Jet

realization that his assassin was a woman. His lips stretched taut and a gurgle choked in his throat as he tried in vain to say something, and then everything went black, and he crumpled to the ground, the knife still buried in his chest.

Jet bent down and felt Arkadi’s throat for a pulse, and then after confirming he was dead, pulled a cell phone from her pocket and snapped a photo of the body, his face clearly visible. She thumbed the phone’s buttons with the hand that wasn’t covered in blood and sent it as an e-mail attachment to a blind, single-use address, then slid the cell back into her black pants.

The assignment complete, her priority shifted to getting clear of the compound and out of the country as soon as possible. By the time the bodies were discovered, she would be long gone, and the attack would be attributed to warring criminal factions fighting for territory.

She didn’t know exactly who the target was, or what he had done to deserve his fate. She almost never did. That wasn’t her job. All she knew was that he was to be dispatched with extreme prejudice, and it had been deemed important enough to mount an expensive, complicated mission in an area of the world far from home. And now, whatever threat he posed was finished. End of story.

She wiped the bloody gore off her black-gloved hand, leaving a streak on the thick white carpet, then scooped up the SIG from where he had dropped it and stepped cautiously through the doorway.

The other guards were out cold. The gas would keep them that way for at least six hours, so they posed no danger to her. Not that she would have hesitated to terminate them all, but there was no reason to, and she wasn’t gratuitous. She valued efficiency, and the killings tonight had been necessary in order to reach the target. Nothing more.

Back at the car, she stripped off her clothes and dropped them into a trash bag, along with the backpack and the weapons, donning a muted sweater and jeans before tossing the sack into the back and closing the hatchback. She slid behind the wheel and started the motor, then paused to study her face in the rearview mirror. In the pale wash of moonlight, she could make out a few flecks of dried blood on the bridge of her nose, which she wiped off with a tissue wetted with saliva. The eyes that looked back at her were calm and flat, divulging nothing, giving no hint of what she had just done. As she put the car in gear, she thought about what Ariel had said to her in the early days. He’d complimented her, praising her as the perfect operative after a particularly difficult mission she’d carried out flawlessly.

Perfect. She was, she supposed. But what he didn’t realize was that the engine that drove her was fueled by a volatile combination of anger, hate and despair. Every time she carried out an operation, she felt pride at being the best. The rest of it — the killing, the personal danger, the flirting with death while dancing on a razor’s edge — was immaterial. And part of her hated it, she realized — a sudden revelation that explained why she felt so empty inside even after a successful operation. Somewhere deep down in her core she hated herself and those who had made her this way, who had created a cold, calculating killing machine for their own selfish purposes.

A solitary tear rolled down her cheek as she pulled down the little road to the larger highway that would lead her to the contact point, where she would abandon the car to be sanitized by another operative, then take a flight from Grozny to Moscow, where she would disappear, only surfacing when she was needed again. In that forlorn tear was concentrated all of the anguish and loathing that a lifetime of hardship had forged, a monument to a life without a future or a past.

Only today.

And today, she’d done her job. As usual. As expected.

As always.

Chapter 6

Three Years Ago, Algiers, Algeria, North Africa

The security detail manning the perimeter of the walled beachfront compound on the bluff three stories above the sand wore heavy windbreakers to fend off the evening chill. Even though Algiers was situated on the Mediterranean, the moods of March could plunge it into the high forty-degree range at night, and tonight was one of the more frigid, even though the sun had only set an hour before.

In addition to the compound’s guards, each of the guests had brought their personal bodyguards, resulting in an uneasy equilibrium within the villa, as menacing figures in dark suits with barely concealed weapons passed one another in the halls and jockeyed for position in the larger common rooms.

Luxury automobiles had been arriving since five o’clock, when the first of the targets came straight from his private jet. Every light in the massive villa glowed bright, its expansive grounds and huge swimming pool illuminated by discreetly mounted spotlights designed to eliminate potential hiding places. The neighborhood was one of moneyed power and exclusivity, and police cruisers were stationed at either end of the beach to ensure that nobody disturbed the residents.

The tiny earbud crackled in Jet’s ear.

“Delta. Are you in position?”

“Roger that,” she whispered.

“Anything new from your end?”

“Negative. The last of them showed up half an hour ago. It looks like everyone’s gathered for a late dinner in the formal dining room.”

“Nice. What’s your take on hostiles?”

“They’ve got a small army and look alert.”

“How many do you see?”

“Exterior, two dozen. Inside, it’s hard to make out, but based on the head count we did as they arrived, I’d have to say at least twenty, total. So almost fifty armed and dangerous.”

The voice paused…then said, “Let me touch base with control. I’ll get back to you.”

“Roger. Out,” she murmured.

She continued watching the villa through her sniper rifle’s high-powered scope. Even though she was two hundred and fifty yards away, hidden on the roof of a construction site, she could still see the activity in the principal rooms. Whoever was running the security must have believed that throwing bodies at the problem would be sufficient, and hadn’t thought to shutter the windows. The ten-foot-high walls surrounding the main house probably had a lot to do with their sense of invulnerability. Besides which, nobody knew about this meeting, or would have recognized the men in the room, all of whom had been in Algeria for less than eight hours.

Nobody, that is, except her team.

It had been well over a year since she’d taken part in an operation with the full group, which was minus Rain, the code name of the operative who had gone into deep cover in Yemen six months prior.

Jet, Tiger, Fire and Lightning had been called into this when Ariel had been alerted that five terrorist financiers were going to be meeting for an unprecedented conference on neutral ground. Such a gathering presented an irresistible opportunity — the chance to cut off funding to any number of terrorist organizations, many of which viewed Israel as Satan’s embodiment on earth.

The planning was as good as it could be with six days advance notice. Resources had been allocated, personnel had been scrambled, and the team had been assembled and deployed.

One of the negatives from Jet’s perspective had been the source of the intel. The CIA had alerted them and had insisted on an observer who could represent its interests. The condition hadn’t been negotiable. The combination of a short timeframe and the presence of an outsider hadn’t sat well with Jet or any of the rest of the team, but in the end it wasn’t their call.

And now she was on a roof in North Africa, staring through a Hensoldt ZF 4 scope at a heavily fortified group that looked like it was ready for trouble. This wasn’t her ideal scenario. She preferred surgical strikes to brute force, but sometimes circumstances didn’t permit it.

The earbud chirped, and then Fire’s voice returned.

“We’re to hit them as soon as possible. Everyone is now in position. Engagement to occur in two minutes. Repeat. Engagement in two minutes. Are there any questions?”