like it was newspaper, euros and dollars, mostly; jewelry in glass containers, a row of watches that looked like they each must have cost more than what Zoya made in a year back when she had steady work.
She saw file cabinets and contracts stacked one upon the other in the unlocked drawers, bearer bonds, and satchels full of travel documents and passports.
It was a mother lode of supplies and loot for either an intelligence organization or an organized crime firm of some sort; Zoya could not determine which.
Looking around, unsure what to make of it all, she began scanning the locking mechanisms used on a single horizontal panel built into the wall. Most of the cabinets were unlocked or didn’t even have doors on them. Obviously Cassidy considered the vault door itself the only necessary deterrent for all this loot and compromising material. But the panel on the far wall—Zoya assumed it covered a pull-out drawer—had been secured with a heavy key lock, and this she found interesting. It seemed whatever was inside, Cassidy wanted to keep it even more secure than the rest of the items in the vault. She stepped up to the panel immediately and took the lock-picking tools she’d procured from Gorik Shulga’s SVR equipment cache.
She began working, and opened the large metal drawer in under a minute. Inside she found one item only. It was an iPad, the newest model, along with a charger.
Perplexed, she put the device inside her shirt and the charger in her hip bag, and then she headed back out of the vault, grabbing a thick wrapped stack of twenty-pound notes on the way.
* * *
• • •
Five minutes later she had descended the outside of the building and was just dropping down to street level when a pair of black four-doors skidded through the intersection, turning her way. She tried to dive into a darkened area, but this was Earl’s Court, and the street lighting was good. She turned and ran as fast as she could, unsure who was after her, but under the assumption that Fox and his big goon had called for support, and she just happened to be unlucky enough to time her escape to coincide perfectly with the arrival of the reinforcements.
She was on foot, she hadn’t brought a car or a motorcycle, but she was able to duck down a side street, then turn into a narrow alleyway, at the end of which she saw a sizable wall.
She sprinted towards it.
One of the sedans turned into the alleyway behind her.
As she approached the fourteen-foot-high wall ahead, her brain worked through the geometry and physics involved with climbing it. She told herself the corners would be key; she could pick a side, launch up, and use a foot against the building next to the wall, then the wall itself, and alternate back and forth, harnessing the momentum generated in her run along with the momentum generated by her legs during the pushoff of the climb.
This basically meant she would be running up the corner, and she knew she couldn’t do it for long before the momentum stored and generated equaled less than the force of gravity pulling her back to Earth, and at that point she would fall.
She hoped by then she’d be close enough to the top to grab hold.
The sedan behind her had her pinned in. It stopped and she heard car doors open. The driver put his high beams right on her.
Zoya leapt into the air. Right foot on the building, shoving up and high, left foot on the wall, hands slapping both surfaces for balance and a tiny bit more help with her climb. Back and forth, three steps on each side in all, and then she extended her arms over her head, grabbed the six-inch ledge at the top of the wall, and heaved herself up with her strong arms, shoulders, and back.
She had just started to fling herself over onto the other side and away from her attackers when she saw the second sedan parked there, the men from it just now getting out of their vehicle.
Der’mo!
She launched to her feet and began moving across the narrow ledge no wider than a balance beam.
Guns were raised in her position on both sides, but as she ran she heard no gunfire, only Fox’s voice, speaking Russian. “Zoya? Your father would like a word.”
Instantly she stopped. She turned towards the side of the alley from where Fox’s echoing voice addressed her. She