"Ohhh… That's not good." Felix says in an oddly voice, considering his words.
"What's not good?" I ask, continuing to read my book.
"Look!" He responds a bit louder, the hand holding his nightly scotch aiming at the large, flat screen in a corner of the living room.
I tilt my head backwards on the couch's armrest and take in the upside down news cast on the screen. With an uninterested gaze, I try to focus on what's got him so worried. The good looking young woman is speaking somberly of the death of some important dude.
I shrug, the name says nothing to me. "Is it me or are the news anchors are getting younger every year?"
"Cosima!" Felix interrupts, his finger pointing at the TV. "Look!"
I roll my eyes and shift on the couch to get a better view. "So? Some old geezer bites the dust. Why should I care?"
"Yeah?" He challenges. "Look where it happened!"
I read the scrolling captions on the bottom of the screen: "Russian billionaire, Alexei Lebedev found dead in his Hotel suite in Warsaw; Lebedev was to be received by the Prime-Minister this afternoon; Polish police are not releasing any details regarding the circumstances surrounding Mr. Lebedev's death". Poland. Sarah's in Poland.
"You don't think…" I don't dare say it. Ms. S doesn't have many rules, but the "no death" policy is an unbreakable principle.
"I don't think so." Felix takes a large swallow of his drink. "Not unless something went incredibly wrong."
"Was he Sarah's target?" I ask, now fully focused on the picture of the man on the screen. He looks like every other billionaire: sharply dressed in a black suit, short, white hair receding at the temples, surrounded by extremely fit men; most likely his security detail.
"You know as much as I do." Felix lashes out as he stalks to the bar. After pouring another glass of scotch, he turns back to me. "I haven't seen her since she came over to give Sarah her mission."
Although it's not unusual for Ms. S to go several weeks without checking in on us, it doesn't happen when one of us is out. On those occasions, she stops by every day to be sure whoever's out didn't make contact with some sort of emergency. While the three of us are each other's first line of defense when things don't go according to plans, Ms. S is always a last resource.
Sarah left for Poland three days ago, she's expected to return in two. That's all we know; the location and the timeframe. We aren't given any other information on someone else's mission; not unless is a joint effort.
"If something goes wrong Sarah will contact us." I try to appease Felix.
"What if she can't?" He's starting to pace and I know he's on the verge of breaking down. "What if she's in trouble?"
They've been together forever, picked up from the foster system by Ms. S when they were only 14, and have been inseparable since they were 5; or so they've told me. The only thing they don't have in common with your everyday siblings is the biology. Everything else is there. They pester each other day and night, half the time I can't bear being in the same room with them, but they've got each other's back and god forbid someone decides to torment either of them the way they do each other. Sometimes even I don't get away with it.
"I'm gonna call S!" Felix says and goes for his phone.
I jump out of the couch and run towards him, grabbing his hand before he can make the call. "Fe, you can't do that. You have no idea if this has anything to do with Sarah."
"Like hell I can't!" He shouts back, clearly beginning to panic. "I won't let my sister… AHHH… You Bitch!" He stops to complain as I twist his arm behind his back, his cell falling to the floor.
"No name calling." I say, releasing his arm. "Let's wait a few hours. If we don't hear from Sarah in that time, we'll think of what to do."
He begrudgingly settles, but his one night cap turns into three. By the time he's getting himself a forth, I'm starting to think that maybe we should've called Ms. S. The secure line rings, and Felix gets to it before I even manage to get off the couch. I pause to think that if he was this fast on his missions maybe S would let him get a few more like he's always asking.
"Sarah?!" He answers, ignoring my disapproving look. "Oh... Thank God!" He lets out, but his relief is fast replaced by annoyance, as it always happens between the two of them. "Where the hell have you been? We've been worried sick." He listens quietly from some time, his eyes going to me after a while. "No, no... Just Cosima. Yeah, sure!" I watch him set the phone down and press a button.
"Hi Cos!" Sarah's voice fills the room, but I can hear the apprehension in her tone. "Hope you didn't call S."
I give Felix one of my looks as I answer. "No, we thought it was better to wait a little longer. But we watched the news and I imagine Ms. S..."
"Yeah, yeah... It's a shit storm around here." She says and wherever she is it sounds like the end of a very long tunnel.
"Do you need one of us for an extraction?" I ask, because Felix is too busy feeling relieved to be practical.
"No, it's fine." Sarah says, her connection starting crackle. "I mana...out of Warsaw...I'm in uhmmm Szczecin, which is just...Germany, will get out there and..."
Static.
"Sarah! Sarah!" Felix screams into the phone.
"What!?" She screams back.
I roll my eyes and say slowly so she can understand me. "Call us when you get to Germany, okay?"
"Roger that!"
Six, long hours later she informs us that she has reached Berlin and from there will catch a plane to meet up with us in London.
The next afternoon Ms. S arrives at our East End house to debrief Sarah, and while usually that happens in private, this time she insists on having all of us together.
"Care to explain how this happened?" She asks sitting at our table, the perpetual mug of tea between her hands. "It was a simple mission, Sarah."
"Oi, it's not my fault some lunatic decided to make his head explode like a fucking melon, is it?" She's confrontational, but I recognize her underlying emotion; Sarah never fails and this is probably bothering her more than anyone.
"Language!" Ms. S warns her with a stern face. "When... How did that happened?"
"How the hell should I know?" Sarah says, her shoulders sinking low. "I was approaching his hotel room, when I hear shouting from inside. Next thing I know the two guards in the hall open the door and the guy's missing half his head."
"Ewww... Visual." Felix makes a disgusted face.
"Sniper?" I ask.
"As far as I can tell." Sarah nods and continues. "So anyway, everyone's running around; in and out of his bedroom, cops crawling all over the place. It's not like I could get what I came for."
"And what exactly was that?" Felix eyes Ms. S as he poses the question.
Sarah waits for Ms. S to give a small nod before she answers. "It was simple, really. Get in, copy his hard drive, get out."
"What was so interesting about his hard drive?" I look at Ms. S and she avoids my stare.
"You know I don't ask those questions of our clients." She says getting up. "It's none of our business why they want it. If they pay they'll get it."
"And that's the issue." Felix chimes in. "Whoever this client is, they've paid and won't get it."
"Thats the least of our concerns, we can refund him, no problem." Ms. S turns back around and faces us all, one at a time. "This business is built on reputation alone, and we can't afford to lose that."
A thoughtful silence falls as we contemplate what she just said. Of course that's the biggest problem we have to solve. If it's thought we're not reliable then clients will start to look elsewhere, and competition in this business is ferocious.
"I'll get it!" Sarah's raspy voice cuts the silence. "Don't say anything to the client yet. If he asks, say that we're still taking care of..."
"No, you won't! We do nothing until we know who wanted Labedev eliminated and why."
"The man was a rich fuck, probably with ties to the Russian Mafia." Sarah gets up quickly and starts to pace. "Half the world wanted him dead and the other half wanted to pull the trigger!"
"Maybe so." I say calmly. "But only a hand full of people could've pulled off what happened in Warsaw."
"Cosima's right." Ms. S grabs her coat and heads for the door, but stops to look pointedly at Sarah. "You stay put! I can't have you running around for the time being. There's no saying if anyone saw you there."
"I'm better than that!" Sarah says back, but I'm pretty sure the older woman didn't hear her.
We don't hear from her for two weeks. Ms. S doesn't tell us if she's making progress with her investigation into what we've started to call "The Warsaw Fiasco", much to Sarah's displeasure. The media is also losing interest in the case. For once Sarah was right: Lebedev was not loved and I'm sure his body was not yet cold when his so called friends came forward to denounce his not so subtle ties with some of the most notorious Russian criminals. In fact, the more they talked about the man, the more I'm sure they had nothing to do with it. Most likely they are afraid something similar will happen to them.
I don't shed tear for the guy, but the lack of information is as disturbing as it is unexpected. The general public isn't privy to the sort of information we are, and while it's not uncommon for these sort of things to never be known to them, to those who are inside the business, these kind of assassinations are claimed. In our line of work, more than anything else, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Ms. S stays out of the killing contacts, but that doesn't mean some offers don't come to our door on occasion. And while those type of contracts tend to be the most lucrative, there are still some people who come to us precisely because we don't take them. Win some, lose some, as Ms. S likes to say.
When she finally gets back to us, is not to give us information about "The Warsaw Fiasco", but with a new job.
"For this one I'll need all of you." She announces and has to wait a moment for us to calm down. Those are the one's we like the most. Distributing folders like they're playing cards around the table, she continues. "The target is a Mr. Henry Webster, 56, widowed 10 years ago."
"Whoa... That's young. Any alarms there." I ask, looking at a picture of what I assume to be him, clearly taken from afar.
"Not that I could say. Breast cancer. Hospital records seem legit." Ms. S says, confident about the early research she always does before handing us a job.
"Okay... What do you need us to do?" Sarah asks, not even bothered to open the folder.
Ms. S hesitates and that is unusual. "That's the thing..." She stops to clear her voice. "We don't know yet."
"What do you mean?" Felix is the one that voices our surprise.
"For now your job is to get in and gain their trust. New instructions will come as it progresses." She explains further.
"I don't like it." Sarah pushes the folder to the center of the table. "Why don't we have everything we need to know now?"
"Our client is aware of the rules under which we operate and has assured me they won't be broken during this job."
"Well, if he says so..."
I hear Sarah's sarcasm from a distance, my eyes glued to one particular photograph in the folder. She looks different: the wild blonde curls which I used to spend hours admiring are gone and a straight, silky golden hair frames her graceful but strong features. Although I'm sure she could say the same of me, over ten years have come and gone. But it's more than her looks; it's also something about the way she carries herself, more confident somehow, even if she's hanging on some guy's arm. Maybe it's the situation where the picture was taken: some sort of social event, judging by the way she was dressed. The photo is clearly taken by a professional.
"Oi, Cos? Anyone in there?" Sarah's hand waving in front of my eyes.
I blink a few times and clear my throat. "I can't do this job." I say, my voice still sounding hoarse to my ears.
Ms. S laces her fingers and, placing her elbows on the table, brings her hands to her chin, eyes locked with mine. "I understand there's an element in this equation you're familiar with from your past."
Her gaze is pointed, as if daring me to ask from where she got that information. I've never shared anything other than the strictly necessary about my past, but I've always suspected she knew more about it than she has let on.
"It's more than that!" I point at the picture. "If she's...an element, then I can't use any of my aliases. She knows my name, knows where I came from."
"Then you'll be Cosima. As far as I'm concerned that's all she knows." She's not backing down and usually I know better than confront her head-on. "Unless you have been in contact with her ever since."
I'm sure my expression is one of defiance, but I can't seem to hide it. "You know damn well that hasn't happened."
She opens her arms. "Good! It's settled then."
"Who are you two talking about?" Sarah, who has been surprisingly quiet the whole time, asks.
"I put my savings account that it's about the nice piece of ass in this photo." Felix says, holding the photo in front of Sarah's eyes, whose only answer is a long whistle and takes the photo from Felix's hand.
"Delphine Cormier, 30, soon to be Mrs. Webster by marriage with the target's eldest son." Ms. S says, while giving me a side glance. "My sources tell me she's a regular at the Webster residence."
"I bet she's not wearing any knickers in this one." Sarah offers, holding the picture close to her eyes. "You can tell by the way her dress is so tight."
"What's your story with her?" Felix asks, recovering the photo from Sarah and inspecting it himself.
"None!" I dryly answer. "We have no story!"