by David Archer
Jenny smiled sweetly at him. “That's true,” she said. “And I'm very frustrated, so unless you want to help solve that problem by becoming my next victim, shut your mouth and do your job.”
Randy burst out laughing. Jenny’s threats sounded a lot worse than they really were. Well, usually, anyway.
Dave returned an hour later with the rope, just as Jim reported that the Kalashnikovs were headed down for dinner. Both of the surveillance officers left their rooms a moment later, also headed for the restaurant.
“Well, we might as well join the party,” Jenny said. The four of them left the room and rode the elevator down to the main floor, then entered the restaurant a moment later. The maître d’ seated them right next to the Kalashnikovs, by pure coincidence. Jenny noticed that Olga, the teenage daughter, was paying close attention to Jim Marino and quietly encouraged him to flirt a bit. That opened the door for some friendly banter between the two tables, which caught the attention of the surveillance officers.
“Demetri thinks you're hot,” Randy whispered to Jenny.
“I doubt that,” Jenny said just as softly. “He’s probably just wondering why they’re talking to us at all.”
Jim chuckled. “Art’s right,” he said. “The dude is spending more time thinking about getting into your pants than he is watching his assignment.”
Jenny pretended to ignore what was said for a moment, then turned and looked directly at Demetri. She let her eyes rove over him, as if she were appraising his physique, and saw the little smile he gave her in return. His own eyes bounced down and back up, as he made it clear that he liked what he saw.
Jenny winked at him. She hoped he got the idea that she wanted to meet up later for some fun, because that was exactly what she had in mind. Of course, it wouldn’t be the kind of fun he was hoping for. She went back to pretending to be a happy little wife, but made a point of glancing back at him every once in a while.
The Kalashnikov family finished their dinner first and left the restaurant with Khrushchev following them out. They would be leaving the hotel at 6 A.M. to go and board the boat, and Jenny and the boys would be right behind them. They stayed in the restaurant for another fifteen minutes, then Randy paid the check and they headed back to their rooms. Jenny gave Demetri one more wink as she left the restaurant and smiled shyly when she saw him lick his lips.
He followed them out of the restaurant and into the elevator, avoiding Jenny as he punched the button for his floor. He spoke politely to Randy, but in Russian, and Randy pretended not to understand. A moment later, the elevator door opened and Demetri waved to all of them as he walked down the hall.
“What did he say?” Jenny asked.
“Cocky jerk asked me if I was going to get upset about him taking you to bed.” Randy grinned. “You don’t know how tempted I was to tell him he was the one who was going to be upset.”
“We can forget the rope,” Jenny said when they got back upstairs. “Demetri will happily let me in. Jim, make sure you kill the security cameras on that floor. I'm going to head down to see him in a few minutes. As soon as I'm done, I'll go take care of Khrushchev, too.”
“I'm killing the one in the elevator, too,” Jim said. “I don’t think they have anybody actually monitoring the cameras; they just keep them recording so they can look at it later if they need to.”
Jenny went into the bathroom and changed into a simple dress, then took advantage of the moment to use the facilities. She found in the past that it was best to do her killing with an empty bladder, because the excitement could cause it to become slightly overactive. She didn’t want to have to make another stop before she got to Khrushchev.
“How do I look?” She twirled around once as she stepped out of the bathroom, and all three of the men gave her an appreciative nod. She went to her purse and took out a small tube that was labeled as hand sanitizer, squeezed some into her palm and rubbed it into both hands, including the fingertips. It seemed to dry almost instantly, but it was in reality a liquefied plastic that was better than wearing gloves. As long as it was on her hands, she could not leave a fingerprint anywhere. “Wait up for me. I shouldn’t be long.”
With the knife tucked into the top of her left stocking, Jenny gave the men a finger wave and stepped out the door. She went to the elevator and found it waiting, then pushed the button for the floor below. When the doors opened, she turned and walked down the hall and then knocked on Demetri’s door.
He opened the door cautiously, and she saw that he had one hand behind his back. A smile broke across his face, though, and he immediately stepped back to let her in. As soon as she was inside, he turned to keep the hidden hand behind him as he pulled open a drawer and dropped something heavy into it.
Jenny smiled. “Do you even speak English at all?”
“Quite fluently,” he said. “Your husband didn’t understand what I said, did he?”
She laughed. “No, he doesn’t speak any Russian. Neither do I, for that matter, so what was it you said?”
Demetri smiled and took her into his arms, looking directly into her eyes. “I told him he was a very fortunate man,” he said. “I told him he was fortunate because he is married to such a beautiful woman.”
Jenny laughed with delight and then slipped her arms around his neck. She leaned her face toward him and felt his lips touch her own for only a second before her knee came up and ruined his day.
Demetri doubled over, but his instinct for survival made him turn and grasp at the drawer where he had dropped his gun. He managed to get it open, but then Jenny caught his hair and yanked him backward, driving her other knee into his kidneys as hard as she could.
“Don’t you know it's not nice to flirt with a married woman?” she hissed at him. “It's also not nice to lie, you son of a bitch. You didn’t tell him I was beautiful, you said you wanted to boink me!”
Demetri looked up into her eyes, his own eyes wide and staring. The thin blade in her hand caught his attention, and he tried to raise an arm to ward it off, but she was too fast. It sliced across his right carotid artery and jugular so quickly that he didn’t even feel it, and he continued to try to struggle for almost forty seconds more before the lack of blood flow to the brain stole his consciousness.
Jenny looked down at him as she let him fall, then reached down and wiped the blade on his shirt. “You weren’t half as much fun as I wanted you to be,” she said. “Maybe your friend will do better.”
Demetri had fallen between the bed and the dresser, out of sight of the door to the room. She checked herself carefully to make sure no blood had gotten on her dress, then slipped the knife back into her stocking and walked out the door. She put the do not disturb sign on the door, pulled it shut behind herself, and walked with a smile to the elevator.
The Kalashnikovs were on the top floor, and Jenny rode the elevator up. She walked down to Khrushchev’s room and tapped on the door, and wasn’t surprised when he opened the door just as cautiously as Demetri had done.
“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said quickly. “I was looking for the other man who was with you. Do you know where I can find him?”
Khrushchev gave her an odd smile, one that seemed almost predatory. “He is three floors down,” he said. “If you wish, however, I could have him come up and we could all enjoy ourselves together.”
Jenny threw him a shocked smile, as if the thought excited her at the same time it seemed shameful. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “I—I—do you think he would?”
Khrushchev chuckled and stepped back, allowing her to enter the room. Unlike Demetri, he didn’t even bother trying to hide the gun. He simply laid it on the bed as he turned to the hotel room phone.
“Wait, don’t be in such a hurry,” Jenny said. “Couldn’t we have a little fun without him, first?”
She had walked to the other end of the room, twirling around as she did so to give the impression that she was nervous. Khrushchev grinned and replaced the receiver, then took a couple of steps t
oward her. Jenny reached up and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her dress, allowing her cleavage to show as she spread her arms to invite him in.
Khrushchev took the bait, pulling her close to him and burying his face in her cleavage. He was kissing the tops of her breasts as he began pulling the dress down over her shoulders, and Jenny squealed delightfully as she yanked up the dress and snatched out the knife.
Khrushchev froze as the point of the knife touched his left temple. He slowly raised his eyes to look into her face, and then his expression turned to one of terror.
“Let me tell you a secret,” Jenny whispered. “Your friend is a whole lot better looking than you are. Well, he was.”
Khrushchev continued to stare into her face. “He is dead?”
“Very. The problem is, he didn’t tell me what I want to know.”
“You're Americans?” Khrushchev asked.
“Oh, goodness, whatever would make you think that? We are actually from a small town in China, but it's amazing what they can do with plastic surgery these days, isn’t it? Now, tell me. Why are you so interested in following that family around?”
Khrushchev moved back slowly and allowed himself to sit on the corner of the bed just behind him. Jenny kept the knife point at his temple, exerting just enough pressure to convince him that she could plunge it into his brain without any warning.
“He is an important man,” he said. “It is our job to watch over him.”
“Really? You don’t seem very good at it. Your friend was spending more time trying to flirt with me than paying attention to what they were doing. Do you think he’s in some kind of danger?”
He shrugged. “Important men are often in danger. That's why we were assigned to watch over him. If some danger approaches him, we will be there.”
Jenny nodded. “Okay, that's pretty much what I thought.” She grinned at him. “I bet right now you're wishing you had called in sick, aren’t you?”
Khrushchev moved suddenly, whipping his left hand up and around and slapping her hand and the knife away from his head. He was up in a split second, turned and lunged for the gun that was laying on the other bed, but Jenny caught the back of his shirt collar. Instead of using it to pull back on him, however, she only used it to help her move forward more quickly. The knife flashed downward and sliced across the back of his right thigh, and Khrushchev fell face first onto the floor with Jenny on top of him.
“Dammit,” she said, “you got blood on my dress.” She hopped upward and brought her knee down in the middle of his back, then used the knife to slice quickly down the back of his right arm. The sensitive skin and tissues there caused him to grunt in pain, but she was impressed when he didn’t scream. She put the knife against his temple once again, this time on the other side as his head lay on the floor. “Well, you just ruined all my fun. I was really planning to make this last a few minutes, but you had to go and be stupid.”
She yanked the knife away from his head and quickly sliced his throat. She kept her knee in his back until his feeble struggling stopped, then got up and looked down at herself.
There was an obviously wet blood stain on her dress, just above her right knee. She shook her head in disgust, then stepped over to his open suitcase. She selected one of his button-down shirts, then took off the dress and rolled it up with the bloodstain inside. A moment later, she had the shirt on and the rolled- up dress tucked under her arm as she left the room. The sign on the door said the occupant did not want to be disturbed.
All three of the men looked up questioningly as she reentered her room, but she simply shook out the dress to explain. “I couldn’t exactly wear that through the halls, now, could I?” she asked. “People will pay less attention to a girl wearing a man’s shirt than they will to a girl with a bloodied dress, trust me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Before the boat launch,” said the Russian guide in badly accented English, “you must know these two things. Number one, there must be no noise. Nothing can be done to disturb the whales. Number two, do not throw thing into water. Nothing, throw no thing into water. Whales do not eat food like you and me. Do not feed the whales.”
Jenny had laughed, at first, about having to take an hour-long class before being allowed to sail out on the whale watch, but she was finally beginning to understand. Blue whales had been hunted almost to extinction during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and were almost wiped out. Now, after three decades of being protected under law, blue whales were beginning to regain their population.
For more than fifty years, however, they had not been seen in the Sea of Japan. That had only changed over the last couple of years, when three pods of blue whales had begun appearing there during their feeding season migrations in the summer months. The total numbers of all three pods was less than a hundred whales, but they were rather predictable in their travels. The pod they would be watching on this particular day was moving very slowly, covering only about fifteen miles a day as they hunted the krill that made up their diet. The guide explained that all of these tourists were very lucky to even get the opportunity to see these magnificent animals in their migratory journeys.
“That's our boat,” Randy said. “The one with the picture of the mermaid on the mainsail.”
“You guys do know how to sail, right?” Jenny asked. “I've always wanted to learn, but I never had the chance.”
“I grew up on the water,” Dave said. “That's only a thirty-five footer, I could handle that in my sleep.”
The Kalashnikovs were boarding a slightly larger boat just a few slips down. Randy helped Jenny step aboard, then watched as Dave started the small diesel engine and then prepared to move out of the bay. Randy and Jim cast off the lines and the boat slowly began moving backward out of its slip. When it was clear, Dave spun the wheel and shifted the transmission into forward, then eased the throttle ahead. They had to keep it under three knots inside the bay, to avoid wakes that could cause problems for any other vessels.
Jenny kept an eye on the Kalashnikovs’ yacht, which was just beginning to leave the dock. It was apparently a more agile vessel than theirs, because it seemed to turn completely around right after it came out of its own slip, and it was moving alongside them only a moment later. Jenny saw Kalashnikov look over and recognize her, and gave him a cheerful wave.
“We’re going to watch the whales,” she shouted, and she saw him nod. She wasn’t sure if he actually heard her or not, but she gave him another wave and turned her attention towards the water ahead.
It took almost an hour for the boats to get far enough out to raise their sails, but finally they were moving along with the wind powering them. Dave sat at the helm, as perfectly at home controlling the seagoing vessel as he would have been behind the wheel of a Lamborghini.
The journey out to see the whales would last only about two and a half hours, due to the fact that the whales, following the krill, tended to stay close to the Russian shoreline. The current pod was only about twenty miles off the coast and the boats were averaging seven knots, or slightly over eight miles per hour.
Despite the sunshine, the air was rather cool. Jenny kept a jacket on as she sat beside Dave at the stern, watching him handle the helm deftly. They chatted a bit, and Dave explained quite a few things about sailing to her, but the boat they were on was a fairly new one. Almost everything on it, including the sails, were primarily controlled by a computer. About the only thing David really needed to do was pay attention to the compass and keep the boat pointed in the right direction, but he could easily have turned on the autopilot for that.
Up at the bow, Randy and Jim were relaxing in their own way, drinking beer and watching some of the girls on other boats nearby. Jim speculated that Russian girls must not feel the chill in the air, because several of them were stripped down to bikinis and laying out in the sun on the decks.
“Wish Jenny would try that,” Randy said. “She is a sight to behold when she is wearing a bikini.”
“Yeah, more than I want to. Blows my mind, seeing her acting like—like a lovesick schoolgirl. What she sees in him, I'll never know.”
Jim was quiet for a moment, then looked over at his friend. “She sees a man who can accept her for who she is,” he said, “and one that will let her feel safe when she’s at home with him. Considering how messed up our lives are, I figure she’s entitled to any kind of happiness she can get.”
Randy puffed up his cheeks and blew out the air. “Yeah, yeah, and I agree. I just can’t figure out what it could be about him that caught her attention. Good grief, he’s a foot and a half taller than she is. You think it would be impossible for them to—you know.”
Jim chuckled. “Where there’s a will,” he said, “I guarantee you there’s a way.”
The easy banter continued for the rest of the ride out to the pod, but finally the word came through the radios that it was time to reduce their speed. They were within a mile of the whale pod, and it was time to cut the noise level down.
And a few minutes later, the first whales were sighted. Dave turned on the autopilot so that he and Jenny could go up to the bow, as well, and the view turned out to be every bit as magnificent as its advertising had suggested.
More than two dozen big blue whales were continually breaching the surface, and Jenny let out an uncontrollable squeal of delight when one of them breached right between their own boat and that of the Kalashnikovs. Its huge snout rose several feet out of the water before plunging back in, and its broad back was visible for several seconds before the tail flukes rose a dozen feet or more into the air. Jenny braced herself for a splash, expecting the tail to slam down onto the water as she’d seen in YouTube videos, but it sliced the waves cleanly.
That was when she saw the fins in the water, and realized that the whale was being followed by what looked like a massive school of sharks. Moments later, the same whale appeared again, and it suddenly struck Jenny that this one, along with its toothy followers, was actually keeping pace with the boats. The next time it breached, she looked very closely and then nodded her head. She was absolutely convinced that she was looking at Big Willie.
