Both men were just twenty-one years old, and they had been working with the Sidorenko organization since they were adolescents, manning mobile phones in St. Petersburg to report police presence in the red-light district. They pledged no allegiance to the effeminate millionaire in the dacha they guarded. No, they were fascists and Sid would hardly be the one to rule their ideal Russia. But Sid was a means to an end for them; he provided them safety and security and enough money to pay for their basic needs, and in return they spent a few nights a week guarding his property when he was here west of the city.
A single frozen mud road led through the forest from the compound gate to the north, and it ran straight for almost a kilometer before coming to a T. Lev and Yevgeny walked the length of the road, occasionally shining their flashlights into the thick larch that ran on either side. They expected no trouble but if trouble came, both young men were drunk enough and replete with enough testosterone to know unequivocally that they could handle it.
They stopped for a moment so Lev could piss; he shifted his rifle to his shoulder and opened his coat and pants right there in the road while Yevgeny took a sip from his thermos.
From the dark above them came a quick movement, sending both men diving headlong into the snow. Something large shot past just feet from their heads, and then a dark form was silhouetted against the white bark of the larch trunks for an instant before it slammed into the trees, cracking and popping branches before a last thud of impact with the ground.
The two young Russians scrambled to their feet and ran toward the noise. Yevgeny chambered a round in his Kalashnikov and Lev shined his flashlight on the big dark mass in the snow.
It was a hang glider, its frame twisted, its dark blue wings torn to shreds by the broken larch. A propeller jutted from the broken tree limbs.
“What the fuck?” Lev muttered, his flashlight scanning all around the forest, searching for a hint as to where the hell this thing came from.
Yevgeny did not answer Lev’s question, because he did not know what the fuck. But he did know what to do. He reached for the radio inside his coat. “North patrol to north shack! Something’s going on out here!”
Court moved up a quiet fourth-floor hallway with his pistol leveled in front of him. He’d wiped moisture from the lens of his night vision monocle, and through it he had a narrow, dim, green view of the way ahead over the top of his long silencer, and he saw no threats.
The intel he had been provided by the Moscow Bratva had not given him a clear picture of the inside of the mansion, so Court was doing much of this by feel. Court had been inside another of Sid’s St. Petersburg properties, and there Sid kept an office and bedroom on the top floor, no doubt because he felt he was safer up here. Court decided he would clear the top floor first, imagining Sid’s paranoia would force him to keep the same setup for all of his properties.
The dark hallway ended at a balcony that overlooked a wide circular atrium. He peered over the railing and, four stories down, he saw a low fountain in the center of a courtyardlike space, along with a few tables and chairs nestled between potted plants and trees.
Above him, over the center of the atrium, the glass-domed roof, some thirty feet across, was rimmed with ornate iron support beams, from which lights hung. The lights were off now, and only a faint glow of the moonless night through the glass hazed his night vision monocle.
Scanning the open balconies on the floor below him, he saw two guards one floor down on the other side of the atrium. They sat in chairs by an open staircase. Court thought it likely there would be more men directly under him.
Gentry had no plan to return to this part of the house, but he took a quick mental picture of the area. If he needed a fallback option, he might well find himself here again, and with no time to get a proper look at the layout.
This done, he left the balcony and began heading up a hallway that shot off to his right. It was dark here; there were electric lighting sconces along the corridor, but they were turned off for the night. Upon making a turn in the hall, however, he saw a single sconce shining brightly outside a heavy wooden door at the far end of the passage. The rug that ran all the way down to the end of the hall was more ornate than the bare floor of the hall he had just left, and there was an unmistakable scent of wood smoke and incense in the air.
Court got the impression he was nearing his target.
He’d made it only a few feet up the hall when a door on his right opened. The muzzle of his pistol swiveled toward the movement, and his finger left his trigger guard and took up the scant slack of the Glock’s trigger safety. At first he saw no one in the doorway, but he lowered his aim and centered his pistol on a small boy, no more than six or seven years old. The boy looked at him with sleepy, unfixed eyes. Behind the boy Gentry saw a child’s bedroom.
There was little light in the hall and no light in the bedroom, and Court doubted the boy could see the gun or even identify the man standing in the hall five feet in front of him.
Court knew who the boy belonged to. His intel indicated that Sidorenko, a bachelor, had family who lived with him: two male cousins who were part of his organization and a sister, and his sister had several children. Court braced himself to encounter kids here in the mansion, but he hoped that hitting in the dead of night would help keep them from straying downrange of his gun barrel.
No such luck.
“I can’t sleep.” The boy said it in Russian, but Court understood.
Court lowered his pistol and hid it behind his leg, but his long night vision optic protruded from between his eyes. The boy noticed it and peered closer.
“Back inside,” Court replied in Russian. “Lock the door.”
“Who are you?”
“Back inside,” Court repeated.
“Are you a monster?” the boy asked.
Court knelt down, his NOD’s monocle inches from the boy’s face. “Yes, I am. I am a monster. Run. Back inside. Get under your bed and hide until your mother comes for you.”
The boy’s eyes widened in fear. He stepped back in the room and shut the door.
Court stood back up and began moving quickly up the hall toward the light by the heavy door.
FOUR
One thousand ninety-one miles south of St. Petersburg, the Lipscani neighborhood of Bucharest, Romania, had quieted down much in the past hour. For most of this Saturday evening the district had been full of young partygoers, as many of the city’s best clubs were located in this warren of winding streets and back alleys. But it was four A.M. now, and the late hour along with an icy wind had driven everyone indoors, either to the dance floors at Kulturhaus or Terminus or Club A, or back to flats and hotels around Romania’s capital.
On the fifth-floor rooftop of an office building directly on the opposite side of the Dambovita River from Lipscani, a man lay prone behind a Knight’s Armament SR-25 sniper rifle. He peered through his weapon’s optics, centering his crosshairs on the back of a man’s head, just visible through sheer silk curtains, two hundred twenty meters away.
The sniper’s nine-power scope showed him everything he needed to see. In a fifth-floor luxury apartment on Splaiul Independentei, the heavyset man, well into his sixties, stood in his bedroom in his underwear and socks, slowly and ceremoniously undressing a much younger woman, a girl, really, who stood obediently in front of the bed, her eyes fixed to a point somewhere out the window.