Kara said nothing. She looked at him inquisitively.
Kornev repeated himself and softened a little.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I have to attend a business meeting downstairs. Do you have a room at this hotel?”
Kara said nothing again and waited right up to the point where she felt that Kornev was becoming agitated.
Finally, she responded, her voice soft and sexy, “Yes, I have a room here. Do you want me to leave?”
She said it in a tone that sounded as if the mere suggestion of asking her to leave would hurt her feelings.
Kornev thought about that for a moment.
Kara could tell he was mentally walking through his hotel room, analyzing if there was anything on the premises that could be compromised. As of that exact moment, she didn’t suspect that Kornev thought she was anything other than a lucky one-nighter, but he had made millions on being careful and this situation was no different.
“Sure, you can stay,” Kornev finally said. His body language changed and he looked more relaxed.
That was a good answer. That meant that she would have time to do what she needed to do. If it wasn’t for the sake of keeping up appearances, she would be gone before he ever got back from his meeting and he would never see her again. But that would cast suspicion upon her and could make Kornev nervous.
Kornev pulled Kara’s head close to him and kissed her on her forehead.
“I will see you very soon,” Kornev said, getting out of bed, making no attempt to cover his nakedness.
The Russian’s clothes were piled in a heap on his side of the bed. Kara watched as he pulled on his underwear, pants, shirt and shoes. All the while, Kara made mental notes of everything she saw. Kornev had two tattoos. High up on his right arm was an inked Hammer and Sickle of the USSR. It looked military and had some age to it. The colors were faded in a fashion that dated the work back a decade or more. Black and red. The ring around the sickle, as well as the star that interlaced through the sickle, was black. The sickle itself was red, with a smattering of white starbursts. The white touches gave the impression the sickle was made of metal and its edges were glinting off the sun. On the inside of his other arm was a name of some sort. As Kornev got dressed, the name flashed into view and then was gone. Two more sightings and Kara pieced together the Russian letters as Кристина, which translated to the name of Kristina. Kara also noticed an ugly wound that had not healed nicely on Kornev’s left shoulder. It looked like the result of a gunshot from a large caliber handgun at close range. It had made a big hole and left a shallow indentation that had not been sewn well. The area at the top of Kornev’s pectoral muscle had been cut away, leaving his chest uneven. As Kornev turned to locate his socks, she noticed an equally ugly scar on the flip side, where the bullet had exited.
Part of Kara’s job was intelligence gathering. Being able to positively identify Kornev under any circumstance was important. Physical identification was critical and indexing tattoos and old wounds was much better than just matching his face to a recent photo. If one of Kornev’s many enemies got a hold of him and left him dead in a field, maybe even decapitated him, then the CIA would still be able to make a positive ID from just the tattoos that Kara documented in her mind. After her assignment had been completed, all that information would be typed up and added to Kornev’s file in the CIA database.
It took Kornev less than two minutes to get dressed. He leaned over and kissed Tonya on the top of her head. He didn’t say goodbye or see you later, he simply walked out of the bedroom. A moment later, Kara heard the front door of the hotel suite close with a light click.
She waited for a minute in case Kornev had forgotten something. When she was relatively sure he was gone; Kara whipped off the satin sheets and quickly hustled out into the front room of the suite. She looked around and located her dress. She found it in a tiny heap next to her purse by the front door. She quickly stepped into the dress, pulled it up and threaded her arms through its thin straps. Wasting as little time as possible, she adjusted her dress while she walked over to the small desk-like piece of furniture. The table looked like something you could buy in IKEA, but sturdy. It was made of blond wood, chrome and glass. The table would suffice as an extra surface to hold an opened piece of luggage, but Kornev had been using it as a desk.
Kara went directly for his phone charger that was plugged into the socket on an ornate lamp. Moving quickly, she unplugged the charger from the lamp and removed the white iPhone cable that was plugged into its port. His phone charger was a little different than most of them she had seen. In a perfect world, it would have been the common white charger that Apple sold in the millions and provided in the package with each of its iPhones. But this was an aftermarket unit. It was black, not white, and smaller than the original Apple charger.
Kara knew that time was her biggest enemy. Kornev had not told her when he would be back. He had said, I will see you very soon, but how long was very soon? Five minutes? A half hour? Kara tore a few sheets of paper out of the hotel note pad that was sitting next to the lamp. She folded them over once, then twice and then once more, creating a thick square of paper.
Not bothering to put on her shoes, Kara cupped the iPhone charger in her hand, picked up her purse from the floor and opened the front door to the room. Trying to look casual, she glanced out into the hallway. Kara looked left for a moment and then right. She was pleased that the hallway was empty. She was also pleased that Kornev didn’t have any type of security detail. He must have felt that personal security was not needed since he was in his home town of Nizhny Novgorod, colloquially shortened to Nizhny for most Russians. She was told by her intelligence handlers that Kornev employed body guards if he ventured to foreign lands. If Kornev had his guards with him at the Volna Hotel they would not have prevented her from completing her current assignment. But guards would have certainly made it more difficult.
Kara stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back. Her mother had always told her that posture was everything when it came to finding a good husband. What man in the world would want a slouchy woman? What man, indeed?
With her shoulders in their perfect position, Kara opened the door and walked out. She checked the hallway again and turned around and inserted the square of paper into the area on the door jamb where the bolt met the strike plate. Being careful not to smash her fingers, she closed the door gently on the thin sheets.
Testing her work, she pulled the door toward her a few centimeters and it opened, indicating that the bolt was being held open by the paper. Confident that she would be able to get back into the room, Kara turned and began walking briskly toward her own room only four doors down the hall.
Kara reached into her purse to remove her room’s keycard. The number on her door was 407 and it was closed and locked as it should have been. Afraid she would see a mystified Kornev rounding the corner; she hurriedly opened her door and entered her dark room. During her entire stay at this hotel, she had spent less than five minutes in this room. When she had arrived earlier that day, she had done some touchups to her makeup and then went directly down to the bar. Her mission had been dependent on being on display when Kornev went to the bar for happy hour, just as he had done the night before.
The first night that Kornev had spent in the bar, had not been very exciting for him. Her CIA support team had told her that Kornev had sat at the bar and watched a high school hockey game on television. The only other people that had been in the bar were two old couples that sipped wine and had then retired early.