He put his hand over Baron’s mouth. Baron’s eyes opened, found Henry. “Shooter, your three o’clock. Acknowledge,” Henry told him.
Baron nodded, gestured for him to move back, and lifted the sofa cushion, revealing a respectable cache of weapons. Henry gave him a solemn look of admiration. Then he grabbed a case containing a disassembled sniper rifle, ammunition, and a few grenades for his burn bag, and tucked a Glock with a silencer into his waistband.
“You’re a shitty houseguest, you know that?” Baron said in a half-whisper as he watched Henry tool up. “Most people bring flowers or a bottle of vino. How the hell did they find us?”
“Listen to me,” Henry said. “Danny’s good, she’s really good. But she doesn’t know how much she doesn’t know. Take care of her, all right?”
Baron nodded.
“Thanks, brother,” Henry said.
Henry got up and headed for the front door, keeping himself too low for a clean shot but not so low that he was completely out of sight. Bracing himself, he stepped outside, slinging the burn bag over one shoulder as he closed the door behind him. The bag was a bit heavier now but he didn’t mind the extra weight. For a few seconds, he held very still, scanning his surroundings and listening.
Good morning, Cartagena.
He began walking briskly toward the center of Old Town, doing his best to look like he was off to spend the day sightseeing and shopping, and not at all like he was toting a bag full of weapons because someone was trying to kill him.
This guy was good.
Henry didn’t catch a glimpse of him for at least ten minutes, and even then it was only by accident. Crossing a street, he happened to look down and saw his stalker’s reflection in a puddle of water. Henry turned casually and, hiding the pistol in his hand behind his open shirt, fired at him. It wasn’t his preferred method of taking a hostile down but it was a shot he’d made before.
Not today, however. The guy was gone and Henry knew he hadn’t just rolled off the roof. Talk about reflexes, Henry thought, ignoring the hole he’d put in his shirt. His stalker must have moved as soon as he’d seen him start to turn, without even knowing Henry had a gun.
Better keep my head on a swivel, Henry thought uneasily.
Henry didn’t pick him up again until he reached a parking lot almost ten minutes later. As he walked briskly along a row of cars, some impulse made him stop at a bright yellow VW bug and use its side mirror to check behind him. He caught a glint of metal and ducked a heartbeat before the mirror exploded into fragments of glass, plastic, and rubber.
Dropping to the ground, he crawled around the VW to the Jeep on the other side, dragging the burn bag with him. He waited a few moments and then used the barrel of the Glock to angle the Jeep’s side mirror so he could see the rooftops behind him.
Nothing; his stalker had disappeared again. Being gone was a great idea; Henry decided to try it himself. He crawled under the Jeep to the other side and raised himself carefully, first to his knees and then to a half-crouch. The nearest street was about thirty yards away on his right. Henry hesitated, then made a break for it, forcing himself to stay low until he reached the street, where he straightened up and pushed himself into a sprint. Something whizzed past his head, close enough that he would have sworn he felt the breeze of it cutting through the air before it punched a hole in a brick wall on his right.
Henry veered into a narrow alley, sprinting faster than he had in a long time. The shooter was stalking him openly now, no longer caring that Henry could see him leaping from one rooftop to another. Like he wanted to show he could go just as fast as Henry on the ground, but without as much effort.
Time to turn and fight—gun time, not run time, Henry thought, hoping Danny and Baron were well out of harm’s way. He ducked behind a telephone pole, worked the sniper rifle out of the bag and got it assembled.
Okay, Mr. I-go-so-fast-on-rooftops, let’s see who you are, Henry said silently. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and looked through the scope.
Gone.
Fuck. Henry fumed as he scanned roofs through the scope. It took a few seconds before he finally saw a skewed line and a glint of metal and glass that didn’t belong to the structure.
He adjusted his grip on the rifle. Come on, buddy, he said silently, poke your head up so I can introduce myself properly. I’m Henry Brogan. And you are…?
The guy’s head rose slowly from behind the line of the roof and Henry froze.
The face he saw peering back at him through the scope was impossibly, unbelievably, and unmistakably his own.
CHAPTER 10
Henry had heard guys talk about this kind of shit, weird nightmares where they were tracking down a target, and when they looked through the scope, they saw their own faces looking back at them. It wasn’t that unusual among snipers. According to common wisdom, if you had it more than twice a week, it meant you’d been on the job for too long and it was your subconscious telling you to quit. Some guys dreamed it the other way round, like what was happening to Henry now—they were being hunted by someone who turned out to be their doppelgänger. That one seemed to occur less often but it still wasn’t unusual.
Henry had never had either dream. He only had one nightmare and it was all about drowning. It came and went in frequency and the details varied—his subconscious would swap out his father for Verris and vice versa and often he was simultaneously five and twenty-five as he drowned. He couldn’t remember ever having the evil-twin dream. Therefore, as absurd as this was, he couldn’t be dreaming. The man with his face was real—quite a bit younger, he saw now. But it was his face.
Except it couldn’t be real.
Except it was.
Caught between real and unreal, Henry lowered his rifle.
The man on the roof responded to that with a burst of machine-gun fire.
Okay, that was definitely real, Henry thought, squeezing himself into the space behind the telephone pole while real splinters flew and real chunks of concrete burst from the real wall behind him. Apparently the guy was no longer worried about attracting attention. If he ever had been.
He fired another burst of real gunfire. Henry leaned out from behind the pole to answer with a burst of his own, just to make him duck, then scooped up his burn bag and ran like hell, although his legs were so shaky he stumbled and dipped from side to side like the ground under him was a rolling ocean. But those real bullets nipping at his heels straightened him out pretty quickly; again he pushed himself into a hard sprint, making for an abandoned building at the end of the alley.
Now he would see if all abandoned buildings really were alike, Henry thought, feeling surreal. Maybe the ones in Cartagena’s Old Town were classier, dripping with history. The sign on the boarded-up entrance said something about how trespassers would be prosecuted. Next to it was a legal-looking notice he might have worried about if he hadn’t been under fire. Henry raised his rifle and, still sprinting, shot out the boards, obliterating both signs. Tiny fragments of the road pelted him from behind as he made it to shelter.
This wouldn’t fool the shooter, of course; the guy knew where he was. But at least he wasn’t such an easy target. Or so he hoped, he thought as he scanned the place quickly. It had been an apartment building, its three floors built around an open-air courtyard. Definitely nicer than the usual abandoned building—for all the good that would do him, Henry thought, going up the nearest staircase two steps at a time.