The soft, metallic click from the hallway was a sound that belonged in a morgue. It was the sound of a drawer sliding shut on a cold body. The handle on the communications room door turned with a slow, deliberate grace that was more violent than a kicked-in lock. There was no time for thought, only for the cold calculus of a cornered animal. Sineus’s hand was already on the pistol tucked at the small of his back, his body turning to face the door, placing himself between it and Anja Petrova.
The door swung inward. The man who filled the frame was not a spy. He was a piece of brutalist architecture given flesh, a man built of concrete and state-sanctioned force. Viktor Morozov. The bloodhound from the Ninth Directorate. His dark suit was immaculate, a stark contrast to the raw power in his shoulders. He moved with the heavy certainty of a glacier, and the air in the room grew colder, the hum of the server banks seeming to thin and waver in his presence. Two other men, lean and watchful in identical suits, flanked him, their eyes sweeping the room and dismissing everything in it but the two people they had come for.
Morozov’s gaze settled on Petrova. It was not the look of a man finding a person, but of an accountant locating a misplaced figure in a ledger. His voice, when it came, was as flat and gray as a concrete wall.
— The asset will be returned.
It was not a demand. It was a statement of inevitable physics, like gravity. There was no room for negotiation in it. The world had narrowed to this sterile room, to the hum of machines and the smell of ozone, and the absolute certainty of violence. Sineus saw the path of the bullets, the way the two flankers would create a crossfire while Morozov advanced. It was a textbook kill box.
But Petrova was not a textbook asset. Before Sineus could move, she acted. She was a creature of systems, and she knew that the most complex machine is most vulnerable to a simple, catastrophic shock. With a sharp, fluid motion, she grabbed a heavy metal stool from beside a console and swung it with all her strength into the glass front of a backup server rack.
The result was immediate and absolute. The glass shattered with a percussive crack. A shower of sparks erupted in a brilliant, blinding flash of blue and white light, and a sound like tearing metal filled the room. A wave of raw electricity, a loud, angry burst of static, screamed from the dying machine. The main lights overhead blew out, plunging the room into a flickering, hellish twilight lit only by the strobing of red emergency beacons and the dying, electrical fire. A klaxon began to blare, a frantic, pulsing shriek that echoed through the embassy. Chaos was a key, and Petrova had just turned it in the lock.
The two flankers were momentarily blinded, their professional composure shattered by the sudden sensory assault. Sineus didn’t waste the moment. He wasn’t trying to win a fight; he was trying to change the geometry of the room. He lunged forward, not at Morozov, but at the heavy bank of tape machines beside him. He put his shoulder into it, shoving the multi-ton unit with the desperate strength of a man pushing a tombstone off his own chest. The machine scraped across the floor, tilting, and slammed into Morozov, pinning him against the wall. It wouldn’t hold him for long, but it didn’t have to.
— Now! — Sineus’s voice was a low bark.
He grabbed Petrova’s arm, pulling her toward the door. In the frantic scramble, as they pushed past each other in the narrow space between a sparking console and the wall, she pressed something small, hard, and rectangular into the pocket of his coat. A swift, covert transfer of some unknown currency. He didn’t have time to register it beyond the feel of cool Bakelite against his knuckles. His focus was on the hallway, on the spreading panic the alarm was creating.
The corridor was a scene from a madhouse. Doors were thrown open. Confused aides and diplomats spilled out, their faces masks of alarm. The klaxon was a physical blow, relentless and disorienting. Sineus and Petrova were no longer targets; they were just two more bodies in the chaos, moving against the tide of people who were running toward the noise. He saw a sign for a service stairwell and pulled her toward it.
They found a janitor’s locker room on the floor below, the air thick with the smell of bleach and damp wool. They tore off their borrowed diplomatic clothes, the fine fabric feeling like a costume from another life. They pulled on the rough, gray coveralls of maintenance staff, the coarse material a welcome anonymity. The price of escape was their identity, burned away in the fire of the alarm. They were no one now, and that was their only shield.
They joined the stream of kitchen staff and clerks heading for the main exit, their heads down, their movements purposeful. Sineus could feel Morozov’s psychic presence like a cold spot in the building, a focused point of rage and will, but the bloodhound was lost in the panicked herd. They were just two more workers fleeing a fire, their faces blank, their presence unremarkable.
Then they were outside, the cold, damp Zurich air a shock after the recycled atmosphere of the embassy. Rain was beginning to fall, a fine mist that beaded on their hair and turned the distant streetlights into blurry stars. The embassy’s alarm was a dull, angry pulse behind them, the sound of a hornet’s nest they had kicked over. They didn’t look back. They walked, not ran, melting into the evening crowds, just two more ghosts on a wet city street.
They found the car where the contact had said it would be, an unremarkable black sedan parked in a dark alley two blocks away. As Sineus slid behind the wheel, he felt the small, hard rectangle of the keycard in his pocket. It was a question he didn't have time to ask. They had the location of the Echo Protocol. They had a new, unknown tool. And they had the full, undivided attention of the KGB’s most brutal hunter.
He turned the key, and the engine caught. The car pulled out into the rain-slicked street, leaving the embassy and the screaming alarms behind.
They had to flee Europe by sea, their last and most dangerous option.
