by Lee Child
I said, “Times Square.”
“OK.”
“Tomorrow morning at ten.”
“Why?”
“I want people around.”
“That’s too late.”
“For what?”
“I want it now.”
“Tomorrow at ten. Take it or leave it.”
She said, “Stay on the line.”
“Why?”
“I have to count my money. To check that I have seventy-five.”
I unzipped my jacket.
I put my glove on.
I heard Lila Hoth, breathing.
Fifty yards away the black door opened. The covered alley. A man stepped out. Small, dark, wiry. And wary. He checked the sidewalk, left and right. He peered across the street.
I put the phone in my pocket. Still open. Still live.
I raised the MP5.
Submachine guns were developed for close-quarters combat, but many of them are as accurate as rifles out to medium ranges. Certainly the H&K was reliable out to at least a hundred yards. Mine was fitted with iron sights. I moved the selector lever to single shot and put the front sight square on the guy’s center mass.
Fifty yards away he stepped to the curb. Scanned right, scanned left, scanned ahead. He saw the same nothing I was seeing. Just cool air and a thin night mist.
He stepped back to the door.
A taxicab passed by in front of me.
Fifty yards away the guy pushed the door.
I waited until I judged his momentum was all set to move forward. Then I pulled the trigger and shot him in the back. Bull’s-eye. A slow bullet. A perceptible delay. Fire, hit. The SD is advertised as silent. It isn’t. It makes a sound. Louder than the polite little spit you would get in a movie. But not worse than the kind of thump you would get from dropping a phone book on a table from about a yard. Noticeable in any environment, but not remarkable in a city.
Fifty yards away the guy pitched forward and went down with his torso in the alley and his legs on the sidewalk. I put a second bullet into him for safety’s sake and let the gun fall against its strap and took the phone back out of my pocket.
I said, “You still there?”
She said, “We’re still counting.”
You’re one short, I thought.
I zipped my jacket. Started walking. I hugged the far side of Madison and overshot 58th by a couple of yards. I crossed the avenue and came around the corner with my shoulder tight against the frontage of the buildings. I needed to keep below her line of sight. I passed the first old building. Passed the second.
I said from forty feet below her, “I have to go now. I’m tired. Times Square, tomorrow morning at ten, OK?”
She answered from forty feet above me. She said, “OK, I’ll send someone.”
I clicked off and put the phone back in my pocket and dragged the dead guy all the way into the alley. I closed the door behind us, slowly and quietly.
Chapter 78
There was a light in the alley. A single dim bulb, in a dirty bulkhead fixture. I recognized the dead guy from the photographs in Springfield’s Homeland Security folder. He had been number seven of the original nineteen. I didn’t remember his name. I dragged him the length of the space. The floor was old concrete, worn to a shine. I searched him. Nothing in his pockets. No ID. No weapon. I left him by a small wheeled trash receptacle covered in baked-on grime so old it didn’t smell anymore.
Then I found the inner door to the building, and unzipped my jacket, and waited. I wondered how long it would take for them to get worried about the missing guy. Less than five minutes, I figured. I wondered how many there would be in the search party. Just one, probably, but I hoped for more.
They waited seven minutes and sent two men. The inner door opened and the first guy stepped out. Number fourteen on Springfield’s list. He took a pace toward the alley door and the second guy stepped out after him. Number eight on Springfield’s list.
Then three things happened.
First, the first guy stopped. He saw that the alley door was closed. Which did not compute. It could not be opened from the outside without the key. Therefore the original searcher would have left it standing open while he prowled the sidewalk. But it was closed. Therefore the original searcher was already back inside.
The first guy turned around.
Second thing, the second guy also turned around. To close the inner door quietly and precisely. I let him get it done.
Then he raised his eyes and saw me.
The first guy saw me.
Third thing, I shot them both. Two three-round bursts, brief muted purring explosions each a quarter of a second long. I aimed for the base of their throats and let the muzzle climb stitch upward toward their chins. They were small men. Their necks were narrow and mostly full of arteries and spinal cords. Ideal targets. The noise of the gun was much louder in the roofed alley than it had been out in the open. Loud enough for me to worry about it. But the inner door was closed. And it was a stout piece of wood. Once upon a time it had been an outer door, before some earlier owner had sold his air rights.
The two guys went down.
My spent shell cases rattled away across the concrete.
I waited.
No immediate reaction.
Eight rounds gone. Twenty-two remaining. Seven men captured, three more down, three still walking and talking.
Plus the Hoths themselves.
I searched the new dead guys. No ID. No weapons. No keys, which meant the inner door wasn’t locked.
I left the two new bodies next to the first one, in the shadow of the trash can.
Then I waited. I didn’t expect anyone else to come through the door. Presumably the old Brits on the North West Frontier had eventually gotten wise about sending out rescue parties. Presumably the Red Army had. Presumably the Hoths knew their history. They ought to have. Svetlana had written some of it.
I waited.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I pulled it out and checked the window on the front. Restricted Call. Lila. I ignored her. I was all done talking. I put the phone back in my pocket. It stopped vibrating.
I put my gloved fingers on the inner door’s handle. I eased it down. I felt the latch let go. I was fairly relaxed. Three men had gone out. Conceivable that any one of them might return. Or all three of them. If anyone was inside, watching and waiting, there would be a fatal split second of delay for recognition and a decision, friend or foe. Like a Major League batter sorting a fastball from a curveball. A fifth of a second, maybe more.
But no delay for me. Anyone I saw was my enemy.
Anyone at all.
I opened the door.
No one there.
I was looking at an empty room. The abandoned restaurant’s kitchen. It was dark and dismantled. There were shells of old cabinets and gaps in the countertops where appliances had been hauled away to the secondhand stores on the Bowery. There were old pipes in the walls where once faucets had been attached. There were hooks in the ceiling, where once saucepans had hung. There was a large stone table in the center of the room. Cool, smooth, slightly dished from years of wear. Maybe once pastry had been rolled on it.
More recently Peter Molina had been murdered on it.
There was no doubt in my mind that it was the table I had seen in the DVD. No doubt at all. I could see where the camera must have been positioned. I could see where the lights had been set. I could see knots of frayed rope on the table legs, where Peter’s wrists and ankles had been tied.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I ignored it.
I moved on.
There were two swinging doors leading to the dining room. One in, one out. Standard restaurant practice. No collisions. The doors had porthole windows set eye-high to an average man of fifty years ago. I ducked down and peered through. An empty room, large and rectangular. Nothing in it except a lone orphan chair. Dust and rat shit on the floor. Yellow light com
ing in from the street through the big filthy window.
I pushed the out door with my foot. Its hinges yelped a little but it opened. I stepped into the dining room. Turned left and left again. Found a back hallway with restrooms. Two doors, labeled Ladies and Gentlemen. Brass signs, proper words. No pictograms. No stick figures in skirts or pants.
Plus two more doors, one in each of the side walls. Brass signs: Private. One would lead back to the kitchen. The other would lead to the stairwell, and the upper floors.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I ignored it.
Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: Attack from the high ground. Couldn’t do it. Not an available option. Around the time the Israeli list was being written the SAS in Britain had been developing a tactic of rappelling off roofs into upper-story windows, or smashing through the roof tile itself, or blowing through directly from one adjacent attic to another. Fast, dramatic, and usually very successful. Nice work if you could get it. I couldn’t. I was stuck with the pedestrian approach.
For the time being, at least.
I opened the stairwell door. It swept an arc through a tiny thirty-inch by thirty-inch ground floor hallway. Directly across from me, close enough to touch, was the door that led out to the residential entrance. To the street door with the single bell push and the crime-scene tape.
Directly out of the tiny hallway rose a single narrow staircase. It turned back on itself halfway up and rose the rest of the way to the second floor out of sight.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I pulled it out and checked it. Restricted Call. I put it back in my pocket. It stopped vibrating.
I started up the stairs.
Chapter 79
The safest way up the first half of a dog-legged staircase is to walk backward, looking upward, with your feet spread wide. Backward and looking upward, because if overhead resistance comes your way, you need to be facing it. Feet spread wide, because if stairs are going to creak, they’re going to creak most in the middle and least at the edges.
I shuffled up like that to the halfway break and then sidled sideways and went up the second half going forward. I came out in a second floor hallway that was twice the size of the first floor version but still tiny. Thirty inches by sixty. One room to the left, one to the right, and two dead ahead. Doors all closed.
I stood still. If I was Lila I would have one guy in each of the two rooms dead ahead. I would have them listening hard with weapons drawn. I would have them ready to fling open their doors and start up two parallel fields of fire. They could get me going up or coming down. But I wasn’t Lila and she wasn’t me. I had no idea of her likely deployment. Except that as her numbers diminished I felt she would want to keep her remaining guys reasonably close. Which would put them on the third floor, not the second. Because the flutter I had seen had been at a fourth floor window.
At the fourth floor window on the left, to be precise, looking at the building from the outside. Which meant her room was the room on the right, looking at it from the inside. I doubted that there would be any significant difference in the floor plans as I went up. It was a cheap, utilitarian structure. No call for custom features. Therefore a walk through the second floor room on the right would be the same thing as a walk through Lila’s room two floors above. It would give me the lie of the land.
I squeezed the slack out of the MP5’s trigger and put my gloved fingers on the door handle. Pushed down. Felt the latch let go.
I opened the door.
An empty room.
In fact, an empty and part-demolished studio apartment. It was as deep as but half the width of the restaurant dining room below. A long, narrow space. A closet in back, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a living area. I could see the layout at a single glance because all the dividing walls had been torn back to the studs. The bathroom fitments were all still there, odd and naked behind a vertical array of old two-by-twos, like ribs, like the spaced bars of a cage. The kitchen equipment was intact. The floors were pine boards, except for ragged-edged old-fashioned mosaic in the bathroom and linoleum tile in the kitchen. The whole place smelled of vermin and rotten plaster. The window over the street was black with soot. It was bisected diagonally by the bottom of the fire escape.
I walked quietly to the window. The fire escape was a standard design. A narrow iron ladder came down from the floor above and gave onto a narrow iron walkway under the windows themselves. Beyond the walkway a counterbalanced section lay ready to fold down toward the sidewalk under the weight of a fleeing person.
The window was a sash design. The lower pane was designed to slide upward inside the upper pane. Where the panes met they were locked together with a simple brass tongue in a slot. The lower pane had brass handles, like the ones you see on old file cabinets. The handles had been painted over many times. So had the window frames.
I undid the lock and put three fingers into each of the handles and heaved. The frame moved an inch, and stuck. I increased the pressure. I got close to the force I had used on the barred cages in the firehouse basement. The frame shuddered upward, an inch at a time, sticking on the left, sticking on the right, fighting me all the way. I got my shoulder under the bottom rail and straightened my legs. The frame moved another eight inches and jammed solid. I stepped back. Night air came in at me. Total gap, about twenty inches.
More than enough.
I got one leg out, bent at the waist, ducked through, got the other leg out.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I ignored it.
I went up the iron ladder, one slow quiet step after another. Halfway up my head was at the level of the third floor sills and I could see both front room windows.
Both had closed drapes. Old soot-colored cotton material behind soot-stained glass. No apparent light inside. No sounds. No evidence of activity. I turned and looked down at the street. No pedestrians. No passersby. No traffic.
I moved on upward. To the fourth story. Same result. Dirty glass, closed drapes. I paused a long time under the window where I had seen movement. Or imagined movement. I heard nothing and sensed nothing.
I moved up to the fifth floor. The fifth floor was different. No drapes. Empty rooms. The floors were stained and the ceilings sagged and bowed. Rainwater leaks.
The fifth floor windows were locked. The same simple brass tongue-and-slot mechanisms I had seen below, but there was nothing I could do about them without busting the glass. Which would make noise. Which I was prepared to do, but not yet. I wanted to time it right.
I hauled the strap around until the MP5 hung down my back and I got a foot up on the window sill. I stepped up and grabbed the crumbling cornice high above my head. I heaved myself over it. Not an elegant process. I am no kind of a graceful gymnast. I finished up panting and sprawled facedown on the roof with a face full of weeds. I lay there for a second to get my breath and then I got to my knees and looked around for a trapdoor. I found one about forty feet back, right above where I judged the stairwell hallway would be. It was a simple shallow upside-down wooden box sheathed in lead and hinged on one side. Presumably locked from below, probably with a hasp and a padlock. The padlock would be strong, but the hasp would be screwed into the frame, and the frame would be weak from age and rot and water damage.
No contest.
Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: Attack from the high ground.
Chapter 80
The lead sheath around the trapdoor lid had been beaten with felt hammers into gentle curves. No sharp corners. I got my gloved fingers under the edge opposite the hinge and yanked hard. No result. So I got serious. Two hands, eight fingers, bent legs, deep breath. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to think about Peter Molina. So instead I pictured Lila Hoth’s insane smile at the camera right after she checked the Kabul taxi driver’s departed pulse.
I jerked the lid.
And the night started to unravel, right there and then.
I had hoped that th
e hasp’s screws would pull out of either the door or the frame. But they pulled out of both together. The padlock with the hasp still attached free-fell ten feet and thumped hard on the bare wooden floor below. A loud, emphatic, tympanic sound. Deep, resonant, and clear, followed immediately by the tinkle of the hasp itself and the patter of six separate screws.
Not good.
Not good at all.
I laid the trapdoor lid back and squatted on the roof and watched and listened.
Nothing happened for a second.
Then I heard a door open down on the fourth floor.
I aimed the MP5.
Nothing happened for another second. Then a head came into view up the stairs. Dark hair. A man. He had a gun in his hand. He saw the padlock on the floor. I saw the wheels turning in his head. Padlock, floor, screws, vertical fall. He peered upward. I saw his face. Number eleven on Springfield’s list. He saw me. The cloud above me was all lit up by the city’s glow. I guessed I was silhouetted quite clearly. He hesitated. I didn’t. I shot him more or less vertically through the top of his head. A burst of three. A triple tap. A brief muted purr. He went down with a loud clatter of shoes and hands and limbs, with two final big thumps as first the remains of his head and then his gun hit the boards. I watched the stairs for another long second and then vaulted through the open trapdoor and fell through the air and landed feetfirst next to the guy, which made another loud noise.
We were all through with secrecy.
Eleven rounds gone, nineteen remaining, four men down, two still up.
Plus the Hoths.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
Not now, Lila.
I picked up the guy’s gun and opened the door to the front room on the left and backed into the shadow. Rested my shoulder on the wall and looked out at the stairs.
No one came up.
Stalemate.
The gun I had taken from the dead guy was a Sig-Sauer P220, with a fat silencer on it. Swiss manufacture. Nine-millimeter Parabellum, nine rounds in a detachable box magazine. The same ammunition I was using. I thumbed the rounds out and dropped them loose into my pocket. I put the empty gun on the floor. Then I stepped back to the hallway and ducked into the front room on the right. It was bare and empty. I paced out the studio layout as I remembered it from below. Closet, bathroom, kitchen, living room. I made it to what I guessed was the center of the living room and stamped down hard. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. I figured Lila was directly below me, listening. I wanted to shake her up, way back in the lizard part of her brain. The scariest feeling of all. There’s something up there.