She peeked around the corner and spied a middle-aged woman in an expensive dress, checking her makeup in the mirror. The woman caught Jet’s reflection and turned to look at her. Jet emerged from the stall with a smirk. “My friend had a little too much to drink,” she apologized, and didn’t stay to challenge the woman’s look of distaste. A drunk escort passed out in the bathroom wouldn’t draw much attention from the high-end crowd – at worst perhaps a complaint that security would deal with swiftly.
But Jet was keenly aware that her window of opportunity was closing; she needed to act, or it would be too late.
Nobody seemed to have noticed the hooker’s disappearance when Jet exited the bathroom, and she scanned the crowd for Leo’s white jacket. She saw it by the pocket doors that led out to the dock area, and she made for that side of the room, wending her way through the press of overfed bodies.
As she neared him, she stopped at a long table laden with plates and silverware and a centerpiece of an ice sculpture of a swan surrounded by caviar and crab claws, and palmed a knife. Her worst-case scenario was to plunge it through his heart and escape in the chaos that would follow. It wasn’t elegant, but a woman in a short skirt would be the last person anyone would suspect of killing him, especially if she was the one who screamed an alarm, creating as much confusion as possible. It would only take a few moments.
She could do this.
Jet was edging to where his back was turned to her, speaking with two earnest-looking men in a low voice, when a hand gripped her arm.
Oleg’s voice rang out over the music. “So now you have time for me, babushka?”
It was tempting to drive the knife through his ribs, but she instead grinned and looked down at her arm.
“A few more minutes, and then our lives together will start for real.”
He leaned into her, vodka heavy on his breath. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you?”
“Smart enough to know a good man when I see him.”
“I have a room across the street.”
“I can’t wait to see it.”
She detached his hand and pointed to the bar. “Can I ask you to get me that drink now, Oleg?”
“Anything.”
“French champagne, if they have it.”
“Ah. You have expensive taste. I like that.”
Oleg tottered off and she spun to where Leo was standing, and then froze at the sight of the man who’d taken her aboard the plane in Kosovo standing beside him – Rudolf. She was only footsteps away and could barely make out what he was saying to Leo as she turned away.
“We must go. I have a boat waiting. They’re at the port.”
Rudolf had seen Jet in person and, even with the makeup, might recognize her. His presence changed everything.
She watched helplessly as he and Leo moved to the pocket doors and out toward the docks, where a cabin cruiser’s lights twinkled at a side tie in the gloom.
Oleg bumped her arm with his shoulder and handed her a champagne flute. “Here you go, my dear.”
She took the offering, her mind working furiously, and offered him a small toast as she pulled away. “I’ve got to use the little girl’s room, Oleg. Will you wait for me?”
Oleg grinned, revealing Soviet-era dental work that hadn’t worn well over the decades. “Until the end of time.”
“Oh, you’re a charmer, aren’t you? Hold my drink and I’ll be right back.”
“Anything, my dear. Anything at all.”
She set the drink in his fleshy hand and made for the entrance, any need for subtlety abandoned now that her target was getting away. But she had a destination – the port – and the boat wouldn’t cover the distance as quickly as she could on her motorcycle, so if she was lucky…
Jet forced her way past the throng at the entryway and out onto the sidewalk, where police were directing traffic around a line of arriving limousines. She kept Leo’s cabin cruiser across the water in sight as it got under way, and removed her roll of clothes from the seat compartment.
A minute later she’d pulled on her pants beneath the miniskirt and exchanged the hooker heels for her running shoes and was goosing the throttle as Leo’s boat headed toward the breakwater and the massive industrial docks beyond.
Chapter 51
Port of Novorossiysk, Russia
Two men waited by a black van in the shadows across the boulevard from a concrete wharf, watching the darkened hull of a freighter tugging at its dock lines at the end of the pier. A pair of pelicans perched atop pilings near the water ruffled their heavy feathers and resumed dozing. The area was quiet except for the sounds of traffic and faint music traveling across the water. A ribbon of moonlight silvered the small wind waves that dented the surface of the protected harbor, providing the only illumination on the silent wharf.
One of the men checked his watch with obvious impatience and murmured to the other in American English, “I hate this part. I always do.”
“Relax. Our boy has it all under control. Our hands are clean. All we have to do is get the stones and drive away. Piece of cake.”
“Not all that easy. I still have to verify they’re genuine. It’s my ass hanging out while I do it, not yours.”