Knuckles beat a knock-pause-knock on wood.
Holden left the window, opened the door.
Itzal carried the two cases in, set them on the bed, stretched a hand in Holden’s direction, and when Holden took it, the old man pulled him in tight for a hug.
Holden gripped the man’s forearms, released them, and carried the cases to the window, where he could unload supplies while keeping an eye on the street.
Itzal said, “What do we face?”
Holden rummaged through the first case. “There’s no we in this, my brother.”
Itzal, soft, plainspoken, said, “To this connerie, I say non.”
Holden withdrew a couple passports, thirty thousand in cash, and a SIG Sauer P226 semiautomatic. “All the same,” he said. He retrieved two spare magazines, several boxes of ammunition. “This is my problem. My war.”
“You can say with confiance who is on this target list?”
“No,” Holden said. “No confidence at all.”
“This is, yes, also my war,” Itzal said. “After first priority like you are gone, they come for the second, and after the second is gone, they come for me. You die today. I die tomorrow. You live today, there are fewer killers tomorrow. It is our war.”
Holden opened the second case, retrieved the Arctic Warfare rifle and a Bullet Blocker fleece vest. He needed to get to Berlin. He needed to be there for the rendezvous, needed to pick up whatever trail remained of the twins before it went completely cold, and pride was a waste of time. He said, “Okay.”
He stood, emptied his jacket pockets, removed its liner, pulled off the hairpiece, and handed both jacket and hairpiece over. “Give me three minutes to get to the roof. Then go be me down on the restaurant patio.”
Itzal pointed to the rifle. “I thought my help is more like so.”
Holden zipped into the vest, stuffed what he couldn’t carry back into the cases, and snapped the lids. “I know what I’m looking for,” he said. “Putting you up top will get me killed.” He dumped ammunition from a box and fed the first SIG magazine.
Itzal said, “And what is this you look for?”
Holden spoke in time to rounds clicking into place. “One male, Asian. One hundred seventy-eight centimeters. One female, Caucasian. One hundred seventy centimeters. Changing faces, changing costumes. Semiautomatic handguns. Possibly a sniper, though I haven’t spotted one yet. Possible reinforcements. Intel off-site. Unlimited resources overhead. I’ve already taken half their team. They’re angry. Now it’s personal.”
The corners of Itzal’s lips turned up in sly understanding.
Caring was dangerous. Anger was worse. Both clouded thinking, both could get a person killed, and with half their team dead, they’d be too far in on both to go back on either. Holden counted on that. He snapped the magazine into the SIG and started loading the next. “They know I want them here,” he said. “They might wait for me at the station.”
Itzal slipped out of his coat and replaced it with Holden’s jacket.
He said, “They know you’ll return?”
“They know where I need to get.”
The old man tsked. “There are other ways to travel. Only fools assume.” He motioned to Holden’s weaponry. “But you do not see them as fools.”
“No,” Holden said. “Not fools.”
He dug into the jacket’s liner, pulled out the mini phone he’d burned to call the hotel, and shoved the accompanying SIM back into place. The kill team had a better chance of getting to him here than they would at the station. They had to know that, but another nudge wouldn’t hurt. He tossed the device toward Itzal. “That links to me,” he said. “If there’s anyone you hate, now would be a really good time to call.”
Itzal rolled the phone over in his hand. “I keep this?”
Holden said, “Be my guest.” He shoved the cases under the bed, holstered the SIG, and picked up the rifle. “Did you come by car?”
“Of course.”
“How close are you?”
“Close enough.”
“Close enough to run?”
“There will be no running.”
Holden strode to the door and paused, hand on the hardware.
There were two killers headed his way, possibly more. He needed a clean here and gone, couldn’t afford a protracted firefight that locked him into the neighborhood, and every minute after the first round, and every extra round beyond the first, exponentially cut the chances of extracting without complications. The odds of lining up two clean shots directly correlated to how much risk Itzal assumed.
The prospects frustrated him.
He should have ended all four killers while he was on that plane.
He left the room without a word, continued to the access door at the end of the hall, and climbed a ladder up, methodically, rhythmically, counting time in a careful balance between the need to hurry and the need to keep his heartbeat steady.
He let himself out onto asphalt tiles.
Unlike the gables that topped every other house in sight, the Mozart’s rooftop was nearly flat, and unlike the window in his room, the rooftop gave him access to a 270-degree bird’s-eye vantage over the Yjunction.
He belly crawled toward the edge and scanned the streets, seeking movement in windows and tiny side yards, searching between parallel-parked cars and manicured hedges. Time wore on, and with time came impatience.
Late afternoon brought a slow increase in bicycles, pedestrians, and vehicles.
He fought against himself, and he fought to clear his head.
Below, Itzal left the patio, crossed the street, and placed himself in Holden’s direct line of site. He was a horrible body double. The hairpiece and jacket looked ridiculous on him, embarrassing really, but the imitation didn’t need to be good, just good enough to be seen. Cigarette in one hand, miniature phone in the other, Itzal dialed.
The line answered, and the conversation grew animated and agitated, dragging on longer than Holden expected, but whoever Itzal had called and whatever was said produced a reaction that time, on its own, hadn’t, and Holden, intent on protecting the old man from threat on the ground, nearly missed the threat on the rooftop at his right.
Shadow alerted him.
Instinct rolled him left.
Adrenaline slowed time to the metronome beat inside his chest.
A sound-suppressed rifle crack dissipated with the city noise.
A bullet struck where he’d been lying.
Instinct kept him rolling.
Another crack, another near miss.
The human psyche, primed for survival, urged him to evade, and the human psyche under attack screamed for retaliation. Instinct stopped him on his back. Rifle stock to shoulder, he searched for the source of fire. Experience, logic, and the four-pound fleece vest with its stitched Kevlar plates held him fast.
He had nowhere to shelter, couldn’t afford to miss.
He waited, exposed, daring a bullet to find him.
A shadow and hint of out-of-place color tripped his focus to a gable peak.
The color shifted and time stretched out into a long warp between life and death, filling the space between heartbeats, and hair became forehead, and forehead became eyebrows, and Holden’s finger reacted.
The rifle report thundered through the quiet.
Red mist filled the crosshairs.
He rolled back to face the street and a world on pause, suspended in the half-second uncertainty that lay between vehicle backfire and reason to run. But someone down there had known that sound. He hunted for that anomaly.
He found it on a bicycle. The woman with the black hair was a redhead now, twenty years older, twenty pounds heavier, grocery bags in the basket, peddling forward with the weariness of a long day on her feet. He hesitated, mistrusting judgment, unsure of recognition, unwilling to risk civilian casualties.
She continued in Itzal’s direction because Itzal was along her path.
Nothing about her indicated interest in hi
m, nothing indicated threat.
Holden followed her with the scope, waiting.
She reached into the basket.
He found black in her hand.
He controlled his breathing, controlled his heart rate, and waited longer to ensure this thing she had reached for wasn’t a phone or wallet, waited, knowing that waiting too long meant Itzal would be dead, waited until her gaze rose and focused on Itzal’s jacket.
Holden shifted crosshairs from head to thigh and pulled.
For the second time, the rifle crack ripped through silence.
The woman fell. Her bike clattered. Itzal hurried toward her with all the urgency of a passerby running to help, and it was help, but of a different sort.
The decision to take a nonfatal shot came from trust.
Itzal, on the ground, was in a better position to assess her true threat.
His hands worked fast. Her head dropped. He called for help, and the front staff rushed from the hotel, and in the confusion, Itzal slipped away.
Holden inched back from the edge.
Time, unspooling, made movement feel like slogging through sludge.
He found the spent shell casings, pocketed them. Crawled back to the access ladder, raced the rungs down, and hurried to the room to collect his cases.
The Polizei would have already been called.
He had to be gone before they arrived.
He disassembled the rifle and shoved each piece securely into foam, snapped the cases shut, grabbed the handles, left the room, and jogged down past the now-empty first-floor lobby, down to the hotel’s basement, and pushed out the door into a small parking garage. If things were otherwise, he’d head for the border and spend the next week out of sight, laying low, waiting for the drama to die down, but he didn’t have that luxury.
An engine revved. Tires squealed.
A black BMW 6 Series backed up and stopped in front of him.
The passenger window rolled down.
Itzal said, “There will be no running. Come.”
CHAPTER 8
Savignyplatz
Berlin, Germany
JACK
HE STEPPED FROM TRAIN TO OPEN-AIR PLATFORM, OUT OF STALE AIR into a drizzling damp and the must of aged stone, wet concrete, and hints of exhaust from late afternoon traffic. He pulled the old jacket tight against the chill and followed the transit crowd, moving slow, head low, shoulders stooped, right leg hitching with a slight limp he’d picked up just outside Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof.
Train doors hissed and closed.
The carriage gave way to empty tracks.
A sparse crowd waited on the opposite platform.
He veered out of the pedestrian flow for an empty bench, groaned stiff joints toward the seat, and leaned forward to tie wayward laces.
Loafers, sandals, heels, and sports shoes strode past his head.
He analyzed gaits and soles and sizes, searching for the familiar and for the out of place, and he scrutinized the shape and height of bodies and clothing across the tracks, looking for signs of the same—an amateur maneuver, obvious and sloppy by old-school standards—anachronistic cloak-and-dagger theater in a world where station cameras and city cameras, facial recognition, gait recognition, and the predictive software they tied to posed a more realistic threat.
Would have, anyway, if subterfuge wasn’t as much about showing a hand as hiding one, and digital surveillance didn’t still have exploitable weaknesses.
As far as electronic eyes were concerned, he’d never gotten off the plane.
What concerned him in the here and now were the human eyes belonging to those who knew better, those who knew where and how to look.
His sister’s words kept him tied to that past and dying art.
“Old school,” was what she’d said.
Clare in the body of a sixty-something-year-old man.
He’d detoured through public spaces, down underground walkways, up empty side streets, into covered shopping areas, and out parking garages to ensure the only way those eyes could stay on him was to follow on foot. He’d moved slowly enough, obviously enough to avoid losing the tail, attempting to force errors and flush whoever followed him so he could see for himself what he was up against and how many were out there, or convince himself he hadn’t been followed at all.
Three hours of wasted time.
He was as certain of being alone as certainty would allow and doubted the certainty. Anyone capable of eluding him this far was capable of eluding still, but neither could he find what didn’t exist, and therein lay the madness.
Absent proof, he found remnants of a ghost in everything.
He just wasn’t sure whose ghost, exactly.
He stretched arthritic fingers toward his shoe and secured the laces, waited until another train rolled in, and joined the departing crowd headed toward Else-Ury-Bogen. Shielded by movement and numbers, he shed his limp and shed the hat, converted jacket to coat, swapped chipped and aged glasses for big, black, bulky frames, and exited out onto the street a good twenty years younger than he’d gone in.
And he followed the old cobblestones parallel to the tracks, scanning windows and doors, searching camera angles, feeding distance calculations and route possibilities to the multidimensional maze inside his head, a maze in which he could travel only forward, never back, and every move toward one opponent rotated layers within time and space, creating blind spots, opening weakness, and shutting off access to the others.
His primary goal was survival.
The goal of survival was to find Dmitry, the real Dmitry. And every other person within the maze was an adversary intent on thwarting that goal.
The US hit squad was close and closing in.
They’d had proxies waiting for him at the Berlin airport, local operatives assembled out of the embassy in a hurry, on the barest of need to know. He’d seen that in their hair and clothing styles, their familiarity with the airport, and in the way they wore dumb cluelessness like a group of teenagers who’d stumbled from bed to kitchen in search of coffee and found themselves in an airport, playing facial Whac-A-Mole. It hadn’t been a fair match, not by any stretch, those four officers, agents—whatever they were—with real world training, put up against a pair whose entire lives had been preparation to survive the worst of Clare’s paranoid fantasies.
If he’d been a different kind of target, they’d already be dead.
But that they were there at all, that was a problem.
He’d expected a welcome committee of some sort.
With the way his original itinerary had been booked through to Berlin, it’d have been incompetence of the highest order for them not to have someone on the ground watching as a just in case, but this hadn’t been that. These three, with their luggage, neck pillows, electronic distractions, and the basic accoutrements of a long layover, were too starched, too food and drink free, too directly focused on one specific gate—his specific gate—to have already spent hours watching a succession of flights deplane.
They’d come in a hurry. Recently. Specifically.
They were watching for his flight.
Which meant that at some point in the hour and a half between the departure gate closing in Frankfurt and the arrival gate opening in Berlin, someone had connected the dots linking him from one flight to the next, and for that to have happened, there’d have had to have been vast resources and top analysts working to make him dead.
He had no idea why.
And he’d had no time to pursue that tangent, because in the hierarchy of what mattered most, finding Dmitry took priority, and the Russians had been waiting, too. There’d been two of them this time, nowhere near as skilled as the solitary spotter in Frankfurt but skilled enough. They’d been aware of the American presence and aware of Jill and aware of him, and he’d seen for himself what his sister had described:
One team hunted him.
The second observed the hunt.
The whole of it had been déjà vu, which had
sent blood rushing to his head and certainty careening into chaos. Time had split, dropping him into an alternate reality in which the invitation from Dmitry had never happened and these operatives weren’t Americans or Russians and none of this was real—not in any true sense—because this was Clare again, Clare manipulating perception and manufacturing truth, Clare putting his mind under fire and his body in the crosshairs, Clare testing response and reaction time, just as she’d done his whole damn life, and in that alternate reality this entire thing was an elaborate show-and-tell, live-demonstration field test, to which outsiders had come to witness what he and his sister could do.
Hate and disgust and rebellion had risen from deep buried grudges.
Hate for the woman who should have been his mother, disgust at himself for being so goddamn gullible, and adamant refusal to be her unwitting puppet.
He’d stood there a second, two, maybe three, brain numb, limbs immobile, committing the unforgivable of unforgivable sins, while his heart raced and his stomach lurched and his mind spiraled in a grasp for any single point in time to which he could anchor reality. Training had smacked him upside the head, forcing him to move and blend and be, and he’d recovered from a failure that would have been fatal had he been up against more hardened opponents.
He’d retreated the way he’d come, and he’d left the terminal on an employee shuttle with a crew changing shifts, his body functioning on habit while his mind rewound and replayed every explosion, every bullet, and every conversation that filled the past two weeks, rewriting what he thought he knew into a different version of the same story, one in which Clare, the master puppeteer, pulled all the strings.
But he hadn’t been able to make the performance work.
Not all the characters anyway, and so the pressure had eased and reality had shifted back to the way it had been, but the hate and disgust and rebellion had remained.
He blamed Clare.
Even if this wasn’t her doing, she’d still put him here, all those years of fucking with his head, of never letting his mind shut down, of turning every location and every encounter into a potential threat to be outmaneuvered when, really, the only threat had ever come from her. This was her legacy, this life of lies, in which up was never up and down never down and every action and every word existed in two or more states at once.
Liars' Legacy Page 6