She glares at me and steps aside to let me in. Bayo is at the monitors, brewing something that smells and looks like motor oil but is allegedly coffee. Allegedly.
“There she is. Miss Mia. The woman of the hour.” He looks up from the screens, his face illuminated by the glow. “Ready to get your hands dirty?”
“Been ready for weeks.” I drop into the chair beside him. “What do we have?”
Bayo pulls up a satellite image of the Red Hook waterfront. The warehouse in question is a hulking rectangle of corrugated steel, squatting at the end of a pier that juts into the harbor like a broken finger.
“Kozlov’s using it as a transshipment point,” he says. “Our contacts inside the Bratva confirm he’s meeting with Global Dynamix representatives tonight. Some kind of handoff.”
“Handoff of what?”
“Dunno. That’s what we need you to find out.” He zooms in on the building. “Best guess? Documentation. Records. Something that proves the connection between Kozlov’s trafficking operation and Project Prometheus.”
“What’s the security?” I ask.
“Light exterior presence, it seems. Most of Kozlov’s men will be inside for the meeting.” Bayo switches to a thermal image, bodies glowing orange against the cool blue of the structure. “We count maybe fifteen, but that could change. Kozlov doesn’t like witnesses, so it’ll be his most trusted people.”
“Entry points?”
“Main door here”—he taps the screen—“loading dock on the east side, a hole in the ceiling over here, and there’s a maintenance access on the roof. That’s our best bet. Old ventilation system. Should be a tight squeeze, but you’ve done worse.”
“The Prague embassy,” I say, remembering with a wince. “That was so narrow I had to dislocate my bloody shoulder.”
“Which you did,” Kat says. “And then complained about it for six months.”
“Yeah, well it still makes a funny sound when it rains.”
Bayo ignores us both. “I’ll be running comms from here. Kat will be positioned two blocks out in the extraction vehicle. If things go sideways?—”
“They won’t.”
“Ifthey go sideways,” he repeats, “you call for extraction and we come get you. Response time is approximately four minutes.”
Four minutes. In a gunfight, that’s a lifetime.
“I’ll be fine.” I stand, moving toward the weapons rack. “Let’s get me dressed.”
Forty minutes later, I’m crouched on a rooftop three buildings away from the warehouse, watching the pier through a compact monocular.
The November wind cuts through my tactical blacks like they’re nothing. I’m wearing my work uniform tonight, lightweight armor under a fitted jacket, both knives strappedto my thighs, suppressed Glock in a drop holster, and enough tech sewn into my clothes to make Q Branch weep with envy. The earrings stay in—my connection to Bayo, my lifeline if everything goes to hell.
“Approaching perimeter,” I murmur. “Two guards on the main entrance. One vaping. The other’s on his phone.”
“Copy that,” Bayo says in my ear. “Thermal shows the main group concentrated in the central space. Meeting must be in progress.”
Good. I need them distracted.
I slip down the fire escape, moving from shadow to shadow with the ease of long practice. The waterfront is deserted at this hour, no late-night joggers, no romantic couples, nobody to witness the small woman in black ghosting through the darkness like she belongs to it.
The vaping guard is my first problem. He’s positioned with a clear sightline to the maintenance ladder I need to access. I watch him for a full minute, memorizing his pattern: drag, exhale, glance left, glance right, repeat. Fifteen-second intervals between sweeps.
When his head turns right, I move.
It’s maybe thirty meters of open ground. I cover it in a silent sprint, my boots soundless on the wet asphalt, and I’m at the ladder before he looks back. Up the rungs, hand over hand, the metal cold through my gloves. The ventilation housing on the roof is exactly where Bayo said it would be, a rectangular box with a grated cover that’s heavily rusted.
The screws give way to my multi-tool with minimal protest. I lift the grate carefully, quietly, and peer into darkness.
“I’m at the access point,” I whisper. “Going in.”
