by Thomas Perry
From time to time Eddie would cheer him on. “Come on, kid. I’ve seen you cut a hundred ribs in a day. Control the blade.”
“I am.”
“What do you do now?”
“Put the blade through the rib cage.”
“What are you going for?”
“The heart and lungs.”
“Where’s my heart?”
“Between the fourth and fifth ribs. Here.”
“What if there’s no opening to reach that?”
“Neck. Front of the elbow, back of the knee, inner sides of the thighs.”
After their first few lessons, the shooting was always done with moving targets. Eddie said, “Most of the guys you’ll collect on are the kind who have always walked right up to somebody and stuck a gun in his face. They’ll be about as close to you as twenty feet and then can’t hit you if you’re moving. You’re not going to be like that.”
Eddie made him practice with a pistol, first trying to hit a small Hula-Hoop covered with butcher paper that Eddie propelled at different speeds. Then it was a set of kids’ rubber balls six inches in diameter that Eddie bought in bulk. Eddie would roll them, bounce them, or throw them. Only when the boy could hit the ball nearly every time did Eddie move on to the next lesson.
Eddie started his rifle training with paper targets, but later the same day changed it to hitting something in motion. He would tie a length of chalk line to a tree limb, tie the other end to an object, push it hard so that it swung like a pendulum, and retreat to stand near the boy as he fired at it. Eddie explained, “The point of shooting is to hit somebody who is alive. If he’s not moving, he’s probably dead, so shooting him is a waste of time and ammo.”
At the end of each shooting session, Eddie taught him to break down each weapon, clean it, and reassemble it quickly. It wasn’t too long before the boy could step into a room, pick up a firearm he hadn’t seen before, and handle it safely and knowledgeably enough to be able to load and fire it in seconds, or take it apart and reassemble it.
Almost a half century later, as Schaeffer sat in the airplane on the flight to Singapore, he knew that what Eddie had been teaching him was about living. It was an attitude, a willingness to put in the work to become an expert. People who didn’t do that would only live if they didn’t meet someone who had. Michael’s life had been dangerous, and he owed the fact that he still had it to Eddie.
So much time had passed. There were many aspects of getting older that Schaeffer did not like. There was a new uncertainty that his muscles would operate as they once had. Because of Eddie, he had always stayed fit and strong through exercise. He had lifted weights, run, and walked. In later years, he added tai chi and yoga so that he could stretch and bend. He had a thin, sinewy body. He knew it must be in the process of wearing out, but it still worked well enough. He had lived to look in a mirror and see gray hair.
Eddie had made his old age possible when he was young. The secrets were not complicated. “Eyes open. Hit first. Move fast. Stop when he’s dead.”
There were variations and extra practice. “Everything you do in a gunfight has to be automatic, done as a habit, a reflex you’ve programmed into your brain. Do it without taking the time to think. Always carry your pistol with a round in the chamber. Put your hand on it as soon as you know you’re going to need it. When he’s close enough, you raise it, aim, and fire exactly as you’ve been taught, exactly as you’ve practiced. It’s unlikely that you’re going to hit any organ that will kill him with your first couple of shots. Aim at his high center mass and keep firing rapidly until he dies or your pistol’s slide stays back and the chamber stays open. When it does, you’d better be moving. You reload quickly and automatically on the run. Eject the empty magazine, slip in the spare one, pull back and release the slide to chamber a round, and fire. You practice these movements until you can’t forget or fumble because your body knows them.” Eddie had taught him how to be the one who survived.
Now he was being hunted again. The four men who had been sent after him in York hadn’t been up to the job, and they had died for it. Their arrival had not been a complete surprise, because people had come after him before. But their passports had worried him. They didn’t have names that were familiar to him from the old days. They weren’t sons of men who had fought him before.
The ones in the parking lot at the Manchester Airport had been even more of a shock to him. There must have been a transponder hidden in the Bentley so that the owner could keep track of where it was. Certainly somebody had sent the two men to the lot at Manchester. The two men weren’t carrying passports, but their driver’s licenses showed they were English, not Italian American or any other kind of American. This time the threat was different. It was good to be as far away as possible.
8
The captain made his announcement, the cabin-crew chief issued her instructions, and the plane descended slowly from above the few wispy clouds into golden unimpeded light, bumped and rattled over the runway until its momentum was expended, and then rolled along sedately toward the terminal.
Schaeffer had slept most of the twelve hours from Singapore to Sydney. He remembered flying when he was young, out on a job. He had learned to lean back in the seat and be asleep before the plane reached cruising altitude. He would get off the plane feeling as strong and flexible as a big cat. He still had the knack, but this time his joints were stiff and his spine felt as though it were missing a couple of vertebrae. Age levied a tax to be paid in small discomforts. A few had come from memorable injuries, but most were just time and wear.
It took him a minute to loosen up, and he felt like a thawing snake uncoiling to get out of the seat. Standing straight was a pleasure, and he stood there letting his muscles loosen while he waited for his turn to leave. He watched the passengers ahead of him retrieving their bags from the overhead compartments, then slowly making their way toward the open hatch on the left side of the plane. They went, and then he went. As he walked up the aisle with his bag, his mind was fully on the question of who was trying to have him killed.
There were plenty of suspects. During his last trip to the United States seven years ago, after Frank Tosca had sent Mafia soldiers after him, there had been collateral damage. He had needed to take out a young man who had been guarding the trail above the resort in the Arizona mountains so that he could reach Tosca’s cabin. Whoever the man was, he’d been at a highly sensitive gathering, which meant he had relatives high in the hierarchy. Dozens of powerful bosses had been there, and because of Schaeffer, they’d all been rounded up by the FBI, booked as persons of interest in Tosca’s murder, and photographed. Some were old enough to have known him. He could think of about twenty men who would like to kill him, but could think of no reason to suspect or eliminate any of them now.
He had bought a few guidebooks to Sydney in the Manchester terminal and read parts of them on the plane to Singapore. He had also downloaded a version onto his cell phone and read more on his flight to Sydney. Now that he’d finally landed at the Sydney airport, what was most attractive was that there was a train from the airport into the center of Sydney. Trains were designed to pack large numbers of people aboard quickly and speed them to a destination, and that seemed to be what he needed now.
As he stepped off the plane, he began scanning faces. He looked for people who showed signs of recognizing him. He saw nobody he could identify as a threat, but his whole situation was a threat. One of the things that bothered him was that neither of the groups of men who had attacked him included people he’d ever seen before. That could mean that somebody had a picture of him. A picture in a telephone’s memory could have been sent ahead to any destination in seconds. If someone in Manchester had found out his destination was Sydney, they could have sent his photo to someone in Australia a whole day ago. There could easily be people here waiting for him, and his photo could be forwarded from one to another without limi
t. Hiding half a world away from danger had become hiding a half second away.
He went through customs easily with his Paul Foster passport. He was carrying enough money but not too much, had no weapons or contraband, and looked like a respectable, well-dressed older man. He moved quickly from customs, as Eddie had taught him. “Never miss a chance to help the enemy make a stupid mistake. Start with anything you’ve got that’s misleading. Once you’re chasing or being chased, all the decisions have to be made fast, with no warning.”
A person had to choose every time a crossroad came up, or he hit a fork in the road, or there were two means of transportation, and keep reversing himself, appearing to do one thing but then doing another.
He saw the sign over the escalator that said “Trains,” walked toward it most of the way, then veered away from it in the direction of the exits. He quickly turned around, stepped on the escalator, and rode it down, looking back to see if he had drawn anyone else off course. He hadn’t.
The escalator took him to the train station under the international terminal. At the foot of the escalator were vending machines. He had read about this in the guidebook. The machines sold Opal cards and single tickets, and he knew it was best to buy the card.
He looked at the escalator again, but saw no stand-outs. He spotted a couple of Australian officials in uniforms and emergency reflector vests, with sidearms on their belts. He decided cops made good company for this trip.
He looked up at the signs and chose Platform 1. The train for the place everyone wanted to go was always Platform 1.
He needed to wait for only about four minutes before a train swept in and stopped, the doors huffing open all at once to let out the arrivals. When they had passed, he stepped in with the rest of the people waiting on the platform. The train was clean and new-looking and had mostly empty seats, all of them upholstered in a blue-patterned fabric that made them look like airline seats.
He noticed the two cops he’d seen earlier striding ahead on the platform to a car at the front of the train. A few seconds later, several passengers came back along the aisle, as though they’d been displaced.
He looked at the guide on his phone. The train to the city took thirteen minutes. The train ride was the last chance for anyone who knew he was here to begin trailing him. After these thirteen minutes, he could climb into a taxi and disappear into a city of five million people. The city center was only six miles away now. The sound of the doors sliding shut while the last people hurried past to get into seats made him feel calmer.
As soon as the train began to move forward, Schaeffer felt his seat tugged back from the top as someone big grasped the back and held it to lower himself into the seat behind. Schaeffer glanced over his shoulder and saw two men had come forward from another car and sat down. When he looked ahead again, his mind carried an image.
They were both bigger than he was. One was tall and lanky with squared shoulders, large hands, and knees that were visible in front of his lap as though his tibia and fibula were overly long. His head was shaved, with only a hint of blond peach fuzz within the hairline. The other man was slightly shorter, but much thicker, with arms that looked as wide as the other man’s legs. Both wore raincoats.
Maybe it was raining outside at ground level, or had rained. It was winter in Sydney, but to Schaeffer it looked as though the coats were meant to cover something. He knew nothing about Australian organized crime, but he’d seen men like these a thousand times in the United States—an expression in the eyes that seemed to say, “You weren’t expecting a nightmare like me, were you?” and a strange mobility of the mouth. Some, like the tall one, would begin to make chewing motions, as though they were aching to say something.
Schaeffer felt a sudden jolt when the thin man hit the seatback with his knee as he stood. Nobody had followed these two men into the car, and the ones who had entered before them had gone on to the next car forward, so Schaeffer was alone with these two. The tall man walked up the aisle, stepped up on a seat, and took out a spray can to spray white paint over the bulb covering the security camera above him. He used his long legs to step over into the next row to spray the next one, and then the next.
Schaeffer used the thin man’s distance to slip out of his seat while facing the big man, and move up the aisle to the front of the car.
By now the two men were both out of their seats. The heavy man, who was supposed to be the strongman, didn’t worry Schaeffer as much as the long one, who put his spray can in his overcoat pocket and was now gripping the overhead bars and stepping on the tops of the seats to propel himself toward the front. As he neared Schaeffer, he swung toward him like an ape.
Schaeffer sensed the man was trying to occupy Schaeffer’s attention so his friend, the strong man, could charge up the aisle to take him down from behind.
Instead, Schaeffer lunged toward the tall man and punched him hard while his arms were above him and his ribs exposed. When the man dropped from the bars, bent over, Schaeffer snatched the paint can that was protruding from the man’s coat pocket and sprayed his face with white paint.
The big man charged forward up the aisle toward Schaeffer, but Schaeffer turned the spray can on him, covering his face too, half blinding him. While the big man was trying to wipe his eyes, Schaeffer threw the can so that it hit his face hard, which bought him time to slip out the sliding door to the next car.
Schaeffer dragged the door shut, unhooked the leather strap from his carry-on bag, wrapped it around the door handle and the safety bar on the wall near it, and fastened the two clasps to hold it. He glanced at his watch. Only two minutes were gone. Eleven more minutes to the station, where there would be more cops. He looked ahead in the car he’d entered, but nobody seemed to have noticed anything going on behind them; they were all facing forward.
Schaeffer turned to face the door he’d strapped shut. The two men, both with faces painted white, were on the other side, pulling hard to open it. The cable in the strap would almost certainly resist, but the leather and the brass clasps were more questionable.
The two white faces grimaced and bared their teeth as they strained against the door. They were big, strong men, and the strap wasn’t made for this kind of use. Schaeffer was comforted by the observation that for the moment, at least, they were going about it the wrong way. The thick, strong man was exerting constant pressure, and his long-limbed companion stood beside him, using his reach to exert the same steady pressure.
As Schaeffer watched, he saw the tall man get frustrated with the first method. He shoved the door hard, then took a step backward and prepared to hurl his shoulder against it again.
The strong man seemed to notice that the sudden jolts when the tall man hurled his weight against the handle were making the door give a little each time. The force must be stretching the leather a bit, or bending the clasps.
Schaeffer guessed that the two attackers were going to succeed at some point. There was no question it was better to keep the pair beyond the door instead of letting them break in. Now they began to work together. They threw themselves against the door handle over and over, stretching the leather a little more. Schaeffer tried neutralizing their efforts by timing their thrusts and pushing the opposite way each time.
He knew he was not as strong as either of them, let alone both. They were about half his age, and the big man was twice his size. He tried to raise his spirits with the theory that these men had been hired only because they looked scary to competitors and debtors, but when he felt the force as the men gave a few more tries, he began to fear that they were as strong as they looked.
Schaeffer kept trying to soften the force of the combined pushes the men exerted, but he was wearing himself out and time was going too slowly. He couldn’t hold them indefinitely.
He saw the moment when the lanky man realized how to win. His eyes focused on the strap as he seemed to realize that if it stretched only a lit
tle bit more, there would be enough space between the door and the frame to let a blade through.
Schaeffer looked at the hands of the two men gripping the door. The big man wore a watch with a face about an inch and a half in diameter. Only four minutes had elapsed. There were still nine to go. He braced his back against the wall of the train car and his feet against the door handle, and sapped the next few attacks of their force. Meanwhile he watched the men’s faces. The tall man strained harder. He grimaced so that his spray-painted face looked like a bleached skull gritting yellowed teeth.
The knife came out fast, the man’s right hand appearing from somewhere behind his thigh, shielded from sight at first by the overcoat. It arrived at the crack between the door and the frame and jabbed through, the long blade protruding as it came down, sharpened side first.
Schaeffer dropped his leg to get it away from the opening just as the blade slid downward. The skull-face’s snarl changed to a smile, and the man strained harder as his partner pushed the door. The blade was long—about eight inches—and it almost reached the strap this time.
Schaeffer shifted his weight to the armrest of the aisle seat and kicked the blade from the side on the chance that it might be thin enough to bend, but it wasn’t. He turned, took his leather bag by its handle, and hurried forward along the aisle toward the next door.
As he slid the next door aside, he studied the mechanism to see if there was a more effective mechanical way to block it—a built-in lock or something, but if one was present, he didn’t see it. He shut the door, used the belt from his pants to wrap the handle and the nearest bar, and buckled it in place. Then he went on to the next car and the next.
Many passengers were in the car he’d just left and the one he’d entered, and a few of them became aware that he was engaged in some kind of struggle but didn’t seem able to interpret it. A couple of the men half stood, then sat back down. A few seemed to think that since he was moving quickly, he must be the problem, but then they looked behind them, saw his two pursuers, and changed their minds. For one reason or another, all seemed paralyzed.