She smiled. It was a cold, beautiful thing. “Then you’d better give me the location, or I’ll make those twenty minutes feel like a lifetime.”
He talked. They always did.
Vasily spun around, his hand diving for a panic button. He never reached it.
“You’re too late,” he gasped, tears mixing with sweat. “It’s already in a dead-drop. My contact picks it up in twenty minutes.” Agent 17 Red Rose HOT-
She lit a cigarette, the tip glowing like a tiny red rose in the dark.
Agent 17 was already there, one stiletto pinning his wrist to the console. He screamed. She pressed a finger to her crimson lips—a single, perfect red nail.
She found him in the control room, a rotund man in an ill-fitting suit, sweating through his shirt. Two guards. One by the door, vaping. Another by the window, scanning the yard with a rifle that cost more than his monthly salary. She smiled
“The algorithm,” she whispered. “Where?”
Agent 17 walked out into the cooling night. The red warning light on the plant’s smokestack blinked in slow, hypnotic pulses. HOT. She pulled out a compact, checked her lipstick—still perfect—and dialed her handler.
“And tell Control,” she added, blowing a smoke ring into the humid air, “the Rose is still sharp.” They always did
Amateurs , she thought.
She didn’t look back. Her hand snapped out, and a single, thin throwing knife—forged to look like a rose’s stem—buried itself in his throat. He made a wet, gurgling sound and collapsed.
“Package intercepted. The thorn has been applied. I need a clean-up crew at the old thermal plant.”
She released his wrist, and he slumped forward, sobbing with relief. As she turned to leave, he lunged for a hidden derringer taped under the console.