Evan kicked the briefcase across the threshold into Room 10. It spun on the carpet, rocketing behind the man, the feed on Evan’s phone whirling vertiginously. At once the blocky heels of the man’s boots loomed large on Evan’s screen, the briefcase seemingly stopping right behind him, and his left foot began a startled pivot.
Evan took a single giant lunge through the doorway, grabbing the man’s gun hand as it swung to meet him. He caught the inside of the wrist and raked the arm in violent outward rotation, snapping tendon and bone. Already his knife hand was rising, that tanto tip tapping up the man’s bared torso—smack-smack-smack—each blow placed between a different set of ribs.
The look of surprise on the man’s face was pronounced — he was elite, not cannon fodder, and dying clearly wasn’t in his playbook.
The gun floated to the bed, bouncing twice, and Evan tilted him down softly onto the mattress on top of it.
Katrin was looking up at him from beneath the bed with an expression he couldn’t at first place. Maybe horror.
He held one finger to his lips, extending his other hand to her.
She rolled onto her back, throwing up a hand, and he clasped it around the thumb and whisked her out and onto her feet. A wet gurgling sounded from the bed.
“My God,” she said, too loud. “Is he…?”
The front window exploded in at them, the pistol reports setting his ears ringing. Evan pivoted to protect Katrin, shards showering his back. Her mouth pressed to his chest, her scream vibrating his skin through his shirt.
He propelled her into Room 11. Sweeping aside the curtains, he half flung her out into the alley and hopped through after her. A crimson feather lay across one porcelain cheek, a stud of glass glittering in the skin.
“Your briefcase,” she said. “What about—”
He grabbed her hand, yanked her toward the carport and the waiting Taurus. They jumped in, and he pulled out and down the alley. He accelerated to the first intersecting street, then veered right and stopped, idling behind a Norms Restaurant. A few of the patrons were hustling out onto the sidewalk, craning in the direction of the gunshots. Others rushed to their cars, shielding their kids.
“What are you doing?” Katrin said. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Why’d you stop?”
He took his foot off the brake, letting the car creep forward, forward, until he could make out the motel parking lot one block over. The purple Scion remained, still perched in its spot right off the street.
He pulled the RoamZone out, the feed still active. A worm’s-eye view of the Room 10 carpet, strewn with broken glass. “Did you recognize that man?” he asked.
“No.”
“Never saw him before?”
“No.”
On the feed, a set of boots approached, and then the view carouseled, bringing a rugged face into close-up. One of the men from the first SUV. Behind him, sprawled across the bed, a pair of legs shuddered.
“How about him?” Evan asked.
“No,” Katrin said. “I swear.”
The man touched his ear. “We got two down, Slatch. Well, shit, one and three-quarters. Gonzalez is fucked.”
The other half of the transmission was not audible.
Behind the man another voice shouted, “Clear!” His partner swept by in the background, barreling across into Room 11. The bark came again: “Clear!” He ran back into the main room. “Looks like they split through the alley. Does he want us to pursue?” The partner cocked his head, looking directly at the lens. “The fuck?”
“Can we please get out of here?” Katrin said.
Evan shot a look up the block at the Scion, but it gave up nothing, just the glare of the midday sun off the windshield. Whoever was behind the wheel was waiting for the field team to confirm the targets’ presence, letting them absorb the higher risk.
They’d absorb more than that.
Katrin again: “What are we waiting for?”
On Evan’s phone the second man approached now, shoulder to shoulder with his partner. They leaned in, peering at the briefcase.
“This,” Evan said, and keyed a code into his phone.
From a block away came a resonant boom. The feed went to static. A few onlookers shrieked. But Evan wasn’t watching them.
He was watching the Scion.
At last a tall, bulky man emerged from the driver’s seat and stared across the parking lot from behind the open car door. His hands rose and squiggled in the air before him, as if he were playing an imaginary piano.
From the passenger side, a woman emerged. Big floppy hat, sunglasses, shaggy blond hair. The row of rooms was out of view, but smoke wafted across from where Room 10 once was.
The man and woman did not rush to check out the aftermath. Already they were scanning the street, parked cars, the windows of neighboring buildings. Focused not on the explosion or the lost men but on the surrounding area. They were accustomed to diversionary tactics, to secondary attacks, to reading the chessboard.
The big man swept his gaze up the street toward the diner. Before it reached Evan, he dropped the car into reverse, eased back behind the diner, and U-turned for the freeway.
24
Fucked-Up Date
The green freeway signs of the 10 flashed overhead as Evan sliced between two trucks, gunning away from the coast. He had to get Katrin to a secure location, and right now anything beyond his direct control was not secure. Which meant that he was going to do something he’d never done before.
He was going to take a client to one of his safe houses.
He was certain he hadn’t been tracked to the motel. So then how had he and Katrin been located? His mind shuffled through possibilities, replaying particular images from the motel as though they were movie clips, slowing them down, freeze-framing to check details. This was an added benefit of mindfulness meditation — it enhanced recall and helped to heighten awareness. That was the aim when meditating or fighting or lifting the latch on his mail slot: to see everything as if for the first time.
He pictured himself climbing out of the car at the motel. Anyone sitting in a parked vehicle in the front lot? No. Any tourists out and about, snapping photos? No, just a mom and two kids waiting on the sidewalk while the father paid the meter. When he’d first checked in, had the receptionist logged his license-plate number? No. There had been a security camera behind the front desk, at a lazy angle across the front counter. Katrin had been with Evan when he’d booked the rooms. Most security footage these days was stored on an online server.
So.
If Evan were the one hunting Katrin, what would he have done? Assuming that his target would want to regroup after the sniper near miss, he’d look at every low- to midlevel motel within a thirty-mile radius of the dim sum restaurant. He’d eliminate those without ready freeway access and those that were part of big chains with fixed check-in procedures. Then he’d tap into the security cameras in the remaining lobbies and run facial-recognition software on the resultant feeds. This would require enormous resources and know-how, not to mention a huge amount of luck. Implausible? Highly. But — depending on whom Vegas had hired and how expert they were — not impossible.
If he was going that far, why not consider whether satellite footage had been retrieved from the blocks surrounding the restaurant in the wake of the shooting? His Chrysler would have been lost from imagery in the alley, but it could have been picked up pulling out onto Hill Street. A few blocks later, he’d screeched over into the liquor-store parking lot to wand down Katrin. Had he stayed close enough to the umbra thrown by the building to hide their outlines?