by Greg Rucka
Chace stole another glance at her watch, the barely luminous hands of her Rolex now reading eleven minutes past three, then eased the hush puppy out of her pocket, taking the safety off with her thumb and disengaging the slide lock. Though it would make the gun that much more silent, it allowed her only one shot at a time, and with two men waiting, that just wouldn’t do. The timing on this had to be right. As soon as she moved, as soon as she started taking the guards down, there’d be no stopping, no time or opportunity for a real pause until they were out of the city and on the way to the rendezvous with Porter. And even that was suspect, because Chace couldn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be a pursuit once they left the city.
The run would start with her first shot.
When and where it would end, she didn’t know.
From up the lane came the sound of a man’s cough, barely bouncing off the wall and the street, and then she saw him, the walking guard, no more than twenty meters away at the most, emerging from the far corner. He’d been around the front, most likely inside, and Chace took reassurance from that. She was reading the terrain right.
The guard continued in her direction, stopping at the Volga for a moment to lean down and speak to the driver. He was tall enough that bending to the side window of the Volga took his upper body almost parallel to the ground. The pistol in her hand felt solid and even good, and Chace took a deep breath, filling herself with oxygen, then came around the corner, holding the gun flat against her right thigh, her right side to the wall. She started forward, unsteady, bumped into the wall with her shoulder, kept moving forward, almost staggering.
The guard speaking into the car turned his head to her, but didn’t straighten, saying something in Uzbek to the driver. She continued forward, and the guard began straightening, turning toward her and now speaking, and Chace bounced herself off the wall again, now almost even with the rear of the Volga. This time, she brought her right arm up as she staggered back, and pulled the trigger twice in quick succession.
The bullets hit the guard in the chest and face, and he toppled in time with the ejected brass pinging onto the ground. Chace straightened instantly, lunging forward and twisting, bringing the gun around to point through the open passenger window. The driver was staring at her in openmouthed incomprehension, not yet having processed what he’d just seen, and Chace fired the hush puppy once more. The driver made a noise between a gurgle and a gag, then slumped back against his door and didn’t move.
Chace dropped to a knee beside the first body, running her free hand over his clothes, into his jacket, around his waist, and was unable to find a radio on him. So she’d been right about that, at least; the radios were confined to the cars alone, and not to the walking patrols. So much the better.
Pistol in her hand, Chace came around the front of the car and opened the driver’s door, letting the body topple out onto the ground, stepping over it and settling into the seat. The driver had been short, and she had to slide the seat back. The interior smelled of cigarettes and, now, fresh blood. She checked the gauges, saw that there was just over half a tank of fuel still available, and that the engine was still running. Hooked beneath the dashboard on the passenger’s side was a radio set, the indicator light glowing a contented green, the frequency visible on a luminescent LCD screen. Chace checked the volume on the set, turning it up, and heard no traffic.
No alarm, at least not yet.
The Volga was a standard, and she shoved the stick into first, easing out the clutch. She kept the headlamps off, accelerating to second, making her way up the lane. She slowed at the top of the road, turning right, then edged forward until the Volga nosed out onto the street enough for her to look down toward the front of 14 Uzbekiston, almost one hundred meters away. There were street lamps on this side, though poorly placed, and they failed to offer enough illumination to reveal her at the corner, at least from this distance.
Some forty meters down, in the glow of one of the lamps, she could see the second watch car, another Volga, its driver’s door open and the driver standing outside the vehicle. Another of the walking guards was just now passing the car, heading away, toward the stronger illumination at the front of the house. Beyond that, darkness swelled again, concealing the last car, and, presumably, the last walker.
Chace felt her heart beat so strong it seemed to be thumping in her ears. Her lips were dry, and when she ran her tongue over them, she tasted the tang of her adrenaline. Barely coming off the clutch, she turned her car to the top of the lane. The slope downhill was slight, but enough, and she put the car into neutral, letting the vehicle coast toward the nearest Volga. She stayed off the brakes until she was perhaps twenty feet from the car, then let her foot come down gently, hoping they wouldn’t squeak.
They squeaked.
The driver of the second car turned, startled by the noise. Then he recognized the vehicle, or he seemed to, because instead of reacting with alarm, he stepped farther away from his car, raising an arm in greeting. His arm was still raised when Chace came down full on the brakes, stopping beside him. Through the open passenger window, she could see the man’s midsection, watched as his arm came down and he began to lean forward, and she pointed the pistol at him and fired twice. He staggered, bumping against the frame of his car, then falling backward into his seat.
Chace dropped the hush puppy on the passenger’s seat, came down on the clutch, starting the engine again, and then popped the Volga into first gear, accelerating. Ahead, just beyond the wash of the closest streetlight, she watched as the walker turned, confused and tracking the source of the noise. Chace scooped up the gun, came down on the clutch and the brake together, and this time emptied the gun, firing the remaining three shots as she came alongside. Her first shot caught him high in the chest, below the shoulder, the second in the throat, the third missing altogether. She waited until he hit the ground before dropping the gun once more, then rammed the stick into reverse, and backed up the lane as fast as the Volga could bear it. The whine of the engine was tremendous, and she had no doubt that it would carry down the street, to the remaining car, and the remaining guards.
At the top of the lane she braked, went back into first, and turned, accelerating hard as she came around the next corner, then flooring it. She raced the Volga back down the narrow lane, past the corpses she’d made there. Taking her hand from the stick, she ejected the magazine from the hush puppy, then, using her knees to hold the wheel, retrieved one of her spares and slipped it into place, chambering the first round.
She slowed at the turn, fighting the urge to simply race around the final corner. The radio beside the pistol was still silent, and Chace was beginning to wonder if it really was on. She’d half expected the alarm to be raised by now.
Expected, but not hoped. What she had hoped for was that the sound of the Volga reversing up Uzbekiston would have pulled the remaining walker up the street. He’d find the last body Chace had dropped soon enough, and yes, that would raise the alarm. But he’d do one of three things then. Either he’d run to the next car, to see if it had been hit as well, and perhaps decide to use the radio there; he’d run to the house, and raise the alarm; or he’d run back to his staging vehicle, where his partner was behind the wheel.
Chace was hoping for option three, but one and two seemed just as likely.
She edged her car around the corner, once again going as slowly as she could bear, and saw the last car parked in the shadows up the street. It was too dark to see any sign of the driver.
Inspiration hit her then, and she turned on the Volga’s headlights, then started up the street. The lights splashed the remaining car, and she saw the driver of the vehicle opening his door, emerging and raising a hand to shield himself from the glare as he looked her way. She tried to read his expression as she closed the distance, thought she saw there his recognition of the vehicle, but she was closing too fast to take the time needed to process it. Hopefully, this driver was experiencing the same thing.
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p; She kept the headlights on as she came to a stop, and the driver dropped his arm and started toward her, moving outside the spread of the beams. Chace put the car in neutral and set the brake, and it was a reassuring sound to him, she could see it, a sound he expected. Now that she was close enough, she could read his manner as well as his face, and it was clear to her, then, that he suspected nothing.
Why would he? All he had heard was a car reversing up Uzbekiston, nothing else, nothing more.
Chace waited until he was perhaps ten feet from her, then opened the door, and came out firing. She used two bullets this time, because she could use both hands to shoot, and each went where she wished it, and the man fell, his expression of bewilderment clouding into pain, then freezing there.
One left.
Being careful to stay out of the headlights to avoid casting a silhouette, Chace moved up the street, to the last car, in time to see the last walker sprinting toward her. She heard him call out, saw the pistol in his hand, and he called out a second time, and she realized he was shouting the name of the driver. She adjusted her grip on the hush puppy, holding it with both hands, low, breathing through her nose. The cold air burned, and she smelled exhaust and coffee and fried food, and a piece of her mind that had somehow remained detached from everything that had happened in the last two and a half minutes concluded that the driver had been having his dinner before she’d killed him.
When he was perhaps twenty-five feet away, the walker faltered, almost skidding to a stop, and Chace knew he had seen something, perhaps her silhouette, perhaps the body of the last driver. He started to bring his pistol up, but she had been ready, and beat him on the index, firing twice, then twice more. In the distance and the darkness, she couldn’t see her hits, but she saw the results, and the man twisted on his feet, a top in its final stages, then toppled.
Chace took a moment to catch her breath.
Then she turned back to her Volga, climbed once more behind the wheel, and drove up to the front of the house, parking at an angle, half on the driveway, half off. The lights on the ground floor were burning, but the lights above were all out. A single fixture burned above the door.
She left the engine running and walked up the path, setting the slide lock on the hush puppy as she made her way to the door. This time, silence would be more important than volume. The light dug at her eyes, killing off the last vestiges of her night vision. There was no peephole on the door, which was a marginal surprise, and no cameras posted above or around, which was not. Chace tried not to think about the men with the room-brooms on watch inside.
She knocked firmly, twice.
She raised the hush puppy in both hands, and waited.
Just need to use the toilet, she thought, and then found herself fighting a giggle, because, in fact, she was sure she did.
The door rattled, parted, and she saw a slice of a man’s face. She fired, stepping forward and shoving the door, and managed to catch him before he hit the floor. It struck her that he looked awfully young, and for a moment she was afraid she’d made a mistake and had the terrifying but fleeting fear that she’d done all this work only to enter the wrong house. But as she laid the body down on the carpet, beside the rows of shoes left by their owners, she saw the MP-5K resting on the sideboard.
Chace shut the door quietly, working the slide on the hush puppy and removing the empty casing, tucking it into her pants. She’d dumped the spent shells from the garage at the cemetery, so they wouldn’t collide and ring in her pocket. Then she slipped the hush puppy back into her jacket and brought out the knife at her back.
She listened, and for several seconds didn’t hear anything.
Then she heard distant waves rolling onto a shore.
She followed the sound, taking each step as its own movement, keeping her progress deliberate. A stairway ran to the second floor, carpeted, but she ignored it for the moment, pressing forward. The sound of waves disappeared, replaced by a man’s voice, speaking Russian, and she could make out enough to know she was hearing commentary to a football match. A second voice joined the first, and then both laughed.
She came off the hallway, through an open archway, into a kitchen, the sound of the television growing gently louder. She passed the light switch as she entered, and threw it, turning the room dark. A dining room opened up in front of her with a view of the backyard, a semidarkened hallway to her left. She took the hallway, still moving slowly, still hearing the television, now finally able to discern its light at the end of the corridor, beyond a half-opened door. Along the left-hand side were two doors, closed; on the right, one, partially ajar, and she could make out bathroom fixtures within.
Halfway down the hall, she heard movement from the room with the television, the creak of furniture springs losing their tension. She retreated as quickly as she could to the kitchen, then turned and put her back to the wall on the opposite side of the opening to the hall as the light switch. She spun the blade in her hand into a stabbing grip, trying to keep her breathing steady, steeling herself.
It was called wet work for a reason.
A man stepped through the archway. She saw him in profile as he squinted in the darkness, then muttered a curse. He half pivoted away from her, the MP-5K on a strap over his shoulder, reaching to turn on the light with his right hand. She saw he was perhaps an inch or two shorter than her, broad-shouldered, and bald.
Chace stepped behind him, bringing the knife up in her right hand, reaching around with her left to cup his chin, pulling it toward her. She stabbed horizontally into his neck, jabbing once, twice, and again and again and again in rapid succession, and blood sprayed out of the man, hot on her hand and face. She stabbed into his neck a sixth time, but he was deadweight on her now, and she had to kneel to avoid dropping him completely. A ragged breath broke through his perforated skin.
That was the last sound he made.
Chace got back to her feet, saw that the knife in her hand was jumping slightly, a tuning fork catching some stray vibration, and that her hands were trembling. She cleaned the blade on the back of the man’s shirt, then stepped over him and back into the hallway, dimly aware that her front, even down to her trousers, was stained and slick with blood.
She checked the television room first, and found no one there. Working back, she hit the rooms on the hall, opening each door with painful care, just enough to glimpse what was inside. Each room housed two more men, sleeping.
She let them sleep and headed upstairs.
Chace found Stepan first, the toddler curled in a crib in a room with balloon wallpaper, his bottom thrust up into the air, as if he’d fallen asleep while preparing to somersault. She hesitated, then backed out, finally locating the master bedroom after two more doors.
Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov slept in a king-size bed, but only on one side, the one nearest the door. The light from the hallway bled into the room, and Chace recognized him from the photograph Riess had shown her on his digital camera. A positive identification. The way he slept surprised Chace for a second, because she’d expected him to take the opposite side, that it would have been his wife who had wanted to be nearest their son. But of course, that was the reason, wasn’t it?
Chace wondered if Ruslan had changed the sheets since Dina had been murdered.
She approached the bed carefully, not wanting to wake him until she could make certain he’d stay silent, mindful of the four guards and their four submachine guns sleeping below. Reaching his side, she crouched down on her haunches, then put her right hand over his mouth, sealing it with her palm, but keeping his nose free.
He came awake almost instantly, and as soon as Chace saw his eyes open, she put her mouth to his ear and began whispering, “Friend,” in Russian, over and over. Ruslan surged upward, eyes bulging, and Chace couldn’t blame him for that; if someone had woken her like this, clapping a gore-slicked hand over her mouth, she’d have tried to scream bloody murder. She shoved him back down, rising up to add her weight to the press, try
ing to keep him relatively immobile.
“Friend,” she kept repeating.
Ruslan’s arms came up, straining to break her grip, one going to her forearm, one reaching for her face. Then, abruptly, they dropped to his side, and she saw the confusion come into his eyes, stealing away the panic.
“Understand?” she asked, sticking with Russian.
Ruslan nodded.
“Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov?”
He nodded again.
“I’m here to take you and your son to London.”
There was the briefest pause, the confusion again awash in his eyes, before he nodded a third time.
“Quietly,” Chace whispered. “Four still asleep downstairs.” She removed her hand, stepping back from the bed, showing him her empty palms.
Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov sat up gasping for air, staring at her, half in horror, half in amazement. She couldn’t fault him the look; her clothes were covered with blood, much of it still wet, and she stank of gunpowder, sweat, and death. She resisted the urge to touch her hair, to try to brush it back into place, gave him another second to stare, then stepped closer.
“I have a car outside,” she said in Russian. “Dress quickly, we get your son, and we go.”
Without a word, Ruslan started moving, rising and heading to the dresser on the wall opposite the foot of the bed. He stripped, back to her, began pulling on clothes, and Chace watched him for a half second longer, then stepped lightly back, toward the door, to listen at the opening. There was no sound from downstairs, only the shift of cloth and movement as Ruslan continued to dress. Chace took the time to draw the hush puppy, then shrug out of the flak jacket. When she looked back to Ruslan, he was almost fully, if hastily, dressed in dark trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, now working on his shoes.