by Lee Child
Svetlana went into the kitchen. I heard a drawer rattle open. Heard it close. Saw Svetlana come back.
With two knives.
They were long butcher’s tools. For gutting or filleting or boning. They had black handles. Steel blades. Wicked wafer-thin cutting edges. Svetlana threw one of them to Lila. She caught it expertly by the handle with her free hand. Svetlana moved to the corner opposite her. They had me triangulated. Lila was forty-five degrees to my left, Svetlana was forty-five degrees to my right.
Lila twisted her upper body and jammed the P220’s silencer hard into the angle where the front wall met the side. She found the catch at the heel of the butt with her thumb and dropped the magazine. It fell out and hit the floor in the corner of the room. Three rounds showed in the slot. Therefore one was still chambered. She threw the gun itself into the other corner, behind Svetlana. The gun and the magazine were now twenty feet apart, one behind one woman, and the other behind the other.
“Like a treasure hunt,” Lila said. “The gun won’t fire without the magazine in place. To prevent an accidental discharge if a round is mistakenly left in the chamber. The Swiss are very cautious people. So you need to pick up the gun, and then pick up the magazine. Or vice versa. But first, of course, you need to get past us.”
I said nothing.
She said, “If you should succeed, in a mad wounded scramble, then I recommend you use the first round on yourself.”
And then she smiled, and stepped forward a pace. Svetlana did the same. They held their knives low, fingers below the handle, thumbs above. Like street fighters. Like experts.
The long blades winked in the light.
I stood still.
Lila said, “We’re going to enjoy this more than you could possibly imagine.”
I did nothing.
Lila said, “A delay is good. It heightens the anticipation.”
I stood still.
Lila said, “But if we get bored waiting, we’ll come and get you.”
I said nothing. Stood still.
Then I reached behind me and came out with my Benchmade 3300, from where it had been duct-taped to the small of my back.
Chapter 83
I thumbed the release and the blade snapped out with a sound that was halfway between a click and a thump. A loud sound, in the silent room. And an unhappy sound. I don’t like knives. I never have. I have no real talent with them.
But I have as much of an instinct for self-preservation as any guy.
Maybe more than most.
And by that point I had been scuffling since the age of five, and all of my defeats had been minor. And I’m the kind of guy who watches and learns. I had seen knife fights all over the world. The Far East, Europe, the hardscrabble scrublands outside army bases in the southern United States, in streets, in alleys, outside bars and pool halls.
First rule: Don’t get cut early. Nothing weakens you faster than blood loss.
Svetlana was more than a foot shorter than me and she was thick and wide and her arms were proportional. Lila was taller, more loose-limbed, more graceful. But all in all I figured that even against blades six inches longer than mine, I still had the advantage.
Plus I had just changed the game, and they were still dealing with the surprise.
Plus they were fighting for fun, and I was fighting for my life.
I wanted to get to the kitchen, so I danced toward Svetlana, who was between me and it. She was up on her toes, knife down at her knees, feinting left, feinting right. I kept my blade down low, to match hers. She swung. I arched back. Her blade hissed past my thigh. I jammed my ass back and my shoulders forward and clubbed her with an overarm left hook. It grazed her eyebrow and then caught her full on the side of the nose.
She looked astonished. Like most knife fighters she thought it was all about the steel. She forgot that people have two hands.
She rocked back on her heels and Lila came in from my left. Blade low. Darting, jabbing. Mouth open in an ugly grimace. Concentrating hard. She understood. This was no longer a game. No longer fun. She ducked in, she ducked out, feinting, backing off, always working. For a time we all danced like that. Frantic, breathless, abrupt abbreviated movements, dust and sweat and fear in the air, their eyes locked on my blade, mine switching constantly between theirs.
Svetlana stepped in. Stepped out. Lila came at me, balanced, up on her toes. I kept my hips back and my shoulders forward. I swung my blade hard for Lila’s face. Huge. Convulsive. Like I was aiming to throw a ball four hundred feet. Lila ducked back. She knew the swing was going to miss, because she was going to make it miss. Svetlana knew it was going to miss, because she trusted Lila.
I knew it was going to miss, because I planned not to let it hit.
I stopped the violent maneuver halfway through and reversed direction and aimed a vicious surprise backhand straight at Svetlana. I sliced her forehead. A solid blow. I felt the blade hit bone. A lock of her hair hit her chest. The Benchmade worked exactly the way it should. D2 steel. You could have dropped a ten-dollar bill on it and gotten two fives in exchange. I put a six-inch horizontal gash halfway between Svetlana’s hairline and her eyebrows. Open to the bone.
She rocked back and stood still.
No pain. Not yet.
Forehead cuts are never fatal. But they bleed a lot. Within seconds blood was sheeting down into her eyes. Blinding her. If I had been wearing shoes I could have killed her there and then. Bring her down with a blow to the knees, and then kick her head to pulp. But I wasn’t about to risk the bones in my feet against her fireplug body. Lack of mobility would have killed me just as fast.
I danced back.
Lila came straight after me.
I kept my hips back and dodged the hissing arc of her blade. Left, right. I hit the wall behind me. I timed it and waited until her arm was across her body and turned sideways and shoulder-charged her and bounced her away. I spun onward to where Svetlana was tottering around and trying to wipe the pouring blood from her eyes. I swatted her knife arm away and stepped in and nicked her neck above her collar bone and dodged back out.
Then Lila cut me.
She had figured out the reach issue. She was holding her knife in her fingertips way at the end of the handle. She lunged in. Her hair was flying. Her shoulders were hunched forward. She was looking for every half-inch of advantage she could get. She stopped on a stiff front leg and bent low and leaned in and slashed wildly at my stomach.
And hit it.
A bad cut. A wild swing, a strong arm, a razor-sharp blade. Very bad. It was a long diagonal slice below my navel and above the waistband of my boxers. No pain. Not yet. Just a brief strange signal from my skin, telling me it was no longer all connected together.
I paused a beat. Disbelief. Then I did what I always do when someone hurts me. I stepped in, not away. Her momentum had carried her knife beyond my hip. My blade was low. I slashed backhand at her thigh and cut her deep and then pushed off my back foot and hit her in the face with my left fist. Bull’s-eye. A major, stunning blow. She spun away and I barged on toward Svetlana. Her face was a mask of blood. She swung her blade right. Then left. She opened up. I stepped in and slashed down on the inside of her right forearm. I cut her to the bone. Veins, tendons, ligaments. She howled. Not from pain. That would come later. Or not. She howled from fear, because she was done. Her arm was useless. I spun her around with a blow to the shoulder and stabbed her in the kidney. All four inches, with a savage sideways jerk. Safe to do. No ribs in that region. No chance of hitting bone and jamming the blade. Lots of blood flows through the kidneys. All kinds of arteries. Ask any dialysis patient. All of a person’s blood passes through the kidneys many times a day. Pints of it. Gallons of it. Now in Svetlana’s case it was going in and it wasn’t coming back out.
She went down to her knees. Lila was trying to clear her head. Her nose was broken. Her flawless face was ruined. She charged me. I feinted left and moved right. We danced around Svetlana’s kneeling form.
A whole circle. I got back to where I had started and ducked away to the kitchenette. Stepped between the counters. Grabbed one of the hard chairs that Svetlana had piled there. I threw it left-handed at Lila. She ducked away and hunched and it smashed against her back.
I came out of the kitchen and stepped behind Svetlana and put a hand in her hair and hauled her head back. Leaned around and cut her throat. Ear to ear. Hard work, even with the Benchmade’s great blade. I had to pull and tug and saw. Muscle, fat, hard flesh, ligaments. The steel scraped across bone. Weird tubercular sounds came up at me out of her severed windpipe. Wheezing and gasping. There were fountains of blood as her arteries went. It pulsed and sprayed way out in front of her. It hit the far wall. It soaked my hand and made it slippery. I let go of her hair and she pitched forward. Her face hit the boards with a thump.
I stepped away, panting.
Lila faced me, panting.
The room felt burning hot and it smelled of coppery blood.
I said, “One down.”
She said, “One still up.”
I nodded. “Looks like the pupil was better than the teacher.”
She said, “Who says I was the pupil?”
Her thigh was bleeding badly. There was a neat slice in the black nylon of her pants and blood was running down her leg. Her shoe was already soaked. My boxers were soaked. They had turned from white to red. I looked down and saw blood welling out of me. A lot of it. It was bad. But my old scar had saved me. My shrapnel wound, from Beirut, long ago. The ridged white skin from the clumsy MASH stitches was tough and gnarled and it had slowed Lila’s blade and deflected it shallower. Without it the tail of the cut would have been much longer and deeper. For years I had resented the hasty work by the emergency surgeons. Now I was grateful for it.
Lila’s busted nose started to bleed. The blood ran down to her mouth and she coughed and spat. Looked down at the floor. Saw Svetlana’s knife. It was mired in a spreading pool of blood. The blood was already thickening. It was soaking into the old boards. It was running into the cracks between them. Lila’s left arm moved. Then it stopped. To bend down and pick up Svetlana’s knife would make her vulnerable. Likewise for me. I was five feet from the P220. She was five feet from the magazine.
The pain started. My head spun and buzzed. My blood pressure was falling.
Lila said, “If you ask nicely I’ll let you walk away.”
“I’m not asking.”
“You can’t win.”
“Dream on.”
“I’m prepared to fight to the death.”
“You don’t have a choice in the matter. That decision has already been made.”
“You could kill a woman?”
“I just did.”
“One like me?”
“Especially one like you.”
She spat again and breathed hard through her mouth. She coughed. She looked down at her leg. She nodded and said, “OK.” She looked up at me with her amazing eyes.
I stood still.
She said, “If you mean it, this is where you do it.”
I nodded. I meant it. So I did it. I was weak, but it was easy. Her leg was slowing her down. She was having trouble with her breathing. Her sinuses were smashed. Blood was pooling in the back of her throat. She was dazed and dizzy, from when I had hit her. I took the second chair from the kitchen and charged her with it. Now my reach was unbeatable. I backed her into the corner with it and hit her with it twice until she dropped her knife and fell. I sat down beside her and strangled her. Slowly, because I was fading fast. But I didn’t want to use the blade. I don’t like knives.
Afterward I crawled back to the kitchen and rinsed the Benchmade under the tap. Then I used its dagger point to cut butterfly shapes out of the black duct tape. I pinched my wound together with my fingers and used the butterflies to hold it together. A dollar and a half. Any hardware store. Essential equipment. I struggled back into my clothes. I reloaded my pockets. I put my shoes back on.
Then I sat down on the floor. Just for a minute. But it turned out longer. A medical man would say I passed out. I prefer to think I just went to sleep.
Chapter 84
I woke up in a hospital bed. I was wearing a paper gown. The clock in my head told me it was four in the afternoon. Ten hours. The taste in my mouth told me most of them had been chemically assisted. I had a clip on my finger. It had a wire. The wire must have been connected to a nurses’ station. The clip must have detected some kind of an altered heartbeat pattern, because about a minute after I woke up a whole bunch of people came in. A doctor, a nurse, then Jacob Mark, then Theresa Lee, then Springfield, then Sansom. The doctor was a woman and the nurse was a man.
The doctor fussed around for a minute, checking charts and staring at monitors. Then she picked up my wrist and checked my pulse, which seemed a little superfluous with all the high technology at her disposal. Then in answer to questions I hadn’t asked, she told me I was in Bellevue Hospital and that my condition was very satisfactory. Her ER people had cleaned the wound and sutured it and filled me full of antibiotics and tetanus injections and given me three units of blood. She told me to avoid heavy lifting for a month. Then she left. The nurse went with her.
I looked at Theresa Lee and asked, “What happened to me?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Of course I remember. But what’s the official version?”
“You were found on the street in the East Village. Unexplained knife wound. Happens all the time. They ran a tox screen and found traces of barbiturate. They put you down as a dope deal gone bad.”
“Did they tell the cops?”
“I am the cops.”
“How did I get to the East Village?”
“You didn’t. We brought you straight here.”
“We?”
“Me and Mr. Springfield.”
“How did you find me?”
“We triangulated the cell phone. Which led us to the general area. The exact address was Mr. Springfield’s idea.”
Springfield said, “A certain mujahideen leader told us all about doubling back to abandoned hideouts twenty-five years ago.”
I asked, “Is there going to be any comeback?”
John Sansom said, “No.”
Simple as that.
I said, “Are you sure? There are nine corpses in that house.”
“The DoD guys are there right now. They’ll issue a loud no comment. With a knowing smirk. Designed to make everyone give them the credit.”
“Suppose the wind changes direction? That happens from time to time. As you know.”
“As a crime scene, it’s a mess.”
“I left blood there.”
“There’s a lot of blood there. It’s an old building. If anyone runs tests they’ll come up with rat DNA, mostly.”
“There’s blood on my clothes.”
Theresa Lee said, “The hospital burned your clothes.”
“Why?”
“Biohazard.”
“They were brand-new.”
“They were soaked with blood. No one takes a risk with blood anymore.”
“Right-hand fingerprints,” I said. “Inside the window handles and on the trapdoor.”
“Old building,” Sansom said. “It will be torn down and redeveloped before the wind changes.”
“Shell cases,” I said.
Springfield said, “Standard DoD issue. I’m sure they’re delighted. They’ll probably leak one to the media.”
“Are they still looking for me?”
“They can’t. It would confuse the narrative.”
“Turf wars,” I said.
“Which they just won, apparently.”
I nodded.
Sansom asked, “Where is the memory stick?”
I looked at Jacob Mark. “You OK?”
He said, “Not really.”
I said, “You’re going to have to hear some stuff.”
He said, “OK.”
I hauled myself
into a sitting position. Didn’t hurt at all. I guessed I was full of painkiller. I pulled my knees up and tented the sheet and moved the hem of my paper gown and took a peek at the cut. Couldn’t see it. I was wrapped with bandages from my hips to my ribcage.
Sansom said, “You told us you could get us within fifteen feet.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore. Time has moved on. We’re going to have to do it by dead reckoning.”
“Great. You were bullshitting all along. You don’t know where it is.”
“We know the general shape of it,” I said. “They planned for the best part of three months and then executed during the final week. They coerced Susan by using Peter as leverage. She drove up from Annandale, got stuck in a four-hour traffic jam, say from nine in the evening until one in the morning, and then she arrived in Manhattan just before two in the morning. I assume we know exactly when she came out of the Holland Tunnel. So what we have to do is work backward and figure out exactly where her car was jammed up at midnight.”
“How does that help us?”
“Because at midnight she threw the memory stick out her car window.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because when she arrived she didn’t have a cell phone with her.”
Sansom glanced at Lee. Lee nodded. Said, “Keys and a wallet. That was all. Not in her car, either. The FBI inventoried the contents.”
Sansom said, “Not everyone uses a cell phone.”
“True,” I said. “And I’m that guy. The only guy in the world without a cell phone. Certainly a person like Susan would have had one.”
Jacob Mark said, “She had one.”
Sansom said, “So?”
“The Hoths set a deadline. Almost certainly midnight. Susan didn’t show, the Hoths went to work. They made a threat, and they carried it out. And they proved it. They phoned through a cell phone picture. Maybe a live video clip. Peter on the slab, that long first cut. Susan’s life changed, effectively, on the stroke of midnight. She was helpless in a traffic jam. The phone in her hand was suddenly appalling and repugnant. She threw it out the window. Followed it with the memory stick, which was the symbol of all her troubles. They’re both still there, in the trash on the side of I-95. No other explanation.”