Gloves on. Cap low. Dark clothes, dark shoes, nothing reflective. I moved the way I'd always moved through other people's crime scenes. Deliberately, efficiently, like I had every right to be there.
The building's side entrance had a keypad. The code hadn't been changed since the third-floor job. Four digits, and I was inside. The stairwell was concrete and musty. Still no cameras.
Second floor. Third door on the left. I stood outside and listened.
A television was on with the volume low. Some Russian talk show with a lot of shouting. Beneath it, the rhythmic creak of a recliner and the faint click of a laptop keyboard.
He was awake. That made it slightly more complicated and significantly more satisfying, although satisfaction wasn't the point.
Efficiency was the point.
I picked the lock in twenty-two seconds. The deadbolt turned with a soft click that was swallowed by the television noise. Ieased the door open three inches and waited. The sound didn't change. He hadn't heard.
The layout was a standard one-bedroom. Kitchen to the right, living room straight ahead, bedroom and bath to the left. From the angle of the door, I could see the blue glow of the television reflecting off the far wall and the back of a recliner.
I stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind me, one inch at a time, until the latch caught with a sound no louder than a breath.
The apartment smelled like reheated food and cigarettes and the faint chemical sweetness of gun oil. Dmitri was a careful man. He maintained his weapons. He watched his surroundings.
But he didn't watch his back.
Not tonight.
I crossed the kitchen in four steps, avoiding the linoleum seam where the flooring buckled slightly—a trip hazard I'd noticed from the doorway. The living room carpet was thin and didn't creak. I came around the side of the recliner in a smooth arc, staying out of his peripheral vision and coming up behind him.
He was typing something. His pistol sat on the end table within arm's reach. One hand on the keyboard, one holding a glass of something brown.
I moved.
The knife went in below his left ear, angled up and forward through the carotid artery and the internal jugular. He jerked once—hard—and the glass fell from his hand and hit the carpet without breaking. His right hand shot toward the gun, but hisarm went weak before his fingers reached it, and his hand dropped to the armrest and slid off.
His mouth opened. No sound came out.
I held the blade steady and counted. Five seconds. Ten. His body shuddered, then went slack. The recliner springs creaked as his weight settled.
I pulled the knife out clean.
He was still warm when I started working. The cleaner in me took over like muscle memory—I couldn't help it. Gloves checked for tears. Blood spatter assessed. Drop path calculated. The arterial spray had gone forward and down, most of it absorbed by his shirt and the carpet in front of the recliner. Minimal wall contact. Minimal cleanup.
Old habits.
I wiped the knife on his shirt, closed his laptop, and left the pistol where it was. Then I searched the apartment. Took his phone, his passport, a thumb drive from the desk drawer. Anything that might connect back to the cell's communications or to Raven's name.
Thirty minutes. In and out.
I left the way I came. Locked the door behind me. Walked to the car with the same unhurried stride I'd used walking in and threw the trash bag in the trunk.
One down.
Konstantin was a different problem.
The gated community required credentials I didn't have and a face that wouldn't be remembered. But the golf cart security onlycovered the front roads, and the stone wall along the western perimeter backed up to a greenbelt that was thick with cedar and live oak and offered about forty feet of unmonitored darkness.
I scaled the wall at 4:50 AM. Dropped into the cypress trees and waited.
The house was dark except for a light in the kitchen. Through the window, I could see one of the guards—a big man with a shaved head and a shoulder holster—sitting at the counter scrolling through his phone. The other guard would be in the front room.
At 5:42, the patio door opened.
