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She ran straight up to the intersection, dropped to her stomach, then shifted the pistol to her weak hand and peered around the corner, her cheek just off the floor.
His light shone on her. She answered with three rounds, the clicks barely echoing as she sprang up and saw he was down, his head blossoming with blood. The other two rounds had struck him in the chest, but he was wearing a vest, probably an old Level IIIA. He was middle-aged and former military, judging from his weapon, crew cut, and tattoo on his wrist. She snatched up his 9mm pistol, an MP-443 Grach, the latest standard issue military sidearm with a seventeen-round magazine. She tucked the pistol into her belt and winked at the dead man. That he’d been killed by a woman had probably a
Three to go. She raced back through the intersecting tu
Nadia was wearing a strong perfume that stood out sharply, and the Snow Maiden reached another intersection where for a moment she thought she’d have to rely on only her sense of smell until a slight thump to the right set her off again toward two more intersections.
They were staging another ambush. She could feel it.
Suddenly, dead silence, only her footfalls.
She stopped, waited, then shifted to the wall and crouched down, slipping her phone into her leather jacket’s i
With both hands, she clutched her pistol and aimed for the intersection.
Still nothing . . .
Back in the car, on the way here, Boris had been smoking a cigarette and asking why they called her the Snow Maiden. She’d never worked with him before, and it’d been interesting to explain it to him, even as she was plotting his death.
Snegurochka was the Snow Maiden in Russian folklore. In one tale she was the daughter of Spring and Frost. She fell in love with a shepherd, but when her heart warmed, she melted. In another narrative, falling in love transformed her into a mortal who would die. In a third story she was the daughter of an old couple who created her from snow. She leapt over a fire and melted.
Major Viktoria Kolosov felt a special attachment to the character that stemmed from something deep in her subconscious. Never warm your heart? In this business, maybe so.
She was holding her breath now, thinking about the single round left in her magazine, the spare six-round mag still tucked in her hip pocket, and the bodyguard’s Grach pressing against the small of her back. She should change guns now but feared making even the slightest movement.
The shadows seemed to collect on the left side of the intersection, and then she saw the silhouette of a head peering around the corner.
She fired, a spark leaping off the wall, damn it. There wasn’t even time to curse. She was already rolling across the floor while reaching into her waistband for the Grach. By the time she came out of her roll, she had the pistol and was raising it while the bodyguard returned fire, three rounds booming and stitching across the floor, extending from her ghost to her current position hunkered down at the opposite wall.
Going asymmetric in a gunfight was not a technique for amateurs or veterans turned bodyguards, men too often married to their conventional tactics. She proved that to this oaf by sensing his pause to check fire.
She sprinted straight up the tu
Simultaneously, she grabbed his pistol and shot him in the head.
Not a half second later, she dropped to the floor as the guy behind her, the guy whose curse of surprise had given him away, fired above her head.
With her chin buried in her chest, the pistol down low near her knee, she squeezed off two rounds that sent him staggering back.
But he didn’t fall, and the shots must’ve gone high or wide, striking him in the arm or shoulder. She fired once more and he finally dropped.
Thump. Silence again.
She was panting and wincing over the stench of gunpowder. Her ears rang from all the close-quarters gunfire.
Shuddering over how much time she’d wasted here, she sprang up, ejected and pocketed the magazine from one of the bodyguards, then tugged free her phone, its narrow beam now lighting the way.
The last bodyguard would present the greatest challenge. She had to eliminate him without inadvertently killing Nadia, the spoiled little rich girl who, of course, was a research student at ETH Zurich’s Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, CSCS. ETH was considered one of the finest schools in Europe, and daddy had footed the entire bill. Poor baby was having a bad day, wasn’t she?
The Snow Maiden snorted and raced up the tu
And there it was again. That perfume.
Gritting her teeth and tucking her arms close to her sides, she ran a marathon up that tu
The next passage bore to the right, the walls closing in like a compactor, just wide enough for one person now. She slowed and held her light high above her head like a lantern—
And there they were, twenty meters ahead. The bodyguard was helping Nadia off the floor from where she’d fallen. Her jeans were torn at the knee and bloody, and her dirty blond hair hung down in her face, just like her father’s.
The bodyguard spotted her light, shoved Nadia forward into a side tu
The Snow Maiden crouched as two rounds pinged at her shoulder, the sparks on her periphery, the bullets so close she felt their wind.
Damn, it’d be a bitch to die here. She was just a few months away from marrying Nikolai Antsyforov, a physician ten years her senior who’d not only swept her off her feet but who appreciated her job, her position, her strength. At the moment he was in Paldiski, Estonia, treating workers involved in a reactor accident. He was fresh out of medical school, and his passion, like hers, knew no bounds.
Remembering all she had to lose was wrong and weakened her. She was better than this, better trained. She blinked away the thoughts and burst forward, crossing to the opposite side of the tu
Just as he doused his light, she hit the ground again, heard their footfalls. They were making another break.
She reached the side tu
Holding her breath, the Snow Maiden came around the corner, raised the gun with both hands, and took aim.