Six Seconds

At 5:40 a.m., the underground garage beneath the Queens building reeked of spent gasoline, mildew, and rusted metal.

The fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickered in a relentless rhythm, throwing sallow, stuttering streaks of light across the oil-stained concrete floor. Patches of peeling paint exposed the crumbling red brick underneath, where the early-winter cold of New York seeped through the cracks and settled into a thin frost on the floor.

She had spent the rest of the night getting ready to disappear. The go-bag held three passports, $9,000 in mixed bills, a first-aid kit, two magazines of silver rounds, and a change of clothes that looked like nothing at all.

She had burned her notes in the bathtub page by page and run the water over the ashes. All except one sheet with 14 names on it, and a folded piece of coloring-book paper with a stick figure in purple crayon. Those were in the inside pocket of her jacket, over her heart, where she could feel the stiff edge of them when she breathed.

Vanya stepped off the last stair of the stairwell. Her combat boots touched the floor without making a sound.

She stopped.

The garage was quiet, the way it always was at this hour. Tonight the quiet had weight to it, like a held breath.

Her survival instinct—the one forged through thousands of hours of surviving the Siberian snow—twitched at once at the back of her neck. Something was wrong.

The air was too thick. The smell of rust was heavier than usual, mixed with a very faint trace of cheap cigarette smoke. And most important—she counted three sounds that shouldn't be there.

The tiny scuff of coarse nylon brushing the corner of a concrete pillar 50 feet away. The safety of a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun being thumbed off. And footsteps moving in a pincer formation: two on the left, one on the right, and a fourth waiting in ambush behind the black SUV parked across from her truck.

These weren't street thugs. They weren't local mob muscle brawling on instinct, either.

It was a textbook military formation. They moved at 15-foot intervals, covered every blind corner, and kept their footsteps in time with their breathing. Scaring her was never the point. They had come to wipe her out.

Vanya didn't back up the stairs. Backing up meant cornering herself in a narrow space with no way out.

One.

She pitched forward and shot off like an arrow splitting the wind. The man hiding behind the concrete pillar on the left had just eased his muzzle out when Vanya was already on him. Her left hand caught his wrist and wrenched it back and up with brutal, explosive force. The crack of his wrist bones rang out, crisp and clean, in the dead quiet.

Before he could even howl in pain, the serrated knife in Vanya's right hand had sunk deep into the joint of his neck, twisted once, and come back out. Blood sprayed in a dark streak under the flickering lights and spattered the concrete wall. She hauled his collapsing body up in front of her as a human shield.

She didn't think about any of it. Thinking came later, if it came at all. Right now there was only the next shape in the dark, and the angle it would come from, and the count.

Two.

A burst from the second man's MP5 shredded the chest of the body she was holding up. The crack of gunfire roared and bounced off the enclosed concrete walls in deafening echoes.

Vanya waited for the first six rounds of the burst—the moment recoil pushed the muzzle about an inch up, the way physics said it would. She shoved the body forward, slid her foot across a slick of oil, and slipped past the other man's barrel.

She let the knife drop, and instead her finger hooked straight into the trigger guard of his own MP5. She clenched the muscles of her arm and forced his muzzle to swing back around and fire straight up into his chin. A dull, muddy BLAM. The second man's brains hit the wall.

Three.

The third man charged from the right with a sawed-off Remington shotgun. Vanya didn't dodge. She drove straight inside his reach and slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose. The impact made her vision swim and flooded her mouth with the bitter taste of blood, but the man reeled back. Vanya yanked the pistol from his hip, flipped it around, and hammered the heavy butt into his temple twice in a row until his skull caved in and his huge body dropped like a sack of bricks.

It took only four seconds. Three bodies lay sprawled across the slick of oil. Fresh blood curled out and mixed with the dirty motor oil.

The man whose skull she had caved in had lost his earpiece when he fell. It lay on the oil-slicked concrete by his outstretched hand, a tiny beige comma of plastic.

Vanya knew that earpiece. She was wearing one exactly like it in her collar. It was the model Aegis issued to its field operators, and she had never seen it anywhere else in the world.

Something went very quiet inside her, the way a room goes quiet when a door that should be locked swings open by itself.

Vanya was breathing hard as she took a step back, the pistol in her hand aimed straight at the SUV parked across from her—where the fourth man was backing slowly into the shadows. She was a weapon Siberian Shadow had forged since she was nine, with hunger, cold, and injections. She was no fragile woman in need of protection, and she needed no one's pity. She handled every threat on her own, with reflexes burned all the way into her spinal cord.

"Who sent you?" she asked the dark behind the SUV.

Nobody answered. She heard a breath, ragged and fast. The fourth man was young, then. Young and frightened and a long way from the plan he had been given.

But the fourth man didn't fire. He looked at her with panic in his eyes, then pressed down on a small device in his hand.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

A rapid electronic beeping came from under Vanya's pickup truck—right beside her feet.

She knew the sound. Everyone in her line of work knew the sound.

The red light of a detonator blinked nonstop, reflected in her pale gray eyes. C4, rigged with a pressure trigger and a radio detonator. They hadn't stopped at gunmen; they had built a perfect trap.

Vanya went rigid. Her military instincts instantly ran the cold math in her head: kill radius, 10 feet.

Time to detonation: a second and a half. No cover. Not enough time to dive past the concrete pillar.

She did the math again, and it came out the same. It always did.

She had seen death countless times. But this was the first time she had seen it coming for her this cruelly and this precisely. Vanya shut her eyes and clenched her fists, ready to take the blast that would tear her body apart.

Absurdly, she thought of the crayon drawing in her pocket. She thought of the little girl in Flushing waiting at a door, and of how nobody would ever know to tell her that the woman with the badge had not come back either.

Exactly one second.