Covenant Page 2

  Jessica dropped the belt in her canvas tote, which she switched to her left shoulder, and screwed the suppressor onto the barrel while she walked to the front door. She placed her pistol on the beige marble-topped foyer table, next to an open laptop. The laptop display showed three images provided by a sophisticated, wireless camera drilled into the door’s peephole. The leftmost image focused on the entrance to Reznikov’s suite; the middle image gave her a traditional peephole view of the hallway surrounding her door and the rightmost image centered on the entrance to the suite area. Two private stairways flanked the windowed door beyond the suites, leading to the pool or beach.

  She studied the guards, waiting for them to settle back into the comfortable seats they would die in. When “goatee” was firmly planted in his chair, Jessica gripped the pistol in her right hand and slid it behind her thigh. She’d drill the first guard through the forehead, then target the bigger man’s neck. The thought of him grasping at the wound, struggling to breathe made her happy. Imagining a serrated blade cutting deep into his stomach caused a devilish grin. If she did this right, there would be time for both. Of course, if she missed his neck on the first shot, she’d take him down instantly with a head shot. She couldn’t risk him raising the alarm.

  “I’m in place, ready to take out the guards,” she whispered.

  “Backup ready,” stated Munoz.

  “Poolside ready,” reported Melendez.

  “ES ready. Surveillance camera outside of the target suite entrance has been placed in an endless loop. Hotel security and communications systems are disabled,” announced Timothy Graves, the team’s electronic support (ES) technician.

  Stationed on board one of the yachts in the resort’s nearby marina, Graves and Anish Gupta, the team’s hacker, had used the boat’s sophisticated communications array to access the hotel’s servers. “Child’s play,” he had reported to the team. Coopting the wireless signal from the Russian-installed camera had proven more difficult. Remotely accessing the laptop next to her on the table, he systematically attacked every wireless signal in range, decrypting every signal within seconds, except for one. GHT81432D1 required a brute-force software program.

  “Copy,” answered Daniel. “Monitor local emergency response and police frequencies. Lots of cell phones around.”

  “Monitoring,” said Graves. “I can delay their arrival if the need arises.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t,” said Daniel. “Jess, the show is yours. I start shooting once you breach the door.”

  “I’m walking out of the—hold on,” she said, her peripheral vision catching movement on the computer screen.

  The guards were out of their seats, standing in the same menacing poses they assumed every time she passed through the secure doors at the end of the hallway. A quick glance at the rightmost screen showed a woman dressed in a royal blue jacket and khaki slacks stepping through the door.

  “Looks like a member of the hotel staff decided to pay our friends a visit,” said Jessica.

  “How often has that happened?” said Munoz.

  “Once,” replied Graves, “and the Russians raised hell.”

  “Maybe they forgot to pay a bill,” said Daniel. “Is she alone?”

  “As far as I can tell. The hallway beyond the doors looks empty,” said Jessica. “I see a hotel name tag.”

  “Maybe she’s room service,” said Melendez.

  “She’s not carrying anything besides a tote bag,” said Jessica.

  “I meant she’s the room service,” he replied.

  “I know what you meant,” she said.

  “Let’s see what happens,” interrupted Daniel. “If she goes away and the guards ease back into their seats, we’ll execute the plan. If not, we wait another day. Watch this one closely.”

  “Got it. She’s passing my door,” said Jessica.

  Chapter 5

  Talia walked past the door leading to the off-duty guard suite and approached the two men standing in front of the target suite’s double entrance. Without breaking eye contact with the smaller guard, she noticed his left hand drifting slowly along his hip, most likely headed to a concealed holster. His larger compatriot crossed his arms and just stared at her chest. Easy pickings if she timed it right. When she reached the last door in the hallway, the first guard’s hand moved past the point of no return, disappearing behind his hip.

  She smiled warmly even as her right hand slipped into the tote and effortlessly yanked the pistol from the internal holster. Her pistol cleared the bag before his expression changed. The first suppressed bullet hit him square in the face, spraying the suite’s white doors with a mosaic of deep scarlet pieces. The second bullet hit the gawker between the eyes, finishing the gory masterpiece behind them. The man’s lustful expression remained intact as he collapsed against the side of the hallway, arms still folded uselessly in front of him.

  “Both guards down. Move up,” said Talia.

  ***

  “Shit,” whispered Jessica, watching the second guard crumple. “The hotel bitch just shot the guards.”

  “Say again!” hissed Daniel.

  Jessica studied the screen for a moment. The impeccably dressed woman paused momentarily in a two-handed firing position before lowering her pistol and continuing toward Reznikov’s suite. She was good, but walking up to two men in a hallway and shooting them dead wasn’t exactly the pièce de résistance of black ops fieldwork. Movement in the rightmost screen drew her attention away from the shooter. Two men shouldering suppressed submachine guns entered the hallway through one of the private access stairwells inside the suite area.

  “Two additional shooters entered the hallway,” she said.

  “Abort mission. Let them finish the job,” said Daniel.

  “They approached the guards without disabling the camera. How professional can they be?” she said, placing her hand on the doorknob.

  “She’s right,” said Graves. “I’ve detected no electronic attempts to override the Russians’ security system.”

  “Stand down!” said Daniel.

  “We only get one shot at this guy,” she said. “They won’t shoot a pregnant woman.”

  “Are you out of your mind!” she heard, before jamming the pistol into the canvas bag.

  ***

  Talia pivoted left and assumed a combat shooting stance when she heard the door open. She aligned the pistol’s tritium sights with a dark-haired woman’s head and applied pressure to the trigger. The woman screamed and backpedaled into the door frame, giving Talia a moment to assess the situation. Her eyes scanned the woman, immediately noticing that she was pregnant. Shit. The last thing she wanted to do was endanger this woman.

  “Go back in your room,” Talia commanded.

  The woman pressed an index finger against her lips and shook her head. She looked terrified.

  “There’s two more inside,” the woman whispered in Spanish, crossing the doorway to approach her. “They just passed out. I need help.”

  Talia took a step backward, extending an open hand to stop Gilad and Seth from coming any closer. The woman kept her hands in the air and slid against the wall—afraid to look at her pistol. What the hell was going on in there? A rage ignited at the thought of these Russian pigs violating this woman. She shifted the semiautomatic to the open doorway and reached out to the frightened woman.

  “Two targets in room. Passed out,” she whispered to her team, turning her head to give the woman instructions that might keep her alive.

  An unexpected surge of pain shot up her right arm, forcing her to drop the pistol. Before she could react, the woman had slipped behind her and locked a forearm across her throat, pressing the edge of a knife under her right jawline. Repeated shots from a suppressed pistol next to her head tore into the two Mossad operatives. They died without firing a shot—their line of fire obstructed by an operative careless enough to become a human shield.

  ***

  Jessica pressed the trigger three times in ra
pid succession, the bullets stitching high across the second assassin’s chest and knocking him to the blood-splattered marble floor. With the two threats eliminated, she no longer needed a human shield. She twisted the gun and placed it against the woman’s head. What happened next didn’t make sense. The woman’s head slipped under her arm as she fired the pistol, the 9mm steel-jacketed bullet hitting the wall next to them. She barely registered the fact that the pistol’s slide had locked back before her own knife came back at her.

  The elbow shot to her knife-wielding arm knocked the razor-sharp blade into her right shoulder, slashing bare skin. The woman in front of her twisted, facing her long enough to grip the same arm and torque the elbow outward and down. She knew exactly what was coming next, but had no way to stop it. With Jessica’s arm yanked downward, the assassin jabbed the short knife into her stomach. A sharp pain creased her abdomen, and she let go of the knife—her only defense against a repeated stabbing with her own blade.

  With the knife gone, the assassin tried to force her arm into a permanent hold, but Jessica lashed out with her empty pistol in her disengaged hand, connecting with the side of the woman’s head. They both stumbled back a few feet before scrambling after the weapons on the floor.

  Jessica didn’t have to look far. The killer’s still-loaded pistol lay on the floor between them, beckoning her to try to grab it. In the fraction of a second it took her to process the situation, the woman flicked open a serrated blade and lunged.

  Desperate to keep the pistol out of play, she stepped into the attack, blocking the underhand stab with a forearm and simultaneously striking the woman’s face with the empty handgun. The impact gave her the moment she needed to step on the pistol and slide it behind her, temporarily removing it from the equation.

  She heard it skim along the smooth marble floor and hit a wall. She hoped it was a wall. If it somehow got past the guards and hit the suite’s entrance doors, they were screwed. The door had a peephole.

  Chapter 6

  He shook his head at the image in the mirror, barely able to stand his own face. The deep, mottled scar running from mouth to ear along his left cheek hadn’t improved. His captors made sure of that. Sorry—liberators—though the distinction ran a bit murky from Reznikov’s perspective. His “liberation” involved being smuggled into a third world shithole stuffed inside the dirtiest freighter possible, then shuffled from one fetid jungle hideout in South America to the next.

  Occasionally, they occupied a marginally suitable structure near a town that smelled little better than a highway truck stop bathroom. Not that he really noticed the stench over his rotting feet and perpetual body odor. He sweated incessantly in the jungle, even when he was fairly certain that his body had already expelled all fluids save for the very blood coursing through his veins. The “dry sweat,” as he called it, produced an odor that would repulse even the most deodorant-intolerant Muscovite.

  At least they hadn’t deprived him of vodka. They knew better. Without his daily ration, he would have killed himself trying to escape—and that wouldn’t go over well with the big man in Moscow. He had them over a barrel in that regard. Their whole purpose in life was to keep him alive so he could one day return to make their pakhan money. Incredible sums of money, from what he guessed. There was a method to this madness, though it was hard to discern when your own body odor kept you awake at night, along with the unbearable heat and the constant fear of a thumb-sized bug crawling over your face.

  His exile to the jungle served two purposes, both “in his best interest,” he was told. He’d hate to see what wasn’t in his best interest. Primarily, the Solntsevskaya Bratva used their shadowy network of South American drug contacts and human-trafficking farmers to disappear him. Admittedly, this made sense, though he would have preferred to vanish at a private beach house in Thailand. Of course, in an environment ripe with easy women and free-flowing liquor, he wouldn’t be able to “focus” on his work, the real reason the Bratva kept him hidden.

  A sophisticated Satcom rig and powerful computer suite accompanied them everywhere, allowing him to finish preliminary work and projections on his next masterpiece. They even cleared trees with explosives to create a line of sight to the nearest encrypted satellite on his behalf. Little did they know that he was recreating a virus he had long ago brought to virtual life in a sophisticated computer simulator. Nobody knew about this special research project. Not even the snoops at the Vektor Institute—sort of.

  The only person that had ever heard him babble about his prized creation was Arkady Belyakov, fellow bioweapons scientist turned snitch. They had both been drunk out of their minds at a dingy bar on the outskirts of Novosibirsk, when one too many shots of vodka sufficiently loosened Reznikov’s tongue. Not an easy feat. He’d considered hitting Arkady over the head and pushing him off one of the small bridges on their walk back to the scientist housing area, but correctly reasoned that he’d be the prime murder suspect. They’d been the only patrons at the bar.

  Instead, he walked arm in arm with Arkady, delivering him safely home to his family—all the time worrying if he’d said too much in the bar. Fortune smiled on him a week later, when Arkady’s wife scolded him in the Vektor parking lot. Arkady had blacked out at home, skipping their planned family picnic the next day with a vicious hangover. Poor Arkady. The Americans executed him during their raid against Vektor Institute, at Reznikov’s suggestion.

  The thought of Vektor Institute’s demise gave him a rare smile. Berg had done all of his dirty work, destroying Vektor’s bioweapons laboratory and assassinating the cadre of scientists assigned to the program—eliminating any future competition. As Vektor Institute’s only surviving bioweapons engineer, his market value rose considerably. Unfortunately, the only customers capable of freeing him from CIA captivity turned out to be the Solntsevskaya Bratva—an ironic twist of fate. He traded nearly all of his market value away for the simple pleasure of exchanging one captor for another.

  He couldn’t complain too much. His exile to the rain forest slums of South America was a small price to pay to be alive. Karl Berg had been moments from putting a bullet in his head—essentially winning the game of double crosses that Reznikov held so close to his heart. Only the Bratva’s impatient quest to secure an invaluable asset saved him from an unceremonious death in the unremarkable woods of Vermont. He gently touched the scar—Berg would pay dearly for this, and his yearlong imprisonment with these cretins.

  “Anatoly! Open the damn door,” he heard, the doorknob rattling.

  He’d kill them too when the time was right. They showed him no respect, treating him like shit all day long. Anatoly Reznikov was better than them. Better than all of this.

  “You better not be passed out in there, you drunken piece of shit! We got a problem,” said Valery Zuyev, his “handler.”

  Zuyev was closely connected to Matvey Penkin, a brigadier in the Bratva. Penkin was in the top tier of Solntsevskaya leadership, his position solidified by the income-earning potential of selling Reznikov’s products to the highest bidder. The booze and women flowed freely when Zuyev visited, so he came to appreciate the man on a Pavlovian level.

  “I’m taking a dump,” said Reznikov. “Do you mind?”

  “Cut the bullshit. I can hear your voice near the sink,” said Zuyev. “We have a situation.”

  “All right!” he barked, downing the lukewarm vodka in a thick tumbler and opening the door.

  “There’s always a goddamn situation with you,” hissed Reznikov. “What now?”

  “Something hit the door,” said Zuyev, pulling him by the arm toward the front of the suite.

  “Check the cameras, for shit’s sake,” said Reznikov, reaching for one of the half-full, open bottles of clear liquor on the nearest table.

  “We’ve done that,” said Zuyev, nodding at a computer station with a picture of the hallway.

  The scene looked normal. Two guards seated several feet from the door.

  “Then take a lo
ok through the peephole,” said Reznikov, shaking his head.

  “No shit,” said Zuyev, yanking him around the corner leading directly to the entrance “We’re taking precautions.”

  Taking precautions was an understatement. Six of the eight Bratva security guards crouched in various concealed locations, aiming black, short-barreled AKS-74Us at the double entrance. The two remaining guards kneeled behind furniture, facing the floor-to-ceiling glass that surrounded the suite.

  “Shut the curtains and stay clear of the windows!” ordered Zuyev, spurring the two men into action.

  While they closed the curtains, Zuyev settled in behind Reznikov’s chief of security, a surly brute called Yergei.

  “What are we looking at?” said Zuyev.

  “Checking now,” said Yergei, signaling for one of the guards to approach the door.

  A muscular, tattoo-covered Russian crept to the door, slowly raising his head to the level of the peephole. He stared for a few seconds, then looked toward Yergei and shook his head.

  “What are you seeing?” insisted Zuyev.

  The guard crouched and moved quietly toward them, whispering when he arrived. “I see two women facing each other in the hallway. No sign of Misha or Yakov. Chairs are empty. I can’t see the floor through the peephole.”

  Zuyev yanked him back into the living room area, stopping at the computer screen. The image clearly showed the two guards sitting in the chairs. They rubbed their faces and shifted in their seats—nothing seemed out of place. Reznikov suddenly felt nauseous. Berg’s people had found him. The psychopath that had restarted his heart to torture him over and over again was here. It was the only explanation.