Khadse climbs to the third floor. Very close now.
I wouldn’t even be doing this damned job, he thinks, if it weren’t for Komayd. Which was fairly true: when Ashara Komayd came to be prime minister, oh, seventeen years ago or so, her first order of business had been clearing out all the hardliners from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hardliners like Khadse, who saw a lot of action in those days, plenty of it very nasty.
He can still remember her memo, ringing with that self-important, priggish tone Komayd was always affecting: We must remember not only what we do, but how we do it. As such, the Ministry will be going through a period of reorganization and reorientation as we make adjustments for the future.
Ashara Komayd was cleaning house, cutting everyone recruited by her aunt, Vinya Komayd—and Khadse had always been a favorite of Vinya’s.
And suddenly, there he was. Cut loose in Ahanashtan after a decade of service, and promptly forgotten. He tried to find some pleasure when Komayd herself was booted from Parliament, what, thirteen years ago now? But politicians always have their parachutes. It’s the grunts like Khadse who have the harder landings. Even Komayd’s personal thug, that lumbering, one-eyed oaf of a Dreyling, even he’d gotten a plum retirement, some kind of royal position in the Dreyling Shores—though he’d also heard the fool had found some way to cock it all up.
I’d be doing this for free, Khadse thinks, seething. Twelve years of service, and then so long, Rahul, good-bye to you, good-bye to you and all you worked for, all you fought for, all you bled for, I’m off to spend the Ministry’s coffers on worthless idealism and leave the intelligence world a smoking crater behind me.
He walks down the fourth-floor hall. Another guard, a woman, young and trim and dressed in black, stands at attention at the corner. As Khadse expected.
Khadse shuffles toward the young guard, his face the very picture of doddering befuddlement, holding a smudged piece of paper with a name and a hotel room on it. “Pardon me, ma’am,” says Khadse, bowing low and emanating obsequiousness, “but…I seem to be on the wrong floor, perhaps?”
“You are,” says the guard. “This floor is off-limits, sir.”
“The fifth floor is off-limits?” says Khadse, surprised.
The guard almost rolls her eyes. “There is no fifth floor, sir.”
“Oh, no?” He stares around himself. “But what floor is…”
“This is the fourth floor, sir.”
“Oh. But this is the Golden Hotel, yes?”
“Yes. It is.”
“But I…Oh, dear.” Khadse drops the piece of paper, which flutters to the guard’s feet.
The guard, sighing, reaches down to pick it up.
She doesn’t see Khadse step lightly behind her. Doesn’t see him whip his knife out. Doesn’t have time to react as the steel bites into her jugular and severs it wide open.
The spray of blood is phenomenal. Khadse dances away from it, careful to avoid any spatter on his clothing—he reflects, very briefly, that avoiding bloodstains is one of his oddest but most valuable talents. The guard falls to her knees, gagging, and he dances forward and delivers a devastating side-kick to the back of her head.
The guard collapses to the ground, pouring blood. Again, Khadse puts down his valise and dons the brown gloves. He wipes and sheathes the knife, then searches her. He finds a hotel key—this one 402—grabs the guard by the ankles, and hauls her around the corner, out of view.
Quickly now. Quick, quick.
He presses his ear to the door of 402—they’re all suites up here—and, hearing nothing, opens it. He hauls her in and dumps her body behind the couch. Then he wipes off his brown gloves, pulls them off, and exits, delicately picking up his valise on the way.
He almost wants to whistle merrily as he steps over the bloodstains. Khadse always was good with a knife. He had to learn to be, after an operation in Jukoshtan when some Continental took objection to the way he was walking and tried his damnedest to slit Khadse’s throat. Khadse walked away from the experience with a lurid scar across his neck and a predilection for working close and dirty. Do to the Continentals, he used to say to his colleagues, as they would do to you.
He walks to Room 408—which is, as he expected, right beside the King Suite, where Ashara Komayd has set up her offices for the past month. Doing what, Khadse isn’t sure. The general word is that she’s managing some charity or other, something about locating orphans and finding homes for them.
But from what Khadse’s employer said, it’s a lot more than just that.
But then, thinks Khadse as he silently unlocks Room 408, the mad bastard also said this hotel was covered in defenses. He opens the door. But I don’t call two soft young eggs like those a very rigorous defense.
Again, Khadse tries not to think about the coat and shoes he’s currently wearing. Tries not to think about how his employer suggested that such articles of clothing would serve as tools against Komayd’s defenses—which, of course, would suggest that Komayd’s offices are covered in the sort of defenses Khadse cannot see.
That, he finds, is a very disturbing idea.
Horseshit, is what it is, he thinks, shutting the door behind him. Mere horseshit.
The hotel suite is empty, but its arrangement is deeply familiar to Khadse, from the weapons on the distant desk to the security reports on the bedside table. Here is where the guards prepare for their assignments, there is the telescope they use to watch the street from the balcony, and here is where they doze in between their shifts.
Khadse stalks over to the wall and presses his ear against it, listening hard. He’s almost positive Komayd’s over there, along with two of her guards. An unusual amount of security for a former prime minister, but then Komayd’s received more death threats than almost anyone alive.
He can hear the two guards. He hears them clear their throats, cough very slightly. But Komayd he doesn’t hear at all. Which is troubling.
She should be in there. She really should. He did his homework.
Thinking rapidly, Khadse silently pads over to the balcony. The doors have glass windows, veiled with thin white curtains. He sidles up to the windows and glances out sideways, at the balcony next door.
His eyes widen.
There she is.
There sits the woman herself. The woman descended from the Kaj, conqueror of the gods and the Continent, the woman who killed two Divinities herself nearly twenty years ago.
How small she is. How frail. Her hair is snow-white—prematurely so, surely—and she sits hunched in a small iron chair, watching the street below, a cup of tea steaming in her small hands. Khadse’s so struck by her smallness, her blandness, that he almost forgets his job.
That’s not right, he thinks, withdrawing. Not right for her to be outside, so exposed. Too dangerous.
His heart goes cold as he thinks. Komayd is still an operative at her heart, after all these years. And why would an operative watch the street? Why risk such exposure?
The answer is, of course, that Komayd is looking for something. A message, perhaps. And while Khadse could have no idea what that message would contain or when it might arrive, it could make Komayd move. And that would ruin everything.
Khadse whirls around, kneels, and opens his briefcase. Inside his briefcase is something very new, very dangerous, and very vile: an adapted version of an antipersonnel mine, one specifically engineered to direct all of its explosive force to one side. It’s also been augmented for this one job, since most antipersonnel mines might have difficulty penetrating a wall—but this one packs such a punch it should have no issues whatsoever.