secured it around his waist while she talked.
“Zakharova is in the hall. She’s leaving.”
“What’s she wearing?”
“Looks like workout gear. Swimsuit in her bag.”
“Then she’s going to the gym.” Maksim said it with confidence, then reached for his pack of cigarettes on the sink.
“Hurry up,” Sorokina demanded, then looked at Pervak. “Put your shirt on. We can do this right now.”
She rushed back through the bedroom and into the living room, then leaned over the other woman on the team, who was again seated at the computers watching the screen.
Bolichova said, “She got off on the second floor. Looks like she’s heading to the spa.”
“What would it take to shut off all cameras to the spa?”
“A press of a few buttons, but I don’t advise it.”
“Why not?”
“You’d also want to control the cameras for Maksim’s movement into the location. Doing the job here on the fourth floor would be a lot easier. I’ve prerecorded the empty hall to play back during the hit. Hotel security won’t see a thing. If you want Maksim to go down to the second floor, kill her in the health club, and then get out of the building, I’ll have to bring the entire system down. Easy to do, but hard to fool anyone as to what is happening. Police will be here in minutes, and it definitely won’t seem like natural causes when they find that the hotel cameras have been tampered with.”
Maksim had followed Inna out of the bedroom, still wearing only the towel. “We go with the original plan. She’ll be hungry after her workout, and she’ll order food and coffee when she gets back to her room.”
Inna looked again at Anya. “What about making entry on her room now? Lie in wait for her. I can open the lock.”
“No,” Pervak said. “This scenario benefits us. We use the time we have now while she’s in the gym to get all the luggage out of the building except for two laptops and our weapons. When she comes back, we go in.”
Inna turned to Maksim. “When she calls for breakfast, they’ll tell her twenty minutes, but you go in fifteen. We cut the cameras seconds before we open this door, and you take the cart. This needs to look like suicide. The best way to ensure that is to overpower her at gunpoint, put her in the tub, then slit her wrists. When she bleeds out, you leave, then put the Do Not Disturb sign on her door. No one from the hotel will enter all day.” She smiled. “We’ll be in Moscow by then.”
“What about the real room service?” Semyon asked.
Anya Bolichova answered this. “Just like D.C. I’ll call and cancel it before it comes up. Spoof the phone in Zakharova’s suite so they think it’s her.”
This made sense to everyone, Inna included. She turned to Maksim. “Put your room service attendant’s uniform on, and be ready.”
He saluted the woman sarcastically, then turned on his heel, leaving a cloud of cigarette smoke behind in the room as he left.
* * *
• • •
Zoya opted for a swim in the large indoor pool. She put her backpack in a locker, leaving the door open while she put on the one-piece suit she’d bought upon arrival here at the Adlon once she saw the great pool. She pulled her little SIG Sauer from the pack and slid it up through a leg hole in her suit, eventually pushing it up around her midsection. She wouldn’t be able to draw it especially quickly, but, she reasoned, if she met any threats while she was in the pool, having a gun on her, though inconvenient to access, would be better than the alternative.
But she didn’t really think it likely that she was in great danger now. Zoya knew a thing or two about Russian government-ordered extrajudicial killings, and all she knew on the subject told her there was no way Maksim Akulov would come into the center of a five-star hotel, full of cameras, for such a brazen hit.
No, if the Russians got her, she decided it would be by them running her down with an SUV as she stepped off a streetcar.
Still, the pistol gave her the peace of mind she needed to dive into the pool.
She swam laps, executed racing turns at each end, measured her breathing, felt the endorphins pumping into her brain.
Exercise always helped her relax, but this morning it was difficult to think of anything more than the fact that the fabled