Retrouvailles

Project Cobra: Red Light

(Anything in italics is in Russian)

Anya Lenkov's POV

"The file will be on the table. Good luck Agent Lenkov." Throwing the burner phone away any and all contact with my handler was cut off until the mission was finally complete. Any and all contact from now on was to only be made if it's an emergency and even then it's frowned upon. Only if you're dying do they consider it an actual emergency. They don't care about my well-being, especially after years of training that made the same sentiment fill my own head. Climbing the stairs to one of the many safe houses the KGB has across the world my mind absentmindedly wanders back to what brought me here. What made me who I am. The Red Room. A place that technically doesn't exist where they trained women and girls, sometimes from birth, to be the world's best and most dangerous spies and assassins. Many don't make it out alive and those who do secretly wish they didn't most of the time because even after the years of training, brainwashing, and desensitization the horrors never seem to stop. You get used to it fast there, they make sure of that, but every mission only gets darker and darker. The more missions you complete, the more trusted you are. The more trusted you are, the more insider assassinations you get to complete against the women you graduated with all those years ago. The more you complete, the more desensitization you end up going through because of all the memories they manage to hold. All of it is a cycle they want. Because those assassinations remind you why you can't step out of line, remind you that you're just expendable to them.

Finally reaching the door I easily push those memories to the back of my mind because now those memories could jeopardize the success of my mission and could possibly make me sloppy. Which could lead me to being killed too. Normally the memories don't bother or distract me much. They're something that are easy for me to control, like my emotions. But sometimes it can be quite the opposite when a certain someone from my past comes to mind within them. Someone who made the Academy's horrible teachings melt away for a while when we were training and living together. Someone who made me feel worth it. Someone who made my life a living contradiction. Natalia Alianova Ramonova. Of course that's probably not her name anymore, we haven't seen each other in years, or probably have heard our names. Which is a good thing in all actuality. If we saw each other or heard each other's names that most likely meant that we were being tasked to kill one another or something worse. Seeing a Red Room graduate in real life most certainly meant you we're about to die. There are rare occurrences where missions overlap but usually we're given a warning. For me however I've only seen them when tasked to kill them, and thankfully she's never been handed to me so far. With a graduate of her caliber there could truly only one person could take her out successfully, that sadly being me. We were the top graduates in our age bracket and some may even say the entire training facility as a whole in its history. Which is why we became 'friends' in the first place. We felt the pressure for success from all angles every second of every day and we only had each other to understand that. No one else had that amount of pressure on their shoulders. Only we could understand, so we did our best to do that for each other even though in the end it got us in trouble often. But it was worth it. We made it out alive somehow.

After locking the door behind me I take my gun out and do a quick sweep of the apartment just in case someone got in here. Being paranoid is part of the job, it keeps you alive. After clearing every room and checking my surroundings through the windows I finally walk over to the table to see who my next target is and am surprised at the picture in it. Alexander Peregoncev used to be one of the top mission handlers on our team and has recently went underground after defecting and promising to spill our secrets to the enemy. We had no idea where he went. Whoever got to him first did a good job at keeping him under our radar and out of sight for a long time. But like usual they made a mistake. They ran into one of our agents in a club in London, a huge coincidence that surprised all of us considering how careful they were being and just how reckless going to a club was. Although they couldn't have known they would be spotted they should've understood that any public appearance would eventually tip us off whether we get the information legally or not. But the best thing is that they don't know that we was them in the first place and planted a tracker on him. One that even has a small audio device implanted inside it. So it's no wonder they woke me up in the middle of the night to fly me out to London without giving me that much information besides being tasked another assassination. After throwing the file to the side the big metal briefcase becomes my main focus, it's contents will help me pinpoint the man's exact location and where he'll meet the enemy. We know it's soon and that it already didn't happen, we would've seen multiple news stories and exposes about it all. Everyone thinks that the KGB is a dead organization that fell with the fall of Soviet Russia back in the 90's, but in reality we still have more power than the other legal government agencies. So having evidence we still exist would create shockwaves around the globe and essentially expose our massive amount of influence to the world after years of being off the grid and hiding. It would ruin everything too.

Inside is a laptop, new burner phone, multiple listening devices with one connected to his tracker already and a gun. The gun gives away how they want this man to die, in public. It'll ensure others who want to defect will not follow in his footsteps and if they do will give them a glimpse into their possible futures. At least if they say they'll tell all our secrets. Setting everything up it becomes apparent that they're back to being extremely careful and not going out in public unless it's absolutely necessary. Right now they're arguing about dinner and how it isn't safe for him to be outside at night. Even during the day he shouldn't be but that's probably an argument they'll have with him another day instead of now. I just have to hope that sooner or later they'll talk about their meeting with whoever helped him defect because this argument is already getting on my nerves. This man still is as stubborn as he was at the KGB and the men protecting him aren't as thick skinned as his old workers were at all. It's obvious they've been sick of him from the moment he was under their care and can't wait for this particular assignment to be over so they can go back to their old one. So their bickering after only minutes of listening has made it unbearable. Normal people would've lost their minds at this. It sounds like a horribly plotted out reality show or sitcom. Knowing it'll soon become unbearable for even me to listen too my mind automatically goes to that special place that still allows me to retain information but not focus on it fully. It makes the next three hours go by quickly and my reward for my exceptional patience to feel better than I imagined. After hours of arguing he finally agreed to stay inside and not go to a restaurant for dinner but that wasn't the reward. It was a quick phone call from the group that was harboring him. "Meet us at the Legacy Cafe in two days time at 8 AM." Then the line goes dead. But now we know who he's meeting with and in turn makes this mission even more difficult to complete. That cafe is popular and in a very crowded area.  Although most of its seating is outside they're protected by the many innocent bystanders that act as human shields. For an inexperienced sharpshooter this may be a shot that they couldn't take confidently, but for me it's still quite easy. That and getting confirmation that he's selling our secrets to foreign agents officially gives me the green light to continue.