by Lee Child
I stamped again.
I got a response.
The response came in the form of a bullet smashing up through the boards three feet to my right. It tore a splintered hole and buried itself in the ceiling above me and left dust and traces of smoke in the air.
No gunshot. They all had silencers.
I fired back, a triple tap vertically downward, straight through the same hole. Then I stepped away to where I guessed their kitchen was.
Fourteen rounds gone. Sixteen remaining. Nine loose in my pocket.
Another shot came up through the floor. Seven feet from me. I fired back. They fired back. I fired back one more time and figured they were starting to understand the pattern, so I crept out to the hallway and the head of the stairs.
Where I found that they had been figuring exactly the same thing: that I was getting into the rhythm. A guy was sneaking up on me. Number two on Springfield’s list. He had another Sig P220 in his hand. With a silencer. He saw me first. Fired once, and missed. I didn’t. I put a triple tap into the bridge of his nose and it climbed to the middle of his forehead and blood and brain spattered on the wall behind him and he went back down where he had come from in a heap.
His gun went with him.
My spent brass tinkled away across the pine.
Twenty-three rounds gone. Seven left, plus nine loose.
One guy up, plus the Hoths themselves.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
Too late for bargains, Lila.
I ignored her. I pictured her crouching one floor below. Svetlana at her side. One last guy between them and me. How would they use him? They weren’t dumb. They were the heirs of a long and tough tradition. They had dodged and weaved and feinted through the hills for two hundred years. They knew what they were doing. They wouldn’t send the guy up the stairs. Not again. That was fruitless. They would try to outflank me. They would send the guy up the fire escape. They would distract me with the phone and let the guy line up through the glass and shoot me in the back.
When?
Either immediately or much later. No middle ground. They would want me either surprised or bored.
They chose immediately.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I stepped back into the left-hand room and checked the view. The iron ladder rose right-to-left from my perspective. I would see the guy’s head as he came up from below. Which was good. But my angle wasn’t good. The street was narrow. Nine-millimeter Parabellums are handgun rounds. They are considered suitable for urban environments. They are much more likely than a rifle round to stick in the target and go no farther. Subsonic Parabellums, more likely still. But nothing is guaranteed. And there were innocent non-combatants across the street. Bedroom windows, slumbering children. Through-and-through bull’s-eyes could reach them. Wild deflections could reach them. And ricochets, or fragments. Certainly out-and-out misses could reach them.
Collateral damage, just waiting to happen.
I crept through the room and flattened myself against the window wall. Glanced out. Nothing there. I extended my arm and flipped the window latch. Tried the handles. The window was stuck. I glanced out again. Nothing there. I stepped in front of the glass and grabbed the handles and heaved. The window moved and stuck and moved again and then shot up in the frame and slammed open so hard the pane cracked end to end.
I backed up against the wall again.
Listened hard.
Heard the dull muted clang of rubber soles on iron. A steady little rhythm. He was coming up fast, but he wasn’t running. I let him come. I let him get all the way up. I let him get his head and shoulders in the room. Dark hair, dark skin. He was number fifteen on Springfield’s list. I lined up parallel with the front wall of the building. He glanced left. He glanced right. He saw me. I pulled the trigger. A triple tap. He moved his head.
I missed. Maybe the first or the last of the three bullets tore his ear off but he stayed alive and conscious and fired back wildly and then ducked back outside. I heard him fall against the narrow iron walkway.
Now or never.
I went out after him. He was scrambling headfirst down the stairs. He made it back to the fourth floor and rolled on his back and raised his gun like it was a hundred-pound weight. I came down the ladder after him and leaned away from the building and stitched a triple tap into the center of his face. His gun spun and clanged end over end two floors down and lodged ten feet above the sidewalk.
I breathed in.
I breathed out.
Six men down. Seven arrested. Four back home. Two in a locked ward.
Nineteen for nineteen.
The fourth floor window was open. The drapes were drawn back. A studio apartment. Derelict, but not demolished. Lila and Svetlana Hoth were standing together behind the kitchenette counter.
Twenty-nine rounds gone.
One left.
I heard Lila’s voice in my head again: You must save the last bullet for yourself, because you do not want to be taken alive, especially by the women.
I climbed over the sill and stepped into the room.
Chapter 81
The apartment was laid out the same as the ruined place on the second floor. Living room at the front, then the kitchenette, then the bathroom, then the closet in back. The walls were still up. The plaster was all still in place. There were two lights burning. There was a folded-up bed against the wall in the living room. Plus two hard chairs. Nothing else. The kitchenette had two parallel counters and one wall cupboard. A tiny space. Lila and Svetlana were crammed hip-to-hip in it. Svetlana on the left, Lila on the right. Svetlana was in a brown housedress. Lila was in black cargo pants and a white T-shirt. The shirt was cotton. The pants were made of rip-stop nylon. I guessed they would rustle as she moved. She looked as beautiful as ever. Long dark hair, bright blue eyes, perfect skin. A quizzical half-smile. It was a bizarre scene. Like a radical fashion photographer had posed his best model in a gritty urban setting.
I aimed the MP5. Black and wicked. It was hot. It stank of gunpowder and oil and smoke. I could smell it quite clearly.
I said, “Put your hands on the counter.”
They complied. Four hands appeared. Two brown and gnarled, two paler and slim. They spread them like starfish, two blunt and square, two longer and more delicate.
I said, “Step back and lean on them.”
They complied. It made them more immobile. Safer.
I said, “You’re not mother and daughter.”
Lila said, “No, we’re not.”
“So what are you?”
“Teacher and pupil.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to shoot a daughter in front of her mother. Or a mother in front of her daughter.”
“But you would shoot a pupil in front of her teacher?”
“Maybe the teacher first.”
“So do it.”
I stood still.
Lila said, “If you mean it, this is where you do it.”
I watched their hands. Watched for tension, or effort, or moving tendons, or increased pressure on their fingertips. For signs they were about to go somewhere.
There were no such signs.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
In the silent room it made a tiny sound. A whir, a hum, a grind. A rhythmic little pulse. It jumped and buzzed against my thigh.
I stared at Lila’s hands. Flat. Still. Empty. No phone.
She said, “Perhaps you should answer that.”
I juggled the MP5’s grip into my left hand and pulled out the phone. Restricted Call. I opened it and put it to my ear.
Theresa Lee said, “Reacher?”
I said, “What?”
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to call you for twenty minutes.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Where are you?”
“How did you get this number?”
“You called my cell, remember? Your number is in the call log.”
> “Why is your number blocked?”
“Precinct switchboard. I’m on the landline now. Where the hell are you?”
“What’s up?”
“Listen carefully. You have bad information. Homeland Security got back to us again. One of the Tajikistan party missed a connection in Istanbul. He came in through London and Washington instead. There are twenty men, not nineteen.”
Lila Hoth moved and the twentieth man stepped out of the bathroom.
Chapter 82
Scientists measure time all the way down to the picosecond. A trillionth of a regular second. They figure all kinds of things can happen in that small interval. Universes can be born, particles can accelerate, atoms can be split. What happened to me in the first few picoseconds was a whole bunch of different things. First, I dropped the phone, still open, still live. By the time it was down level with my shoulder whole lines of conversation with Lila were screaming in my head. On the same phone, minutes ago, from Madison Avenue. I had said, You’re down to your last six guys. She had started to reply, and then she had stopped. She had been about to say, No, I’ve got seven. Like earlier, when she had started to say, That’s not close to me. The voiced dental fricative. But she had stopped herself. She had learned.
For once, she hadn’t talked too much.
And I hadn’t listened enough.
By the time the phone was down level with my waist I was focusing on the twentieth guy himself. He looked just like the previous four or five. He could have been their brother or their cousin, and probably was. Certainly he looked familiar. Small, sinewy, dark hair, lined skin, body language bridging wariness and aggression. He was dressed in a pair of dark knit sweatpants. A dark knit sweatshirt. He was right-handed. He was holding a silenced hand-gun. He was sweeping it through a long upward arc. He was aiming to bring it level. His finger was tightening on the trigger. He was going to shoot me in the chest.
I was holding the MP5 left-handed. The magazine was empty. The last round was already chambered. It had to count. I wanted to change hands. I didn’t want to fire from my weaker side, under my weaker eye.
No choice. To change hands would take half a second. Five hundred billion picoseconds. Too long. The other guy’s arm was nearly there. By the time the phone was down around my knees my right palm was slapping upward to meet the barrel. I was turning and straightening and tucking the grip back toward my chest. My right palm stopped and cradled the barrel and my left index finger squeezed the trigger with exaggerated calm. Lila was moving on my left. She was stepping out into the room. My finger completed its squeeze and the gun fired and my last round hit the twentieth guy in the face.
The phone hit the floor. It sounded like the padlock. A loud wooden thump.
My last spent shell case ejected and rattled away across the room.
The twentieth guy went down in a clatter of limbs and head and gun, dead before he hit the boards, shot through the base of the brain.
A head shot. A hit. Not bad for my left hand. Except that I had been aiming for his center mass.
Lila kept on moving. Gliding, swooping, ducking down.
She came back up with the dead guy’s gun. Another Sig P220, another silencer.
Swiss manufacture.
A nine-round detachable box magazine.
If Lila was scrambling for the gun, it was the only one in the apartment. In which case it had been fired at least three times, through the ceiling.
Maximum six rounds left.
Six versus zero.
Lila pointed the gun at me.
I pointed mine at her.
She said, “I’m faster.”
I said, “You think?”
Way off to my left Svetlana said, “Your gun is empty.”
I glanced at her. “You speak English?”
“Fairly well.”
“I reloaded upstairs.”
“Bullshit. I can see from here. You’re set to three-round bursts. But you fired only once. Therefore that was your last bullet.”
We stood like that for what seemed like a long time. The P220 was as steady as a rock in Lila’s hand. She was fifteen feet from me. Behind her the dead guy was leaking fluid all over the floor. Svetlana was in the kitchen. There were all kinds of smells in the air. There was a draft from the open window. Air was moving in and stirring through the room and funneling up the staircase and out through the hole in the roof.
Svetlana said, “Put your gun down.”
I said, “You want the memory stick.”
“You don’t have it.”
“But I know where it is.”
“So do we.”
I said nothing.
Svetlana said, “You don’t have it but you know where it is. Therefore you employed a deductive process. Do you think you are uniquely talented? Do you think that deductive processes are unavailable to others? We all share the same facts. We can all arrive at the same conclusions.”
I said nothing.
She said, “As soon as you told us you knew where it was, we set about thinking. You spurred us on. You talk too much, Reacher. You made yourself disposable.”
Lila said, “Put the gun down. Have a little dignity. Don’t stand there like an idiot, holding an empty gun.”
I stood still.
Lila dropped her arm maybe ten degrees and fired into the floor between my feet. She hit a spot level with and exactly equidistant between the toecaps of my shoes. Not an easy shot. She was a great markswoman. The floorboard splintered. I flinched a little. The Sig’s silencer was louder than the H&K’s. Like a phone book smashed down, not dropped. A wisp of wood smoke drifted upward, where the friction of the bullet had burned the pine. The spent shell case ejected in a brassy arc and tinkled away.
Five rounds left.
Lila said, “Put the gun down.”
I looped the strap up over my head. Held the gun by the grip down by my side. It was no longer any use to me, except as a seven-pound metal club. And I doubted that I would get near enough to either one of them for a club to be effective. And if I did, I would prefer bare-knuckle hand-to-hand combat. A seven-pound metal club is good. But a two-hundred-fifty-pound human club is better.
Svetlana said, “Throw it over here. But carefully. If you hit one of us, you die.”
I swung the gun slowly and let it go. It cartwheeled lazily through the air and bounced off its muzzle and clattered against the far wall.
Svetlana said, “Now take off your jacket.”
Lila pointed her gun at my head.
I complied. I shrugged the jacket off and threw it across the room. It landed next to the MP5. Svetlana came out from behind the kitchen counter and rooted through the pockets. She found the nine loose Parabellum rounds and the part-used roll of duct tape. She stood the nine loose rounds upright on the counter, in a neat little line. She put the roll of tape next to it.
She said, “Glove.”
I complied. I bit the glove off and tossed it after the jacket.
“Shoes and socks.”
I hopped from foot to foot and leaned back against the wall to steady myself and undid my laces and eased my shoes off and peeled my socks down. I threw them one after the other toward the pile.
Lila said, “Take your shirt off.”
I said, “I will if you will.”
She dropped her arm ten degrees and put another round into the floor between my feet. The bang of the silencer, the splintering wood, the smoke, the hard tinkle of the spent case.
Four left.
Lila said, “Next time I’ll shoot you in the leg.”
Svetlana said, “Your shirt.”
So for the second time in five hours I peeled my T-shirt off at a woman’s request. I kept my back against the wall and threw the shirt overhand into the pile. Lila and Svetlana spent a moment looking at my scars. They seemed to like them. Especially the shrapnel wound. The tip of Lila’s tongue came out, pink and moist and pointed between her lips.
Svetlana said, “Now your pants.�
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I looked at Lila and said, “I think your gun is empty.”
She said, “It isn’t. I have four left. Two legs and two arms.”
Svetlana said, “Take your pants off.”
I unbuttoned. I unzipped. I pushed the stiff denim down. I stepped out. I kept my back against the wall and kicked the pants toward the pile. Svetlana picked them up. Went through the pockets. Made a pile of my possessions on the kitchen counter next to the nine loose rounds and the roll of tape. My cash, plus a few coins. My old expired passport. My ATM card. My subway card. Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. And my clip-together toothbrush.
“Not much,” Svetlana said.
“Everything I need,” I said. “Nothing I don’t.”
“You’re a poor man.”
“No, I’m a rich man. To have everything you need is the definition of affluence.”
“The American dream, then. To die rich.”
“Opportunity for all.”
“We have more than you, where we come from.”
“I don’t like goats.”
The room went quiet. It felt damp and cold. I stood there in nothing except my new white boxers. The P220 was rock steady in Lila’s hand. Muscles like thin cords stood out in her arm. Next to the bathroom the dead guy continued to leak. Outside the window it was five o’clock in the morning and the city was starting to stir.
Svetlana bustled about and balled up my gun and my shoes and my clothes into a tidy bundle and threw it behind the kitchen counter. She followed it with the two hard chairs. She picked up my phone, and shut it off, and tossed it away. She was clearing the space. She was emptying it. The living room part of the studio was about twenty feet by twelve. I was backed up against the center of one of the long walls. Lila tracked around in front of me, keeping her distance, pointing the gun. She stopped in the far corner, by the window. Now she was facing me at a shallow angle.