Duke just nods, looking unhappy. “I don’t like it, Rin. I know there’s not much by options, but I don’t like it. It’s my job to protect you, and here I’m putting you in unimaginable danger.” He winces. “Your dad is going to kill me. Actual murder.” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe I’m allowing this.”
I shake my head. “You’re not allowing me to do anything. I’mchoosingthis. I’m an adult, and for a civilian, I’m actually very well trained for something like this. I never expected to need the training, that’s the funny thing. It always felt like a game to Cal and me.” I shudder. “Suddenly, it’s all very much not a game.”
“You can’t hesitate, Rin.” He holds my shoulder. “You rely on your training, your instincts.” His pale blue eyes are deep, serious in a way Duke rarely is. “Bury your soul deep, Rin. There’s no conscience. No good or bad, no right or wrong. There’s just the objective—get Apollo, Yelena, and yourself to safety. You kill anyone—anyone—who gets in the way, who tries to stop you. You just shut your emotions down—there will be time to be afraid and sick to your stomach and all that after.”
I hold his hand as it rests on my shoulder. “I can do this.”
He nods. “If anyone can, you can.” He smiles. “You’re your mother’s daughter, and your mother is the most badass woman I’ve ever met—tied with Layla, that is.”
“So it’s a three-way tie?”
He shrugs. “If I start ranking the women in my life, I’ll get in trouble eight different ways,” he says, snickering. “My point is, you’re your mother’s daughter, and I know she wouldn’t hesitate to do what you’re doing, in your place. She may hate me for not trying harder to stop you, but I know I couldn’t stop her either, so…”
I pat his hand as we leave the hookah cafe. “Don’t worry, Uncle Duke, I’ll protect you from Mom.”
He just cocks an eyebrow at me. “Hey, she can be scary.”
I laugh. “Believe me, I know. She’smymother, after all.”
Thomas jogs over to us from the street corner, pocketing his phone, joining us and directing us across the street. “Our timeline has moved up, I am afraid. My friend says the convoy is supposed to arrive in a couple of hours—it stops outside of the city to refuel and change drivers and allow the women to pee and stretch their legs. This is where you will join them. My friend will say he found you, a lone tourist lost in the wrong part of town in a city she had no business being in.” His expression is no longer so jovial as when I first met him an hour or two ago. “It is a very sad truth that this is all too believable.”
“What do I need to do?” I ask, as we round a corner into a narrow, dead-end alley.
“You will need to act scared—and once you meet my friend and see the convoy, I do not think it will be too big of an act. I think maybe some dirt. If we could make fake bruise for you on your cheek, so show you fought him? That would be best. But time is short. We have to get you to the meeting place.” He indicates a sixty-year-old Land Rover, dusty and ancient but well-maintained. “Get in, everyone.”
Anselm and Alexei arrive behind us, separately, and we pile into the vehicle, too many of us and not enough seats—there’s a second-row bench, and behind that, two more benches parallel to the length of the vehicle, facing in. I sit on one of these with Anselm beside me.
Anselm digs in a pocket and produces two small, thin lengths of metal and a lock. “A crash course on lock-picking.”
He shows me how to use the two pieces of metal to pick the lock, and then has me try. It feels impossible at first, in the back of jouncing SUV, but after some false starts and failed attempts, I get it. And once I’ve gotten it once, I understand the basic principles and mechanics of it. Thirty minutes of practice isn’t enough to make me an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a start.
“Some female operatives I know hide these in their hair, and others in the underwire part of their bra,” Anselm says, taking the lock from me and leaving me with the lockpicks.
I consider. “I feel like they may mess with my hair. The bra feels safer, to me. Harder to access quickly, but less likely that they’ll fall out or be found.”
“I agree.”
I pull my arms inside my T-shirt and remove my bra, and then slide my arms back out of the sleeves—I borrow Anselm’s knife to make a slit in the bra along the underwire, and then slide the lockpicks inside, and put the undergarment back on. Retrieving them again will require taking the bra off, probably, but I feel confident they won’t be found. As long as they don’t take the bra, that is. But I can’t let myself imagine that scenario, and why such a circumstance would occur.
I shut that line of thinking down—with extreme difficulty, I force my mind away from that and force myself to focus on the present—on what I can do, what I am doing. Still, my hands shake, and my palms are clammy, and my stomach roils with uncertainty and nerves.
“I tried to think of some way of letting you smuggle in a weapon. A knife, at least. But I must assume you will be searched. This is the best I can do.”
He reaches into a different pocket and produces a metal card, about the thickness of a thicker-than-normal credit card; examining it, I discover it is a knife, cleverly designed so that it unfolds from the card shape into a small knife.
I unfold and refold it a few times. “Great, but…where should I keep it that they won’t find it?”
He indicates my foot. “Give me your boot.” I remove my right boot, and he reaches into it, lifting the insole and placing the card-knife inside. “It will be uncomfortable—you must not give away any hint of that discomfort, no limping, no walking strangely. And then, once you are certain you will not be searched again, you can put it in your pocket.”
I replace the boot—not giving away that I’ve got a knife under my heel will be harder than acting afraid, I think. “I didn’t do any training with knives,” I say. “Only how to disarm someone else with one, and that was focused on breaking wrists and elbows, incapacitating, and getting away.”
He nods. “It is so you have at leastsomething.” He taps his throat. “If you must use it, aim here.” Another tap to the inside of his thigh, high up. “Or here, on either leg. Anywhere else will hurt them, definitely slow them down, but to kill quickly, it must be one of those places. Don’t try to fight with the knife—dramatic knife fights are Hollywood bullshit. You stay away out of reach until you see an opening to hit one of the two places, throat or femoral artery. You make your strike, once,hard, and then it’s done. If your opponent has a knife as well, you must accept that youwillbe cut.”
I nod, swallowing hard. “Am I crazy for hoping to get a gun instead?” I shudder. “Killing someone with a knife sounds…worse, somehow.”
He shrugs. “Not crazy. It is worse. By all means, getting a gun into your hands is your number one priority. But remember the plan—do not make your presence known if at all possible until after we have begun.”
“How will I know when you’ve started your assault?”
