“And tell Control,” she added, blowing a smoke ring into the humid air, “the Rose is still sharp.”
He talked. They always did.
She lit a cigarette, the tip glowing like a tiny red rose in the dark.
Vasily spun around, his hand diving for a panic button. He never reached it. Agent 17 Red Rose HOT-
She moved like a ghost through the turbine hall. Her heels—thin, lethal, and surprisingly silent on the grated walkways—were her signature. Others wore tactical boots. Agent 17 wore stilettos. It unnerved people. It made them look at her legs instead of the razor wire garrote in her hand.
“The algorithm,” she whispered. “Where?”
“You’re too late,” he gasped, tears mixing with sweat. “It’s already in a dead-drop. My contact picks it up in twenty minutes.” “And tell Control,” she added, blowing a smoke
The safehouse smelled of stale coffee and ozone. Agent 17, known in seventeen classified files as “Red Rose,” pressed a fresh clip into her sidearm with a soft, decisive click. Her codename wasn’t poetic; it was a warning. A red rose meant beauty with thorns. The “HOT” appended to her file stood for High-Value Objective Termination.
“Package intercepted. The thorn has been applied. I need a clean-up crew at the old thermal plant.”
Agent 17 was already there, one stiletto pinning his wrist to the console. He screamed. She pressed a finger to her crimson lips—a single, perfect red nail. Vasily spun around, his hand diving for a panic button
She found him in the control room, a rotund man in an ill-fitting suit, sweating through his shirt. Two guards. One by the door, vaping. Another by the window, scanning the yard with a rifle that cost more than his monthly salary.
Amateurs , she thought.
She smiled. It was a cold, beautiful thing. “Then you’d better give me the location, or I’ll make those twenty minutes feel like a lifetime.”