Page 93 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
“Says who?”
The man—Jake Sawyer from MI6—just gave her a long look—a whole conversation in his eyes when he said, “Michael Kingsley.”
She didn’t hear his name again for a long, long time.
Chapter Fifty
One Year Ago
Russia
Alex
Alex wasn’t supposed to be there, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her.
Not when she’d been undercover for five years.
Not when she’d burrowed her way so deeply into Kozlov’s inner circle that she could practically see the rotten core.
Not when she was so very, very close to taking down someone who was so very, very evil.
Alex and Sawyer had a theory and an agenda and a plan that absolutely did not involve her doing a black bag job by herself, so, yeah—
Alex wasn’t supposed to be there.
But something waswrong, and Alex couldn’t trust anyone at the moment—not even herself. So she was silent as the grave as she slipped through the shadows of the Kozlov compound, worrying about what she had to do.
The thing that made Kozlov so dangerous was that he had the ruthlessness of a twenty-first-century villain in the body of an old-school spy. He’d been KGB, and his tradecraft was still sharp, but there were rumors about a database—one single cache of information that included everything from contacts to calendars, inventories to investments. There was a computer somewhere in that compound where the mother lode was stored. And as soon as Alex found it...
Well, it sounded too good to be true, which meant it probably was. But Alex had to take the chance.
Rumor had it, there were only two copies. One was a backup housed at a second location, but one was supposedlyhere, and Alex had an idea where to look, so she stayed silent as she slipped through the shadows toward Kozlov’s empty office—not skulking because skulking was for amateurs. No, Alex strutted. Alexbelonged. Half of Kozlov’s goons were in love with her and the other half were terrified of her. (With a fair amount of overlap in the middle.) So she didn’t act out of place as she picked the lock on the office door and stepped inside.
A few days before, she’d felt a draft coming from the glass-fronted shelves that lined the wall behind Kozlov’s desk, and Alex had come to one conclusion: there was a secret room back there. And what better place to keep a secret computer?
So that was why Alex stood there in the middle of the night, staring at the kind of display she’d seen twice in her life: once at the Farm and again in Amalfi.
She looked across the illuminated shelves full of lipstick cameras and tiny transmitters and wondered what Kozlov would do if he ever learned that Alex had been the one who’d turned his most prized possessions into ash. He’d done his best to rebuild the collection, but there was a reason Alex had been avoiding those particular shelves.
They made her think about Amalfi.
And Amalfi made her think about King.
And thinking about King made Alex feel.
And feeling was careless and reckless and far too much like the girl in the airport Ramada, waiting for her chicken fingers and flirting with strangers. Feeling would get Alex killed, and right then she had a reason for living, so she was careful as she took in the tall shelves that seemed embedded in the old stone wall.
She was examining the sides of the cases when she heard the doorknob rattle, so she didn’t waste a minute before diving under the desk. She was having trouble breathing when she heard the words—
“Come, Sergei. Close the door.”
Kozlov.
He was supposed to be at the Lake Como house with Mistress Number Three, but he wasn’t. He was there. Which meant...
“Our house is not secure,” the old man whispered, and the little hairs on the back of Alex’s neck stood straight up. The air flowing through the vent in the floor felt like a sandstorm. Shefelteverything. Sheheardeverything. Her heart was a drum so loud, it was going to get her caught.
“Sir, I assure you. The migration is complete.” There was no mistaking the deference in Sergei’s voice. “The servers are safe. They cannot be breached from the outside. There are only two places on earth where someone can access your data. Here and at the backup, and as you know, the backup is constantly moving. I assure you—”
