Evan’s operational priorities clarified. Which angles to cover, who to take out first, best means of egress.
From beneath the bed, Katrin’s jagged breathing came audible, and he shushed her as quietly as he could manage.
The form at Room 9’s rear window lowered out of sight. Evan strained to listen for footsteps moving through the alley. He lifted the Wilson, rotating it slowly across the back window directly behind him, gauging the shooter’s crawling progress as he passed beneath the sill of Room 10.
At the appropriate interval, movement sparked in Evan’s narrow view into Room 11 to his right. The shadowed figure, easing onto his feet again.
A quiet scraping back in Room 9 reached Evan’s ears, and then came a muffled pop of the window lock. The partner. A black-gloved hand, ghostly beneath the wind-fluffed curtain, gripped the pane and slid it soundlessly upward.
They were entering the rooms on either side simultaneously.
“What’s the point of calling me in if you’re gonna keep me in the car?” Candy said.
“Let the field team take the first charge,” Slatcher replied. “I’m the backstop. You’re on cleanup. That is your specialty.”
Candy made pouty lips. “And here I was hoping we’d be getting our hands sticky like old times.”
Wedged behind the wheel of the Scion, Slatcher refocused on the text messages scrolling across his right eyeball. More precisely, at the messages projected from the high-def contact-lens display. Top Dog was talking, and when TD talked, you listened.
Top Dog loved his toys, especially ones that enhanced secure communications. His latest and greatest was wearable technology. The fully pixelated contact lens projected images so they could be perceived with ease. Supposedly molding the liquid crystal cells into a spherical curve had been a bitch, but that wasn’t really Slatcher’s concern. His concern was keeping the goddamned thing from drying out in the middle of a mission.
TD’s last text message scrolled: IS THE AREA CONTAINED?
Slatcher lifted his hands and typed in the air on an imaginary keyboard. His reply appeared in a two-foot float off his face: YES. PERIMETER ESTABLISHED.
He wore radio-frequency-identification-tagged press-on nails to type and send messages literally out of thin air. There was no end to the beauty tech products in Top Dog’s bag o’ tricks.
Beside him Candy twirled her hair, whistled the chorus from “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
ARE BOTH TARGETS CONFIRMED?
NOT YET.
WHEN?
One of his men in the front parking lot looked back at the Scion, gave a little nod. Slatcher’s fingers danced a few inches above the steering wheel.
NOW.
Keeping his eyes on the black-gloved hand reaching through the window of Room 9, Evan reached behind him and lifted the briefcase from the nightstand. He stepped through the adjoining door into 9 and crouched, setting the briefcase quietly on the threadbare carpet just past the threshold. Katrin’s sideways face, tight with panic, filled the gap beneath the dust ruffle. She was trembling. Over the bed and through the opposing doorway, the rear curtain of Room 11 billowed up into view, then drifted out of sight again. The window, penetrated.
Evan made a calming gesture to Katrin, a slight sink of one palm toward the floor. Then he pulled back into Room 9.
The intruder readied for entry. One glove gripped the edge of the window frame, braced. A boot rose into sight, slipping through the curtains. Evan gauged the man’s position, moving to the blind side. He flattened against the wall next to the window, his back pressed to the drywall.
It had to be silent.
If there were shots, if the intruder shouted or fell back through the window, the team in the parking lot would crash the front doors.
Evan laid his pistol within reach on the carpet and eased open his Strider knife. It gave the faintest click when the black-oxide blade locked.
The menacing bulb of the suppressor sliced through the curtains. A broad shoulder swung into view next, straining beneath the T-shirt.
Evan held position.
The lead boot pointed now, toes feeling for the carpet. Sweat sparkled on the band of the man’s neck, in the back of his buzz-cut hair. Veins stood out on his hand and wrist, his grip firm on the pistol.
Evan could have reached out and tapped his shoulder.
The faintest tremble came from the floorboards two rooms across — a boot setting down in Room 11. Evan sensed it more than heard it. He felt a pull to Katrin, hiding one room over, soon to be within reach of the second intruder.
First things first.
He held his focus on the man before him, eliminated all else. Painstakingly, the man drew his upper torso through the curtains and shifted his weight onto his lead leg. He shot a quick glance at the open adjoining door as he drew his other foot through, but Evan remained sunk back in his blind spot.
The man’s trailing knee came to his chest, the foot clearing the sill. He eased it to the floor. Straightened. Started to turn.
Evan slid behind him, gripped the back of his head, and whisked the blade across his throat. The man corkscrewed stiffly onto his heels, their bodies aligned chest to spine, a full-body seal to muffle any sounds of struggle. Evan tipped the man’s head down hard, chin to chest so the lungs wouldn’t suck and give away their position. The gun tumbled from the limp fingers, and Evan caught it midway to the floor as he sank the man’s bulk to the carpet.
Evan deposited him soundlessly on the floor. His heels scraped quietly against the carpet. His eyes rolled up at Evan, the sclera pronounced. His lips guppied, but there would be no sound, not with what had been done to his trachea. The puddle from the severed carotid expanded out and out, wreathing his head like a halo.
Evan moved soundlessly to the brink of Room 10, halting shy of the adjoining door’s frame and extracting his RoamZone from his pocket. The briefcase sat open on the floor just back from the threshold, the pinhole lens in the lid feeding his cell screen a tilted swath of the room — seam of wall and ceiling, headboard of the bed, top half of the doorway to Room 11. A head whipped through the frame as the man entered Room 10. The edge of his shoulder remained. He was standing beside the bed under which Katrin hid, but Evan couldn’t make out his orientation.
Not the view he needed.
Evan reached toward the threshold with his shoe, nudging the back corner of the briefcase as delicately as he could manage, all the while keeping his eyes on the shifting video feed on his phone.
The side of the man’s neck came into the frame. His cheek. One eye. Two. Evan had his head in frame and little more.
The man was scanning the room, not yet noticing the infinitesimal movement of the briefcase in the shadows beyond the threshold.
Evan’s palm was sweating against the hardened-rubber cell case. He watched the feed, debating whether to attack or lie in wait.
Then the man sank from sight.
Evan strained to make out a sound, heard nothing. Was the man searching under the bed? He couldn’t afford to wait to find out. With the toe of his shoe, Evan pressed on the briefcase lid, the view in his hand scanning as it tilted down. The bedspread came into sight, one nightstand with a lamp — then the man. He squatted by the mattress, pistol aimed beneath the bed, his other hand reaching for the dust ruffle.
On the tiny screen, Evan made out Katrin’s canted head beneath, the flash of her eyes, her open mouth wavering, not yet screaming. The pistol swung, centering on her head.