by Greg Rucka
Her hand tightens at his hip.
“Okay,” she says. “That was pretty good.”
“She’s heading for the elevator.”
“We have a room?”
“CI badged the manager after Brock checked in. Four forty.” With his free hand, he takes the key card from his pocket, shows it to her. She plucks it. “Passkey.”
“Guess we know where we’re going.”
“Guess we do.”
She keeps her arm around him until they’re in the elevator, his arm around her shoulders. Once the doors are closed, she turns and kisses him, keeps kissing him even as Lopez comes on the radio in their ears.
“In position.”
Nessuno breaks off long enough to say, “Confirmed,” then brings her mouth back to his until the elevator chimes and comes to a halt.
That’s when they hear the shots.
That’s when Nessuno opens the door and Bell goes through it. Jordan Webber-Hayden is on the floor, and there’s a smear of blood on the bed, and Bell has his weapon up and ready and in both hands, and there’s Brigadier General Emmet Brock with his. Bell gives the warning, knowing it won’t be taken, and he shoots, understanding that is exactly what Brock wants, and hating Brock’s guts for making Bell give it to him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
JORDAN LEAVES BROCK, drives a dozen blocks, doglegs another four, and then reverses direction and returns to the Starbucks where she started. She parks in a different spot, even though the one she’s left only minutes earlier is still vacant, and she takes a moment to pretend to check her hair and makeup in the mirror, but in truth she is trying to confirm that Brock has departed and that she is, in fact, being followed.
About Brock, she’s certain he’s on his way to the Hilton at BWI. He’ll get there early, she knows, because he’ll want to make certain he’s gotten there clean. The clock on the dashboard is reading eleven past ten in the morning. She has plenty of time.
Whether she has picked up surveillance is uncertain. There had been a navy blue Prius with Virginia plates behind her when she left, and through the start of the first dogleg as well, but it had turned off before she’d completed the maneuver and begun the second. When she’d reversed direction, she thought she’d seen it again, but that could have been paranoia; the model and color are common enough, and she hadn’t been able to see its plates.
She finishes up in the Jetta, climbs out, taking her messenger bag. Inside she orders a green tea latte, finds an empty table, and opens her laptop. She doesn’t bother with the camera this time, or even with a direct link to her Lover. Just sends a simple e-mail, the address and the time for the meeting, adding that she had to do nothing, that Brock did it all himself. She contents herself surfing from one news site to another while awaiting a response, but she’s not really reading, and when she sips her drink, it tastes off. She knows why; she can feel the adrenaline and her excitement and her anxiety. She is on the cusp, she can feel it; she can jump either way.
She genuinely doesn’t know if she can do what her Lover has asked. The sincerity, the desire of Brock’s offer was unexpected, even though she suspected the depth of his feeling for her. All the doubts she had put aside when her Lover returned—Brock brought them forth again. She wants to be pure and certain, not so suddenly conflicted, and she thinks that if Brock had made the offer only a day earlier, before her Lover had reappeared, she would have taken it gratefully. She would have walked away with him, leaving everything behind.
Now her Lover has returned, and that changes everything, the way what he asked her to do to that mother and her daughter changed everything. She has his promise. She has him again.
From her seat, she can see where she’s parked, and she keeps glancing up, and there are no navy blue Priuses in sight.
Then the e-mail she is waiting for comes, and she opens it and reads what her Lover has written.
There is a house in France I bought for us years ago. Tell me you like France.
She can’t keep herself from smiling, can’t keep the small squeak of joy from escaping.
They had fought the night before, the first time they had ever fought.
She’d asked him to stay with her, to spend the night in Jordan Webber-Hayden’s home, and he had refused. It was too dangerous, he said; it would put them both at risk. There was the chance that Brock would return, and his passion for her made him unpredictable. If he came back to find them together, it could jeopardize everything. She knew he was right, she didn’t need to remember any of her tutors or any of her lessons, but she had argued with him anyway.
“I don’t care,” she said. “Please, dorogoy, just this night. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be without you.”
“Zoya.” He cupped her face in his hands, kissed her lips. “You think I do not wish to remain? You think there is anywhere I would rather be than with you?”
She pulled away. She struck at his arm, not to hurt him but to tell him that his touch was unwelcome, and took some satisfaction that the gesture seemed to both surprise and wound him.
“Zoyenka,” he said.
Her leg ached, and her arm. She squeezed her eyes shut, and it was a mistake, because the memory of the woman and her child came back, sharp with detail. She could again smell the rank fear in that house, see and hear the sobbing girl, the anguish of her mother. She had killed the girl first, and her mother’s scream had been primal, had continued in anguish until Jordan had silenced her with a shot.
“I can’t do this anymore.” She opened her eyes, saw that he hadn’t moved, that there was sadness on his new face. “I do not want to do this anymore.”
“You don’t have to.”
She didn’t understand.
Her Lover said, “Pack a bag. Clothes, things you would take on a short trip, and Jordan Webber-Hayden’s passport. One bag only, you understand? Nothing more. Everything else here you leave behind.”
“I’m leaving?”
“You are compromised, and I will not allow it. After I meet with the soldier’s friends tomorrow, I will return to you here, and together we will leave.”
“I’ll come with you?”
“Yes. We are both in danger now, and I will not allow it. I cannot allow it.”
Her hands were shaking, she realized. She clenched them together, and he came and put his arms around her.
“You have been everything I needed, done everything I hoped,” her Lover said. “Now I need you to do one more thing. Just one more thing, Zoyenka, and I will give you everything I promised you all those years ago.”
The pressure in her breast was becoming unbearable. She buried her face against his shoulder.
“The only thing I have ever wanted is you,” she said.
It is ten thirty exactly when she leaves the Starbucks in Chevy Chase, and she takes the next ninety minutes for a drive that in the best of circumstances lasts only thirty. She doglegs, doubles back, takes the highway and varies her speed, and all the while she is watching the vehicles as much as the traffic, trying to spot patterns, trying to flush any possible surveillance. There are navy blue Priuses on the road, but the one she sees with Virginia plates doesn’t match the one in her memory, and the driver is a black male, not a white female with dark hair.
At the Hilton, she parks the Jetta in the lot, then makes her way to the lobby. It’s only two minutes before noon, and there is a cluster of pilots and flight attendants waiting for the shuttle, and some business types, nothing that raises an alarm. She goes to the desk and gives her name, and the young woman there brightens and gives her an envelope. Inside Jordan finds a slip of hotel notepaper, a room number written on it.
She goes to the house phone, asks the operator to connect her with the number she’s just read, and the phone rings twice before Brock answers it.
“I’m in the lobby,” Jordan says.
“Come up.”
She hangs up, moves to the elevators. The airline personnel are filing out the front doors
, and a couple is entering after them, arms around each other, shoulder and waist. She thinks of her Lover and Brock at once, because everything about their manner tells Jordan that they’re in love. He’s whispering in her ear, and the woman’s expression tells Jordan that the proposal is indecent and welcome.
She rides the elevator up alone, reaches Brock’s room and knocks, and the door opens at once. She steps into his arms before he can speak, kisses him, and his surprise gives way to his passion, the way it always has. He turns her, knocking the door closed, and his hands are eager, fingers dragging along her thighs, slipping beneath the hem of her dress. She wraps her arms around his neck, makes a sound into his mouth before pulling her lips away.
“How much time do we have?” she asks.
“All of it,” Brock says.
She brings her mouth in close to his again, runs her hands from his shoulders down to his chest, but instead of keeping her close and taking the kiss, he steps back. His hands slide along her bare arms, down to her wrists, holding them gently. He smiles at her, and Jordan thinks this is the first time in a very long time that she has seen that smile.
“I’m so sorry, Jordan,” Brock says.
“What?”
“This is how it has to be.” He lets go of one hand, takes the gun off his hip. The sound of the weapon going off safe is damning.
“Emmet,” she says.
“You would never leave him,” Brock says. “But you came here anyway. There’s only one reason you would come here anyway, Jordan.”
It’s not entirely true, but she knows there’s no point in denial, in trying to explain to him her conflict, how close he came to having her. No purpose to showing her desperation or making a plea. She is here to kill him, and he knows it; whether he intends to kill himself along with her doesn’t matter.
She doesn’t think about what to do or why to do it. She thinks that her Lover will be waiting for her at her West End condo, and she thinks that there is a house in France waiting for them tomorrow, and she knows that she will not allow everything she has done, everything she has sacrificed, to go to waste.
She thinks all this instantly, intuitively.
Brock brings the pistol up, his other hand still on her wrist, and she twists her arm away from him, slams the palm of her free hand into his face. The weapon discharges, and she feels a sear along her chest, and she cries out as she grabs for the barrel. All the tutors, all the lessons vanish, and she screams at him that she will not let him do this, will not let him take this future from her, wrenching the gun. Brock shouts in pain, and suddenly the weapon isn’t in her hand, but it’s not in his, either. He yanks on her wrist, spears heat into her shoulder, and she punches at his throat and gets his chin instead. He hits her, and she finds herself on the bed, bouncing off of it, and he’s reaching for the gun on the floor.
She kicks, digs a heel into his side, and Brock falls to a knee. She kicks again, skims his back, and he’s coming up with the weapon. She tumbles to one side, off the bed and onto the floor, and he is rising, steadying himself.
The door flies open, and she sees the man from the lobby, the one who made her think of her Lover in attitude, if not in body, and he has his own gun in his hand, advancing. The woman hugs the wall of the hallway outside, just visible.
“Brock!” the man shouts. “Drop it!”
Brock does not drop it, pivots, and the two shots come rapid, and the man advances and the woman takes the corner into the room behind him. Jordan launches herself forward, throws her shoulder into the woman, slams her against the door frame, hears her grunt with the collision.
Then Jordan is out of the room and not looking back, and running with everything she has, trying to get away.
“Jordan Webber-Hayden,” the woman shouts, and somehow a neuron connects for Jordan, and she realizes that this woman shouting and the woman in the blue Prius this morning, they are the same. “Stop!”
Jordan Webber-Hayden does not stop.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE GENERAL HITS the floor, and Hardball hits Nessuno, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, the chief thinks that there’s a reason why specialists train day after day after day to clear rooms. She’s not a specialist, not at this, but this time, she’s not having any of it.
“Rabbit,” Nessuno shouts, sending it out on the net, sending it wide, and she shoves off the door frame and pivots into the hall. She shouts after the woman, “Jordan Webber-Hayden! Stop!” and gets exactly the result she’d expected. The door to one of the neighboring rooms flies open, one of the CI agents posted there swinging out, SIG in his hands. Hardball is at the end of the hall and crashing through the fire exit.
“No shot.” Nessuno barks it, makes it an order, already chasing. “We need her alive.”
Responses crash in her ear, radio traffic suddenly nuts. Bell’s voice, and it’s the second time she’s heard him speak amid chaos and adrenaline, and, as before, he’s almost unnaturally calm. Brock is down, need medic, need evac, Blackfriars is in pursuit of Hardball.
She catches the door just before it swings shut, slams it open but pauses, checks low first, and sees a pair of black heels discarded on the landing, spatters of blood. Checks high, and there’s a flutter of white summer dress with black-and-gold pattern rounding a corner.
“She’s in the stairs,” Nessuno says, repeats it, adds, “She’s heading up.”
Taking the stairs now, as fast as she can, racing past droplets of blood on the cold concrete. She’s tired, she’s smelly, she’s hungry, but all that vanishes, adrenaline and fury propelling her to take the stairs two at a time. She rounds one corner, another, and Jordan Webber-Hayden is fast or inspired, but Nessuno thinks if she can keep up the pressure, they’ll have her. They can cut her off at the roof. They can cut off her route.
Except Nessuno is rounding the landing at seven, and she hears the door being knocked open above, and she looks up just in time to see Hardball wrenching the fire extinguisher from its holder. The canister comes crashing straight for her head, and Nessuno jumps back, feels the air shift her hair, brush her face. She leaps over it as it begins to spit on the stairs, nearly loses her footing, rights herself, and is onto eight as the door is again closing. This time, she goes through without pause, and Jordan Webber-Hayden is running barefoot away from her down the carpeted hall.
Full sprint after her, gun in one hand, and Nessuno won’t even consider trying the shot, doesn’t dare risk it. She’s shouting that they’re on eight, and wondering where Bell is, where anyone is. Jordan Webber-Hayden cuts right around a corner and out of sight, and a second later Nessuno rounds after her, into the short hallway of the eighth floor’s elevator bank, trying to stay on her feet.
Something bashes her shoulder, catches her across the jaw, and Nessuno tastes blood and realizes she’s on the ground, rolls in time to avoid the foot trying to find her neck. Jordan Webber-Hayden stands, holding the house phone from the table, handset gripped in her right, base unit in her left. She’s spitting fury, swearing at her, fabric ripped in a line across the left side of her torso, dark blood shining. She kicks, barefoot, and Nessuno gets her hands up and catches her foot, twists, brings her down, and that’s when she realizes she’s lost her weapon.
Jordan Webber-Hayden lands facedown, lashes back with the handset of the telephone. It cracks audibly against Nessuno’s forehead, makes her see dancing light, rocks her back, and Jordan Webber-Hayden lunges forward again, phone jangling miserably as it’s discarded. She reaches for the gun with both hands, still cursing, and Nessuno hears seven-tiered Russian insults blending with English calling her a cocksucking cunt.
Nessuno throws herself forward, lands on the other woman’s back. An elbow comes around, hits her hard in the side, but Nessuno gets her left arm beneath, up, drives her right thigh between Jordan Webber-Hayden’s, locks her ankles around the woman’s left leg. She grabs her wrist, yanks, closing the chokehold at the woman’s throat, pulling with all her might, and Jordan
Webber-Hayden won’t stop fighting, even as the blue streak turns hoarse. They rock together, and Nessuno flips onto her back, now with the other woman on top of her, pulling and pulling, and she can hear the radio in her ear spewing nonsense. Jordan Webber-Hayden drives her elbow back into Nessuno’s side again, but this time it’s weaker, and her other hand is clawing at Nessuno’s wrists, nails tearing skin and drawing blood, trying to break the hold. There’s a distant chime, the sound of Bell’s voice, and then there are hands on her, pulling at her, and she realizes that they’ve been separated, that CI has the other woman facedown on the carpet once more, cuffs snapping around her wrists.
Bell helps her to her feet, and she spits out a mixture of saliva and blood, wipes at her mouth with her sleeve. She’s drenched with sweat, and when she touches her forehead with her fingertips, she can feel the goose egg coming up.
Jordan Webber-Hayden has stopped struggling, and she’s stopped swearing.
Nessuno realizes that the woman is sobbing, choking out one word over and over again.
“What’s she saying?” Bell asks. “Anybody know what she’s saying?”
“Dorogoy,” Nessuno says. “It means ‘my love.’”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
SO MUCH FOR rules, the Architect thinks. Rules are made to be broken. Some things, he acknowledges, have to be done himself.
The first communiqué from Zoya comes, and with it the address and the time, and it gives him roughly three hours to do what must be done. He’s anticipated the day’s work and has done his shopping already, fortunate to find an electronics store open at nine that morning. The camera is a new Canon EOS, and he charges the battery while working at his laptop at the hotel. He sends her a response, imagining her smile when she reads about their plans.
