Good. At least Wells didn’t have to worry he was shooting a civilian. He pulled the Glock. The tile on the roof was cheap and cracked and didn’t offer great footing. But the roof itself was only slightly sloped and Wells was not even twenty-five feet away from the guy. An easy shot. The man never looked back. Never even turned his head.
Wells sighted, wasted a second wondering if his target knew what was really happening here. Probably not. Probably he’d taken a bodyguard job for the pay, been told the night before to get on a plane. Excellent benefits. Must be willing to travel on short notice. An employee. Nothing more. Maybe he would have thrown down his shotgun and surrendered if Wells gave him the choice. Maybe not. The answer didn’t matter. Wells had no choice himself.
Wells squeezed the trigger twice. He aimed center mass, missed a few inches high. The back of the guard’s head exploded in a slaughterhouse spray of blood and bone and brain. He crumpled face-first onto the scrubby lawn next to the Mercedes, dead before he knew what death was. Rudi would have been jealous.
From the room below, a woman yelled, “Binyamin!” Wells knew that voice. Salome. She must have flown directly from Jordan. So she and Amos were inside. How many others? Only the Mercedes was in the driveway, and no other cars were parked in front. They had taken a cab here. Which meant two or three people. Unless they’d taken more than one cab.
Wells fired two shots into the air, hoping that Duto would understand his message: That wasn’t Frankel and this isn’t over. Now he had to move. Where?
—
Two shots, then two more. From the roof. Of course Wells was on the roof. He was a vulture. A vampire. Salome looked out. Binyamin lay in the grass not ten meters away, his head a cracked egg. She lifted her pistol, hoping Wells would jump down.
“Wells!”
No answer. No noise at all.
“Wells! Don’t be a woman! Quit hiding!”
Still nothing. Was he creeping around up there? Or keeping still, hoping she would come out? She wondered how far the nearest police station was, how many minutes they had. The cops would take everyone into custody. They would need to sort out this strange house where Americans and Israelis were slaughtering each other. When they realized Witwans was a South African citizen, they would separate him and question him alone. Salome couldn’t imagine what he would say. She’d peeked in on him a few minutes before. He’d deteriorated badly since she’d last seen him. The broken blood vessels in his nose had advanced to his cheeks. Even in sleep he smelled sweet, sickly, his liver fighting a losing battle against the poison he poured down his throat.
And what if Duto was here? An American senator and the former CIA director. The police would listen to his story, no matter how bizarre it sounded. Salome’s mere presence here would help to confirm his accusation. How could she explain her sudden trip to South Africa, or how she’d ended up in this house with the former director of the South African nuclear program?
No, she and Witwans had to disappear. As long as they could escape this neighborhood and reach the highway, they should be safe. South Africa was huge, and she had plenty of cash. They could take the N1 all the way to Johannesburg, or head along the coast to Port Elizabeth. The police would have no way to connect them to this house. They’d been here only a couple of hours. No one knew who they were.
But they couldn’t go anywhere until they put a stake in the vampire on the roof.
Frankel ran back into the living room, his pistol drawn. “What happened?”
“Wells shot Binyamin. From the roof.” Luckily, they could speak openly in Hebrew. “Stay with him in case Wells tries to break into his room. Now.”
“What’s happening?” Gil, the second guard, yelled from the kitchen, at the back of the house.
“Guard the back door. Wells is on the roof.”
“How’s that?”
“Just watch it.”
She imagined how Wells might attack. The house was only about fourteen meters wide, eight across. Forty-five feet by twenty-five. Its layout was simple. In front, the living room spanned the width of the building. In back, the kitchen did the same. A center hallway connected the two rooms. The main bedroom ran along the right side of the hallway. A smaller bedroom and a bathroom shared the left. Witwans had naturally grabbed the big bedroom. Even in a kidnapped alcoholic haze, he acted the king.
The shouting next door stopped. In the silence, Salome listened for Wells. Nothing. Yet she was sure he hadn’t jumped down. The noise would have been obvious. She wondered why he hadn’t already tried to come at them. He’d just blown a man’s head off, so he couldn’t be planning to stick around for the cops. But if he figured that they would run, he might wait on the roof for the chance to pick them off.
On the flatscreen, CNN’s countdown clock ticked away. 21:34:51 . . . 21:34:50 . . . But she and Wells had their own countdown. She would give Wells exactly one minute to make his move. She hadn’t heard any sirens, so they still had a little time before the police arrived. Ideally, Wells would blink first, come off the roof to attack the house. As long as he was up there, they couldn’t touch him.
If Wells hadn’t moved in sixty—now fifty-five—seconds, she would tell Frankel to grab Witwans and hustle him out the back door and along the north wall of the house to the Mercedes. Gil and his shotgun would lead the way. She would cover the front yard from the living room. They would dare Wells and his friends to stop them. The alleys along the north and south sides of the house were narrow, and the edge of the roof overhung them. Wells would have to perch over the eaves for a shot. He’d have to be accurate. Gil wouldn’t.
Still, she’d rather have him on the ground.
She checked to be sure she had a round chambered and flattened herself beside the front door. As she waited, every cell in her body came to life. The opposite of the depression that had once swallowed her.
She knew she would kill Wells.
—
At that moment, Wells would have traded what was left of his soul for a CS grenade, or even the homemade Molotov cocktail that had served him in Istanbul. Too bad the devil was serving other clients. Wells didn’t even have the shotgun. He’d left it with Duto, knowing he would need both hands to shimmy up the carport.
After killing the bodyguard, Wells stepped off the roof onto the wall that divided Salome’s house from its southern neighbor. The wall was no wider than a single concrete block, with glass bits embedded in its top, so Wells had to tread carefully. But the wall gave him the chance to move quietly, rather than pounding the roof and giving away his position.
As he tightroped along, he heard Salome yell twice to him. At him. Did she think he’d answer? That she could convince him to throw away his tactical edge by insulting his masculinity? He understood the trick. Still, the words goaded him.
A window was cut into the house’s south wall about halfway down. Through its bare glass, Wells glimpsed an unmade bed. He saw a shadow in the room. He guessed Witwans was down there, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept moving. Six inches past the back right corner of the house, he stopped. The wall on which he stood ran another six feet to the rear lot line, then swung left around the back of the house and left again around its north side. Cracked concrete covered most of the narrow backyard below, creating a patio with all the appeal of an exercise pen in a supermax prison.
Next door, Jacob stopped shouting. He’d done his job. In the silence, Wells listened for sirens, heard none. Yet. Nor any movement inside the house. Salome was playing defense. Probably she figured he was still up front staking out the Mercedes. She hoped he would come down, open himself to a counterattack. He understood. The house had only two obvious entry points, the doors in front and back, both easily covered. But Wells was left with no choice now but to do what Salome wanted. He had to move, and quickly.
The back of the house had two windows that looked out on the patio, one on each side of the back door. Wells
inched to his right along the wall. Through the nearer window, he spotted a yellowish Formica countertop and a couple of glasses. Kitchen in back, living room in front.
He craned his head, but he couldn’t see if anyone was inside. The kitchen lights were out, and the sun was hidden behind clouds. Keeping the room in shadow. Then, an answer to a prayer that Wells hadn’t uttered, the sun broke through. Wells caught a glint of light off metal, a shotgun barrel. The man holding it was against the wall a few inches left of the back door.
Just that fast, the sun was gone. The break Wells needed. Now he knew where to aim.
His phone buzzed. He pulled it, found a text from Duto: Where you? Wells decided to take the seconds to respond. Back of house. More men inside.
He shoved away the phone and jumped into the backyard, as far from the wall as he could. He wanted to land close to the door. He could aim and fire the Glock faster than the guy could bring the shotgun around, a life-or-death advantage in a close quarters firefight.
He heard his left foot break almost before he felt the pain, a loud pop as he landed on the concrete and then an electric spike running up his ankle, into his leg. He fell forward and braced himself with his left hand and kept his head and his right hand up. He was not even ten feet away from the door. As the guard spun and tried to bring up the shotgun, Wells fired once, twice, three times, not caring whether the rounds went through the door itself or its center window. Against a 9-millimeter round at close range, a painted plywood door offered no more protection than a piece of cardboard. The wood burst and blood spattered through the sudden holes in the guard’s white short-sleeved shirt. But he was still raising the shotgun.
Wells scrambled forward, toward the house, left of the door. The shotgun blast tore the door off its hinges and echoed off the concrete walls. For a second, Wells couldn’t hear anything at all, and then sound came back bit by bit.
He was squatting with his weight on his right leg, his face pressed to the house’s back wall, maybe two feet to the left of the doorway. His right hand, his gun hand, was closer to the doorway. He leaned over and fired twice for cover and peeked inside. The guard lay on the linoleum kitchen floor, three feet inside, almost close enough for Wells to touch, the shotgun beside him. Blood soaked his shirt from shoulder to waist.
Salome yelled in Hebrew from the front of the house and the guy coughed and tried to answer, but he could manage only a bubble of blood. No saving him. He would be dead in minutes.
Wells fired twice more and reached into the house and grabbed the shotgun by the barrel, its steel slick with blood. The guard’s fingers were still wrapped around the stock, and Wells had to wrench it away. He looked up to see Frankel in the hallway, maybe thirty feet away. Frankel fired three times as Wells spun back to the safety of the wall. One shot smacked the door frame and the second was close enough for Wells to hear it whistle by. The shotgun was a pump-action Remington 870, a 12-gauge. Wells checked the tube magazine, found four shells. He wiped off the blood as best he could and racked a round, the chk-chk as unsubtle a warning as a sidewinder’s rattle. He set the gun aside, hoping he’d bought a few seconds to figure out how badly he’d injured his leg. He turned, putting his back against the wall, and pushed himself up with his good leg, thankful for all the squats he’d forced on himself over the years. When he was standing, he put a feather of pressure on his left leg. The pain flared as he bore down. But Wells could handle pain. The deeper problem was that he couldn’t put weight on the front half of his foot. He’d broken at least one bone, maybe torn the big ligament, too. He couldn’t remember the name but it was the one that always bothered basketball players. Even the light pressure he’d applied caused his foot to rearrange itself in real time, and not for the better. Evolution in reverse.
He’d broken the foot in Afghanistan years before and banged it up again in Istanbul three weeks earlier, but he’d thought he was fully recovered.
Wrong.
He could stand. And he could hobble, if he used his heel and kept all the weight off the front of his foot. But he sure couldn’t run. What do you call a woman with one leg? Eileen.
Lucky he wasn’t in the middle of a gunfight or anything.
Frankel fired twice more from inside the house. He seemed to be moving closer, coming down the hallway. Wells reached across his body, grabbed the shotgun, fired blindly through the door. One shot and one shot only. Even after grabbing the Remington, he was still far too close to black on ammunition for comfort. He had just three rounds in the shotgun, five in the Glock. The pistol had a seventeen-round magazine, but Wells had already fired eleven rounds, four in front and seven back here. He had a plastic bag with loose ammunition in his pocket, but he couldn’t imagine Frankel would give him the time he needed to reload.
Duto had better get inside before then.
—
Again Wells caught Salome wrong-footed. She was watching the yard, but the shots came from the back, the kitchen. Three. Then a shotgun blast. She turned and ran, trying for the hallway. But Wells stuck a pistol through the remains of the back door and fired twice more. She skidded into the back wall of the living room to stop herself.
She peeked down the corridor. Gil, the second of the bodyguards she’d brought, lay on the kitchen floor. She couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. “Gil!” she yelled. He turned his head a fraction, but if he spoke she couldn’t hear him.
“Adina,” Frankel said from the bedroom halfway down the hall, just as Wells appeared again in the kitchen doorway.
“Amos, he’s coming for the kitchen—”
Frankel spun out of the bedroom and into the hall and fired as Wells reached down and grabbed the shotgun from Gil’s hands. But Frankel missed, and Wells vanished again. Now Wells had the shotgun and could keep Frankel out of the kitchen. But Frankel had an open shot at the hallway, so he could keep Wells from coming inside. A standoff.
They had to take him down while they knew where he was, before he disappeared again. And Salome saw how.
“We can pin him. You stay, keep shooting, make him think you’re coming down the hall. I go through the window in there”—she nodded at Witwans’s room—“come around the side of the house. The alley’s not even ten meters. He won’t have a chance. I’ll blow his head off.” And once Wells was dead, she and Frankel could grab Witwans and shoot their way out against whoever was outside without worrying that Wells was behind them.
“What if he turns that way?”
“Even better. He’ll run right into me.”
“Unless he figures out what you’re doing and starts shooting around the corner. Then you’ll be the one who’s trapped.”
Five seconds to get through the window, five to get down the alley. Ten in all. “Ten seconds,” Salome said. “Keep him busy back there that long.”
“Let me do it—”
She shook her head. She would kill Wells. No one else.
She fired twice down the hallway toward the kitchen. She pushed past Frankel into the bedroom where Witwans huddled in a corner, his hands over his ears, a seventy-five-year-old child.
“Please,” Witwans yelled in English. “Please.”
She ignored him. A siren sounded somewhere in the distance. Salome pushed up the window, twisted her body into the alley. Ten seconds.
—
Wells heard Salome and Frankel in the hallway, a low conversation in Hebrew. Making a plan. He wondered if he should try to limp out the alley, but he couldn’t possibly move silently or quickly enough. He was furious with himself, with his body for its betrayal. Would this be where the trip ended for him, boxed in behind this ugly yellow house?
He had come too far. Witwans was too close. He needed one more move. One more.
From inside the house Witwans yelled “Please” twice in English. Like Salome was planning to shoot him. But why would she?
Amos shot three times and
Wells chanced a peek around the door. Frankel had crouched at the far end of the hall. He was almost taunting Wells, daring Wells to step in with the shotgun and try for him. Wells knew he wouldn’t have a chance even on two good legs. He would have to expose himself for a decent shot. As soon as he moved, Frankel would light him up.
But where was Salome?
Frankel raised his pistol, fired twice more—
And everything clicked. The conversation. Why Witwans had yelled. Wells had used misdirection against Salome. Now she was doing the same to him. She was coming down the alley while he focused on the doorway.
He couldn’t stay on the wall. She would use the corner for cover and he had no defense. And he couldn’t go for the door. Frankel was waiting. To survive, he needed to give himself an angle to shoot her as she reached the corner.
With his foot wrecked, he had only one play.
He put his weight on his left heel, ignored the screaming in his foot, took one big stride with his right leg toward the rear right corner of the backyard. He planted on his right foot and spun right ninety degrees while his momentum still carried him forward. He pulled up the shotgun just as Salome reached the corner—
—
She took her last step down the alley, ready to flank him. She wasn’t going to shoot him right away, she wanted him to know what she’d done, how she’d beaten him—
Then she saw him moving, he wasn’t against the wall by the door like she expected, or coming flush around the corner of the house, instead he was lunging for the back corner of the yard, spinning toward her, she needed a moment to understand why, he wanted the angle, he was raising a shotgun to her—
And she swung the pistol around, knowing she was too late, no time to speak, to curse or beg, she screamed a half-note for her death to come—
Her chest exploded, but she felt no pain, and for a moment she thought he might have missed. But then, why was she lying on her back looking at the concrete walls and the clouded sky? Everyone was wrong about dying, the easiest thing in the world. She didn’t even have to move, didn’t fly anywhere, it was the other way, the world and all the sky raced away from her, faster and faster until a single point of light was left at the end of a million-mile tunnel, the tiniest pinprick—
Twelve Days Page 38
