Page 18 of The Atlas Maneuver

Roza seemed unfazed by the admission. Which was odd. But since Kyra planned on killing this woman anyway, what did it matter? The more important question, though, was whether this whore could be useful in finding Yerevan’s highly specialized device. So she returned to the point. “There’s another part to this. A larger cylinder with dials, letters, and numbers on it that this part fits into.”

“And if I show you where it is?”

“I won’t kill you, and you can take what you like from here.”

“What if I report you to the authorities?”

She smiled. “You won’t.”

Roza considered the proposal in silence, and Kyra took the moment to make the kind of critical assessment that had saved her life on more than one occasion. Nothing she’d just said should be believed by any reasonable person. No way was she going to allow an eyewitness to just walk away. Slowly, but clearly, all of the pieces of the puzzle swirling around inside her head began to fit together into something that made sense.

Bitcoin was born on January 3, 2009, when the program that created it first appeared on the internet. By 2014 seventy percent of all the then-bitcoin transactions were handled from one world exchange. Mt. Gox. Based in Japan. But in February 2014 Mt. Gox suspended all trading and announced that 850,000 of its bitcoin had been stolen by hackers. About $450 million U.S. at the time. Which shocked the bitcoin world. Subsequently 141,000 were reclaimed, but 709,000 coins remained missing. The hacker was eventually identified and hunted down, but before he could be arrested by the FBI he transferred those bitcoin to Russia’s Federal Security Service.

Quite a bold move.

Which spoke volumes.

She’d dealt with the FSB before. The successor to the infamous KGB. Its main responsibilities included counter-intelligence, border security, and counter-terrorism. From its headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, which the KGB once occupied, the FSB worked independent of anyone and everything. The Kremlin had long proclaimed its hatred for bitcoin but, privately, through the FSB, it was one of the world’s largest owners of cryptocurrency. So she wondered. Had the FSB set its sights on Samvel Yerevan’s stash? Why not? He was an easy mark.

Everything about this woman pointed in that direction.

This was no whore.

“Come with me,” Roza said, and she hobbled her way down a short hall and into another spacious room that also faced the lake. Some sort of office or study. More glass, stone, and wood mixed in a contemporary style. But it wasn’t the décor that attracted a visitor’s gaze. It was the busts. Classical statues on high, verdant-green marble pedestals that gazed out with an ageless silence. She counted eight against the walls, each fashioned of white marble.

“My best guess,” Roza said, “is that what you seek is in this room. He called this his fortress.”

The desk contained no drawers. Just a stainless-steel frame that held a thick glass slab aloft. Behind it glass shelves were built into the wall with drawers and cabinets beneath. No books. Just porcelain vases, small sculptures, and stone carvings. All impressionistic.

“He had strange tastes in art,” Kyra said.

Roza walked behind the desk to the shelves and leaned against the counter. “He was imperious and sanctimonious, thinking himself innately better than all of us. He never liked anyone or anything to have more meaning than himself. The busts? They are his heroes.”

She recognized some of the images. Napoleon. Alexander the Great. Charlemagne. Julius Caesar. Stalin. “He seemed to like dictators and conquerors.”

A cold tension tightened her body, which brought her alert, sharpened her movements, and heightened her senses. Roza still showed no fear, no impatience. Instead, she remained methodical, calculating, and, above all, capable.

But of what?

Certainly not more than Kyra herself could display.

Her fits of fury had always frightened her parents. As a child she would periodically flail wildly, the anger tough to control. They’d never really known how to deal with her, and psychotherapy in Russia, especially for children, was nearly unheard of. Eventually, on her own, she mastered the process of harnessing rage and using it to wipe away depression, along with an occasional bout of helplessness. Her first kill came at age nineteen. Done on a dare. Away to be accepted. More favors followed until she realized that a market existed for the service. At first she’d been hesitant about the urge, which seemed to come from deep inside her, a place she’d tried to repress and deny. Eventually she came to accept that a terrible violence seethed just beneath her amicable exterior. And instead of frightening her, it provided a sense of strength.

Along with an insight she’d learned to trust.

The obviousness of this situation broke through her clouded thoughts and she could delay no longer. If she’d read this scenario right, reinforcements were surely on the way. More FSB agents, backing up this one here in the dacha.

As a teenager Kyra had first learned that she possessed an acute sense of color. Strong and clear, seeing things—like rainbows inside pieces of ice—that others never saw. Some colors triggered manic and euphoric episodes, others produced giggle fits. Oddly, the malady faded with age, replaced by an exceptional degree of peripheral vision. A German optician explained to her that such acuity was normally not possible because the majority of vision receptors, the cones, were packed in the central part of the eye. Her abnormality? She had an overabundance of cones. Which had temporarily heightened her view of color and permanently increased the range of her peripheral vision beyond normal limits.

A hidden asset she used to maximum advantage.

Which was why she’d shifted her position closer to the Napoleon bust, her eyes clearly angled away from Roza, who still stood behind the desk. But she was able to see out of the corner of her eye as the woman, propped against the counter, eased open the drawer behind her in the wall unit and slid one hand inside, out of view.

Kyra reacted, grabbing the marble bust, spinning around, and launching it across the room. The heavy mass crashed into Roza just as the woman’s right hand came into view, from the drawer, with a gun in her grip. Roza raised her left arm to shield herself from the impact but the heavy bust pounded into her hard and she collapsed to the floor, dazed and in pain. Kyra darted across the room and relieved Roza of the gun.

A cold rage devoid of all feeling engulfed her.

She stared at the gun. Clean. Well oiled. Loaded with fresh rounds.

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