Bella led the way, her black coat sweeping behind her as she moved quickly. Galina shoved Ivan Vanko to get him moving.
The man was built like a boulder. Galina's push accomplished nothing—he didn't budge an inch. The assassin arched an eyebrow, tilted her chin up, and drew back her coat just enough to reveal the holstered pistol. The implication was crystal clear. Ivan gave a faint, contemptuous smile—and finally fell in step behind Bella.
Ivan's sentence was ten years. His father Anton had been given life without parole. A prisoner at that security level warranted a private cell, a dedicated power circuit on the door lock, and a full security detail: six guards who hadn't abandoned their post despite the chaos tearing through the rest of the prison.
Time was running out, and Bella picked up the pace.
A towering guard charged from the side, electric baton raised. She caught his wrist, turned his own momentum against him, and drove the baton back into his gut.
Two more guards came at her from the front, riot shields raised and locked. Bella ran up the wall, executed a clean front flip over both of them, landed behind their line, grabbed each man by the back of the head, and smashed them together.
A guard who'd slipped into the shadows—angling for a clean shot—had his gun slapped out of his hand before he could raise it. She wrenched his arm up behind his back with her left hand, seized his head with her right, and drove it into the wall.
Four guards down in the span of a few seconds. No superpowers, no fatalities—but all four would be waking up with concussions.
Bella strode forward. The remaining two guards didn't flinch. They charged with their batons swinging, shouting as they came.
Brave. That was the word Bella kept returning to whenever she encountered Russians. Perhaps it extended to the whole of the former Soviet world.
These guards were no heroes. They weren't good men—corrupt, susceptible to bribes, guilty of every small cruelty that came with the job. But the spirit in them—that stubborn refusal to yield when outmatched—wasn't something she could dismiss.
She hadn't seen it in Americans, or the French, or the Japanese. Only in Russians had she seen it so clearly: the deep-seated defiance that said we don't care who you are or what you can do—we're coming at you anyway. The Russian spirit. The Soviet spirit.
Those who don't miss the Soviet Union have no heart. Those who want it back have no brain.
A superpower's soul still lived in people like this—proud, unbowed, fighting to the last even when the outcome was never in doubt.
Bella sidestepped the first baton swing, shifted two steps left, steered one guard into the arc of his partner's strike, then dropped the last man with a clean sidekick that sent him flying.
Her coat billowed around her. With her Eagle Vision on, her movement precise and unhurried, she dispatched them like they were kids. Not a single guard landed a blow.
The display was enough to extinguish whatever ideas Ivan Vanko had been quietly entertaining. The bear-like scientist swallowed his thoughts, his expression now carefully neutral—and wary.
Even Galina stared. She had absorbed her ancestors' combat techniques through the Brotherhood's Animus and spent years hardening them in real-world training. She was no amateur. She could have taken six guards herself. But not like that—not with that kind of ease.
They reached Anton Vanko's cell door. The electromagnetic lock was still sealed.
"You're moving faster than I expected." Rebecca's voice came through the earpiece, accompanied by the rapid sound of typing. "Give me ten seconds."
She didn't need ten. The door clicked open in under eight.
Anton Vanko had been curled in his corner for so long that it took him a moment to register the change. He squinted into the light.
"Father!" Whatever else Ivan Vanko was, he was a devoted son. They'd been held in the same prison for years without being able to see each other. He crossed the cell in two strides and pulled the old man into a tight embrace.
What a wreck. That was Bella's first impression. Anton Vanko was a fraction of the man his son was—thin, stooped with age, hollowed out by years inside. Everything she'd read about him pointed to a man of great talent and negligible character.
"Mr. Ivan Vanko," Bella said, "we're leaving this prison. Can you carry your father?"
"Of course." Ivan Vanko was in his forties but didn't hesitate. He scooped the old man up without complaint—he didn't trust anyone else to carry him anyway.
The four of them moved out through the service corridor. With Bella clearing the path, they reached the extraction point without incident, linked up with Shaun and Rebecca outside, and vanished into the Moscow night well before Moscow's security forces and police arrived.
On the other side of the prison, IMF operative Benji Dunn had successfully pulled Ethan Hunt out of his cell. He ran through everything he'd seen on the monitors.
"Hold on—there was a second team in the Lubyanka tonight?" Ethan's build wasn't imposing, but his face had the kind of effortless good looks that belonged on a movie screen rather than in a prison. He zeroed in on the key question immediately. "Who did they extract? Any leads on weapons, vehicles, direction of travel?"
He fired off half a dozen questions without pausing.
Benji scrolled through the footage. "Not a lot to work with. Whoever they are, they're professionals. Weapons-wise... they didn't use any. Just hand-to-hand. And man, they were good—wait. Wait. This is huge. The men they pulled out are Anton Vanko and Ivan Vanko. Father and son. Russian nuclear physicists. Anton Vanko is one of the top researchers in the field of nuclear fusion."
Ethan went very still. He knew perfectly well the difference between fusion and fission, but in his line of work, nuclear anything set off alarms. The entire reason his team had broken him out of this prison was to track down a missing Russian nuclear authorization document.
Nuclear codes. Nuclear scientists. He didn't believe in coincidences.
Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Moscow, Bella studied the Vanko father and son with quiet interest.
Neither of them was a saint—that much was clear from the files. Anton Vanko was driven by greed; Ivan Vanko by pride. But Russia had done them both a favor. After years inside, they were now disgraced fugitives. Unless they wanted to go back to that cell, they had exactly one option: work for Bella.