Peter Kirsanow: Second Strike

She slid down to his ankles to work on his thighs and calves for a while. She had treated some of the Baltimore Ravens a few years back during an undergrad internship. Superb physiques and conditioning, yet nothing like this. This body looked and felt like it had done something serious.

“What do you do, Tom? I mean, seriously.”

“Not much of anything right now.”

“Then how did you pay for our travel and rooms?”

“General frugality.”

She slapped his side. “On your back.”

Garin rolled onto his back and Luci straddled his hips again, kneading his chest, shoulders, and arms. All bulges and veins and striations. She took her time with each trapezius, each deltoid, each biceps, each brachialis. Then the pectorals, where she scrutinized a four-inch scar over his heart. Something had been able to penetrate the iron.

She hunched over to take a closer look, her hair falling over her face and onto his chest. She traced the scar with her index finger.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing much.”

Luci snorted. Tom Lofton, inscrutable to a fault. Placing her palms flat on his chest, she leaned forward a bit more, examining his eyes with a hint of frustration. And a bit of something else.

Garin liked Luci’s eyes. They were big and intelligent, set deep in a bronze face. He liked her body, too. Fit and firm. He liked Luci.

“Ms. Saldana, you were at church on a weekday afternoon?”

“Just like you.” She smiled.

“I bet you went to Catholic school as a kid.”

“K through eight.”

“Then you know the imperative to avoid the near occasion of sin,” Garin said.

Luci stopped kneading, blinked several times, and grinned. Where did he keep that damn time machine?

Luci scooted off Garin onto the floor, still grinning.

Bemused, she stared at him for a second, then rubbed her hands together. “How about some dinner?”

“Sounds good. I could use a wheelbarrow of carbs right about now.”

“Take a shower. Get dressed. You want carbs? How about pasta? There’s a place down East Las Colinas.”

“I could use some turmeric and ginger.”

“I picked up both this morning. They’re in my room.”

“Marry me.”

Lofton disappeared into the bathroom to change, leaving a grinning Luci to ponder her situation. She was alone in a plush hotel room with the most dangerous-looking male in the Western Hemisphere, who nonetheless behaved with altar boy rectitude. She expected to feel disappointment, frustration. Instead she felt a sensation akin to elation, anticipation at the very least. This wasn’t a rejection. It was something closer to… respect, chivalry.

Luci’s eyes flitted about the room as she waited. The sliding mirrored door to the closet was open and she glanced inside. No clothes on the hangers. Only a pair of running shoes on the floor and a black gym bag on the overhead shelf. Spartan, like everything else she’d observed about Garin. Yet he’d flown them first class from Reagan National and booked two rooms for five nights in a luxury hotel.

Garin emerged a few minutes later. The linen pants were accompanied by a white linen shirt. He held his arms at his sides and raised his eyebrows.

Luci nodded in approval. “Nice. I should go back to my room to shower and change too.”

“You’re fine as you are, Luci.”

“Will only take a minute. It was hot out there and I’ve got analgesic all over me.”

“All right,” Garin said, nodding.

“You can wait for me in the room.” She cast a mischievous look. “I’ll keep the bathroom door locked to avoid ‘near occasions.’”

Garin smiled, an event that occurred with the frequency of a lunar eclipse. He followed her to the door and she opened it.

For Garin, the milliseconds slowed to seconds and the seconds to minutes. Standing in the hallway outside the door were two men dressed in sport coats with PB-6P9 handguns raised at eye level, suppressors attached.

With his left hand, Garin jerked Luci back into the room behind him as he crouched and thrust his right hand toward the pistol of the man to Garin’s right. He grasped the barrel just as the weapon discharged, striking the man to Garin’s left in the neck. Garin ripped the pistol from the grasp of the shooter on the right, then reversed its grip and fired two suppressed rounds into the assailant’s chest, followed by another just above the bridge of his nose. Without pausing, Garin pivoted to the man on the left, now lying on the hallway floor, and fired an insurance round into his forehead as well.

Elapsed time from door opening to dead shooters: a tick under four seconds. Speed, Garin always maintained, kills.

He quickly examined the hallway. Empty. He noticed something amiss with the bottom hemisphere of the surveillance camera affixed to the ceiling down the hall. The shooters had, thankfully, disabled it.

Garin secured both weapons in the process, then quickly dragged the bodies of the shooters to the emergency exit stairwell two rooms down, depositing both on the landing. When he returned to the room, Luci had staggered to her feet, her eyes wide with panic and bewilderment. Garin wrapped her in a brief bear hug and then held her at arm’s length, looking dead into her eyes.

“Grab every single thing that belongs to you here and in your room as fast as you can. Time to check out.”

MOSCOW,

AUGUST 15, 3:44 A.M. MSK

Piotr Egorshin should not have been nervous.

Piotr Egorshin was a star, and stars shouldn’t get nervous, or, on the rare occasion when they might, it should not be noticeable.

Yet it was painfully apparent to Egorshin’s driver that his boss was nervous, if not downright fearful. Though he appeared to be reclining comfortably in the expansive back seat of his Kortezh limo, his driver, looking in the rearview mirror, could see his body was tense, his fingers drumming rapidly on the armrest.

Not only was Egorshin a star, but his stardom was on the ascendancy, with no apogee in sight. At age thirty-eight he had rocketed through Russian military intelligence, the head of a special cyberwarfare unit within the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU. The unit sat at the pinnacle of Russia’s vast cyberwarfare apparatus, an apparatus that transcended government agencies, coordinating cyberespionage, counterintelligence, degradation of foreign information services, distributed denial of service attacks, and other informational war capabilities among an array of military, intelligence, business, and cybercriminal networks.

The unit had no name, purposely so. The West had not even heard rumors of its existence, though its effects were spectacular.

Because there was scant daylight between military cyberwarfare efforts and those of the highly sophisticated Russian cybercriminal syndicates, it was staggeringly difficult, if not impossible, for the cyberforensics of Western intelligence services to attribute, if not trace, cyberattacks—whether inconsequential or devastating—to the Russian government. This permitted the GRU to engage in all manner of mischief with near impunity.

Egorshin’s operation was assisted by a familial connection in the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence, who had, over the course of several decades, succeeded in planting agents within the US National Security Agency—the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world. Egorshin’s uncle, Sergei, had run a string of NSA mules for the KGB beginning in the early 1980s. US intelligence believed they had rolled up all such moles during Operation Global Story in 2010, but most of the SVR agents arrested in the operation were mere decoys. The SVR agents who remained within the NSA relayed information on the Five Eye encryption to Sergei, who relayed such information to his favorite nephew. Consequently, Russian military intelligence was able to monitor much of the West’s most highly sensitive communications in real time.