by Barry Eisler
He walked out without a backward glance, cutting through the fog and lasers and gyrating crowds on the dance floor to the other side of the club, and then heading to the restroom closest to Sorm’s VIP room. The guards were still flanking the VIP-room door and scanning their surroundings, but he was in ghost mode now and they took no notice of him.
The bathroom was crowded—most of the urinals occupied, and a dozen young Thais and Westerners adjusting their gelled hair and smoothing their plucked eyebrows in front of the mirrors. The music was loud, too, almost as loud as it was out on the dance floor. He tossed the plywood scraps into a trashcan propped at the apex of a spiraling steel base, and went into a stall, where he double checked the Supergrade—full magazine, cartridge in the chamber, good to go. He eased the weapon back into the bellyband and let his shirt drape over it.
Okay. Showtime.
He stepped out of the stall, pausing to wash his hands for form’s sake. He dried them under a jet-loud blower and turned to the door to go.
One of the drunken Americans—the singer—rolled in, saw him, and just stood there. Ah, shit. Shame on him for not having checked his back. He hadn’t been expecting any trouble from a bunch of college kids. Or it might have been just a coincidence. Either way, he could tell from how the kid’s mouth was thinning out into a determined line he was going to have to deal with it.
“Bro,” the kid said. “What was that? You’re not really hotel maintenance.”
“Ingratitude is one of the indignities of my profession, son,” he said, rubbing his cleaned hands together. “I save people from potential peril, and they thank me by questioning my credentials.”
“Speaking of credentials, I’d like to see some.”
“You are more than welcome to lodge a complaint with my supervisor, if doing so will make you feel better. But I have duties to perform.”
He started to move past the kid, and the idiot actually grabbed him by the arm. Dox took hold of the kid’s wrist in his free hand, broke the grip, and squeezed hard enough to make it hurt, at the same time communicating to the kid with the quickness and ease of the move that the pain he was feeling was nothing but a coming attraction if the kid was dumb enough to want the full movie.
He stared into the kid’s eyes. “Son,” he growled, “if you don’t get your dumb ass back to Elton John right fucking now, I will reach down your throat, pull out your liver, and beat you to death with it. Comprendes?”
The kid didn’t even try to break loose—he just lost some color and gave two quick nods.
Dox saw some people looking. Shit.
He let the kid go. “And be sure to wash your hands when you’re done in here. I can’t abide improper restroom hygiene.”
He headed out, circling wide of Sorm’s VIP room and pausing far enough from the bathroom and with enough people in the way to ensure the kid wouldn’t see him when he exited. He relaxed and retracted his energy, the way he did when he was in a sniper hide, just going away and making himself invisible in plain sight. After a minute, the kid came out and headed in the direction of the karaoke room, still looking a little pale.
Okay, Sorm, he thought. Here we fucking go.
He took a deep breath and shifted back into character, heading obliquely across the dance floor toward the VIP room, the gyrating people parting before him, their movements weirdly robotic under the pulsating lights. He boogied to the music like someone who’d had way too much to drink, pausing to dance here and there with some of the ladies he passed, sometimes to their apparent annoyance, sometimes to their apparent delight. He’d dated a dancer years back, and she’d insisted on teaching him the basics, cha-cha and rumba and the tango, which was the only one he really liked. He hadn’t minded, he was always up for something he thought might be foreplay, but he’d never expected any of it to be operationally useful. And yet look at him now.
He cleared the floor but kept on dancing. The guards were only twenty feet away now, and there was nothing between him and them but a handful of people and some fog from the machines.
Fifteen feet.
He swayed his hips and shoulders and rolled his arms and threw in a pirouette for good measure.
The guards weren’t scanning now. They were looking right at him. And their looks weren’t the least bit friendly.
Ten feet.
“Hey,” he called out, doing a little box step. “That’s the VIP room, ain’t it? What’s it cost to dance in there?”
21
Livia was on a stool at the far end of the bar closest to Sorm’s VIP room, sipping a cosmopolitan from a martini glass. She’d retrieved the Glock from where she’d hidden it, and now it was immediately accessible via a cross-draw in the bag she was wearing on her left side, the strap over her right shoulder. The purse was a little large for the skimpy black cocktail dress she was wearing, but there were plenty of women in the club with outsized bags. Some of them were pros, carrying the tools of their trade; others were just party animals packing a change of clothes for the morning after a hoped-for hookup. Her own excuse, of course, in addition to the Glock, was the night-vision gear.
The only other thing that might have looked slightly out of place was her choice of flats as footwear. Heels would have been more the look for clubbing, but on the other hand, for a night of dancing, sometimes the priority had to be comfort. Or, in her case, speed and mobility. But none of it really mattered. If the dress was short and tight enough, men didn’t notice the accessories. The platinum wig and oversized horn-rimmed glasses weren’t standard fashion choices either, she supposed, but they’d be better than nothing against any video recordings.
She’d been chatting briefly with an Australian guy who’d come over to hit on her, their heads inclined just a few inches apart so they could hear each other over the club music. But when she’d refused his offer to buy her a drink and told him she was meeting a friend, he’d moved on. That was fine. She’d wanted a few minutes to scan the club from this position and get a feel for the guards outside Sorm’s VIP room. Those few minutes were done now. She was ready.
She wiped the stem of the martini glass with a napkin and took out her phone. Her heart started hammering, and she breathed slowly and deeply for a minute until she felt calmer. Then she called Little.
“Can you hear me?” she said, turning her head away from the people next to her so she could shout.
“Barely. Sounds like quite a party over there.”
She glanced around. “It is. Are you ready?”
“Say the word and I kill the lights. And open the locks.”
She got up, unzipped the purse, and circled the edge of the dance floor in the direction of the VIP room, her heart hammering hard again. “Ten seconds,” she said.
“I’m with you.”
She kept moving. She was forty feet away now. The music was loud. Pulsing. Laser lights crisscrossed the floor in front of her. The dance floor was packed with undulating bodies, arms in the air, everybody moving, fog from hidden machines rolling and rising around them.
She pulled the goggles from the bag and fired them up. “Eight seconds.”
“Still with you. On your mark.”
Thirty feet. There were maybe fifty people between her and the guards now. Her concealment was getting thin.
She dangled the goggles low, holding them by the head strap so she could pull them on instantly.
Twenty feet. Just a little closer. She wanted it to go down fast. No time for anyone to react.
“Five,” she said. “Four. Three—”
A big guy emerged from the crowds of the dance floor to her left and called out to the guards. “Hey, that’s the VIP room, ain’t it? What’s it cost to dance in there?”
Even if she hadn’t seen him, she would have known from the voice alone. Texas.
What the hell?
“Wait,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Standing by.”
What the hell? she thought again.
The guards were loo
king at Texas. Looking at him hard. Whatever he was trying to pull off, she thought he had maybe three seconds before he got preempted.
“Is that rope line behind you Corinthian velour?” Texas called out, still moving in. “Rich Corinthian velour, just like in my ancestral home in Abilene.”
Then he did a weird little jig and spun in a circle. And as his back turned to the guards, a gun came out from under his shirt like a magic trick—
One of the guards saw the move, or at least recognized that Texas was way too close and that his hands had momentarily disappeared. The guard’s hand swept behind his back—
Texas finished his spin, the gun coming up en route, and—
The guard started to shout something in Thai—maybe “Gun!” But Texas stopped him with a round right to his forehead. An instant later he put another round into the head of the guard next to him, and another into the third, the shooting so fast and certain that all three were shot before the first had even hit the ground.
The shots were loud and unmistakable even over the pulsating music. She heard shouts from the dance floor, the sounds of confused conversation.
Texas stepped over the bodies, straight through the velour rope line, spun so his back was to the door, and blasted it right under the handle with a donkey kick. The door flew open—
Three men in black uniforms and tactical armor were standing just beyond it, guns drawn. Texas, already bent low from the kick, cried out, “Oh, shit!” and simultaneously dove away and tossed something backward into the room. The men saw it. One of them shouted, “Grenade!” in English.
Without thinking, Livia spun away and yelled into the phone, “Cut the lights!”
The club instantly went dark. There was a gigantic Boom! and a flash of light from inside the room. And then another Boom! and flash, and another. And more. Not a grenade, she realized. A flashbang.
She pulled on the goggles and got out the Glock. There was pandemonium behind her. People shouting, stampeding away. The lights in Sorm’s VIP room were still on. It must have been on a separate system, as part of some sort of safe room. The room was empty now. The three soldiers or whatever they were had spilled out into the club, and they must have managed to move before the flashbang went off, because it looked as though they could still see, their guns up in two-handed grips as they tried to acquire a target.
One of them got off two shots. The rounds hit the floor to the left of Texas. Texas rolled the other way and fired twice from his back, hitting the soldier in the chest. The soldier spun away. He might have been hurt, but with the body armor, he definitely wasn’t out of the fight.
Another of the soldiers circled right. They were going to flank Texas. Their vision might have been okay, but she could see that the concussive effect of the flashbang had messed up some of their coordination. Still, even if Texas could get off headshots and obviate the body armor, three on one, he wasn’t going to make it.
Texas rolled and shot twice again. The guy who was flanking him jerked from the impact of the bullets. But again they were chest shots. In the dim light from the VIP room, Texas probably couldn’t see the armor. Or rolling around on the floor, center mass was the best he could manage. Or both.
The third guy moved the other way, hugging the wall. The first guy leveled his pistol, and Texas shot at him again. The round went past the guy’s face. Texas had figured out the problem, but there was too much going on and his position was too poor—
Texas shot again. This time, the round caught the guy in the face and he went down. But while Texas had been engaging him, the third guy had moved stealthily along the wall and was bringing up his gun—
Livia took aim and fired. The first round caught the guy just below the throat. She moved in and kept shooting, walking up the barrel a notch as she closed. Her second and third rounds were both headshots. The guy went down.
Texas whipped his head in her direction and simultaneously started to bring his pistol around, but then whipped his head and the pistol forward again. Even in all the craziness, he must have sensed that wherever the shots had come from, they hadn’t been intended for him. “What the fuck?” he cried out.
And then he rolled again, and just in time, too, because the second guy fired and put two rounds in the carpet where Texas’s body had been just an instant earlier. Seeing he’d missed Texas, the second guy swung his gun around to try to acquire Livia. He was too far to risk a headshot, so she sighted center mass and eased back the trigger, moving in as she fired. Once. Twice. A third shot. He twitched from the rounds. She brought up the muzzle and took aim at—
There was a boom to her right and blood erupted from the side of the guy’s head. While he’d been engaging her, Texas had sighted in the finishing shot.
Livia looked around wildly. People were running in all directions, screaming and shouting. The house lasers were still crisscrossing through the darkness, the music still thumping. She didn’t see any more opposition.
She glanced at Texas. He was still on his back, his head raised off the floor and swiveling left and right, his gun up and extended in a two-handed grip.
“What the fuck?” he cried out again, without even looking at her.
“Where’s Sorm?” she yelled. “He wasn’t in that room!”
“Sorm ain’t here! Can’t you tell? This was a setup! We gotta git!”
He brought his legs in and popped to his feet. For a big guy, he moved fast.
“Where is he?” she yelled, scanning left and right.
“I don’t know! For all I know, he wasn’t ever even here! Come on, we gotta vamoose!”
He moved alongside her and turned so they were facing in opposite directions, with a 360-degree view of the room between them.
“How do you know he wasn’t here?” she shouted.
“I don’t know! All I know is who was here—three professional badasses in body armor who’d likely have punched my ticket if you hadn’t been here to stop them. Do you get it? Sorm knew we were coming. Or I was coming, or you were coming, or whatever, lord have mercy, can we please discuss our theories of whatever the fuck just happened once we’re safely away?”
“What if he went out through the room? It has a back door!”
“I know it does, but—”
“If he was here, that’s the way he went. I’m going after him.”
From the direction of the entrance, she saw three men fighting their way through the crowd. “Shit,” she said. “The security guys. From the entrance.”
“Don’t kill them,” Texas said. “They’re just doing their jobs. They’ve got nothing to do with Sorm.”
She knew it was true. But she was so close, and if these men tried to stop her—
“Just let me handle it,” Texas said. “All right? Lose the goggles and put away the gun. Trust me. Otherwise we’re going to have another gunfight, and I swear two in a day is my absolute limit.”
Still she hesitated.
“I’ll get them to go the other way, all right? Just do what I say!”
Certain she was making a fatal mistake, she pulled the goggles and dropped them in the purse, followed by the Glock.
Texas didn’t say another word. He just slipped the gun back under his shirt, squeezed one of her hands in his, and started waving frantically at the approaching guards with the other.
“Thank God!” he shouted. “Thank God you’re here! Oh my lord, they’re shooting people over there in that karaoke room! And singing Elton John!” He pointed in a direction away from both the entrance and Sorm’s VIP room. “There, over there, do you hear me? For the love of God, hurry! I’m scared! I’m scared!”
The security guys took off. Livia shook her head, amazed it had worked. People really fell for this guy’s hick routine. Without another word, she pulled the Glock and took off straight into Sorm’s safe room.
“Damn it, don’t!” Texas said from behind her, but she didn’t care—if there was any chance Sorm had been here, she was going to kill him.
She leaped over the bodies of Sorm’s Thai guards and into a room filled with acrid smoke. The back door was open, a riser of fire-escape stairs lit up in cold fluorescent light behind it. She bolted straight through.
“Wait!” she heard Texas call from behind her, but she didn’t even slow, she hit the stairwell and tore downward four steps at a time. She could hear Texas’s footfalls echoing just behind her.
“They might be expecting this, damn it!” she heard him shout. She didn’t care. She couldn’t let Sorm get away. She couldn’t.
She heard Texas close behind her, and then somehow he was past her, moving so fast he was pinwheeling his arms for balance. He nearly fell, but managed to grab a banister at the riser below them and stabilize himself. He threw an arm around her waist and caught her. She wanted to sweep his legs and keep running down the stairs, but for some reason held back.
“Listen to me!” he said. “Just listen. The guy who arranged all this for me. The intel. Hacking the door locks. Everything. He’s supposed to have contractors waiting on the ground floor behind the fire exit. If this thing is on the up-and-up and Sorm went that way, the contractors already have him. And if it ain’t on the up-and-up, then the guy those contractors are waiting for is me. We can’t go out that way. There’s no upside, only danger. Please, just listen to me. We’ll get Sorm another way.”
She recognized on some level that what he was saying made sense. But still, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
“No!” she said. “He was here. He was—”
“Damn it, we can’t go out that way. More bad guys could be expecting us, don’t you see? Please. You seem like a nice lady and I don’t want you running straight into a damn ambush. I can tell you mean business with Sorm. So do I. Trust me, okay? We’ll get him.”
He was right. She hated it, but he was right. She shook loose from his arm. “The guest-room floors are all locked,” she said. “We can only get out on the lobby level. Or the parking lot, through the fire exit.”
“I can get my guy to pop the locks.”