“No.”
“I’m sorry.” Brandy swallowed and looked down at the coiled roll of film. “Do you have any?”
“What?”
“Aspirin?”
Pasha took a deep breath, relaxing his shoulders and letting his features soften. He knew that unless he was smiling, he could look terribly mean. “Of course,” he said. “They’re in my suit jacket.”
Pasha went back into the bathroom and came out a moment later with his suit jacket draped over his forearm. He handed her a plain, clear bottle of pills and a cup of water, and watched as she took two pills out and swallowed them.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded.
When she finished drinking her water, he took the cup out of her hands and placed it on the bed table. He walked to the other side of the room and hung his suit jacket on his valet, turned back to her, and grabbed her wrist, abruptly twisting it behind her. He slit her throat with his shaving blade, splattering their white curtains and a bad painting of a grain-processing factory with an arched spray of her blood.
She would die in less than a minute and he was glad. Pasha hadn’t wanted her to suffer and made sure that the cut was deep and completely severed her artery. Though she would be unconscious, at least, if not dead, by the time she fell to the beige carpet, he guided her body down slowly and into a position that would be comfortable for her. When she seemed at rest, he went back into the bathroom and washed her blood off of his hands and wrists. The arms of his bathrobe were finished, so he peeled it off, rolled it into a ball, and threw it into the bathtub. He rinsed his arms one more time before putting his white undershirt back on.
Pasha cursed himself for having put the microfilm in an aspirin bottle. He should’ve put it into his stomach medication, but the Myer aspirin bottle was the same brown color of the film and a safer bet. It had been since before his mistress, Aprilia, that he’d traveled with a woman and he’d forgotten the way they got into everything.
It didn’t appear as if she’d gotten a look at the film and she wouldn’t understand how to read a blueprint if she had—especially one of a spaceship. But the fact that Brandy had seen it at all sealed her fate. He could’ve made up a story that she would’ve believed the way she believed everything else he told her, but that would’ve been one more lie on top of the many he’d already woven, and he had to draw a line somewhere.
And she was eminently capable of making a slip in front of one of his colleagues or pestering him for a deeper involvement in his so-called patriotic missions for Mother Russia. When the time came to break things off with her completely, she might’ve even put some of the puzzle pieces together and blackmailed him. It never ceased to amaze him how a woman of limited intellect could become uncharacteristically sharp when her ego had been bruised and her heart broken by a lover. His mistresses had always been fair-minded, but he’d seen it happen before. A more rational man might have killed Brandy after she’d mentioned knowledge of the metal card, but Pasha was an emotional creature, whose heart was made up of poetry. He had a soft spot for his mistresses.
Pasha rolled up the microfilm and put it back in the aspirin bottle, tucking it into his pants pocket. He would be delivering it to the safe house later that afternoon. Plucking Brandy’s beauty products off the bed, he placed them in her make-up case according to size, returning it and her clothes to her luggage. Pasha then removed some bogus classified documents—Russian—from the lining of his suitcase and laid them out on the bed in order, throwing a mini-camera—the type used in American espionage—on top of them as if it had been dropped there. He dug a small pistol out of the same lining where he’d stored the bogus documents, and opened Brandy’s hand, placing the pistol in her palm and squeezing her fingers around the handle. He always carried props with him in case of an emergency.
Remembering the bathroom, he went to the tub and removed his bloody robe from its cradle, and filled it a quarter of the way with cold water. He was finishing hanging his suit jacket and dress shirt on a rack in the bath when Kosmo Zablov came knocking—late as usual.
“Why aren’t you dressed, you ox?” Kosmo feigned outrage when he saw Pasha in his undershirt. He, on the other hand, was dressed in his usual close-fitting, second-rate clothes trying to affect the look of a Venetian gangster.
“What the… ?” It was hard to miss Brandy’s body and the copious amounts of blood she’d spilled. Kosmo glimpsed her nearly severed head from the doorway and entered the suite to get a better look at her.
“You could’ve at least saved the artwork, my friend. What did it do to you?”
“She’s an American spy.”
Kosmo looked down at the surprised look on Brandy’s face, and at the gun in her hand.
“This little idiot?”
“No idiot, I’m afraid.” Pasha picked the documents up off the bed and held up the camera. “I’ve been trying to trap her for months.”
Kosmo whistled his approval of his comrade’s casual air. He assumed the same kind of cool as he eyeballed the contents of the documents in Pasha’s hand. “You just leave those around for anyone to find?”
“These?” Pasha held up the documents. He’d enjoyed taunting the agent with them, but it was time to wrap up this whole ugly scene. “These are useless. Go ahead—look at them. I made them up.”
Kosmo grabbed them, devouring the first page. “This is great stuff,” he chuckled. “How did you come up with it?”
Pasha shrugged. “I wanted to arrest her, not kill her, but she tried to shoot me.”
Pasha went into the bathroom and returned with his suit jacket and shirt. He dressed slowly as Kosmo sat on the edge of the bed and continued to amuse himself with the false documents. He had one foot on the bloodied carpet and one resting on Brandy’s shoulder. When Pasha finished tying his tie, he tore the top blanket off the bed and covered Brandy’s body with it, making Kosmo put his feet up elsewhere.
“What on earth is this?” Kosmo bent down next to the bed and swept a small, metal rectangle up off the floor. “Soul,” he said, reading the tiny script.
Pasha bit down on his lip. He could still detect a faint residue of Brandy’s sex in the corners of his mouth. “It’s mine,” Pasha told him. It must have fallen out of his suitcase lining when he removed the fake documents. “She gave it to me as a symbol of—oh, I don’t know—love, I guess. You can have it if you want.”
Kosmo chuckled, tossing it on the bed. “Love,” he repeated.
Pasha went to the vanity and applied a light dab of Chanel Pour Monsieur to his neck—a gift from Brandy. He stepped back, appraising himself as casually as he could.
“Have this cleaned up, will you?” he said. “I need to go downstairs and request another suite—one with a clean carpet.”
“You are a cold bastard, aren’t you?” Kosmo stood up, slapping Pasha’s back before going over to the telephone. “I’ll get right on it. You know this is going to get some attention. She’s a Hollywood type—the denials will be fervent and angry.”
“We have the evidence right here—they can deny it all they want.”
Kosmo Zablov smiled, revealing his crossed front teeth. “What the hell?” he said, picking up the receiver, “I’ve always loved to annoy the Americans.”
He dialed the three-digit number, but the front desk was busy.
“Of course, you’ll be sent back to Moscow for this,” Zablov continued. He dialed again and this time the line rang. “And you’ll miss your dinner with the French president next week. Bastard—you always get the greatest of the great boondoggles. President Coty has the most exquisite chef—or so I’ve been told.”
Pasha Tarkhan nodded and tried his best at a smile. “I always end up back in Moscow sooner or later.”