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Shown up like the coyote he proved himself to be that morning thirty years ago.
John fucking Benson.
The name had echoed in Scarlet’s head back at her flat, shortly after getting her instructions, her mission, her target.
A target that worked for the Company.
A woman who worked for the CIA.
The Agency was taking out one of their own.
Felt a bit too close to home, Scarlet had thought as a hint of dread trickled through her. She’d brushed off the feeling, knowing that every NOC asset who’d been in the game this long got to wondering about when her own name would land on someone’s target list. CIA wasn’t exactly known for letting their secrets ride off into the sunset with a retirement package and a non-disclosure agreement.
The dread didn’t last long as Scarlet started her prep-work. The anxiety was quickly pushed aside by the exhilarating thrill that invaded her mind and body every time a new mission came through. She’d quickly reviewed the instructions again, noting the stress on secrecy, on remaining unseen.
Not easy to stay unseen with a Delta guy watching, Scarlet knew. Those guys were trained to be ghosts themselves, which meant Scarlet needed to be straight-up invisible.
Guns and explosives were out of the question. She could use a knife, but that would mean getting close enough, which would be near impossible without being seen—and probably killed—by the Delta guy.
That left just chemical weapons, Scarlet had decided back at her flat. She’d quickly stepped into the little hidden room tucked behind the open kitchen which was spotless like a surgery ward. Her mind raced through options as she perused her pantry of poisons. She couldn’t risk getting close enough to inject something into O’Donnell—certainly not intravenously, probably not even subcutaneously. There was no Room Service order in the system, so that ruled out any poison that could be mixed into scrambled eggs or dissolved into orange juice or stirred into coffee.
Which took her back to the open laundry-ticket.
That was her way in.
“What can I layer cleanly onto cloth,” Scarlet had mused as she scanned her chemical-stacked shelves. “It can’t smell too much, can’t stain too much, can’t be too volatile, can’t be too caustic. If she touches it and it stings, the gig is up. Shit. Not much to choose from. You’re going to have to get creative. Improvise.”
Scarlet ran her sharp gaze along the neatly labelled vials and bottles once again. There were several options almost as lethal as cyanide, but none that would work as fast. So many chemical and plant compounds that could destroy a human from the inside—clog a person’s kidneys, choke the life out of a liver, slowly constrict arteries until a clot formed and stopped the heart.
But all of that took time.
Days at the minimum, weeks sometimes.
Scarlet had been given twenty-four hours.
The timeline narrowed it down to just a few compounds. The delivery method via cloth limited her options even more severely. Some poisons that were easy to apply to cloth wouldn’t be absorbed well through the skin and would require vast doses to be slathered onto O’Donnell’s clothes. Others would leave colored residue on the clothes that would be easy to see. A few would smell too bad to be undetectable. Others would be too harsh on the skin for O’Donnell to not rip her clothes off screaming before the poison got fully absorbed.
Scarlet had whooshed out an anxious breath, wondering if maybe poisons weren’t such a good idea after all. Whatever she used would have to be virtually undetectable at all stages—application, absorption, and autopsy. Anything else would compromise the mission.
Not that the Delta guy would have any doubt that a third party was involved, Scarlet knew. Wagner’s file said he’d started off in Military Police. That meant he understood evidence, would probably make a convincing argument against anything that pointed to him doing the kill.
But this wasn’t about outsmarting Wagner so much as it was about not giving Wagner anything concrete he could use to defend himself. Someone had already decided that Wagner was going to be collateral damage, and this wasn’t going to be tried in a court of law.
Plausible deniability, not reasonable doubt.
Just make itplausiblethat Wagner did it, Scarlet had told herself as she wavered between options. The real mission was India O’Donnell. Wagner was just an unfortunate side-effect, a sacrificial pawn in a game of kings being played at Langley.
Still, even the undetectable poisons took a few minutes to break down and dissipate in the blood and organs of a dead body, Scarlet had thought again with a stab of disappointment. If O’Donnell just keeled over and died in the room, Wagner might immediately take a blood sample from her dead body as insurance in case he was being set up. He could get it tested himself, and if anything showed up, it would be damn hard to argue that a big tough Delta killer would bother poisoning a woman who was almost certainly no match for him physically.
After all, if Wagner had been directly ordered to kill O’Donnell, he’d just do it straight-up with a blade or a bullet. If it needed to look like an accident, maybe he’d stage a head-wound in the shower or a hit-and-run on the street. After all, Mumbai traffic was a deadly killer in its own right.
Shit, it would be so much easier if Scarlet could get them outside onto the crowded city streets. She knew Mumbai like she knew her own body—every secret space, every shadowy place, inside and outside, within and without. Could she wait until they left the hotel?
Scarlet had sighed against the shelf of poisons, quickly checked the time, then gone back into the Raj Palace computer system via her phone, pulled up the reservation under Wagner’s alias.
Check-out date was three days in the future.
Of course, they might leave without checking out—in fact, that would be the strategic choice if they suspected anyone was hunting them. But Scarlet had no information to suggest they knew what was coming. And, unfortunately, no information to suggest they were going to leave the safety of their hotel room anytime soon.