Her HK P7.
God, Rox, no …
“Don’t move,” Roxanne said, hands trembling. She backed away from Nichole slowly. She had the pistol pointed at Nichole’s head.
“This is not what you think,” Nichole said. “I’m CIA. Listen to me, Roxanne:
“David wanted to kill us all, and now you’re going to poison us all.”
“Rox, you’re making a huge mistake. Please put the gun down.”
“I’m not stupid! I heard him talking about nerve agents!”
Nichole showed her the perfume bottle. “This is yours, Roxanne. Your Euphoria.”
“I slept over last night! You could have switched it!”
“Honey, you can’t put a chemical nerve agent in a perfume bottle.”
Well, you could, actually. But Nichole needed to calm Roxanne down. Tell her what she wanted to hear. Get her gun back. “Then put the perfume down.”
“This is our way out of here.”
“God, Nichole, don’t make me do this.
Everything positive that Nichole had seen in Roxanne—her initiative, her resilience—was now distorted in a fun house mirror. How could she have thought about recruiting someone who could snap so easily, who’d abandon rational thought in a matter of minutes?
Roxanne was still her friend, but she was all wrong for this line of work.
Now Nichole had to do something regrettable. She had to incapacitate her best friend. It would hurt Rox, and it would kill Nichole to do it, but she needed Rox safe and out of the way for now. She could be stashed in one of the empty offices until this was all over. Maybe then they’d have a chance of repairing this breach of trust.
So Nichole pretended to put the perfume back into the purse, but snapped her arm up and blasted it right in Roxanne’s eyes, then slapped the gun down, wrapped her fingers around it, pulled the gun away, dropped the perfume, and then followed up with a chop to Roxanne’s face, right between her nose and lip—an incredibly painful blow that would bring her to her knees. Nichole would use the opportunity to cut off her air and render her unconscious for at least an hour.
But Nichole had misjudged the chop.
And she had kind of, accidentally, sent fragments of bone into her best friend’s brain.
Nichole sat there for a while, crouched down next to her friend’s dead body, pondering her next move.
Pondering how she was going to piece together the broken shards of her career as an undercover intelligence operative, which had shattered spectacularly—and quite possibly irreparably—in the past thirty minutes.
That’s when she heard footsteps, way on the other side of the room.
Somebody was walking into the dead wing of Murphy, Knox.
Some
A male voice said, “Look, Molly. All we need is a double-A battery, and we’re pretty much saved. No matter what Amy has in mind.”
“You busy?” Nichole asked now.
Molly turned. She had a twisted little smile on her face. She parted her lips, the upper one beaded with perspiration. She’d been having fun in here with poor Jamie. There was a lot of blood on the floor. God knows what kind of torture she’d inflicted on him. Then she saw his hand, and had a pretty good idea.
Nichole should have charged in sooner. That would have been the nice thing to do. But those harrowing minutes she’d spent, crouched down next to Roxanne’s body, listening to Jamie scream and beg—they’d been essential. Nichole Wise wasn’t one to strategize on her feet. She needed a few minutes to get her game on.
And now she was ready for the Russian farm girl.
Formal Russian for “Hello.”
It
But Nichole didn’t let it shake her. She replied:
How are you?
Ooh, Arabic now. Little Russian farm girl got herself an edu-mah-cation.
Nichole asked,
Molly ignored the question, and shot back her own:
Jamie didn’t know what Nichole and Molly were talking about, everything sounded like gibberish to him—but he knew one thing. Nichole had no idea what she was facing.
“Nichole,” he gasped.
Then he started to crawl forward, using only his right hand, skin burning on carpet, his eyes scanning the empty office for anything remotely resembling a weapon….
There were many ways to go about this, Nichole thought as they bandied about the languages. She had run through two different scenarios while crouched down next to Roxanne’s body.
Molly Lewis had the slender frame of a Russian gymnast—short and skinny. She was probably well trained in various forms of hand-to-hand combat. Now Nichole saw that Molly had this cute little X-Acto blade with a taped-up handle. She was probably like a surgeon with that thing. She’d certainly done a number on Jamie DeBroux’s hand. It had to go.
Nichole, meanwhile, was built like a WNBA player, or at least a decent guard on a women’s college team. She also had her fully loaded HK P7 shoved in the waistband of her capris.
Option #1: Pull the gun, blow the Russian farm girl into the back of this wall, soak the drywall with her blood.
But then she wouldn’t have the chance to gather some potentially career-saving intelligence. So an instant execution was out. Sure, she could shoot Molly in the leg, but the woman could go into shock very easily. No intelligence there, either.
Option #2: Sudden blinding force.
Pummel the Russian farm girl until her eyes blacken and her spine nearly snaps in half. Smash her ribs so badly that every breath becomes a session of exquisite agony. Cripple her, but hold her back from the brink. Nichole needed her conscious. Pliable. Only then would Nichole have a chance of keeping her job, dim as that prospect may seem at the moment.
Nichole liked Option #2 the best, but it wasn’t as if Molly gave her a choice.
She was already charging with her baby blade.
On screen, Girlfriend jabbed her blade forward.
McCoy smiled. “Look at that.”
Her opponent, a tall big-boned blonde whom the paperwork had identified as Nichole Wise, slapped the blade aside with her right hand, then followed up by smashing the heel of her palm into Girlfriend’s nose. Girlfriend was visibly stunned. She dropped the blade. Took a few steps back.
“Ah,” Keene said, sipping at a fresh cup of tea. “Will you look at
“Shut up,” McCoy said.
Nichole was surprised how fast Molly dropped the blade. She thought it would be more of a fight. But so
