by Barry Eisler
“Either you drop the knife on your own,” Larison said, “or you drop it because I’ve shot out your brain stem.”
“That’s not what I said!”
“It’s what he needs to understand.”
A long moment went by. Dox didn’t know what to do. If the man didn’t believe Larison would kill him, it would be a hell of a last mistake.
But whatever Manus saw in Larison’s stance and in his eyes, he must have known what it meant. Dox felt the man’s wrist flex. An instant later, the knife hit the wet pavement with a clang. Dox kicked it away, released the wrist, and took a long step back and to the side, making sure he didn’t get in the way of Larison’s line of sight.
“Thank you,” Dox said, looking at Manus. “Can you understand what I’m saying?”
Manus gave a single nod. It was unnerving, how silent and still and expressionless the man was. It was hard to tell what he might be thinking. Was he willing to listen? Or was he just waiting until he saw an opportunity to gut them both?
“Please, think about it,” Dox said. “My partner’s pointing a gun at you. I’ve never seen him miss, not even from a lot farther than he’s standing right now. If we were here to kill you, or hurt you, why wouldn’t we have done it already?”
Manus watched him for a moment. Then he said, “What do you want?”
The voice was a bit monotone, but overall not so unusual. He must not have been born deaf.
“We know what you’re here for,” Dox said. “Alondra Diaz. We were sent to kill you after you did the deed. But we’re not going to do that. You’re being set up. Do you understand?”
Manus looked at him, expressionless. “No.”
“I know, it’s confusing. Look, I’d like for us to put our heads together. Can we do that?”
“Can I pick up my knife?”
“Do you mind if I hold it for a while instead? I’m recently phobic about swords. It’s a long story.”
Manus didn’t respond. Dox knelt and retrieved the knife. Now that the craziness of the moment was past, he recognized the model. He would have liked to open it, but under the circumstances that would have been unduly provocative.
He held it up and faced Manus so the man could read his lips. “The Cold Steel Espada,” he said. “Very nice. The extra large?”
He’d been hoping to establish a little rapport with that, but Manus only looked at him.
“I’ve always thought of it as a novelty,” Dox went on. “Due to its size. Never heard of someone actually carrying one. But I can see it suits you.”
Still Manus only looked at him.
“Anyway, I’ll look forward to handing it back as soon as we’ve gotten to know each other better and I’m less paranoid about you trying to fillet me with it. Does that seem reasonable?”
Manus said, “All right.”
It might not have been much, but they were talking at least. A little.
“Thank you,” Dox said. “And if I were to politely ask whether you might be carrying any other hardware, would you be truthful with me on short acquaintance?”
“Would you be with me?”
That was fair. “Probably not. Trust doesn’t come easily in our trade. You should have seen my partner and me back in the day. But look at us now. Holding hands and everything.”
He was hoping for some kind of reaction to that—maybe not an outright belly laugh, but something. But Manus just looked at him.
A woman in a jogging outfit turned the corner behind Manus and started running toward them. She saw the tableau and stopped short. For a second, Dox was afraid it was Diaz. But no, this woman was white, with short, sandy-colored hair.
“Police matter,” Dox called out to her. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’ll have to ask you to take an alternate route this morning.”
Manus glanced back. Without a word, the woman did a 180 and was on her way. Manus looked at Dox again.
“Obviously that was for her benefit,” Dox said. “We’re not really police.”
“I’m deaf. Not stupid.”
Oops. “Of course. I apologize. I have it on reliable authority that when I’m nervous, I can talk too much. Anyway, I think we should go. And at the risk of being rude, could I first trouble you to lift that parka high and spin slowly around? You can see my friend is still tense, and I think you might put him at ease that way.”
Manus complied. Nothing under the parka.
“And those pants. Maybe just lift them up a few inches so I can see your ankles?”
Manus complied. Nothing but a pair of socks around ankles as thick as a normal man’s knee.
“Thank you,” Dox said. “And forgive me, but I’m about eighty percent sure that’s a push-dagger buckle on your belt. As it happens, I’m wearing one myself. I’m hoping your pants will stay up without it, and I can give it back to you along with the Espada when we’re done talking?”
Manus removed the belt and tossed it underhand to Dox. Dox caught it and took a look at the buckle.
“Don’t recognize this one,” Dox said. “You make it yourself?”
Manus nodded.
Dox shoved the belt in one of his parka pockets. “Looks like fine work. Maybe sometime you could show me how.”
No response to that. Well, rapport didn’t always come easy.
Dox knew there might be more hardware. In fact, if the man were anything like Dox, he’d have at least three other sharp and pointy things hidden on his person. But they’d been here too long already, and even with the foul weather it was lucky they’d had to deal with only a single civilian. There wasn’t time for a more careful search. The good news was, there was no reason to think Manus would favor another skirmish without first hearing what they had to say. And besides, Larison wasn’t likely to let the man close enough to offer the opportunity.
Dox glanced over at Larison. Larison nodded and holstered the Glock.
“Okay,” Dox said. “Time for us to scram. As it happens, I know a delightful coffee emporium, about five miles south of here—All City, it’s called. Maybe we can regroup there and talk?”
Manus nodded.
Dox wished the man would say more. His calm silence was spooky. But maybe he’d loosen up once they were past the current unpleasantries.
“Oh,” Dox went on. “Just one thing. You should toss that burner you’re carrying. It’s how they’re tracking you.”
Manus looked at him. “I’m not carrying a phone.”
Dox glanced at Larison. Larison looked past Dox and said, “Oh, fuck.”
chapter
eleven
MANUS
When the wingman said, “Oh, fuck,” Manus followed his gaze. The woman jogger was back, flanked by two burly men. None of them was running. They were intent on Manus, the wingman, and the talker, methodically closing the distance from fifty yards away. As they walked, each kept a fist resting on a hip—quick access to a weapon.
He looked in the other direction. The wingman was looking the same way now. Three more large men, approaching from that side. Same distance, same fist-on-the-hip methodical walk.
The talker pulled a gun from behind his back and said something to the wingman. His back was turned so Manus couldn’t read his lips. Probably they were discussing options.
It occurred to Manus that the whole thing could be an elaborate setup. It didn’t feel likely, but—
The talker turned to him. “Sorry I don’t have an extra pistol,” he said. “But here you go, and let’s hope you can put it to good use.” He tossed the Espada underhand and Manus caught it.
The feel of the Espada back in his hand settled it for Manus. The wingman and the talker were no longer a problem. The other six were.
The talker laughed. “On the plus side, with all these blocks of concrete, at least we’ve got cover. Never really cared for Brutalist architecture before, but call me a convert.”
The talker didn’t seem afraid, or even nervous. Manus had the sense that unlike the wingman, the talker would be
easy to underestimate. That in fact, the talker might prefer it that way. Probably the holding hands thing had been his idea. It had worked, too—for one second too long, the incongruity had confused Manus and delayed a proper response.
Without any need for consultation, the three of them started backing away at ninety degrees from the approaching teams. Obviously, the wingman and the talker understood a pincer maneuver and how to avoid it. That was good.
The two teams crept closer. Manus could imagine several reasons for the care they seemed to be taking in their approach. They might have been familiar with his reputation, or with the wingman’s and the talker’s. And although they had superior numbers, they were moving across open grass. There were some trees, but they hadn’t reached them yet. So they might have been concerned about their relative lack of cover. They might also have been concerned about a drawn-out gunfight rather than a quick massacre, and the attention the noise would bring.
The three of them stopped just short of one of the sheer walls of concrete blocks. The talker and the wingman were almost shoulder-to-shoulder, the talker positioned on the right and monitoring the approach of the team on that side, the wingman performing mirror-image duty on the other side. Manus drifted to the left and put his back to the wall. He wished he could see their faces better to read their lips, but it was more important to have something solid behind him.
There was an opening for a stairway a few feet to their right. The wingman glanced toward it, then went back to watching the team on the left. He said, “Don’t like the stairs. Don’t know what’s down there. They could be funneling us.”
The talker turned and glanced at the team coming from the wingman’s side. “Agreed. And I don’t fancy giving up the high ground, anyway.” He went back to watching the team on his side.
Manus thought the wingman was right about the stairs. And the talker was right, too, about not ceding the high ground. And either or both theories could also explain the slow, deliberate approach.
The problem was, if another group flanked them from below, they’d be penned in on three sides without any escape route. If Manus had been carrying, he would have preferred a frontal assault against one of the pincer groups. Attack the ambush, fight your way through it. But he had left the Force Pro, his customary carry, back in Maryland. He’d gotten lazy. Lazy and stupid. Acting like a civilian, even after they’d made him go operational again.
The good news was, he had visited the park several times already, and had studied it closely. He’d gotten stupid, yes, but he still reflexively examined terrain for routes of ingress and egress, still ran constant when/then scenarios.
It was too bad about the Force Pro. But there was a lot he could do with the Espada.
chapter
twelve
DOX
Dox was castigating himself over his earlier hubris—had he really assured himself he’d yet to meet the operator he couldn’t make, right before that damn jogger turned out to be anything but?—when Manus pulled himself up onto the concrete wall behind them, flattened out on top of it, and rolled over the other side.
“He’s gone,” Larison said. “Can’t blame him. Sucks to have nothing but a knife at a gunfight.”
Despite himself, Dox was surprised by the quiet suddenness of Manus’s exit. But there were more important matters to consider. For example, the two teams still approaching, now about thirty yards away.
“Which way do you want to play it?” Dox said. “I don’t like how slowly they’re moving. I think they’re waiting for something, and I don’t want to be here when it happens.”
“I think they’re not sure of their orders,” Larison said. “Look. They stopped.”
Dox watched the woman jogger pull out a cellphone and speak into it.
“Could be that,” Dox said. “Could be she’s calling for reinforcements. I say it’s time to blast our way through one end of the pincer or the other.”
“Agreed. Which side?”
“It’s all the same to me. You have a preference?”
“No.”
“Well shit, what are we going to do? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?”
The woman put away the phone. All six pulled out pistols and started moving again.
“Looks like their orders have been clarified,” Dox said.
“Okay, let’s take the three approaching from your side.”
“Why aren’t they shooting yet?”
“Could be from that far out they’re afraid they’d miss and we’d go down the stairs.”
“Or like you said, they could want us to go down the stairs.”
“What difference does it make?”
Dox couldn’t argue with that. His heart started beating harder.
“You ready?” he said. “One. Two—”
chapter
thirteen
MANUS
Manus hopped from one giant vertical concrete block to another, scanning the area for another team or for anything else suspicious. Other than two elderly Asian women doing tai chi despite the rain, the area was clear.
When he knew he was well past the righthand team’s position, he jumped down and made his way to the stairwell at the park’s south end. He raced up the steps three at a time, crouched at the top, and darted his head around the corner.
He saw the three-man team, their backs to him fifty feet away, still moving methodically forward to close the pincer. Their hands were in front of their bodies now. From the way they were moving, he could tell they were all righthanded, and all holding pistols at high compressed ready. Obviously, they were trained.
If he approached from behind and to the right, the biomechanics would be awkward for them. The distance was farther than ideal, but manageable. The problem was, the other team would see him coming. If they got off a warning, it could be bad.
But he saw no other options. He didn’t even consider leaving. He didn’t want the talker and the wingman to be killed. He wanted to know what they knew. Who was behind this whole thing. Why they had set him up.
Most of all, whether Evie and Dash were in danger.
The thought terrified him. He judged his current odds of success at about sixty-forty. And while he could accept those odds for himself, if he died, who would protect Evie and Dash?
His heart pounding uncharacteristically hard, he opened the Espada, manually depressing the folding mechanism to mute the click he knew the blade would otherwise make. He couldn’t be sure how loud the sound would be, or how far it would carry.
He felt the blade lock into place. He took a deep breath, stood, and charged from behind the corner.
Fifty feet. He raced over the wet grass, knowing there was a chance they might hear or even feel his footfalls. But he couldn’t afford stealth. Speed was everything. Speed and violence of action.
Thirty feet. Someone on the opposite team saw him and began frantically waving his arms.
Twenty feet. The three team members stopped. Checked their flanks.
Ten feet. The man farthest to the right started turning clockwise. He must have sensed Manus’s footfalls because his right shoulder began to come up, his head turtling in—
Five feet. Manus brought back the Espada like a tennis player about to hit a blistering forehand. The man kept turning, turning, his face rotating toward Manus now, his gun swinging into view—
Manus whipped in the Espada. The man’s throat and the lower part of his face were protected by his shoulder, but it didn’t matter, the blade blasted into the bridge of his nose, cut through his eyes, and sheared halfway through his skull. The man’s body convulsed and Manus yanked the blade free.
The man was falling but there was no time to wait; Manus shoved him to the right as the next man kept turning, turning, his gun coming around—
Manus brought down the Espada like a hatchet, aiming for the man’s wrist but connecting halfway up the forearm. The blade sliced through tendon, muscle, and bone. The man shrieked loudly enough for Manus to hear, and the gun, the man
’s hand and wrist still attached to it, dropped to the wet grass.
The woman, the jogger, had turned her head all the way toward him. Her eyes were desperate, shocked, afraid. It meant nothing to Manus. All he cared about was the gun, and the woman had now brought it nearly all the way around—
Manus shoved the second man aside and leaped forward, to the left of the gun, smashing into the woman’s right shoulder, jamming her arm into her body, catching the nape of her neck to keep her from being thrown back by the impact. She struggled to bring the gun around and Manus launched the Espada from hip level as though he was throwing an uppercut, arcing it up under her arm and spearing it up behind her chin and into her brain. The force of the blow lifted her off the ground and for an instant her body twitched as Manus held it aloft. Then he jerked the knife the other way, and she collapsed backward, limbs twitching, insensate.
The second man was on his knees, blood spurting from the stump of his right arm, pawing for the gun with his remaining hand. Manus strode over, raised the Espada overhead like an ice pick, and plunged the point down through the back of the man’s head. The man’s face slammed into the sodden grass like a cannonball, muddy water spraying up around it. Manus jerked the blade free. The man listed left and folded to his side.
Something buzzed past Manus. He realized it was a round. An instant later there was the crack of a gunshot, loud enough for him to faintly hear. Another. A third.
The other team was shooting at him. And where he stood, there was no cover.
chapter
fourteen
DOX
Over the years, Dox had seen his share of blood and guts. Still, what Manus did with that Espada in five short seconds was a wonder to behold. Dox was so stunned by the man’s sudden reappearance, and by the havoc he wreaked, that for a moment he froze, thinking he wasn’t seeing things right. Fortunately, the sounds of gunshots from the team on the left brought him out of it.
He spun and brought up the Wilson. Larison was already engaging. Dox was so adrenalized he barely heard the report of the Glock—just a muted pop, pop, pop. Something snapped back the head of one of the three men and the man went down. Larison, dialing in a head shot.
