The Take(13)

Valentina edged forward until her hands touched the lawn that ran to the forest’s end and she enjoyed an unencumbered view of the home. She was thirty-eight years old, trim and athletic, clad only in tight shorts and a black tank top, a watch cap concealing her hair, and bootblack on her face. Few lights burned from the upper floors. The grounds were quiet, almost too still. At the moment, the ambassador was away, attending a ball at the Hotel Adlon at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, celebrating the end of the G20 summit. It was the first time in twenty years Russia had not been invited to the meeting of the West’s largest economic powers.

Valentina had been sent to give voice to her government’s displeasure.

Crouching, she dashed to the fence, throwing a compact black bag over the top. Even before it landed she was loping down the slope to the lake. She waded into the water and swam out past the final fence post, her head barely above the waterline. The guard on the dock faced away from her, smoking a cigarette against regulations.

Valentina emerged from the lake, silently and with purpose, and skittered up the gentle grade to retrieve her bag. Lying flat, she pulled on black leggings and a skintight, long-sleeved tunic. On her feet, she wore crepe-soled shoes, soundless on any surface. She secured her tool belt around her waist. Two items remained in the bag: a Taser set to twenty thousand volts and a knife. Both were to be used only in emergencies.

Keeping low, she continued to the side of the house. The walls were built of rectangular stone blocks, deeply carved grooves separating them. Using her fingers, she scaled the wall to the first floor and vaulted onto a spacious balcony. She remained still long enough for her heart to slow, her eyes on the sentry, checking that he had not registered her presence.

French doors leading to the master bedroom were secured. She selected a pick and jimmied the lock. A minute later, she was standing inside the ambassador’s home.

Valentina had not come to steal. Her mission was of another nature: to harass and intimidate.

She started in the bathroom. She dumped Madam Ambassador’s perfume in the toilet and emptied her medications on the floor. She snapped a pearl hair comb in two. Finding an appropriately violent shade of lipstick, she wrote “Die Americans” on the mirror. Coarse, perhaps, but frightening enough.

She continued her work in the closet, slashing dresses with a pair of scissors and throwing them into a heap on the floor.

Returning to the bedroom, she spent fifteen minutes rearranging the furniture. She dragged a pair of Louis XV chairs from one corner of the room to another. She spilled books off their shelves onto the floor. She tore the comforter and sheets off the bed. She rehung the paintings upside down. She placed bedside water glasses in a towel, stomped on them, then spread the shards over the parquet floor.

Moving across the hall to the ambassador’s study, she caught the wash of headlights that swept across the driveway and illuminated the grand foyer. She heard a car door slam. Footsteps crunching on the gravel drive. The front door opened. Voices echoed from the grand foyer.

She froze. Her heartbeat did not accelerate. Her blood pressure did not rise. If anything, she grew calmer, oddly excited by the slip-up in her briefing. It came to her that she might have a chance to do something more than deliver a minor fright.

“Did you hear what that Dutch prick Van der Miede said about the president?” A man’s baritone voice. The ambassador. “The gall. Has he forgotten I’m a political appointee?”

“Oh, darling, I think he was rather drunk.”

“Listen, I have to send State a summary of the dinner. I’ll be ten minutes.”

“I’ll be waiting, dear. You got me started in the car.”

“Why you,” said the ambassador, laughing lustily. “Make that eight minutes.”

Footsteps climbed the staircase.

Valentina retreated into the bedroom. She searched the room for a place to hide, a spot to guarantee complete surprise. Her eyes moved from the furniture to the narrow entry hall. Placing a foot on each wall, she stemmed to the ceiling, positioning herself flat against it, hands on one wall, feet on the other.

She listened as the ambassador’s wife approached, hearing the rustle of her dress, a faint humming of a popular tune. The woman passed beneath her and Valentina dropped to the floor. Feeling the vibration, the woman turned. Her eyes opened in surprise. Before she could speak, Valentina slugged her in the jaw, an uppercut delivered with all her force, fracturing the mandible, breaking several teeth, and knocking the woman unconscious.

Valentina caught her before she collapsed and was careful to lay her down away from the broken glass. She slid the knife from its sheath and, kneeling closer, carved two words into the woman’s forehead, the tip of the blade dragging against the skull. Six letters that would deliver her master’s message more eloquently than any speech or discourse.

“Honey,” called the ambassador from his study. “Don’t go to sleep. I’ll be right there.”

Valentina walked to the French doors and lowered herself from the balcony, dropping to the lawn. The sentry remained with his back turned at his post on the dock, twenty meters distant. She slid into the cool water and, when she was fifty meters from shore, removed her belt and shoes and allowed them to sink to the muddy lake bed. She looked once more at the house before swimming across the lake to where a car awaited.

She did not hear the ambassador’s anguished cry when he discovered his wife a few minutes later. It would only be when he cleaned her wounds that Valentina’s message would be read and the purpose of her late-night visit communicated.