She lit a cigarette, the tip glowing like a tiny red rose in the dark.
Vasily spun around, his hand diving for a panic button. He never reached it.
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. 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.” Agent 17 Red Rose HOT-
“The algorithm,” she whispered. “Where?”
“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. She lit a cigarette, the tip glowing like
Her target tonight: Vasily Krovopuskov, an ex-SVR asset gone freelance, peddling a quantum decryption algorithm to the highest bidder. He was hiding in a decommissioned thermal plant on the edge of the Black Sea. The heat was literal. Steam hissed from ruptured pipes, and the infrared overlay on her goggles painted the world in shades of angry orange and deep, dangerous red.
“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.”
“And tell Control,” she added, blowing a smoke ring into the humid air, “the Rose is still sharp.” She found him in the control room, a
He talked. They always did.
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.
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.
Amateurs , she thought.