Her favorite type of mission… one where she worked alone.
The past week felt to her as if it were her job to manage a big group of overgrown teenage boys, although thinking back to her own teenage years, she realized her own father didn’t have it so easy with her.
“Tzarstvo emu nebesnoe.” God rest his soul, she muttered softly.
She smiled a little now, thinking back to her childhood, and then she thought about the men with her here in Vietnam. Well, at least she didn’t have to clean up after them on the boat or at the safe house; as rough as these guys were, as bad as they stank by the end of each day, at least they had military order in their lives that ensured each item in their possession remained zipped in the right pouch at all times. But still, these men, like most men, could be a mess. Zoya had lived in safe houses, team rooms, bunkhouses, and garrisons surrounded by men most all her adult life, so she knew how to keep her own personal space to her liking and mentally shut out the stench, clutter, and grime of large groups of men living in close proximity.
The Russian intelligence officer had just cleared her mind of her father and the jerks she worked with when she heard Sasha speak through her earpiece.
“Positive sighting on… break.” She heard him mumble something to Ruslan, and she imagined the two men looking at the photos she’d texted them on their mobiles, right there in the middle of a pool hall. She closed her eyes, thinking about the shitty tradecraft, but then told herself these men had been given mere minutes to memorize the faces of thirty-five potential targets.
She’d cut Sasha some slack.
After twenty seconds, however, she spoke. “Who is it, Anna Five?”
The reply came after a little more whispering. “It’s number thirteen.”
Zoya’s memory had been good her entire life, but it had been honed to a steel trap through years of training and practical application. “Bui something,” she said without hesitation. “He’s a local cop.”
“Uh… affirmative. Bui Ton Tan. He’s wearing blue jeans, a white shirt with a red track jacket over it. He’s drinking at the bar alone. Do we approach?”
Zoya smiled a little in her helmet. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
She knew the two Zaslon men would not be operating in a low-profile manner. This guy would see them in seconds, if he hadn’t seen them already.
A minute later she smiled again when Ruslan reported that the target appeared to be heading for the back door. “You want us to follow him out?” he asked.
Zoya replied, “Nyet. Just bring the car around.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Lieutenant Bui Ton Tan was a thirty-three-year-old officer in the Vietnam People’s Police, Ho Chi Minh City Public Security Office. He’d worked a full eight-hour shift today, getting off at eleven, and he’d been here in the bar less than fifteen minutes. He just wanted to get a couple of beers in him before going home for the evening.
He’d been halfway into his objective when he saw the two big foreigners in the bar and realized they were looking at him. It took a moment for him to be certain, not that the men were hiding it. On the contrary, they seemed to be going out of their way to stress the fact they had taken an interest in him.
And this was deeply troubling in light of the news he’d received today.
He’d spent the day patrolling the Cat Lai Ward in District Two and hadn’t had any direct contact with anyone in Con Ho Hoang Da, but he had received a text message this afternoon from one of his fellow cops who also moonlighted at the guard shack of the headquarters building. The message said all the guards had been warned about a potential attack from an unknown group of white foreigners, and everyone would be brought in for overtime to deal with the threat. Bui was confused by this; he’d heard about a threat in Hong Kong from a group of Tay, a Vietnamese word used to refer to non-Asians. But that had been earlier in the week and he’d heard nothing since. The Wild Tigers had next to no close connections to Tay in Ho Chi Minh City, so he immediately asked for more clarification, but his colleague had just said they’d need Bui to come in to the gatehouse tomorrow for a full shift on his day off from the police department.
He’d learned nothing else about the danger, but now a pair of big, mean-looking Tay were here.
Bui thought about calling out for help from men here in the pool hall, but the other Wild Tigers present were just young dealers and street thieves. He didn’t know any of them — he worked security at the HQ, after all — and he wasn’t sure enough of the nature of this threat to just assemble a quick posse of strangers. Anyway, as far as Bui was concerned he didn’t need anyone else. Although these two guys were both six inches taller and forty kilos heavier than he was, Bui was carrying his police-issue Makarov pistol in a shoulder holster.
He wasn’t worried about his personal security, but he was somewhat concerned about why the hell these two big Tay were consulting their mobile phones and then looking back up at him.
After quickly downing his second bottle of beer, he decided the prudent course of action would be to just walk out the back door, climb onto his bike, and get out of here. He’d text the security office at the Wild Tigers and report the incident as soon as he was clear.
Bui nonchalantly unzipped his jacket so he could grab his pistol in a hurry if he had to, then slid off the bar stool without looking at the two big men. He nodded to a couple of distant acquaintances on the way out the door and stepped into the alley.
A light but steady rain fell, which pissed Bui off, because he’d left his poncho at the station. He walked up to his Kawasaki bike and fished through his jeans pocket for his keys, keeping one eye on the back door of the pool hall in case the foreigners appeared.
“Chao chu.” Hello, sir. It was a woman’s voice, close behind him in the dark, in the opposite direction from the back door. The voice surprised him because he hadn’t seen anyone around when he came out the door, but the surprise did not scare him at all. He turned around. “Yeah?”
To his astonishment a Tay woman stood there in the dimly lit alley, holding a black bike helmet in her hand.
He didn’t even have time to get a good look at her before she smashed him in the face with it.
Bui flipped backwards over the seat of his bike and then down onto the wet cobblestones. He saw nothing but stars for a moment; his lips and nose burned with pain, but he did not lose consciousness. He blinked hard, then reached into his jacket to pull his pistol, but just as the little weapon cleared the leather of his shoulder holster he felt strong hands on the wrist of his drawing hand, twisting it around, removing the weapon easily.
Bui looked up and saw that the woman had come around the bike and now she stood over him, the gun in one hand, the bike helmet high above her head.
“How about another?” She said it in English, and he understood only because of her tone and the context of the situation.
Bui shook his head to clear away the stars, spit blood, and then said one of the few phrases he knew in English, because it perfectly applied to his sentiment. “Fuck your mother, bitch!”
He had only a slight recognition of the helmet arcing down towards his face before the lights went out completely.
Zoya sat in the front room of the safe house, her legs crossed and her eyes on the lights of the car pulling up the drive. She looked at her watch and sighed.
Ruslan and Sasha had gone to bed as soon as they arrived and moved the blindfolded prisoner to a three-meter-square laundry room in the back of the house, tying his arms behind his back and his legs to his chair. Zoya watched them do this, thanked them for their help, and empathized with their obvious disappointment that they hadn’t been the ones to bash the prisoner in the face.