Page 120 of Secret Weapon

37

EMMY

It was one of those good news, bad news days.

The good news?There was an excellent chance we’d pinpointed exactly who at the embassy was fucking around with Project Marshmallow, and quite possibly, we’d identified the rough location of the weapon itself.

The bad news?Two key members of the team were benched.

I’d thought Darya might be a little happier about being sidelined seeing as (a) she wasn’t my biggest fan and (b) she preferred to bore people to death with macramé classes nowadays, but she looked just as sick as Ana about the situation.

“Nothing is certain yet,” Black said from his perch on the edge of the dining table.I’d never understood how he could stay so still when faced with a massive bloody problem.I paced constantly.It helped me to think.“How sure are you that the man you saw was Six?”

Six.Also known as Ilya Molotov, a fitting name if I’d ever heard one.Darya’s voice had been flat when she called through with the news, but now that she was back at Skywater House, you couldn’t miss the tension in her frame.

“Eighty percent?Maybe eighty-five?I didn’t see him for more than a second.But there’s only one reason a man like Ilya would be hanging around a house in Long Beach, and that’s if there’s something valuable inside.”

Black remained emotionless, as usual.“Playing devil’s advocate, we don’t know that he’s guarding the weapon.He could have been hired as a bodyguard.The thing of value could be his principal.”

Darya snorted at that.“Ilya wouldn’t last twenty-four hours as a bodyguard.He’s offence, not defence.”

“He’d get bored,” Ana agreed.“One of his many flaws is that he has the attention span of a toddler.Another is that he actually enjoys his work.”

I had to agree with both of them.Ana had described Ilya as an arrogant son of a bitch, even as a teenager, and as a member of the Ten, he undoubtedly had skills.So he’d be charging a fee commensurate with those skills, and it would be in excess of Darya’s eight grand a day.No sane person would pay that for a bodyguard, not when they could hire a perfectly competent one from, say, Blackwood for a fraction of that amount.

And Darya’s hypothesis that the weapon was located at the Long Beach house was an interesting one.

“Why would the weapon still be here?If Stepanov’s crew stole it, why wouldn’t they have put it on the nearest plane or boat and shipped it home to the fatherland?They’d only need to fire it at a few folks in Moscow, then blame Markovich for being too soft on the Americans.”

“They tried that before, remember?”Darya said.“Five years ago, when Pushkin was still in power, one of the deputy prime ministers was shot on his way to work, and Lagunov tried to blame that on the Americans—wrongly, of course.But the state controls most of the Russian media, which meant Pushkin could shape the narrative, so the effort was wasted.”

Curious that Darya seemed so certain the USA hadn’t been involved in that little episode.Had she?

“So you think they’ll try some shit here instead?”

“Strategically, it could work,” Ana said.“A Russian target in the US.”

“Like a Russian businessman?Or a politician?”

“Or a group of politicians.Mass murder with an experimental weapon would be big news, and Harrison’s opposition would put their weight behind the story too.”

There could be no good outcome for James in that scenario.Either he’d look like a lunatic for attacking Russians on his own soil, or if he somehow managed to blame the situation on the true culprits, he’d appear weak for not preventing it.The news would trickle into Russia through social media, and if Markovich attempted to quash the story, there’d be cries of a cover-up.The fragile US-Russia relationship would be shattered.Trust would be destroyed as everyone tried to unravel the true story.Conspiracy theories would spring up left, right, and centre, and too many people believed the bullshit they read on the internet nowadays.

“How accurate is the weapon?”Darya asked.

“I’m not totally sure.”

“Because if a number of innocents happened to get caught in the field of fire, the media would lose their collective minds.”

“Are you insane?”

“Just saying.”She shrugged.“There’s a good reason I retired.I was sick of being forced to follow orders I didn’t agree with.”

“Would Ilya do it?”

“Sure, if somebody paid him enough money.”

Fucking hell.Okay, I had to admit that Darya’s hypothesis made a certain amount of sense.Why steal a weapon if you weren’t going to use it?And where better to use it than the home state of Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other social media platform was popular these days?

---