She hardly saw or heard the third explosion, maybe Tricky’s, because she tripped and started to cartwheel down the trail. Conan clawed at the mud, rocks, and branches trying to stop her acceleration. The speed of her tumbling picked up as the slope steepened.
A fourth explosion.
She snatched a glance at a horizon split between the last few feet of overgrown slope and a black void decorated with twinkling lights. Whether they were stars or buildings below, Conan couldn’t tell. For some reason, she relaxed and fixated on that question as she felt her body lose contact with the ground.
Kakaako, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
Colonel Vladimir Markov nodded once at the Directorate commando. He was a bit surprised General Yu had let the mission go forward. It could have been the prospect of writing yet another letter to a Directorate senior official who had sent his boy off to get a safe war for his résumé only to receive in return a body unfit for an open-casket funeral. Or perhaps the possibility that a woman might be doing the butchering had affronted his warrior’s sensibility.
The commando affixed what looked like a ridged black plastic cup to the apartment door’s handle. He gently pressed the white button on the back of the device, and there was a faint hum, followed by a hiss. The electromagnetic charge in the breacher device silently shook the lock apart. There was a faint pop as the commando removed the cup, and he waved Markov forward with an exaggerated bow that showed the Russian the sinister skull painted on the top of his assault helmet. Markov thought it silly, knowing they’d gotten the idea from that video game they all liked to play in their off-hours.
The team already knew she wasn’t home. An external thermal scan of the one-bedroom apartment had shown it was empty. He’d made them confirm it with a second painfully long search done by a two-inch creeper that wormed under the door and checked every room for carbon dioxide levels.
Even though Markov had had to bring the commandos with him, he would enter alone. Their commanding officer didn’t mind. He knew what they were thinking: If the Russian wanted to blow himself up in a booby trap, so be it. This war was dragging on, and only the Russian seemed to be in a hurry to lose a limb.
Markov was indeed in a hurry, but his careful movements did not show it. He removed his shoes in the hallway and covered his feet in a pair of surgical booties.
“Your shoes, sir?” said the Directorate commando in English. “Shall I shine them during your stay with us?”
“Just make sure they’re good enough for General Yu,” said Markov over his shoulder as he stepped through the doorway. The laughter in the hallway followed him inside.
He headed first for the kitchen. He’d never understood why, but people loved to hide things in the kitchen. Explosives in the freezer. Shells in the breadbox. False papers and ID tags among the recipes.
He found nothing. No heads in the refrigerator or fingers drying on the windowsill, which part of him had thought was a possibility.
It was a depressing apartment, bare of any personal items. Just a collection of build-it-yourself furniture, much of it apparently bought used. There wasn’t a single photograph anywhere.
Markov sighed and reached into the satchel. He put on a pair of thick, green opaque goggles that looked like the heavy-duty night-vision gear worn by infantry. He powered them on, and the room appeared before him as clearly as he had seen it moments before. A signal meter showed he was connected to the router in the armored vehicle outside where Jian waited, as ever.
He murmured a series of commands in Russian and the room began sparkling with mosquito-size points of light. The flickering consolidated, giving the floor and furniture a green-blue shimmering hue, like a boat’s phosphorescent wake in the moonlight.
Each streak represented the DNA trail that she’d left during her daily patterns of life. Each was a tiny piece of her that she would never get back.
Ending up in the bedroom, Markov followed the shimmering trail around the bed and over to the wide closet. Of course the trail would lead here. A woman should be close to her clothes, he thought, especially this woman. He smiled at his own sexism.
The lights showed a cluster of activity toward the back of the closet, mostly concentrated on a faded red-and-white shoebox. The box was for a pair of Puma flip-flops, men’s size 11. Whose, he did not know.
He carefully lifted the box slightly with a pen, testing the weight. It was light, making it less likely that it was booby-trapped. Less likely was not impossible, though. Still using the pen, he gently raised the lid, teasing it up to see if there was any resistance from tape or a wire. There was none, and he took the box’s lid off fully, finding inside a hairbrush in a plastic sandwich bag and a green piece of paper folded into a small envelope. He carried the box over to the bed and sat down.
The envelope was addressed to My Love. He slowly opened it, fold by fold. More writing, some kind of anniversary note, and then, with the final unfolding, a small razor blade. It gleamed even in the low light, bright with DNA traces. He folded the blade back into the envelope and laid it on the bed.
He looked at the hairbrush, curious about why it was stored inside a plastic bag. What was so valuable about it? He took the brush out of the bag and eyed it more closely, turning it in the light.
He slowly shook the brush just above the green envelope; strands of hair fell out. He pulled out his pen and ran it across the brush slowly; a few more hairs fell down. Using the pen, he began to separate them, holding his breath so as not to disturb any. The hairs were all short, none longer than an inch, a few straight, a few curled, all of varied thickness. There were twenty-one hairs in total.
Lotus Flower Club, Former French Concession, Shanghai
Sergei Sechin sat at the edge of the bed and stared at the strands of Twenty-Three’s blue hair sticking out from under the sheet. Against the pink fabric, the hair looked like something found on a coral reef, beautiful and fragile. Then, as the weight of his body pressed down on the mattress, bright red blood started seeping toward him.
He stayed seated as the blood came closer and closer. Had she done it herself, or was this a message to him?
In either case, it meant he was blown. Did he have time to destroy his devices and get a back-alley body scan to see if they had tagged or chipped him? Or should he just run? And yet, what he found himself thinking was that now he’d never know Twenty-Three’s name.
The knock on the door snapped him to attention, and he returned to being the intelligence professional he’d been before he entered the room. Why knock? Perhaps to unsettle him further? See how he would react?
His eyes moved to the corner, where there was a small writing table. He quietly opened the desk drawer and found a pen. It had an ivory inlay set with eight brushed-metal bands and a gleaming silver nib, reflecting the recent fad that had many of China’s most powerful writing letters by hand for the first time in decades. It would have to do.
Aware that he was being watched, Sechin scribbled a note. They would give him time to write it, he knew, thinking it a confession. But it was just a message in Klingon directing them to where they could stick something.
He went back to the bed and sat down, then felt her warm blood seeping into the seat of his pants. He leaned over and kissed her through the wet sheet. As he kissed her, he brushed her hair with one hand and felt his neck for the pulse of his carotid artery with the other. With closed eyes, he tensed up and prepared to jam the fountain pen’s nib into his artery as far as he could and then rip it out.