“Give me your purse.”
“Why?”
“Rox, please.”
“Okay, okay.”
Roxanne never went anywhere without her bag—even 9:00 A.M. Saturday morning meetings. And she never went without a full-size bottle of her signature scent: Euphoria for Women by Calvin Klein. Roxanne had been trying to convert Nichole for weeks now, offering her wrist for a sniff often and irritatingly. Nichole didn’t do perfume. She preferred a clean, freshly scrubbed scent. Irish Spring, if possible. Fancy scents make you easy to track.
But now, Nichole was glad for Roxanne’s perfume.
Because she was going to spray an ungodly amount of Euphoria into the air-return vent.
Nichole had read about a lawsuit years ago: In a nine-story law firm, a junior partner decided to play a prank on a coworker who had been caught going to a strip club. He bought a bottle of cheap perfume from a street vendor, then sprayed it all over his buddy’s office. On his seat. On his desk. On the carpet. In the corner. Enough to make the place smell like a lap-dancing stripper for at least a few days. Then the junior partner closed the door.
The problem was, the building’s HVAC system picked up the cheap perfume and redistributed it all over the building. The air-conditioning system wasn’t enough to strip away the scent, and soon, the building was overcome with eau de stripper.
A secretary was allergic. Her throat closed up on the way to the hospital.
The junior partner’s career ended with a one-two punch of criminal and civil lawsuits.
Nichole didn’t want to kill anybody with Euphoria, but if it attracted the attention of building security, they’d have a better shot of making it off this floor alive.
She uncapped the perfume and felt something brush up the base of her spine.
Her HK P7.
God, Rox, no …
“Don’t move,” Roxanne said, hands trembling. She backed away from Nichole slowly. She had the pistol pointed at Nichole’s head.
“This is not what you think,” Nichole said. “I’m CIA. Listen to me, Roxanne: I’m CIA.”
“David wanted to kill us all, and now you’re going to poison us all.”
“Rox, you’re making a huge mistake. Please put the gun down.”
“I’m not stupid! I heard him talking about nerve agents!”
Nichole showed her the perfume bottle. “This is yours, Roxanne. Your Euphoria.”
“I slept over last night! You could have switched it!”
“Honey, you can’t put a chemical nerve agent in a perfume bottle.”
Well, you could, actually. But Nichole needed to calm Roxanne down. Tell her what she wanted to hear. Get her gun back. “Then put the perfume down.”
“This is our way out of here.”
“God, Nichole, don’t make me do this. Please don’t make me do this. But I’m not going to let you kill us all. I’m not! I don’t want to die in here!”
Everything positive that Nichole had seen in Roxanne—her initiative, her resilience—was now distorted in a fun house mirror. How could she have thought about recruiting someone who could snap so easily, who’d abandon rational thought in a matter of minutes?
Roxanne was still her friend, but she was all wrong for this line of work.
Now Nichole had to do something regrettable. She had to incapacitate her best friend. It would hurt Rox, and it would kill Nichole to do it, but she needed Rox safe and out of the way for now. She could be stashed in one of the empty offices until this was all over. Maybe then they’d have a chance of repairing this breach of trust.
So Nichole pretended to put the perfume back into the purse, but snapped her arm up and blasted it right in Roxanne’s eyes, then slapped the gun down, wrapped her fingers around it, pulled the gun away, dropped the perfume, and then followed up with a chop to Roxanne’s face, right between her nose and lip—an incredibly painful blow that would bring her to her knees. Nichole would use the opportunity to cut off her air and render her unconscious for at least an hour.
But Nichole had misjudged the chop.
And she had kind of, accidentally, sent fragments of bone into her best friend’s brain.
Nichole sat there for a while, crouched down next to her friend’s dead body, pondering her next move.
Pondering how she was going to piece together the broken shards of her career as an undercover intelligence operative, which had shattered spectacularly—and quite possibly irreparably—in the past thirty minutes.
That’s when she heard footsteps, way on the other side of the room.
Somebody was walking into the dead wing of Murphy, Knox.
Some bodies.
A male voice said, “Look, Molly. All we need is a double-A battery, and we’re pretty much saved. No matter what Amy has in mind.”
“You busy?” Nichole asked now.
Molly turned. She had a twisted little smile on her face. She parted her lips, the upper one beaded with perspiration. She’d been having fun in here with poor Jamie. There was a lot of blood on the floor. God knows what kind of torture she’d inflicted on him. Then she saw his hand, and had a pretty good idea.
Nichole should have charged in sooner. That would have been the nice thing to do. But those harrowing minutes she’d spent, crouched down next to Roxanne’s body, listening to Jamie scream and beg—they’d been essential. Nichole Wise wasn’t one to strategize on her feet. She needed a few minutes to get her game on.
And now she was ready for the Russian farm girl.
“Zdrastvuyte,” Molly said.
Formal Russian for “Hello.”
It was her on the tape.
But Nichole didn’t let it shake her. She replied: “Kak delah?”
How are you?
“Kowaies Kateer,” Molly said.
Ooh, Arabic now. Little Russian farm girl got herself an edu-mah-cation.
Nichole asked, “Min fain inta?”
Molly ignored the question, and shot back her own: “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
“Natürlich,” Nichole replied. “Mirabile dictu, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Quam profundus est imus Oceanus Indicus?”
“La plume de ma tante.”
Jamie didn’t know what Nichole and Molly were talking about, everything sounded like gibberish to him—but he knew one thing. Nichole had no idea what she was facing.
“Nichole,” he gasped. “Run!”
Then he started to crawl forward, using only his right hand, skin burning on carpet, his eyes scanning the empty office for anything remotely resembling a weapon….
There were many ways to go about this, Nichole thought as they bandied about the languages. She had run through two different scenarios while crouched down next to Roxanne’s body.
Molly Lewis had the slender frame of a Russian gymnast—short and skinny. She was probably well trained in various forms of hand-to-hand combat. Now Nichole saw that Molly had this cute little X-Acto blade with a taped-up handle. She was probably like a surgeon with that thing. She’d certainly done a number on Jamie DeBroux’s hand. It had to go.
Nichole, meanwhile, was built like a WNBA player, or at least a decent guard on a women’s college team. She also had her fully loaded HK P7 shoved in the waistband of her capris.
Option #1: Pull the gun, blow the Russian farm girl into the back of this wall, soak the drywall with her blood.
But then she wouldn’t have the chance to gather some potentially career-saving intelligence. So an instant execution was out. Sure, she could shoot Molly in the leg, but the woman could go into shock very easily. No intelligence there, either.