there until their security relaxes again.”
“Right,” Suzanne Brewer said. “What do you need?”
“Wait one,” Court said, because he scanned Cassidy’s office and saw the masked figure moving through the darkness there, staying away from the window but not out of view from someone with night vision equipment.
The figure looked over the room, began opening drawers in wooden file cabinets and thumbing through them, and then opened up a computer there on the desk.
“Shit. Subject is in Cassidy’s office. Definitely hunting for something.”
“A safe?”
“He’s rifling through the desk.”
“Keep watching and reporting what you see.”
The figure moved to a paneled wall behind the desk and began feeling around. He was thirty feet away from the painting the safe was hidden behind, and Court doubted there was any chance he’d find it.
The person in the office then went back to the file cabinet and fidgeted with his mask for a moment, lining up the eyeholes to read some papers in the file. After several seconds of this, the figure reached up and pulled the knit mask off his head.
Shoulder-length brunette hair tumbled out of the balaclava.
Court blinked in surprise. The figure was facing away from him, kneeling in front of the bottom drawer in the file cabinet, but Court put the subject’s height around five eight, and he noticed the lean frame did seem to have some feminine curves.
Was he looking at a woman?
Court said, “Brewer?”
“I’m here.”
“Uh . . . here’s a twist. The target is a—”
Just then, the person squatting turned towards the door to the office. Through Court’s night vision binos and their ten-power magnification, he could easily see the face of Zoya Zakharova and the look of alarm on it.
Court felt a muscle spasm in his low back and the burn of fresh adrenaline and dopamine in his system. He’d thought about this face in front of him nearly constantly for the past four months, told himself he’d probably never lay eyes on it again, and now the face was here, right in front of him.
And expressing imminent danger.
Brewer spoke. “I lost transmission. Do you have me, Violator?”
Court didn’t answer; he just bit his lip while he watched the former Russian operative close the file cabinet, spin around, then crawl behind the desk.
“Violator, how do you copy?”
After a long pause Court said, “The subject . . . the subject in Cassidy’s office, is identified.”
“Identified? Identified as who?”
“It’s . . . it’s Zoya.”
Clearly Brewer could not process what she was hearing. “What did you say?”
“Zoya.”
“Zakharova is . . . she’s there? In the UK?”
“In the lawyer’s office. Right now. Hiding, looks like she thinks she hears someone coming.”
Brewer said, “What the hell does any of this have to do with her?”
“Lady, don’t ask me. I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on with any of this shit. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
CHAPTER 29
Suzanne Brewer sat at her desk on the sixth floor of CIA’s Langley Headquarters, her phone to her ear. Her eyes were closed while she tried to process the new and utterly dissonant information her agent had just passed on to her.
Anthem was in play in London. But for whom? And how did she get there?
Her first inclination was to tell Violator to shoot Zoya Zakharova in the head from standoff distance right this moment. But she was no fool; she knew there was no way he would comply with the order. Instead she said, “Just watch her.”
Through the phone she heard her agent speak in a challenging voice. “I thought you told me she was at a safe house somewhere.”
“She was. She . . . escaped. A couple days ago.”
Violator said, “I talked to her before you brought her over to the States. She wanted to go. She wanted to work for you. What the hell were you doing to her that caused her to escape?”
“We weren’t doing anything. She was on her way to becoming an asset. She was doing great, only weeks from operational status.”
“Until one day she just walked out the front door?”
“Yes. Well . . . not exactly. The safe house was hit by armed hostiles. Her motives remain unclear because from the surveillance cameras we see that she was in the process of escaping even before the raid began. There is no way she knew she was in any danger when she made the decision