Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Yana
Iam against the earth behind a ridge of pine cover, my elbows propped in the dirt, my eyes on the south face of the mansion.
The compound sprawls below me in the dark. White stone, dull light at the front gates, the long curve of the driveway. The trees around me are thick enough to hide six men with a clean line of sight. We are positioned exactly where I asked us to be.
Friday. 11:47 p.m.
The earpiece on my left side crackles.
“Boss, the shipment is in. We’re rolling out in seven.”
That is Mikhail on the dock. I press the receiver.
“Copy.”
The earpiece on my right side comes alive a second later — Kirill’s voice.
“Yana. Status.”
“Nothing.” I keep my voice quiet. “No movement. The house has been still for two hours. Lights on the second floor, lights at the gate, nothing else.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure. No cars in or out since I called in at nine. No guards rotating off the perimeter. No one has even opened a window.”
“Update me at the next mark.”
“Yes, Pakhan.”
The line goes quiet on his side.
I lower the radio and turn my head a fraction.
The man at my left shoulder is one of the six Kirill assigned to me, Yegor, who has been with the family for nine years and whom I have worked with twice before.
The other five are spread in a loose arc behind me, two at my back, two further along the ridge, one at the car, twenty meters down the slope.
“You’re certain this is the only exit,” I say to Yegor without looking at him.
“South gate, north gate, and the service road behind the east wing. South is here. North, we have covered from the other ridge. The service road has Pyotr and Lev on it.”
“And no other way out.”
“No, Yana. We mapped it twice.”
I nod. I press my eye back to the scope.
The mansion is calm. The kind of calm that, after thirty minutes of watching, starts to feel rehearsed.
I wait, and five minutes pass. Then another five. I look through the scope across the wing windows, the front entrance, and the line of cars in the parking strip. Nothing. No shadow on any glass. No shift in the standing guards at the gate.
It is too still. A house this size, with a Don as restless as this one, does not sit at eleven on a Friday night without one window changing, one door opening, one car starting in the driveway.
There should be staff around. There should be a guard lighting a cigarette.
There should be a kitchen light coming on for a glass of water.
There is nothing. I lower the scope.
And then, on the third floor of the east wing, a beam of light moves across the inside of a curtain.
A flashlight, clearly held by a hand. Sweeping from left to right.
I hold my breath and listen.
Underneath the wind, I hear a sound far away, growing closer—the whine of engines on a back road. Not coming here.
Going somewhere else.
The dock!
My stomach drops. The Italians are not in this house. They left before I got here, or they left while I was watching, or they were never going to leave from here at all. The flashlight on the third floor sweeps once more and goes dark.
Someone is signaling. But who are they signaling?
I think very fast as I look at the men around me.
Have they been bought?
If they have been bought, all six of them will know it. If only some of them have been bought, the ones that have not will still hesitate. Either way, the next thirty seconds will tell me everything.
I shift my hand slowly down to the holster at my hip. I keep my eyes forward on the scope, like I have seen nothing.
I roll to my right, and I shoot Yegor in the side of the head out of sheer instinct; he was compromised.
Two of the men raise their rifles at me immediately.
One of them calls out, “Cover, we have her, hold position—”
We have been compromised! These men aren’t for us!
I shoot the man talking in the throat.
And all hell breaks loose.
The first bullet hits me square in the center of my chest, and the vest takes it.
The impact knocks the breath out of me, but my legs are quick.
I roll and come up at a crouch, and the second round hits the vest at my ribs, and the third round goes past my ear and into the tree behind me. The bark explodes.
I have to run.
I cannot try to fight them all. I am one against four, and the slope is slippery. I am exposed, I have to get to the car, I have to get on the radio, and Kirill needs to know in the next 60 seconds, or the shipment is gone, and so is he.
I go down the slope at a dead sprint. The pine cover is thinner than I want. Two more shots find the vest in my back, and one of them hits low enough that I think for half a second it has gone through. It has not. I keep running.
The car is at the bottom of the slope, hidden between two trunks. The driver is inside with the engine off.
The driver steps out of the car as I reach it. He has his pistol up, and he shoots at me before I can think.
It hits me in the upper arm. I feel it goes through the meat and out the back, and my left side goes useless. I raise my own gun with my right hand, and I shoot him in the head, and his body drops against the open door. I kick him out of the way and get into the driver’s seat.
The four men on the ridge are coming down behind me. I can hear their feet. I turn the key, put the car in gear, and floor it.
The windshield shatters before I have made it twenty meters. Glass goes across the dashboard, across my lap, across the side of my face. I duck and keep my hand on the wheel. Another round hits the back windshield. Another finds the back tire, and the car swerves to the right.
Shit shit!
The tire is going to last me about thirty seconds. I tap the receiver against my ear with my injured hand.
“Pakhan.”
“Yana.” His voice is immediate. “Report.”
“We are compromised.”
A half-second of silence on the other end.
“All of them?”
“All six.”
“Where are you?”
“Coming off the property. The Italians are not here.”
I have to shout it over the wind coming through the broken windshield. “They were never here. The house was a feint. They are on the way to you, Pakhan; they may already be on you. Giovanni is our guy.”
The car swerves again. The back tire is going.
“Get clear,” Kirill orders. “Get somewhere safe. I have the dock.”
“Pakhan, I am on my way!”
“Yana. Get clear!”
The line cuts.
* * *
The back tire is fully gone. I can hear it slapping against the wheel well with every rotation, and the car is pulling to the right, and I keep correcting with one hand on the wheel.
My left arm is useless against my side. There is blood pooling in the seat under me.
The eastern dock is fifteen minutes away.
I make it in nine.
I hear the gunfire as I see the dock. It is muffled by the wind and by the distance, then suddenly it is not. I am turning off the access road, the air is full of the dry crack of rifles, and the orange flash of muzzle fire is breaking the dark between the shipping containers.
I drive the car straight at the gate. The barrier is down, so I hit it. The hood crumples, but the airbag does not deploy. My head slams against the wheel, and I taste blood in my mouth. I push the door open and jump out before the car stops.
Then I am up and running. I run through the open ground at a sprint with my gun in my right hand.
Two men with rifles are behind a low concrete divider thirty meters to my left, firing toward the cargo area.
They do not see me until I am already past them.
I shoot the closer one in the back of the head, and the second one turns, and I shoot him before his rifle is up.
Kirill. Had his men turned on him, too?
I turn the corner of a stacked row of containers, and the dock opens up in front of me.
There are bodies on the concrete. The shipping truck is parked at the loading bay with its back doors open, and its driver is slumped against the front wheel.
Men in black are going between the containers, calling to each other in Italian.
I run into the cover of a forklift, and I scan around.
I cannot see Kirill.
I press the receiver. “Pakhan, Pakhan, report.”
There is static.
“Kirill.”
Nothing.
I tiptoe out from cover and run along the edge of the containers.
I shoot one man as I pass him. I shoot another at the end of the row.
My right shoulder is doing all the work, and my hand is steady, and my arm is shaking with adrenaline and not yet with shock.
I have minutes before shock catches me. I have to find him in those minutes.
I round another corner when an arm hooks around my throat from behind.
It is fast and professional, and my own body goes against me.
I am pulled back, off my feet, and slammed down onto the concrete with the full weight of someone on top of me.
The air goes out of my chest in a cough.
The gun is in my hand for half a second, and then a boot comes down on my wrist, and the gun skids away across the concrete and out of reach.
He pulls me up by the front of my vest and pins me to the side of the container with his forearm across my throat. My feet barely touch the ground.
The attacker is dressed in black and armed. A balaclava covers his face from the bridge of his nose down. A black cap pulled. Nothing of him is showing except his eyes.
The eyes.
I should be fighting. I should be reaching for the second gun at my back. I should be jamming my thumb into his eye socket or driving my knee up between his legs. I am trained to do all of those things in under a second.
But his eyes are dark. They are calm and completely still. They are looking back at me with a quiet attention that does not belong in the middle of a firefight.
I have never seen these eyes before. Yet, I have seen these eyes before.
I cannot place either thought. They sit on each other, and neither wins.
“Yana!”
The voice cuts across the dock underneath the gunfire.
It’s Kirill.
The sound of my name snaps something back into place.
I kick the man, and my knee drives up into the soft place at the inside of his thigh, and he grunts. His grip loosens for half a second, and that is enough. I shove him back with my good shoulder, and he stumbles, and I am reaching behind me for the second gun at my back.
He pulls his, and we point at each other from a few meters apart. The sleeve of his jacket has shifted in the scuffle. At his collarbone, just above the line of the black fabric, the edge of a tattoo is showing—the body of a snake. The head and the rest of it disappear under his clothing.
I shoot, but he spins before the round leaves the barrel.
He spins to the right, and the bullet goes past his shoulder, and he is on me again before I have adjusted.
His arm hooks around my neck from the side and pulls me back against his chest, and his other hand catches the wrist of my gun arm and twists it down toward the concrete.
His mouth is at my ear, the balaclava muffling his voice.
“You’re everything they said you were, huh?”
I elbow him, aiming for his chest, but he absorbs it, and he shoves me away from him, sending me staggering forward across the open space.
I almost fall, but two arms catch me.
“Yana.” Kirill’s voice against my head. “I have you.”
Mikhail is at his side, gun up, firing past us into the dark where the masked man was a half second ago. The man is gone.
I twist out of Kirill’s grip to go after him.
Kirill grabs my arm, the bad one.
“Fuck!”
He pulls back and sees the blood. “Yana. We are outnumbered. We are leaving.”
“Pakhan, the container!”
“Now.”
I look at him. There is blood on his sleeve and his head. He is not asking.
We run and come out to the cargo area, firing at anything that moves between us and the perimeter.
Mikhail goes down, gets back up with a hand pressed to his side, and keeps running.
We reach the car, and we throw ourselves into it—Kirill at the wheel and Mikhail in the back.
I’m in the passenger seat with my arm bleeding into the upholstery.
He drives, and the dock falls away behind us. The gunfire fades. The dark of the road comes up, the city is in the distance, and we are alive.
I press my forehead against the cold of the passenger window. I look out into the dark beside the dock.
He is there, standing between two of the far containers, the balaclava still pulled up, the cap still low, hands at his sides. He is standing perfectly still, watching the car go.
His eyes find mine through the window, but I cannot place him. I have never met him. I would remember a body like that, that grip, that voice. I would remember the snake.
And yet. The eyes and way he held himself when he stood still. Something about the line of his shoulders, the angle of his head when he turned to watch the car. Something familiar that I cannot reach.
The car carries me past him. I close my eyes against the window, and I try to grab the thought.
It slips.