It was a lovely afternoon, but Svetlana Simonov could not see the beauty surrounding her because of the latest assignment that had been given to her by her commanding officer and lover at Omega Force, Jefferson Burke.

For this assignment she was supposed to work with three mercenaries, hired ex-soldiers from a private security outfit called Security Solutions. All Svetlana was supposed to do was find the scientist working to create a new, even more deadly version of the Coronavirus, and let them know where he was. They’d take care of the rest of the assignment—namely, killing the scientist. How they neutralized the threat was up to them.

It wasn’t surprising that Omega Force was outsourcing the dirty work of doing the actual killing. Svetlana knew that she was a honey trap. Eye candy had destroyed so many powerful men over the years. Beautiful women could be more deadly to men than a switchblade knife.

Svetlana knew that one of her main defenses was the fact that almost nobody knew who she was, and she didn’t know anyone who worked at Omega Force, with the exception of her controller, Burke, and a young field agent named Tatiana. Her work for Omega Force was entirely off the record, as far as the government was concerned.

She took a sip of her coffee, then picked up the electronic tablet once again. She did an optical scan to get past security, first of her thumb, and then of her entire hand. When the electronic keyboard showed on the glass screen, she tapped in the proper code, and once again the image of three men came up. Svetlana decided the three were good-looking, though they all had that cold-eyed, hollow-cheeked look to them, as did so many men of action, men who knew what it was like to have been shot at and missed, and sometimes shot at and hit.

These were men who wouldn’t buckle under the strain, no matter what the situation was like. These were men who had killed before, and would do so again.

The leader of the trio was an American. His dossier said that he was thirty-eight, and had been with Security Solutions for eight years. He had been recruited by Security Solutions upon his retirement from the American special forces. He had served in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq while in the service of his country. While working for the firm, he had done assignments in all three of those countries, as well as Germany, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Ireland.

Ireland? What the hell would he be doing in Ireland?

She looked at the face on her electronic tablet, and decided that although he was certainly a handsome man—he was tall, blond, and broad-shouldered--he was probably a cold-hearted bastard who cared only about the assignment, himself, and his men. Svetlana suspected that most mercenaries were that way.

Thirty-eight. That’s the same age as Burke. I wonder if he has Burke’s sexual stamina.

Svetlana immediately dismissed this line of thinking for several good reasons. The first was that she had no intention of ever finding out what the American’s sexual stamina was, so it made no difference. Whether formidable or pathetic, Svetlana didn’t know and didn’t care. The second was that she had been given this assignment immediately upon finishing her previous assignment, without being debriefed by Burke afterward. Part of a mission debriefing by Burke meant a rollicking good roll in the hay that inevitably caused Svetlana to have at least three climaxes, and quite often, many more than that. Once, when he’d debriefed her in Munich over a three-day period, Svetlana had so many orgasms that she had lost count.

She could hardly walk, and she couldn’t stop smiling.

It was a fond memory.

Working with Jack was Nigel Harris. He was British, and his military background was with the vaunted SAS. He, too, had been deployed in the finest vacation hotspots on the globe. He was thirty-two. He had no post-high school education, other than what he received from the SAS and Security Solutions.

Svetlana suspected that the kinds of things Nigel knew how to do probably didn’t look real good on most resumes—unless you were looking for someone highly skilled at killing people.

The third of the trio was Brad Hays, an Australian. His background was similar to the others, with the exception that he could speak several of the languages from East Asia.

That’s unusual. I wonder how he learned those.

Guys like him didn’t learn anything just for the hell of it.

Svetlana looked up from the tablet. There were hundreds of people walking, some hurrying, others taking a more leisurely, distinctly Mexican attitude toward the day. They walked at a slow, casual pace.

I’d go crazy if I took a siesta every afternoon.

Svetlana was far too much an American—meaning she was far too ambitious—to ever think that taking a nap in the afternoon was productive behavior.

Looking around at the majestic building of the Hotel Mexico International, Svetlana found it hard to reconcile the stately beauty of her surroundings with the rampant corruption of the government. She hadn’t spent much time in Mexico, but when she was there, she was always somewhat surprised at how there seemed to be two countries pretending to be one, all while living in the same house. There were plywood shacks and crushing poverty five hundred yards from villas that even the Beverly Hills elite could not afford. There were stately government buildings, and within those walls, every politician was for sale to the highest bidder. There were vows made to put an end to the corruption and the drug dealing, made by politicians who were owned body and soul by multi-national corporations which had no body or soul, and drug kingpins who treated their children like they were gods, yet had no trouble feeding drugs to children less fortunate than their own.