“Call me back in five minutes with all the details. I’m packing right now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Chopra rushed through the living room and into his bedroom. He’d been sitting there, making the transfer, reflecting on his life and what had happened to the Al Maktoum family when, at that very moment, Westerdale — a man he’d not heard from in months — had called about a lead.
Perhaps there was, as Chopra’s mother had once told him, a connection between people with like minds and pure hearts. Maybe there was a connection between himself and Hussein, that they were destined to meet again now. To Chopra, Hussein was still just a small boy playing with a radio control car inside one of the new palaces.
The Republic of the Seychelles was a group of islands off the east coast of Africa, and that was about all Chopra knew of the place. He’d have to get online and decide what to pack, but he vowed that he’d be en route to the airport within an hour.
His heart raced. This was the best lead they’d had since the beginning.
He would do it. Find Hussein. That was his purpose. He wasn’t sure if he was now the man with the metallic wings, but he understood that this was the right thing, the honorable thing, the only thing he could do. His heart ached for closure.
He’d come a long way from his days spent rolling bidis, and as he entered middle age and could say he’d already enjoyed most of life’s luxuries, there would be nothing more pleasing than to see this young man become the phoenix of his nation and rebuild it from the ashes even as the boy himself rose into manhood.
They would be Arthur and Merlin, and Chopra would do all in his power to help the boy sheikh — because there were others, particularly the Russian Federation, who wanted nothing more than to control Dubai, seize its remaining oil, decontaminate it, and profit from the sales. Their government had been eyeing the country like wolves in winter, but the time had finally come for Dubai to return to power and prominence.
Chopra stood a moment and closed his eyes. Maybe this was the true purpose of his life. To bolster a young man, to see a nation rise again. His eyes burned with tears, but then he reminded himself that his celebration was premature, that he hadn’t located the young sheikh yet. Not yet. He wrenched a suitcase from his closet and tossed it on his bed. With trembling hands, he began to pack.
TWO
She was a woman of three names — but only one accurately identified her.
Her birth name was Viktoria Kolosov, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a car transporter from Vladivostok, Russia.
Her married name was Viktoria Antsyforov, wife of the late Nikolai Antsyforov, a physician ten years her senior.
Her code name was Snegurochka. The Snow Maiden. She was thirty-seven and once described by a colleague as a “woman of sinister beauty.”
But those days were gone.
The once long locks had been hacked off into a spiky punk cut. The once curvaceous body was now lean, raw muscle.
However, some things never changed: The man currently chasing her down the narrow cobblestone street would die slowly.
Painfully.
He would, as all the others had, meet only the Snow Maiden, because that’s all she had left.
Snegurochka was the snow maiden in Russian folklore. In one tale she was the daughter of Spring and Frost. She fell in love with a shepherd, but when her heart warmed, she melted. In another narrative, falling in love transformed her into a mortal who would die. In a third story she was the daughter of an old couple who created her from snow. She leapt over a fire and melted.
Consequently, it was better to remain in the cold. Always the cold, where she could see her breath, where people warmed to her personality before she tore out their jugulars and walked away, feeling only the numbing chill.
And the cardinal rule: Never look back.
She rounded the next corner, pressed her back against the wall, then slipped the knife from her hip pocket and thumbed the button. The stiletto flashed out from its hilt and shimmered in the moonlight.
Drawing in a deep breath, she willed herself into a state of calm and waited for him. Oh, how she hated this, hated it more than anything.
She was always running now. Never pursuing. She loved the chase but despised being on the wrong end of it.
Who didn’t want a piece of her?
That was a good question. She was valuable to everyone: the Americans, the Euros, the Russians, even the Green Brigade Transnational — the terrorist bastards she’d betrayed back in Canada. They wanted her because she’d used and murdered their leader, “Green Vox,” a code name for the replaceable idiot in charge. She’d done an expert job of convincing them she was a bleeding-heart tree hugger who loved to blow stuff up.
The Americans wanted her because she was a former member of the Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije (GRU) and could open up the Russian Federation’s entire intelligence community like a can of tuna.
The Euros wanted her for the same reason, and the Russians wanted her dead for screwing them over when they had tried to invade Canada to seize the oil sands. Plus, they didn’t want her puking up all their secrets to their enemies.
She smiled bitterly. It was, after all, nice to be popular. Where the hell was he? She dared not peek around the corner. He was waiting. So would she.
The Snow Maiden had come to France, risky though it was, to wish her cousin Andrei Eskov good luck with his final stage of the Tour de France. Andrei was riding for Katusha, the Russian Federation cycling team, and he was currently wearing the yellow jersey after twenty days of brutal racing, but his lead was only forty-three seconds, so there was a chance he would win the entire tour… or lose it. She had always had a fond place in her heart for Andrei, who as far back as she could remember loved to ride his bike up the hillside roads overlooking Vladivostok. Twice he had taken her on spectacular rides, experiences she would never forget.
After a brief and somewhat tearful dinner together at the team’s hotel restaurant, she had slipped off and returned to her own hotel. At about midnight, she hailed a cab for the airport. Before she could get out of town, another car had followed, she’d been attacked, her driver killed, and now she was on the run.
Her pursuer couldn’t wait anymore and finally rounded the corner, his footfalls light, his breath audible.
She could even smell him — a faint mixture of cigarette smoke and leather.
In one fluid stroke, she buried the blade in his abdomen while simultaneously relieving him of his pistol with attached suppressor. He gasped and fell back against the wall, his breath reeking even more now. She tore off his woolen balaclava to reveal a blond-haired man, perhaps only eighteen or twenty.
“Who sent you?” she asked him in French. “You’ll die anyway. Just tell me.”
He cursed at her in Russian.
She grabbed the hilt of the knife still jutting from his abdomen, gritted her teeth, and drove it deeper into him. He gasped and clutched her hand.
She put the gun to his head. “Did Izotov send you? Are you working with Haussler?”
Before he could answer, a shot tore into the brick wall just over his shoulder.
With a start, she spun — just as another round sent a piece of the wall tumbling onto her back. She flinched, squinted against the shower of debris, and tried to steal a look at her attacker.
He was across the alley, but she only caught a glimpse before he ducked back behind the wall. He had cover. She was in the open.
Time to run. She yanked free her blade, used the guy’s shoulder to close it, then raced away.
The cobblestones beneath her boots threatened to send her tumbling if she wasn’t careful. Her ankle twisted slightly as she reached the end of the alley and turned right, heading down a broader street lined by dark storefronts. She kept low and repeatedly glanced over her shoulder.