Chapter 20 - Number Twelve at the Door
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Enzo didn't say a word—he drew his SIG Sauer from beneath his tuxedo jacket and lunged for the library doors leading to the main dining room.
Before his hand touched the brass handle, the lights across the entire Beacon Hill townhouse—and the entire snow-covered street outside—cut out simultaneously in a coordinated electromagnetic grid kill.
And from the main dining room across the foyer came not the roar of gunfire, but the heavy, simultaneous thud of twelve wineglasses hitting the mahogany table and floor as Don Castellano, Don DeLuca, Don Santini, and the captains collapsed unconscious across their plates—drugged by a colorless, odorless neuro-sedative slipped into the vintage Brunello decanter ten minutes ago!
Outside in the main foyer, Enzo’s four interior guards went down under the muffled thwip-thwip of subsonic tranquilizer carbines fired through the front transom glass.
Enzo shoved Jade back behind the armored steel-lined wall of the library archway, leveling his SIG Sauer at the darkened foyer as the heavy oak front doors of the townhouse swung silently open against the swirling white blizzard outside.
Stepping over the threshold into the red glow of the security emergency strips were two figures dressed in tailored black winter coats.
On the left stood a tall, broad-shouldered twenty-eight-year-old man with ice-blond hair, pale cold eyes, and a federal marshal’s badge clipped ironically to his belt alongside a suppressed Russian Stechkin automatic—and behind his left ear, visible against his shaved temple, was the black ink tattoo IV.
Number Four.
And walking two steps ahead of him, peeling off her white catering server’s apron to reveal a sleek black tactical suit underneath, was a stunning twenty-three-year-old blonde woman with pale blue eyes.
She unclasped the wide silver cuff bracelet from her left arm and let it drop with a metallic clink onto the marble foyer floor—exposing a jagged, eighteen-year-old white crescent scar across the inside of her wrist, and behind her left ear, the Roman numeral XII.
She didn't have a gun aimed at Jade. Instead, she looked across the dark foyer at the woman who had carried her out of a burning basement eighteen years ago, and offered a slow, hauntingly familiar smile.
"Hello, Anya," Number Twelve said softly, her voice echoing through the silent mansion as the red laser dots of twenty sniper rifles from the snowy rooftops across Beacon Hill danced across the library windows, pinning Enzo’s exterior guards in their tracks without firing a shot. "You haven't changed a bit since Route 17. Still throwing yourself in front of monsters to save people who don't deserve it."
Jade stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Enzo in the library doorway, her Glock 43 held steady in her hand, her pulse ice-cold and rhythmic as she looked at the little girl she had spent eighteen years mourning.
"You killed Frank Miller, Masha," Jade said, her voice cutting through the dark like a blade. "The man who saved your life that night."
"Frank Miller was going to warn you before you killed Grigori and Salvatore for us," Masha replied calmly, taking a single step toward the library threshold with her empty palms slightly raised. "We didn't poison the captains in your dining room tonight to kill them, sister—they’ll wake up in four hours with a headache. And we didn't come here tonight to shoot your husband or the baby you’re carrying."
Beside Jade, Enzo went rigid as stone. How the hell did they already know about the pregnancy test she had opened five minutes ago—unless there was a thermal or audio pinhole mic planted inside the silver ribbon of the pharmacy bag from this afternoon?!
"Then why are you standing in my foyer, Number Twelve?" Enzo asked, his voice a lethal promise of death as his gun sight rested squarely between the blonde woman’s eyes.
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Masha reached into the breast pocket of her black coat and tossed a single, unsealed CIA and Department of Justice dossier onto the marble floor between them—stamped with a photograph of the real buyer who had funded the Red Sparrow house in 2008 above Grigori Volkov’s head.
"Because Grigori Volkov was only the kennel master, Anya," Masha said softly as the snow blew in through the open front door behind her. "There weren't twelve kids in that program in 2008—there were thirteen. And Number One just landed at Logan Airport an hour ago with a federal strike force to erase everyone who remembers the Catskills... unless the three of us hunt him first."
