by Allen Zadoff
“This year, I meant. My parents came here for work.”
“Would you like us to call your parents for you?” the wife says, trying to be helpful.
I laugh then. It’s inappropriate, and it instantly sets them on edge. I note the woman’s eyes dart to the corner of the living room.
That’s when I see it. A pink kid’s scooter propped up against the wall near the front door. The woman notices me looking at it.
“That belongs to our daughter,” she says, like she’s warning me against doing anything dangerous, some action that might disturb the peace of this family.
Family.
These are not Program operatives. I see that now. They are a real family, back in their home after a vacation, completely unaware of what has gone on here while they’ve been gone.
I think of my father sitting in the living room of our home in Rochester. We didn’t have a TV when I was a kid. My father spent his time at home listening to classical music and reading books. He’d sit propped on the corner of the sofa, his nose deep in a new novel. Sometimes my mother would lay a blanket across his lap and lie down next to him to read.
My real parents, together and reading. Back when everything seemed normal.
A feeling wells up in my chest, so powerful that it causes me to moan.
The wife unconsciously places a hand on her husband’s shoulder. A united front. That’s what they’re showing me. A partnership that will expel the intruder if need be.
The intruder. That’s me.
I do not belong in this house.
“I appreciate the drink,” I say.
I stand up.
The wife looks relieved. Her husband maintains his caution.
I smile, attempting to set them at ease.
“You know what I just realized? I think I’m one street over from where I’m supposed to be.”
“Oh, that’s what happened,” the husband says, as if it’s an honest mistake on my part.
“I feel silly,” I say.
“It’s no problem,” the husband says.
“I’m sorry to cause you any trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” the wife says.
She turns toward the front door. She makes it two steps before the living room window shatters behind us, exploding inward and sending deadly, razor-edged shards of glass raining down on the wood floor.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
IT HAPPENS QUICKLY AFTER THAT.
The glass shatters, bullets thudding into the wall across from us, each one raising a plume of plaster dust like a tiny volcano.
The husband screams. The wife leaps away from the source of the noise but toward her husband, her body covering his.
Even as I drop to safety, I am processing this: It’s not a normal reaction for a civilian. An overprotective mother or wife might cover a loved one with her body, but this woman moved like she has been trained, tackling her husband at knee level and pulling him down, perhaps sensing that the high muzzle velocity of a weapon like the one that sent these bullets is likely to pass through her body and into his if she remains standing.
She may not be from The Program, but she is some sort of pro, perhaps a former police officer who left the force to have a family. I can’t be sure.
I am only sure that we are under fire and that suburban houses do not come under automatic weapon fire in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in a small city in New Hampshire.
Selective fire, I should say, because six bullets hit the wall. A double burst from a semiautomatic rifle.
I spin and roll from the couch to the floor, staying beneath the sight lines of the window, and I belly-crawl to the couple, now cowering on the floor.
“How many entrances in the house?” I say.
“Two,” the husband says, at the same time that his wife says, “Four.”
They look at each other.
She says, “Front, back, side, garage.”
“That’s right,” he says.
I like this woman. She has operational intelligence even under fire.
More glass shatters behind us as a second burst comes through the front door, three pings in rapid succession.
That means at least two men, advancing and anticipating our reaction inside the house.
“Grab the back of my waistband,” I tell the wife as I crawl in front of her. And then I tell the husband, “You grab the back of her waistband. We’ll move together in a line. Stay low, follow me, and I’ll get you out of here.”
The man starts to ask a question when a line of bullets slams into the wall high above us. That ends the conversation for the time being.
I duckwalk them toward the side door. That’s where we are most likely to get out safely.
I select the side because of the way the attack is unfolding. If you want to take a house quietly, you surround it on all sides and send in an insertion team. If you want to take out a guy and not get your hands dirty, you shoot him through the front window. It’s crude but effective, barely a couple steps above a drive-by. But since that’s the way this attack is happening, the men are likely to be massed in the front yard.
I glance out the side door. It’s clear. I begin to open the door, but the wife stops me, grabbing my arm.
“Our daughter will be home from her friend’s house soon,” she says, fear in her voice.
“How soon is soon?” I say.
“Ten or fifteen minutes.”
“It will be over by then,” I say. “She’ll be okay. I promise you.”
She looks at me, judging whether she can trust me.
A look passes between us. I let her see I am a professional.
“Who the hell are you?” she says.
I hear wood shattering at the front door.
“They’re here,” I say. “You have to get out now or you’re going to die.”
The man’s eyes are wide and unfocused. He’s going into shock. The woman starts to hyperventilate.
“Your family needs you,” I tell her. “Pull it together.”
I see her accessing a deeper part of herself, and her breathing slows.
I fling open the door and go out before them, eyeing both directions.
“Get at least four houses away,” I say. “Is there someone you trust in the neighborhood?”
The husband is uncertain, but the wife points to a green house several backyards away.
Behind us I hear men breaking through the front door and moving roughly through the living room.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” the husband says.
“Go and call the police,” I say to the woman, and she pushes her husband out the door, squeezing next to him as they pass through the bushes into the next-door neighbor’s yard.
I could follow them and get out to the street, but where would I go?
I need the black comms rectangle in the toolshed so I can contact The Program, and I need to find out who these men are.
So while the couple makes their way to safety, I slip into the backyard.
There is one man there watching the back door. Heavyset with wide shoulders.
He stands at a slight angle, his rifle cocked but trained on the ground at his feet, ready to rise at a moment’s notice. It’s a decent operational posture, but only if he has another man backing him up, watching his six.
He does not.
I slip up behind him and I choke him out with a pincer motion, catching his throat in the crook of one elbow, then closing the vise by grasping my wrist with the opposing arm. It’s not the pressure that does it so much as the placement. The neck is the nexus of the nervous and arterial systems, both located close to the surface. It does not take much to gravely injure a person at throat level.
I don’t have time to find out who this man is or why he is doing what he’s doing.
I only have time to neutralize him.
I do it quickly, ignoring the hiss and gurgle as his body fights for breath beneath my grip. Rather than think of these noises as
a man trying to live, I’ve been taught to think of them as the sounds of danger.
When the sounds stop, the danger stops with them.
In this way, it becomes easy to protect myself, overriding the natural human instinct for compassion.
The big man goes slack in my arms. I let him fall to the ground, and I race away from the house, toward the toolshed.
I’m halfway across the lawn when I see something is wrong.
The padlock on the toolshed, the one designed to open with my digital thumbprint.
It’s missing.
I race over to the shed and throw open the doors.
There is no black rectangle, no weapon mounted on the wall.
It’s a normal toolshed packed with gardening equipment.
It doesn’t much matter now, not with danger rushing at me from the house. One man is dead, but at least two men are still here, coming for me.
The back door slaps open, and a tall man steps out in a hurry. If he were smarter, he might slip out the door carefully, but not this guy. He throws open the door and it crashes against the wood frame of the house.
Which means I have to move quickly.
I scan the shed. A bag of mulch at my feet. Small garden tools scattered about, any of which could be deadly but none of which will work effectively in this situation.
I swing around to meet the man coming out of the house, and I see it: a garden spade propped up against the door.
I grab it in both hands, and I turn.
The tall man has been distracted by his partner’s body on the ground. He’s kneeling down to check for a pulse.
That is a mistake.
I rush him, covering the distance across the lawn in less than two seconds. By the time he looks up, the spade is already in motion. The back of the blade whacks him across the bridge of his nose. I hear a sickening crunch and blood spurts.
As he falls back, he brings up his gun to fire, but I step on the barrel with a free foot and the bullet goes wide. He is fast, his other arm reaching for a knife in his belt. I hear a noise inside the house then, a third man reacting to the rifle shot.
There can be no hesitation. Before the tall man can get to his knife, I swing the spade into the side of his skull, hitting him hard enough to take him out for the duration.
I fling myself against the house, waiting for the next man.
He is smarter, which is to say more cautious. He pokes the barrel of his rifle through the door first—slowly. A gunshot and two bodies on the ground are enough to give him pause, and the rifle barrel starts to recede back through the door.
I do not let it happen.
I grab the barrel, yanking hard enough that the man holding it comes flying out the door, trapped by the rifle strap around his shoulder.
I think I have him, when he reaches up and hits a quick release on the strap, falling back into the house and tripping me at the same time, taking me down with him. The spade catches in the door frame and slips through my hands.
Now the fight is up close and personal, the two of us wrestling for dominance on the floor of the house. He is brutal, his muscles thick, his ability to use elbow and knee superb.
I take some punishment. But I do not flinch. Not until a young girl’s scream freezes both of us in place.
It is no more than a split second of distraction, but it is enough for me to get the upper hand, using a knee at his throat and a twisting motion to snap his neck.
I leap up, grabbing the spade as I go, and I throw myself inside the door.
There is a fourth man.
He has found the side door of the house and slipped out without my hearing him.
He’s found more than just a door.
He’s found the couple’s daughter.
She is about nine years old, in jeans and a yellow tank. The collar of the tank has little white flowers on it. Above the collar is a man’s hand.
Around her throat.
In the other hand, he holds a semiautomatic pistol.
This is the girl the wife mentioned to me. She is an innocent civilian, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, an unlucky witness to events that have nothing to do with her.
I should not care about this girl, but I make the mistake of looking in her eyes.
They are wide and dark brown, fear dilating the pupils. I don’t see a stranger, a witness, or a civilian.
I see someone’s daughter.
The man watches my face as I look at the girl. He is a professional. He knows I am weak now.
He glances around, noting his partners splayed on the ground around the yard and in the rear doorway.
He nods to me, almost like he’s congratulating me for doing a good job, for making it this far.
This far but no farther. Because it’s payback time.
He clamps his hand harder on the girl’s throat, and she starts to cough, an involuntary reaction to strangulation.
I put down the spade.
I put my hands up in a nonthreatening manner, and I walk forward. He smiles. His grip lessens but does not release.
He takes the gun from her head and aims it at mine.
It’s a bit of a cowboy move, this aiming at someone’s head. It’s designed to create fear, and at that much it is effective. But it’s not a great shooting strategy.
Heads are small. Heads move in space. Heads can distract from the things bodies are doing.
My head does not move. I keep it still as I walk toward him, allowing him to think he has me. In a sense he does. He holds a girl by the throat, he holds a gun in his hand, and I am unarmed.
But there is an expectation here, an unspoken one that not even a trained soldier like him is aware of. I’m about to risk my life on it.
The expectation is that I’m going to stop walking.
It’s hard enough to walk toward a loaded gun, but if you do it, if you’re ordered to do it, it’s a foregone conclusion that you will get close to the gun and stop.
Nobody walks into a gun.
Nobody who is not fearless.
Nobody but me.
When I hit the point where a normal person would stop, I speed up. Three quick steps that take him entirely by surprise.
I use the heels of both hands as weapons, a lightning strike to the sides of his temples like I’m crashing a cymbal. The skull is designed to protect the brain from injury, but a forceful impact will cause the brain to collide with solid bone. If I’m able to create sufficient impact, I will temporarily short out the brain’s electrical system.
I strike hard and fast, and I see his eyes roll up into his head as his grip releases on the girl’s neck.
But not before the gun fires.
Into the air and over my shoulder.
In the extra second I’ve earned, I grab the girl away from him.
“Run and hide behind the toolshed,” I tell her, and I turn and attack, not allowing the man’s brain time to come back online.
I flip him over on his back, and I grab the rifle from around his shoulder.
He winces like I’m going to shoot him, but I don’t shoot him. I turn the gun upside down and hold the barrel so the blunt stock is pressing into his throat.
I push down, slowly crushing his windpipe.
“Why are you here?” I say.
He eyes dart from side to side, hoping one of his partners has revived. He doesn’t know I’ve removed that possibility.
“It’s just you,” I say. “There’s no help coming.”
He refuses to speak. I press the gun stock harder into the soft structures beneath his neck. He starts to choke, and I back off the pressure the tiniest bit.
“Who sent you?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he says.
I press harder, feel the beginning of tissues giving way in his throat.
“Who?”
“Freelance,” he says. “We’re just a freelance team.”
“For who?”
“Different employers, different assignments.”
“Are you military?”
“Ex.”
“You’re not affiliated?”
“We’re affiliated with whoever pays us.”
I imagine the life he must lead. A former soldier, once loyal to a cause, who now sells his services to whoever pays the rent.
For a moment, I pity this man. Even though he came to kill me and he would have willingly allowed a girl to become collateral damage.
I pity him. Maybe that’s why I decide to let him live.
But the moment I lift the gun stock from his throat, he is in motion, elbows dug into the ground to propel him up toward me, legs moving into striking position.
I swing the rifle in a pendulum motion, hitting him in the head hard enough to rattle him.
But he is resilient. It does not stop him.
He was a good soldier. I can see that now.
He must have been very good in his day. Before he turned, before he became this other thing.
Not now.
Now he reaches for his pistol on the ground, the one that has fallen but remains within arm’s length.
I wanted to save this man’s life, but he’s given me no choice.
I bring the stock down onto his head.
Once. Again. A third time.
His hand was reaching for the gun. Now it twitches and stops moving.
Police sirens in the distance. That means the parents made it to safety. From the sound of the sirens, I’ve got four to six minutes to finish here.
I step away from the dead man, glance across the backyard at the bodies scattered there. I don’t have to take a breath. I’ve been breathing all along, evenly and calmly, even as I’ve defeated these four men.
I lean over the body of the man I’ve just killed, checking his pockets. I find something at chest level.
An iPhone.
I swipe the phone. For just a moment, I expect The Program’s secure apps suite to pop up, but that’s ridiculous.
Why would The Program send a team to kill me? Especially a team like this, unaffiliated and crude in its tactics.
The Program is smarter than that.
But I can’t dwell on this now. I check the iPhone log for recent calls. It’s amazing how many operatives will not pause to wipe their phone clean before embarking on a mission. It’s arrogant and foolish at the same time, but on some level it’s understandable. Almost nobody heads into a mission thinking they’re going to fail, and remembering that even in failure, they must protect their organization.
