It was the slightest thing, the quietly threatening way Curt shifted against the bench, one of those manicured hands drifting close enough to the material of her skirt to make her shiver. But then Patricia’s training kicked in and the muscles of her body coiled, a spring pulling tight. Her mind was instinctively shifting through options. The .22 hidden in the sleeve of her blouse. Small caliber, but at close range it would do the job. The heels, of course; a two-inch blade waiting in the toe of the left, and the spring-loaded syringe of paralytic concealed in the right, along with a second syringe containing the antidote, which she’d yet to employ. The twisted bands tying her long, sable hair into a ponytail; within the material of each twist, a coil of razor wire. And there were always her hands. She couldn’t be certain she could take Curt in hand-to-hand combat, but she was willing to put her training against any in the world. Curt might have spent years perfecting himself into a living weapon, on offer to the highest bidder. But Patricia had been quite literally born for this.

“The Family won’t accept more failure, Patricia.”

Patricia wasn’t her name, because she didn’t have a name. She had a number. Пятьдесят. The transliteration, “Pyats-dess-yat,” was very close to Patricia. But it had never been intended as a name. She was merely the fiftieth girl born in that dormitory on the banks of the Irkut River. Of those fifty, fewer than thirty were still alive fifteen years later, when General Yakov, formerly of the FSB and before that the KGB, had been forced to close down his training facility. She would always remember the “graduation” ceremony, Yakov standing in front of his “children,” bemoaning the fate of the fallen Soviet experiment, the disaster that was Yeltsin’s Russia.

We are all mercenaries now, Yakov had told his ласточки—“swallows,” the name given to the participants in the program that had begun in the 1920s, under Stalin, which had first repurposed Bolshoi dancers and movie actresses, before Yakov had the idea in the eighties of breeding his own. Swallows, girls, now women—trained in techniques that in the end were not so disparate: The strategies to make a man’s heart beat faster were not so very different than the tactics involved in stopping it from beating altogether. Distract, disarm, find a weakness to infiltrate and exploit, strike quickly and with great precision. That training applied whether you were trying to make a man fall in love with you or break his neck.

Patricia forced her muscles to uncoil, as she saw that Curt likewise relaxed against the bench next to her. At the moment, at least, he was not there to replace her, or kill her.

“No more delays, Patricia. Do whatever you need to do to cut those threads and untie that knot.”