In a voice almost too soft to hear, Lucas said, “Please.”
Karl shifted his torso to one side, just enough for Lucas to duck beneath his arm and scurry off.
Aurora felt her legs shaking and willed them to stop. Denial washed through her. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. Could it?
She realized she was still gripping the phone, her palm slick with sweat.
“Can I…?” Her mouth was too dry, the sentence choked off. “Can I please go, too?”
“I don’t think so, pretty girl,” Sturmer said. “We’d like to talk to you. Back in the privacy of the church.”
She heard footsteps behind her, Karl herding her back to the other men, to the rear door, to the hellish darkness that waited beyond.
“No,” she heard herself say. “No!”
But Karl kept coming, a bulldozer with a raised shovel. She swiveled to Sturmer and Ryan, getting ready to scream, but then Karl’s chest slapped into her from behind, knocking the breath out of her, driving her forward, delivering her to them. He didn’t even need to use his arms.
Time slowed, details sharpening. Her mamá’s refrain came back to her, hard-learned on the streets of Zapopan—Eyes, throat, groin.
She pictured her mamá’s weathered face, her hands raw at the end of each day from scrubbing floors and toilets. And she told herself: Not without a fight.
She made a fist, hammered it back into Karl’s groin.
He grunted, rearing up and knocking her forward at the same time.
She dropped the phone, heard it slap the ground at her feet, the rectangle of obsidian-dark glass facing upward. The camera had somehow flipped to selfie mode, and in its recording eye she saw the rickety fire escapes above, latticing the sky.
And something else above them.
A man on the rooftop, looking down.
He jumped.
A thunderclap ripped through the alley as he hit the fire escape on the far side.
The men jerked upright, peeling away from her, reeling. She was too terrified to lift her gaze. She stared down at the phone, the blinking red light.
Another clang as the form leapt down to a fire escape landing on the other side. The metal structure jogged on its moorings, a spill of silt trickling down.
One of the big men—Sturmer or Karl—let out a guttural moan of fear.
The figure above plummeted off the second fire escape now, looming ever larger in the recording at Aurora’s feet. She was half crouched, her hands lifted to hover over her ears.
Ryan said, “What the h—”
A wet crunch severed the word in his mouth. In her lowered gaze, she watched his ankles roll to the sides and snap, his knees pile-drive into the ground, his torso rip backwards. Then his face was right there on the ground in front of her, his jaw hanging at an angle beneath one ear.
She closed her eyes, pressed her palms to her ears.
Not hard enough to block out the snap of a bone.
The crack of a skull fragmenting.
The crackle of tendon and muscle tearing.
Two big bodies thumped the ground, one in front of her, one behind her.
Someone was gasping.
Someone was moaning in a way that sounded wrong, the noise bubbling through liquid.
Someone was screaming, the sound smeared into the asphalt.
A new voice that was calm, almost gentle, cut through the commotion. “Quiet, please,” it said. “I won’t ask again.”
Then there was just the surround-sound of pained, labored breathing, scurrying in the brick walls like a trapped sparrow.
“You can open your eyes,” the voice said.
She did.
Three puddled bodies around her, limbs twisted, eyes straining.
The clouds had parted, the sun boring through, the bricks painted in gold. She saw a pair of black tactical boots standing just before her.
“It’s okay now,” the man said.
Slowly, slowly, she lifted her gaze.
He stood before her, backlit by the sun, his face shadowed. Average size, average build. From what she could see, he looked like not much; just an average guy, not too handsome.
The Nowhere Man reached down and picked up Lucas’s phone. The red light illuminated his face.
Still recording.
He pressed stop.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m going to have to keep this phone.”
She thought about how much a recording like that would mean to Lucas.
“No problem,” she said.
Around them the men respired and moaned.
Ryan lay on his back, lurching, gripping his throat with his one functional hand. Choking noises came from his mouth, his nose.
“He’s suffocating on his own blood,” the Nowhere Man said. “What do you want to do?”
Aurora looked down at Ryan. He stared up with imploring eyes. He didn’t look so scary anymore.
She thought about the kind of time he and his friends would have taken with her in the church. The things they would have done to all theparts of her. And she felt it inside her, something like desire drawing across her heart, a dark curtain. The razor edge of rage and pain turned outward, a sweet release.
She blinked hard, her gaze narrowing to that tattooed swastika on his bald pate. That was where it would lead.
Ryan’s eyes bulged. He gagged, cracked lips wavering in a silent plea.
She stuck the toe of her sensible DSW ballet flat in his ribs and flipped him onto his side. Blood drooled from the corner of his mouth, and then he started breathing raggedly again. A stainless steel glint showed near the pocket of his jeans.
Lucas’s Breitling.
“Is that your watch?” the Nowhere Man asked.
“No,” she said. “The guy who … who ran away and left me here. With them.”
The Nowhere Man crouched and fished the watch the rest of the way out of Ryan’s pocket. Gave it to her.
Then he stepped over the ruinous mess of Karl’s body and turned to offer his hand, a gesture at once surreal and chivalrous.
She took his hand.
Cool to the touch.
He was barely even breathing hard.
He moved ahead of her, keeping her hand, leading her down the alley.
They reached the end and stepped out onto the pavement.
He let go of her hand, started walking away.
“Are you really him?” she said to his back.
He paused, not turning.
Then kept walking.
He cut into the next alley and was gone.
She stood there a few moments, catching her breath. Staring up the alley at the men cringing and sobbing, she felt oddly empowered.
She walked the opposite way, around the corner of the church, and was surprised to see Lucas’s Range Rover still there, parked up the block. It was facing away and she could make him out, hunched over the wheel.
She walked up the block.
Opened the passenger door.
Climbed in.
He stared at her in shock, his face red. He’d been sobbing.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Thank God. Thank God you made it out. I didn’t have any choice. There was really nothing I could—”
“Lucas,” she said. “Shut up.”
He did.
For a moment.
“You have, uh…” He indicated his face.
She flipped down the visor, thumbed off the droplets of blood from her cheek. Snapped the visor up.
Then she flipped the Breitling into his lap. He stared down at it, stunned.Then back up at her. “How did you—?”
“I’d like you to drive me home now,” she said.
It took a few tries, but he succeeding in fumbling the keys into the ignition. He pulled out, gripping and regripping the steering wheel as if he were kneading it.
“You’re right about one thing,” she said.
“What—” his voice cracked. “What’s that?”
“It’ll be nice to be older,” she said. “So I can finally meet a real man.”
His mouth guppied once, twice, but for oncehe didn’t have anything to say.
She rolled down her window and stretched her arm out, let it surf along the wind like she used to when she was a girl.
Like Lucas said, the world was a big place.
But she figured she’d find her way in it.
Read on for a preview of Out of the Dark
The next exciting thriller from Gregg Hurwitz
Available January 2019
From Minotaur Books
© Gregg Hurwitz
1997
Prologue: Perennial Rain
Evan is nineteen, fresh off the plane, trained up, mission-ready. And yet untested.
His first assignment as Orphan X.
He adjusts rapidly to this foreign place, a city with drizzly rain, imperious ministry buildings, and men who kiss on both cheeks.
His backstop is impeccable, endorsed by visas, a well-stamped passport, verifiable previous addresses, and phone numbers that ring to strategically placed responders. Jack, his handler and surrogate father, has built for him a suitably banal operational alias—enterprising young Ontarian, recently separated from his equally young wife, eager to shepherd his family’s home-siding business into territories unknown. He and Jack worked the identity, kneading it like dough, until Evan was aligned with it so thoroughly that he actually felt the sting of his domestic setback and the fire of ambition to expand into this brave new market. Evan has learned not to act but to live his cover. And he does his best to stash away the part of him that does not believe his alias until the point at which he will require it.
He moves frequently around this gray city to prevent degradation of cover. Now and then in the streets, he comes across others his age. They seem like creatures of a different species. They don backpacks and trickle in and out of hostels, drunkenly recounting school tales in foreign tongues. As always, he remains separate—from them and everyone else. The United States has no footprints in this country. There will be no rolling-car meetings, no physical contacts from an embassy. If he fails, he will expire in a cold prison, alone and forgotten, after decades of suffering. That is, if he’s not fortunate enough to be executed.
One night he is meditating on a threadbare blanket in a hotel seemingly as old as the country itself when the mustard-yellow rotary phone on the nightstand gives off a piercing ring.
It is Jack. “May I speak to Frederick?” he says.
“There is no one here by that name,” Evan says, and hangs up.
Immediately he fires up his laptop and pirates Internet from the travel agency across the avenue. Logging in to a specified e-mail account, he checks the Drafts folder.
Sure enough, there’s an unsent message.
Two words: “Package waiting.” And an address near the outskirts of the city. Nothing more.
He types beneath: “Is it a weapon?”
Hits SAVE.
A moment later the draft updates: “You’re the weapon. Everything else is an implement.”
Even from across an ocean, Jack casts arcane pearls of wisdom—part koan, part war slogan, all pedagogy.
Evan logs off. Because they communicated within a saved message inside a single account, not a word has been transmitted over the Internet, where it could be detected or captured.
On his way out of the rented room, Evan freezes, hand wrapped around the wobbly doorknob. He has been tasked. Once he goes through that door, it is official. Seven years of training has brought him to this moment. His body is gripped by a comprehensive, bone-crushing fear. He doesn’t want to die. Doesn’t want to crack rocks and eat goulash in some labor camp for the rest of his days. Doesn’t want his last moments to be the pressure of a Tokarev nine-mil at the base of his skull and the taste of copper. The perennial rain streaks the window, a tap-tap-tapping on his nerves. He’s sweated through his shirt, and yet the tinny doorknob remains cool beneath his palm.
Like a prayer, he hears Jack’s words in his ear as if he were right beside him: Envision someone else, someone better than you. Stronger. Smarter. Tougher. Then do what that guy would do.
“Act like who you want to be,” Evan tells the stale air of the hotel.
He vows to leave his fear behind him in that room. Forever.
He opens the door and steps through.
The bus out of the city reeks of body odor and sweet tobacco. Sitting in the back, Evan applies a thin sheen of superglue to his fingertips to avoid leaving prints. He prefers this to gloves because it looks less conspicuous and allows him better tactile sensation.
Uneven asphalt erodes into a winding dirt road carved into a mountainside. Eastern Bloc municipal rigor dissolves into hamlets in shambles. Bedsheets flap in the wind. Buildings lean crookedly. Riding a wet gust, a muezzin’s call to prayer. It is as though they have traversed not communities but continents.
The address belongs to a walk-up apartment overlooking a cart-congested road. Evan mounts the curved stucco staircase, padding across blue-and-white Turkish tile, and knocks on a giant arched door, its wood embellished with rusting metal straps. It creaks open grandly to reveal a round man in loose-fitting clothes of indeterminate style.
“Ah,” he says, wireless spectacles glinting. “I trust your journey was safe?” A sweeping gesture of arm and draped sleeve accompanies his softly accented English. “Come in.”
The ceiling is high, churchlike. A Makarov pistol rests in plain view on top of a television with rabbit-ear antennae. The man and Evan pass through clattering bead curtains into a cramped kitchen and sit before shallow teak bowls filled with figs, dried fruits, and nuts.
The man produces a small plastic bag with EYES ONLY Magic Markered on the label in Cyrillic. Inside the bag is a single bullet casing. Evan examines it through the plastic. A copper-washed steel cartridge from a 7.62 × 54mmR round.
It dawns on him that this shell holds a fingerprint, that it is to be left behind to direct blame elsewhere for what Evan will be instructed to do.
He thanks the man and moves to rise, but the man reaches across the table, wraps his brown fingers around Evan’s wrist. “What you hold in your hands is dangerous beyond what you can imagine. Be careful, my friend. It is an unsafe world.”
* * *
The next morning Evan takes to the city neighborhoods he has been scrupulously exploring for the past few weeks. He knows where to make inquiries, and these inquiries land him in the back of an abandoned textile factory, speaking to a trim little Estonian over an industrial weaving loom on which Sovietski rifles are laid out at fastidious intervals.
The preserved shell in Evan’s pocket requires a round that fits a limited range of guns. He looks over the Warsaw Pact offerings, spots a surplused-out Mosin-Nagant with a PSO-1 scope. He points, and the Estonian, using a clean gun cloth, presents it to him. As he observes Evan examining the Russian sniper rifle, his smile borders on the lascivious.
The gun will give Evan a two-inch grouping at a hundred meters, which is all he needs, but he affects a negotiator’s displeasure. “Not a world-class rifle.”
The man folds his soft pink fingers. “It is not as though you are going to the National Matches at Camp Perry.”
Evan notes the reference, tailored for him, a North American buyer. He lifts a wary eye from the scope, regards the little man in his ridiculous suit and pocket square.
The Estonian adjusts his tie, dips his baby-smooth chin toward the rifle. “And besides,” he says, “three million dead Germans can’t be wrong.”
“Alvar?” A weak feminine voice turns Evan’s head.
A beautiful young girl, maybe fifteen, stands in the office doorway, naked save for a ratty blanket drawn across her shoulders. Her eyes sunken and rimmed black. Bones pronounced beneath her skin. Behind her, Evan spots a filthy mattress on the floor and a metal cup and plate.
“I’m hungry,” she says.
Evan catches her m
eaning through his grasp of Russian, though he presumes she is speaking Ukrainian. He makes a note to add this linguistic arrow to his Indo-European quiver.
The Estonian seethes, an abrupt break in his middle-management demeanor. “Back in your fucking bedroom. I told you never to come out when I am conducting business.”
She doesn’t so much retreat as fade back into the office.
Evan hefts the rifle, as if he will be paying by the ounce. He flicks his head toward the closed door. “Looks like she keeps you busy.”
Alvar grins, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “You have no idea, my friend.”
To the side a pallet stacked with crates of frag grenades peeks out from beneath a draped curtain. The Estonian notices Evan noticing them.
“My friend, 1997 has proven good to me,” he says. “It is the Wild West here now. Orders coming in faster than I can fill them. High quantity now. These are the kinds of movers who move nations.”
“For which side?” Evan asks.
The man laughs. “There are no sides. Only money.”
At this prompt a wad of bills changes hands.
* * *
Seventy-two hours later, Evan finds himself in the sewer beneath a thoroughfare, stooped in the dripping humidity, Mosin-Nagant in hand. He stands on the concrete platform above a river of sludge, waiting. The eye-level drainage grate set into the curb grants him a good head-on vantage down the length of the boulevard. In the distance, squawks from mounted speakers and the roar of an erupting crowd. The parade drawing nearer.
Various coded dispatches from Jack have filled in some of the blanks. The target: a hawkish foreign minister gaining power by the day, vocal about nuclear development. Breathing the swamplike air, Evan waits. A cheer emanates from the street above him. He lifts the rifle, the tip inches from the mouth of the curb inlet, and clarifies his view, allowing the scope to become his world.
Children held aloft on shoulders laugh and clap. On the banked curve of visible street, sawhorses hold back the masses. Miniature flags flicker before faces like swarming insects.
The front of the processional, a phalanx of armored SUVs, turns into view several hundred meters away. The vehicles head up the stretch of asphalt toward Evan. His view is slightly offset from each windshield as it flashes in the muted midday sun.
The Intern Page 2
