Collateral (Tier One #6)

Home of Dr. and Mrs. Oleksiy Honchar

Kiev, Ukraine

2130 Local Time

Gavriil dragged the Queen Anne–style upholstered chair in front of the French doors and took a seat. Then, he pulled back the ornate silk curtains, revealing a set of arched glass balcony doors. Pity he’d had to kill the couple who lived here . . . it was a very nice house, and from the pictures on their dresser they seemed like a happy couple.

It wasn’t personal . . . just bad luck.

From this vantage point, he had an unobstructed view of Denys Bondar’s mansion. Bondar was the opposite of what one would expect from a Russian covert operative—brash, colorful, public, and always in the tabloids with a new woman. He’d splashed onto the Kiev scene a few years ago as a millionaire playboy architect, and he ran in circles with Kiev’s most important and influential elite—politicians, lawyers, bankers, and business tycoons—and was rumored to have had affairs with many of their wives. The rumors, he dismissed with a perfunctory wave of his hand, but also sometimes with a wink. He’d made many allies in the capital city, and twice as many enemies. His antics and scheming brought him constant attention from the paparazzi as well as scrutiny from the Ukrainian government’s watchful eyes.

Bondar was a covert operations nightmare.

And yet another demonstration of Arkady’s brilliance. Bondar had been the source of some of the most important intelligence coming out of Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

Gavriil rolled his neck and got a satisfying crack on the left side, where he carried all of his stress. He raised the boxy binoculars to his eyes, scanning in thermal mode across the yard and street and seeing nothing of concern. Next, he scanned the back of the house, a curious blend of Russian and Italian contemporary architecture, and saw no movement in night vision or with thermal imaging. Next he scanned the downstairs rooms, before moving up to the second floor. He switched from thermal to night vision with the flip of his thumb and peered through the open French doors of the balcony off the master bedroom. Inside, Bondar was sitting on the edge of a king-sized bed while a young and completely naked woman knelt in front of him, her head bobbing up and down.

Lucky bastard.

Gavriil tried to remember the last time he’d been with a woman . . . a year? Longer? He exhaled. The women he was drawn to were confident, successful, and attractive—the alpha females. Wooing women of that caliber took effort, commitment, and time, none of which he could spare in his profession. And so, for the foreseeable future, he’d chosen abstinence.

No attachments. No liabilities. It was the best way.

It was the only way.

Gavriil watched the woman stand up and push Bondar down onto the bed. Then she straddled him. Gavriil looked away and, with a chuckle, resumed sweeping the exterior for any sign of the American operators, whom he felt in his gut were coming for Bondar tonight.

He just knew it.

“Specter Two—One,” he said, his wireless earbud transceiver transmitting to his colleague on the stakeout. “Any movement on the front approach?”

“Negative, One. All quiet.”

He pictured the Zeta sniper, Ruben, in his roost two houses south of the intersection and across Redutna Street. The operator had the advantage of setting up in a house that was unoccupied; the family normally in residence was away on holiday in Greece.

“Odin?” he queried, calling his field operations coordinator, who was managing cyber, comms, and surveillance for the mission.

“No movement on satellite. No suspicious vehicle traffic. Nothing unusual in the comms from the American embassy. We don’t have ears inside the known CIA safe house, but no unusual traffic or activity there,” Odin said in clipped, precise tones.

The young, bearded Muscovite was undoubtedly seated in front of myriad open computers, streaming data from multiple sources, including city camera feeds, satellites, pirated feeds from local law enforcement, and even streaming audio from the American embassy, where a trusted source had recently placed a new listening device. Odin was one of Gavriil’s favorite coordinators. Never any emotion—just streams of useful information devoid of passion or editorial comment. He sometimes wondered if the man might be half machine . . . the first of Arkady’s next generation of Zeta cyborgs.

“Check,” he said and frowned.

Perhaps the arrival of the American 787 a few days ago in Kiev had been a ruse or a red herring. He was certain it heralded the arrival of the American Ember team—as predicted by Arkady. And yet, still nothing. They had detected no activity around Bondar to suggest new ISR. The Americans were crafty—nearly the equal to Zetas, perhaps—so not detecting any new ISR did not mean it wasn’t happening. By putting himself in the Americans’ place, he had assumed that the hit would be tonight. He’d arrived at this conclusion by estimating the time he would need to conduct reconnaissance and counterintelligence operations before making the hit.

Unfortunately, he had made many other assumptions to get to this point. The assumption that the Ember team would come to Kiev, the assumption that Sylvie Bessonov had given up the Denys Bondar NOC to the Americans, and the assumption that the Americans would choose to disappear Bondar to a black site to interrogate him about the Javelin missile attack rather than executing him like the other Zetas. For a target like Bondar, someone always being watched by the paparazzi and the public, taking him at home was the logical choice.

It has to be here, Gavriil reassured himself. Just be patient and trust your instincts.

He raised the binoculars again, and unable to resist, zoomed in on Bondar’s bedroom. The bed was empty.

“Where’d you go?” he murmured, and with a flick of his thumb, switched to thermal imagery. “Oh there you are,” he said with a grin, seeing, in glorious heat map color, Bondar working the girl bent over the love seat in the corner.

He watched until he became bored, which wasn’t long, and lowered his binoculars.

Although Gavriil had never met the man, he imagined the Zeta agent was as lazy, callous, and overconfident as an operative could be and still be in play. Such irony . . . at the pinnacle of his professional success, Bondar was tactically comatose. His hubris had made him vulnerable. Gavriil saw the man’s future with perfect clarity. Soon, Bondar’s ego would make him unmanageable. He would forget why he was here and no longer appreciate the man who’d made him. He would forget that his money was Petrov’s money, that he was standing on the shoulders of giants—only giants hidden in shadow. Soon, he would ascend above his legend and demand fealty and obedience from his master, and when that day came Arkady would send someone like Gavriil to remind Bondar of his mortality. But that day was not today, and before it could happen, they all needed to survive the Americans.

Gavriil exhaled and swept the exterior of the house. Seeing nothing, he scanned the downstairs first and then the upstairs again. The lovebirds had now decoupled, with the woman sitting on the toilet in the en suite bathroom and Bondar standing fully naked just inside the open balcony doors, lighting a cigarette.

How can you not know you are being surveilled? How can you not sense death creeping nearby, my Bright Falcon brother?

Gavriil would never, ever allow the pursuit of carnal pleasure to dull his tactical edge. Bondar was an easy sniper headshot where he was standing. An amateur could take him.

Fucking pathetic. Maybe I should order Ruben to take the shot and save us all a lot of trouble.

For a moment he actually contemplated the idea, before shooing it away.

“That’s my own hubris talking,” he said to himself. “And besides, Arkady would kill me.”

Gavriil set his binoculars down and decided to finally relieve the pressure that had been building in his bladder for hours. After slinging a black backpack onto his left shoulder, he crossed the bedroom toward the bathroom. En route, he carefully stepped over the two corpses on the floor beside the bed. When the couple was found in a few days, the double homicide would look like a robbery gone bad. He had already ransacked the house for jewelry, collectibles, and taken the man’s wallet. As a finishing touch, he’d break a window downstairs on his way out once the operation here was complete.

Standing over the toilet, he retrieved a wide-mouthed plastic bottle from his backpack and relieved himself into it. The dark yellow stream—a negative side effect of keeping his hydration to a minimum to avoid the distraction of frequent urination—filled it only halfway. Without spilling a drop, he replaced the cap with a glove-covered hand and slipped the bottle back into his backpack. He glanced at himself briefly in the darkened mirror, amused by the bouffant hairnet cap on his head, designed to decrease the likelihood of leaving hair for the forensic detectives to find. It wouldn’t really matter—he had used a blood sample from a known heroin addict to leave DNA evidence spattered on the floor beside the bodies. He’d executed the older couple with a cheap pistol, which would be found in the addict’s flophouse apartment along with blood from the victims.

Feeling better, he returned to the chair by the window and looked out into the night.

Ember had conducted six assassinations in a row and encountered zero resistance. That sort of winning streak has consequences, even for professionals. Overconfidence creeps in. An expectation of victory dulls the reflexes, even if ever so slightly. Like Bondar, Task Force Ember was undoubtedly inebriated by its own success.

Tonight, Gavriil would use that to his advantage.

He put the binoculars back to his eyes.

They were coming . . .

And this time, Zeta was ready.