Chapter 2 - Eleven Minutes of Darkness
The silence returned, but it was a heavy, tactical silence.
Marin knew the third man was recalculating. The primary rule of an assassination contract was speed; once momentum was lost, the window of clean extraction narrowed exponentially.
"Who are you?" the third man’s voice called out from the dark hallway. It was accented, cool, and flat—Eastern European military training. "You're not on the manifest."
Marin didn't answer. To speak was to give away her position within the dark room.
Instead, she reached up to the desk, pulled down the heavy brass desk lamp, and slid it quietly across the carpet toward the left corner of the room. She kept her body low, lying flat on her stomach near the foot of Adelaide's bed.
"You're making a mistake," the man said, his footsteps shifting slightly to the right. "We aren't here for you. Step out, walk down the back staircase, and you live."
"She can't hear you," Marin lied, her voice projected toward the far corner of the room using vocal technique. "And if you drop a grenade in here, you destroy the target you were hired to secure alive."
A brief pause.
He wants her alive, Marin realized instantly. This isn't an execution. It's a kidnapping.
That changed the math. A team sent to kill would have tossed explosives through the door immediately. A team sent to capture needed the target uninjured.
The third man rounded the jamb, gun raised, sweeping the room.
Marin clicked the penlight—still lying on the floor near the brass lamp—on remotely via a length of medical tape she had rigged.
The beam flared. The operator fired three suppressed rounds into the source of the light, shattering the bulb and the brass lamp.
In that half-second of distraction, Marin rose from the shadow of the bed. She didn't use the gun; firing in an enclosed room near Adelaide could rupture the old woman's eardrums or hit a secondary oxygen line.
She closed the distance with a low drive, targeting his knees.
The collision drove both of them into the hallway. The operator was heavy, wearing body armor, but Marin used his center of mass against him, twisting his wrist until the bones in his thumb cracked. The sidearm clattered across the marble floor.
He struck her backhand across the jaw. The force sent a wave of white pain through Marin’s vision, the taste of iron filling her mouth.
She didn't retreat. She grabbed his tactical vest, jammed her foot into his hip, and threw him over her head using a classic combat-sambo leverage throw. He crashed into the heavy marble balustrade of the staircase, his head striking the stone with a sickening crack.
He slumped down the stairs, unconscious.
Marin lay on the cold marble floor, chest heaving, blood trickling from her lip.
Elapsed time: 4 minutes, 12 seconds.
She forced herself to her feet, her muscles burning. She returned to the bedroom, stepping over the two groaning men on the carpet.
Adelaide was gasping now. The sound was a wet, rattling choke—the fluid was rising in her airway.
"I'm here," Marin said, dropping to her knees beside the bed.
Without power, she grabbed the manual bulb-suction device. She inserted the tube into Adelaide's airway with precise, steady fingers, pumping the manual bulb rhythmically.
Pump. Clear. Pump. Clear.
Adelaide’s eyes were wide with terror, but as the suction took hold, the wet rattling slowly subsided. Her chest rose and fell in a steady, albeit fragile, rhythm.
"You... child..." Adelaide gasped, her frail hand reaching out to clutch Marin’s blood-stained scrub top. "What... are you?"
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"Just your night nurse," Marin said quietly, checking her watch in the moonlight.
She had two minutes before the rest of the estate’s secondary security protocols were supposed to trigger—if anyone was still alive to trigger them.
