Midnight in Dubai
She was pointing a gun to execute a man. DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 8
From Episode 7: Penny’s helped crack open the secrets on Timur’s laptop, but a killer interrupts the mission…and he says her name.
The bathroom door gave way, slamming into the wall and ricocheting back. The butler extended a hand to still the door. He was dressed like a butler, anyway, black tie, cufflinks, polished shoes. White guy, though, or perhaps like Penny, of ambivalent stock, a bloodline that could pass for anything from black Irish to Persian. The other hand raised a handgun that seemed small in his palm—a choice of concealment over power. It was fitted with a suppressor to muffle the sound, but indoors, it would still make a bang.
The man pointed his gun at her.
She didn’t look him in the face. Never look at your opponent’s face. Never raise your hands in an obvious martial pose. Two basic rules of Shimura’s aikido. The third never: wait for an opponent to strike.
Penny launched herself toward him and to the side. The silencer in that marbled room couldn’t suppress the gunshot’s scream. Something yanked her right upper arm backward but did not stop her. The gun’s rack opened, popped its magazine. He moved a hand behind his waist to retrieve another clip but she landed beside him and folding his gun hand in her two arms.
Astonishment. She pressed into the fold of his elbow, letting his own movement spin him around.
Now she reversed her arms, going against the grain of his bones. Crack.
He bellowed. She released him and kicked the ball of her foot into the back of his knee. Down he went. She wasn’t through with him. Penny grabbed both of his ears and smashed his face into the corner of the sink counter. Crunch pop. Screaming—both of them screaming their lungs out. In the mirror the remains of his left eye oozed to a dangle. His blood adorned her skin.
Not all of it was his. Her right arm was soaked.
I’m shot. She couldn’t believe her own eyes.
Torn nerves. The pain made her a quick convert.
Penny ran the faucet. The blood was coming out rapidly, unstoppably, but the wound looked superficial—a glancing hit. She rotated the arm, which hurt more, but nothing precious was damaged.
Did the wound even matter? Viktor Gubinov was here. Coming for me. It seemed incredible, and she might have freezed right there, if not for the awkward splay of her feet around the corpse of the gunman she had just…mauled.
All of those cold mornings in Shimura’s dojo. For self-defense. That’s what she had told herself. For warding off handsy rich men. Not for…
Breathe.
She had actually killed someone.
You’re alive!
Each inhale brought a new hotwired pain. Yeah, she was alive all right.
The washcloth couldn’t stem the bleeding. She opened her toiletry bag and removed a tampon applicator. She pulled out the tampon from the plastic tube and, gritting her teeth, stuffed it into the trench made by the passing bullet, the string hanging loose. The cloth turned crimson and expanded beneath the pressure of her fingers, and she felt dizzy. She tipped forward and puked into the sink.
Penny gulped water and tried again. The tampon seemed to have done the trick and staunched the bleeding. The bullet hadn’t hit an artery and it hadn’t struck bone.
Think.
Penny ran to the closet outside. She grabbed her silky La Perla thong and tied it around her arm, to fix the tampon in place. Next, sensible things: khaki pants, T-shirt, linen blazer, rubber-soled slip-ons. She returned to the bedroom. Timur still lay unconscious, the laptop still on, its screen unspooling coded gobbledygook.
She returned to the bathroom to take the assassin’s Smith & Wesson M&P22, plucking the magazine from his belt. Penny reloaded and with a washcloth unscrewed the hot suppressor, which went in a blazer pocket, followed by two more tampons. She gulped a fistful of aspirin.
Get to the safehouse in Deira, the industrial part of Dubai across the creek. That was the plan, right? Wrong. Everything was blown. There was not going to be any exfiltration. If she was going to escape the country, she’d need Veronique’s Swiss passport.
Locked in Kasym’s briefcase.
She crouched by the bedroom doorway leading to the hallway. Where was that worm? Kasym must have had a role in this…this catastrophe.
“Penelope, time to die…”
She prowled toward Kasym’s room, gun first. She reached his door and the wall exploded beside her ear. She couldn’t hear a thing but knew the shot had come from the stairway. Another flash burst from beneath the projected hands of the clock.
Midnight in Dubai.
A second man in a butler’s black tie, thick eyebrows like dashes on his bald white skull.
Kasym’s door wouldn’t open. She returned suppressing fire, turned, shot the lock. Waited as more bullets raked the hallway from below. Push-kicked the door in. Tumbled in on her good shoulder and bullets sang above.
Kasym cowered in the furthest corner of the room, his mustache quivering like a wounded snake.
The Penny who had never killed anyone before was gone. This new Penny didn’t have time to care. “Passport. Now.”
“Wh-who are…”
She pointed the armed pistol at him. “Shut up.”
He moved to a settee where the other briefcase case lay open, its lid facing her.
She kept her back to the wall and her body down. Two more bullets flew inside. Straighter angle, hit the far wall, and Kasym trembled. Faint tang of urine in her nostrils.
The second gunman was on the other side of the door.
And Viktor was a minute away.
“Hurry up.”
Kasym’s face transformed into a look of a drunkard’s courage. His pistol had been inside the case, and he brandished it now, a small snub-nosed Beretta that fit into his slender, shaking hand.
She didn’t hesitate. Her bullet smacked him in the collar.
Penny ran toward his briefcase. Inside, three bundles of cash, each banded by a currency strap: U.S. dollars, Russian rubles, Emirati dirhams. She stuffed them into her opposite inner breast pocket along with Veronique Goetzle’s passport.
“You…” hissed Kasym, bleeding on the carpet.
He was clambering to his knees, the Beretta still in his hand. She had had enough of Kasym Shokay. She spun a roundhouse kick that knocked him unconscious, his weapon arcing across the room, but as she completed her spin she stopped cold.
The second gunman had entered the room, death delivered in black tie.
She pulled the Smith & Wesson’s trigger.
Nothing.
—The empty cartridge laughed up at her.
Or maybe it was the assassin who was laughing, his eyebrows knotted in an X.
Idiot should have shot her instead; she flung the gun at his face.
The man deflected her missile with a raised forearm, but it was enough. His shot, wide, blistered a window. She raised the briefcase and rolled on her shoulder, spinning behind her shield. Kasym’s Beretta lay on the carpet. A bullet whacked the briefcase, its force tearing it from her hand. She was on her knee. The assassin ejected his magazine and fluidly rammed in another. He resumed his firing stance and took careful aim, but by the time he was ready to squeeze his trigger, a red spot coughed out of his chest, ruining his fine white shirt.
He looked down in surprise. She fired the Beretta again—not much recoil from such a light gun—and blew a hole in the side of the butler’s cheek. He wasn’t dead, but his hands jerked and he shot a chunk out of the chandelier. Glass crackled onto the carpet. She waited as he teetered. He was struggling to get his gun to stop shaking. Penny kicked the weapon free of his hand. She leveled the Beretta at his head.
The assassin’s eyes trembled. The veins in his throat bulged, stark against the tattoos rising from beneath his bloody shirt.
She was pointing a gun to execute a man.
…the remains of his left eye dangling in the mirror…
She should have just done it, but her mind had taken her out of the moment, escaped the pumping of adrenaline. She and the assassin stared at each other, blue eyes to black. Human to human. He raised his shaking palms in supplication as blood surged from where his cheek had been.
Dammit.
She had to get out of there.
The Beretta was stainless steel. Penny slammed the butt against his head. He wasn’t out, but he was down, whimpering into his hands. She grabbed the gunman’s weapon, another Smith & Wesson, and took off for the stairs.
The first of Timur’s bodyguards lay sprawled at the bottom. The two butler-assassins had taken the sentinels out quietly: the garrote wire still clasped the man’s neck. Another horror to process.
She jumped the corpse and made for the front door. The other bodyguard lay sprawled by the side table, the wires protruding from the back of his neck tied like a pretty bow, his dead hand draped across the box of cigars like a final wish.
Two Russian-trained bodyguards assigned to protect the chairman of KazPetro, eliminated so efficiently. She should be dead, too. Beginner’s luck. And what about Timur, why wasn’t he joining the body count? Had they assumed the prone chairman was already dead?
Penny didn’t think so.
The assassins hadn’t come for Timur Buribaev.