Teamwork
Paris
May 1974
The couple strolling down the street in the twilight were far from normal.
Her auburn hair was piled on her head in a stylish updo. His was worn short and brown. Her dress and jacket were the height of fashion. He wore a long-sleeved coat and gloves that seemed slightly out-of-place despite the chill in the evening air.
Aside from the man’s coat, they looked every bit the European tourists, from West Germany, perhaps, or maybe Denmark. The man’s withdrawn demeanor indicated haughtiness (it wasn’t) and the woman’s expression told any who saw her that she was every bit in love with this city, these sights, this vacation (she wasn’t, at least not yet).
She hung on his arm, pointing to different buildings, exclaiming over the tiny family-owned Parisian restaurants that lined the street. He reacted rarely and did not smile, but to the other passerby, it was obvious that he loved his wife, and took pleasure from her joy.
They drifted through the city and returned to a hotel at a few minutes past midnight.
It was not their hotel.
No one in the lobby questioned the man and woman who looked every inch the upper-crust Middle European vacationer couple as they walked past the front desk. The woman nodded cordially at a bellboy and they stepped into the elevator without a backward glance.
Once inside, though, their demeanors changed entirely.
The woman’s lively demeanor vanished like melting wax dripping from her face. She ran her hands along the inside of her coat, checking the revolvers stored there, then the smoke grenades, then the stranglecord, then the three vials of poison. The man did the same along the inside of his calf-length coat. The metal of the weaponry made faint clinking sounds against his left hand as he rifled through the concealed pockets.
The one thing that did not change was the subtle change in their expressions that was visible only when one of them looked at the other. It was a softening of the muscles around their eyes, or a change in the shape of their lips, or a bleeding out of tension. It was a language all their own, indecipherable to an outside viewer. The only message that could be translated was a simple one.
This man and this woman cared about each other as neither did any other person alive.
No one watching could know exactly how true that was.
The elevator doors opened on floor nineteen. Floor twenty was reserved at the moment for the visiting British dignitaries.
The shaft closed. The elevator descended.
The woman glanced around the empty hallway, sank her fingers into the crack between the doors, and hauled them apart.
She and the man who was not her husband swung deftly into the empty elevator shaft. It echoed with the clanks and mechanical noises of the equipment. While the woman slowly let the elevator doors close, keeping the noise at a minimum, the man carefully secured several packages from his pockets to the inside of the elevator.
They worked in perfect harmony with not a word needed to coordinate each movement.
In silence the woman attached three packages from her own jacket to the walls of the elevator shaft. They stood carefully balanced on a ledge that girded the open space; it was barely fifteen centimeters wide, yet neither of them faltered in so much as a step.
The woman was the first to leap from the ledge to the maintenance ladder above her head. She gripped the lowest rung and pulled her body up without any apparent trouble, scaling the ladder two grips at a time. The man hauled himself up one-handed and followed closely behind.
They balanced on the ledge next to the elevator doors one floor above. The woman drew the two revolvers from her pockets - old-fashioned Serbian models - and nodded to her partner.
He sank the fingers of his left hand into the crack between the doors and violently ripped them open.
Shouts came from the hallway on the other side. The woman was through the opening in less than a second, rolling to the side and coming up shooting. The pistols spat death from her hands as she fired with inhuman accuracy at the four guards in the corridor.
Her partner joined her as they crumpled to the floor.
She was a terrifying sight, spattered in blood that matched her hair. The dead-eyed expression on the man didn’t help. They ran in a silent, crouching gait.
Alerted by gunfire, the guards in the dignitary’s rooms shredded the hallway with automatic fire. The man and woman dove flat on their stomachs and soldier-crawled the last fifteen feet into position. The woman crouched while the man tore off his jacket and took a deep breath.
The man exploded through the door like a cannonball, shouting in Serbian as he laid into the men in the room. He fought hand-to-hand while the woman used the last two shots in her revolvers, dropped them on the floor, and drew a knife. She dove into the fight, looking more like a ballerina than an assassin. The man forcibly tore limbs from bodies and shattered ribs with his blows while the woman spun and leaped from one person to the next. Where she went, death followed.
They were through in seconds.
The room was bathed in blood. Six more guards lay dead on the floor, and the dignitary was moaning on the settee, not long for the world: the woman’s two shots had found their mark.
“Primary target down,” she said.
The man was not breathing any harder than he had been in the elevator shaft. His nice jacket was shredded in several places, and a gleam of silver showed through along his left arm.
“You are unharmed?” he said in Russian.
The woman replied in the same language. “Shallow scrape on my left arm. Yourself?”
“I am fine.”
She examined him with a critical eye. “No, you’re not.”
“Natasha-”
Natasha ignored the man’s protests, pushed him against the wall, and packed a torn pillowcase into the bullet wound in his side. She taped over it with brutal efficiency, aware of the seconds draining away before their exit window closed. “We wouldn’t want you bleeding out before we get out of the country, now, would we?” she asked, and looked up at her partner with a smirk.
He met her eyes for a long second, and then they were kissing, holding each other with as much aggression as was present when they fought. It was a clash of lips and tongues and teeth and hands. The man grunted when his wound was jostled. It only made him clutch Natasha tighter among the bodies of their enemies. Blood spatters from the both of them were smeared across their jackets and faces and fingers.
They broke apart at last, more out of breath than either had been from their battle.
“We should clean up,” Natasha said at last, smirking at the mess they’d made of each other.
For the first time, the hint of a smile quirked the man’s lips. Natasha ran a washcloth under the sink and tossed it to her partner. He wiped down his face and hands while she turned her jacket inside out. The reverse side was clean of blood. The man passed her the washcloth back and set to work on his own clothing. His shirt was shredded beyond repair; he made a noise of frustration and simply tore it off, revealing a rock-hard body and a scaled silver metal arm with a red star embossed on the shoulder. If he noticed how Natasha’s attention was captured briefly by this sight, he showed no sign of it, and retrieved his coat from the hall. With it buttoned up to his throat and his gloves on, all sign of the deadly assassin vanished.
Natasha paused for a few seconds to readjust her hair, and they slipped into the hallway as shouts and pounding feet came from below.
Hammering sounded against the barricaded stairwell door.
The man and woman froze. Their exit plan was scrapped.
Natasha was the first to recognize their opportunity. She led her partner to a laundry chute halfway between the stairwell and the massacre they had left behind, tugging open the metal covering. The chute was easily large enough for her, and probably wide enough for her partner’s shoulders.
With a quicksilver smile, she caught the upper edge of the gap and flung herself through feet-first, graceful and acrobatic.
The man was less coordinated. He climbed in, contorting his muscular frame to fit in the opening, and braced himself easily with the metal arm and his legs while he tugged the door closed, and not a second too soon. He could hear the footsteps of the downstairs guards, hotel security, and their horrified shouts as he closed his eyes, let go, and fell soundlessly into the shadows.
Natasha landed in a laundry cart, flexing her knees to absorb an impact that would likely have torn the tendons of ordinary humans. She dove out headfirst, rolled, and shot to her feet before the terrified maid by the washing machines even had time to scream. Natasha snapped the young woman’s neck without hesitation as her partner landed heavily in the laundry cart with a grunt.
They left the laundry room and found themselves in the staff-only region of the hotel. They’d both memorized a map of the building before the mission, and took the turns in harmony without hesitation.
A group of bellboys, pausing for a smoke, stood outside the break room.
They looked up and saw a tipsy, wealthy couple giggling and leaning on one another.
“ Bonjour !” Natasha said in a deliberately dreadful French accent.
“Hello, boys,” her partner said. He’d once more transformed from the cold killer into another person, this time a gregarious young man with a beautiful woman, out for a vacation in a foreign capital. “Think you could tell my wife and I the way to the lobby? I’m afraid we’re somewhat turned around.”
Natasha made a show of adjusting her clothes, careful to keep the jacket closed, as if her dress were mussed after a tryst in the back halls.
Sure enough, the young men were smirking. They looked perhaps five years younger than Natasha’s partner, at the most, though he was much older than he appeared.
“This way,” the one in the center said in excellent English, and began walking toward the lobby.
He deposited the drunken couple in the lobby and returned to his friends without the faintest idea of the events on the top floor, or that he had just given two international assassins their way out of his hotel.
Seconds later, an explosion bloomed in a hollow elevator shaft and rocked the hotel building.
In the ensuing chaos, the couple melted into the street outside the hotel and into the shadows around the memories of any witnesses. The deaths of the British dignitary and his guards were pinned on radical members of the Serbian Communist Party, thanks to the pistols Natasha left, which were the only trace of the killers.