It took the two bodyguards less than a second to realize what she was doing. The tall Dutch woman was covering the security camera.
Braam Jaeger continued to face the elevator door and did not turn around, but just as the two younger men at Vilar’s side started to react to the woman’s action, two pistol silencers appeared around the sides of his suit coat, both pointing backward toward the guards. He’d cross-drawn them from his waist inside his coat and now his left hand pointed one gun around the right side of his body, and his right hand aimed the other gun around his left. He glanced up at the reflection in the polished metal doors.
Both weapons fired as one. Even suppressed, the bark of two automatic pistols rang loudly in the small space.
The two bodyguards slammed back against the wall, then dropped to their knees, perfect holes in their foreheads. They’d both drawn their guns, so two weapons tumbled from their hands. The man on the left collapsed a second slower than the man on the right, but they both fell facedown onto the floor of the elevator car.
Lucio Vilar de Allende stood still, his briefcase in his right hand, the bodies of his protection agents crumpled on either side of him.
Braam Jaeger turned around now, reholstered the weapon in his right hand inside his coat like an expert, and raised the weapon in his left.
Vilar spoke in a hoarse whisper. “I… I do not understand.”
The statement was directed toward the man with the gun, understandably, but Martina Jaeger answered. Her handbag still covered the camera. “No? I think it should be obvious. Somebody out there doesn’t like you very much.”
And with that Braam shot Venezuela’s top federal prosecutor in the right eye. His head slammed back against the rear wall of the car and he crashed to the floor, settling perfectly between his bodyguards.
Braam fired twice more into the already still form. Control shots, just to make certain the target was dead.
With the second bark of the silenced pistol, a few drops of blood splattered up and onto Martina’s lavender Louboutin pumps.
“Verdomme!” she shouted.
“Het spijt me”—Sorry — Braam replied, then knelt and took the pulse of the prosecutor, who was clearly dead.
He scooped up spent shell casings — all of them still hot — while Martina Jaeger began unbuttoning her blouse with her free hand. She unfastened only two buttons below her breasts, then peeled up a black square of fabric held to her skin with electrical tape. She raised it up under her handbag, and she pressed it over the camera’s lens.
Once done, she lowered her purse and glanced up at the floor-number readout. “Vijftien,” she said. Fifteen. She turned, watching Braam as he stood up from collecting the casings.
She said, “One in each guard, three in the target.”
Martina said nothing else. Quickly Braam realized what she meant. He’d collected only four shell casings. He knelt again and found a fifth. It had rolled under the right forearm of the principal target. He pocketed it while Martina stepped in front of him to shield him from view of anyone waiting for the elevator when it reached their floor.
It opened at seventeen, which was undergoing renovations and therefore empty. Braam pulled a small wedge-shaped doorstopper from his coat pocket and propped the door open, then they exited and moved quickly to the stairwell, with Martina slipping off her pumps as she did so.
They hurried down the stairs and made it to the underground parking garage in less than six minutes. Martina put her shoes back on and they walked naturally through the lot, until Braam folded himself behind the wheel of their parked Audi A8, and Martina climbed in next to him.
They left the Parque Cristal one minute and four seconds before the first alarm bells rang.
They drove north along the Caracas — La Guaira highway in the direction of the airport, and most of the trip was conducted in silence. The pair had done this sort of thing before, so even though the fight-or-flight chemicals coursing through their central nervous system increased their heartbeat and blood pressure, they remained outwardly cool and calm.
The Audi pulled into the parking lot of the Playa Grande Caribe Hotel and Marina, on the shoreline of the Caribbean Sea. Braam parked and each of them grabbed a rolling duffel from the trunk, and with the luggage trailing behind them they walked through the hotel’s entrance. Passing the reception counter, they strolled through the large facility, until finally they exited the back and continued down a winding sidewalk that led them to the marina itself.
Here they climbed into a small gray dinghy, Braam started the engine, and they motored out to a forty-two-foot sailboat moored in the marina.
Braam started the engine while Martina unhooked the line from the mooring ball, and in moments they were churning out of the marina and into open water.
Braam kept one eye on the sea in front of him and the other on his laptop. Open in his browser was a weather forecast for the southern Caribbean. The conditions looked fair for the next twenty-four hours, which was crucial if they were going to make it to Curaçao by three a.m. There was a six-forty a.m. direct flight to Amsterdam the next morning, and the Jaegers had tickets and every intention of being home by tomorrow night.
Twenty minutes after setting sail, Martina stepped up to the bridge with two glasses of champagne in her hands. She passed one to Braam, seated at the helm, and with it she gave him a high five.
No one was around to see this, they were miles out to sea, and if anyone had been, they would have adjusted their show of affection to tie in better with their cover for status: that they were husband and wife.
Braam and Martina Jaeger were not, in fact, married. They were brother and sister, and they were contract killers working for Russian intelligence.
3
Three days after the explosion of the liquefied natural gas facility in Lithuania, two well-dressed businessmen sat together at a café table in a little restaurant attached to the main hall of Warsaw’s Centralna station. The older of the two was nearing fifty, short but powerfully built, with curly dark hair flecked with a significant amount of gray. The younger was in his thirties and of average height, with short brown hair and a trimmed beard and mustache.
The men drank coffee and checked their watches from time to time; the older of the two perused an English-language newspaper and the younger kept his phone in his hand, but he mostly just sat with his legs crossed, his bored eyes drifting around the station. The appearance of the two was indistinguishable from twenty-five other pairs of businessmen in the central hall, and not markedly different from any of the three hundred or so standing or sitting here at the station.
When the men spoke, they did so in English, but even that wasn’t unusual at all in a cosmopolitan city such as Warsaw.
An announcement of the impending departure of the 9:55 Warszawa — Berlin express came over the PA in Polish, German, then English, and the men stood, hoisted shoulder bags and briefcases, and headed for the stairs down to the platforms.
As they walked through the middle of the crowded hall the younger man spoke softly. His business associate would not have been able to hear him if not for the earpiece transmitter the size of a hearing aid hidden in each man’s ear.
“If he’s a no-show, do we still board the train?”
The older man responded: “No sense sitting around Warsaw if we don’t have intel on his location. This is all we’ve got. We’ll take the train and check it out, maybe he boarded and we just missed him in the station.”
Dominic Caruso nodded without speaking, but the truth was he would have preferred to stick around Poland a little longer. They’d only just arrived the evening before, but already he could tell this was his kind of town; the history of the city was fascinating, the beer and the food were good and cheap, and the few people he’d encountered seemed laid-back and nice. He’d also noticed that the women were stunning, though this was nothing to keep him here. He was in a relationship at the moment, so he told himself it was probably just as well that he was about to climb on the next train out of town.