Christ, she is distracting, even here.
We take a position near the coffee kiosk on the upper level, where the sightlines cover the main entrance, the platform stairs, and the taxi rank beyond the glass. Vix buys two coffeesand hands me one without looking at me, and her fingers brush mine during the transfer, and the contact is brief and warm and sends a current through my hand that I let travel before discipline catches up.
"Tommy's pulling security camera feeds from the Westbahn network," Sarah says. "Scanning for Volkov's known security personnel from the compound files we seized. Stand by."
We wait. Vix drinks her coffee and reads the guidebook and photographs the vaulted ceilings, and I lean against the railing and watch the crowd and think about the fact that the woman next to me sat across a restaurant table from Gregor Volkov in Prague and let him live, and in a few hours she will face him again, and I do not know what she will choose this time.
I know what I would choose. The question has never been complicated for me. Volkov ordered my execution in Budapest. He filmed it for insurance. The guard who owed a debt to a Serbian arms dealer left a door unlocked and I walked out, and I have spent a decade knowing exactly what I would do if I found myself in a room with Gregor Volkov and a clear line of sight.
But this is not my vendetta. It is hers, and the distinction matters more than my preference.
Sarah's voice cuts through: "Got him. Platform six, arriving in twelve minutes. Two security, both armed, moving in a close protection formation. Volkov is wearing a dark overcoat. He looks nervous."
"Nervous men make mistakes," Vix murmurs. She sets the coffee down and lifts the camera, angling the lens toward the platform stairs. "What's his exit strategy?"
"Vehicle pickup at the south entrance. Tommy traced the plates to a rental registered through one of Volkov's shell companies. We think the extraction point is a logistics warehouse on the outskirts. Baumann confirmed a Committee staging facility in that area."
"Mercer?" I ask.
"Mercer and Stryker are in position. Stryker redeployed after the Fane network was secured. They have eyes on the warehouse. They'll move when you give the signal."
Vix looks at me. The guidebook is closed, the tourist persona folding itself away like a costume she has decided she no longer needs, and what replaces it is the woman I watched plan a three-pronged assault on Committee infrastructure from the head of the briefing table. She is sharp and analytical and carrying a fury that has been building since London.
"We follow him to the warehouse," she says. Her voice is quiet, calibrated for my ears alone. "Let his security deliver him to a controlled environment and then we take it."
"Agreed."
We do not discuss alternatives. We have been finishing each other's tactical sentences since MI6, and the shorthand has only grown more fluent over the weeks of operating together. Vix sees the approach, I see the execution, and the space between her intelligence and my violence is where the operation lives.
Volkov arrives on schedule. I spot the security detail first, two men in dark jackets with the flat alertness of professionals whose principal is rattled. They emerge from the platform stairs flanking a man I recognize from a dossier photograph and from a Prague restaurant where he unfolded a napkin in his lap while Vix sat across from him and smiled and did not kill him.
He moves through the station with the hurried gait of a man who can feel the ground shifting beneath him. His empire is in ashes. His compound is an empty shell. His financial infrastructure is frozen. And the woman who burned it all is standing close enough to count the stitches on his overcoat, with a camera around her neck and a look on her face that I would not want directed at me.
Vix photographs him, three shots in quick succession, clinical, the shutter sound lost in the station noise. The habit is pure intelligence professional, a woman who never stops collecting data, even when the operation is moving past collection and into something more final.
They exit through the south entrance. The security detail moves Volkov into a dark sedan with the efficient urgency of men who know their position is compromised, and the car pulls away from the curb and heads south.
We follow in the vehicle Tommy arranged, a rented Volkswagen that blends into Austrian traffic. I drive. Vix navigates from the passenger seat, feeding me updates from Sarah's satellite coverage while her eyes track the sedan through the suburban streets. Her left hand rests on the console between us, close enough to touch, and I don't.
"They're heading for the industrial district near Maxglan," Sarah confirms. "Mercer reports three additional personnel at the warehouse. Light security."
"Volkov's running scared," I say. "He wouldn't be traveling with a skeleton crew if he had better options."
"He doesn't have better options." Vix's voice carries the cold satisfaction of a woman who stripped those options away, one by one, from Zurich to Vienna. "I made certain of that."
The warehouse sits in a row of commercial units south of the Salzach, a corrugated steel building with loading bays and a single entry point visible from the road. Mercer and Stryker have already established a perimeter. The sedan disappears through a roller door, and the door closes behind it, and Volkov is inside a building that Mercer controls.
"Mercer, go," I say into the comms.
"Copy. Moving."
The op takes minutes. Mercer and Stryker enter through a service access point on the north wall and secure the warehouseinterior with the controlled efficiency that Echo Ridge has refined through dozens of operations. The comms feed delivers fragments: verbal commands, the sound of bodies being directed to the ground, the metallic clatter of weapons being surrendered. Volkov's security detail is neutralized without casualties, disarmed and restrained in the loading bay while Mercer holds the interior.
"Clear," Mercer says. "Principal is in the office at the east end. He's alone."
I look at Vix. Her jaw is set, her breathing tight and controlled in a way I recognize from the Prague restaurant. She is holding herself together by force, and the force is costing her.
But the look in her eyes is different. In Prague, the fury was raw, barely leashed. Here, it has been refined, tempered by the time spent in operational work and the systematic dismantling of everything Volkov built. She is not going into that office to rage. She is going in to deliver a verdict.
