He drops the weapon into the stream of passing waste below. After pocketing the kill brass, he takes out the plastic bag and shakes onto the dank ledge the copper-washed steel shell case with its invisible fingerprint, a fingerprint that he now knows belongs to a Chechen rebel of some reputation.
They will search the crowd, the surrounding buildings, the parked vehicles before they will think to look beneath the earth, but nonetheless Evan runs to his exit point and emerges through a manhole cover into a park five blocks north. He walks three blocks east, away from the quickening commotion, and boards a bus. A few klicks later, he exits, flips his reversible jacket inside out, and zigzags the city, the spreading news on the lips of passersby, wafting in snatches from café tables, blaring from car radios.
Once he’s safely back in his rented room, he logs in to the e-mail account and creates a new saved message consisting of a single word: “Neutralized.”
A moment later the draft updates: “Close the operation.”
Evan stares at the words, feeling the glow of emotion beneath his face. He runs a hand over his short hair, and his palm comes away damp with perspiration. He stands up, walks away from the laptop, walks back. Types: “Request phone contact.”
He hits REFRESH. Hits it again. Nothing.
Jack is thinking it over.
Seventeen anxious hours later, Evan finally receives a response, and two hours after that he is standing at the specified cross street, having reached Jack at a pay phone from a pay phone. He’s caught Jack on the front edge of an East Coast morning, though he seems as alert as ever, his station-agent’s mind shaping his responses into neat packets of words, articulate silences, loaded intonations.
“All he did is provide a cartridge case,” Evan says.
Jack says, “That’s all he did of which you’re aware.”
“He seems loyal. An asset.”
“Don’t believe everything you think.”
The breeze blows flecks of moisture into Evan’s face, and he hunches into the collar of his jacket, turning this way and that, watching pedestrians, vehicles, the windows of the towering, stone-faced buildings all around.
“He’s not a friend to us,” Jack says. “He’s a friend to everyone. A businessman. He doesn’t just sell cartridge cases with fingerprints. He moves weaponry.”
“Weaponry?”
“Fissile material. Highest bidder. He is a complicating factor in our work there. That has to be enough for you.”
“What about the Sixth Commandment?” Evan says, anger creeping into his voice. “‘Question orders.’”
“You’ve questioned them,” Jack says. “Now execute them. Close the operation. Your friend and anyone else you might have used. This cannot — will not — come back on us.”
The steady hum of a dial tone follows.
Evan wanders the neighborhood until he comes upon a GAZ Volga, a four-door sedan as common on these streets as a Chrysler in Detroit. He hot-wires it and leaves the city, driving into a bruise-colored sunset. He parks several blocks from the apartment with the curved stucco staircase and then closes the distance under cover of the rapidly falling night. Only once he’s reached the blue-and-white Turkish tiles does he remove his pick set. The rusting lock on the arched wooden door gives itself up within seconds.
Evan steals silently across the dark front room with its vaulted ceiling. The Makarov pistol remains in its place, resting atop the antique television. It is loaded.
In the rear of the apartment, the kitchen is lit, and carrying through the beaded curtain is the static-filled sound of an animated radio announcer rattling on in a language with which Evan is unfamiliar. Tajik? Bukhori?
How little he knows of this life he is about to extinguish.
The hanging beads slice his view into vertical slats. The man sits at the small chipped table, facing away, spooning soup from a bowl. An old-fashioned radio rests on the counter beside a hot plate. A prosaic little portrait: Man Eating Dinner Alone.
Evan steps through the curtain, the clattering beads announcing his presence. The man turns and looks back through his wireless spectacles. There is a moment of recognition, and then the lines of his face contract in sorrow. There is no anger or fear — only sadness. He nods once and turns slowly back to his soup.
Evan shoots him through the back of the head.
As the man tilts forward, his chair slides back a few inches and his body remains resting there, chest to the table’s edge, face in the soup.
Evan lifts him out of the soup, upright into the chair, and cleans his face as best he can. His left eye is gone, and part of his forehead. As Evan returns the dish towel to the counter, he comes upon a crude clay ashtray, shaped by a child’s hand.
He vomits into the sink.
After, he finds a bottle of bleach in a cabinet and sloshes it into the drain.
As he exits onto the dark staircase, he becomes aware of a man easing up the stairs, drawn perhaps by the sound of the gunshot. The man’s left fist gleams even in the shadow.
They freeze midway down the stairs.
The man is all dark silhouette to Evan, just as Evan is to him. The man’s head dips, orienting on the pistol in Evan’s hand. The man lowers his own gun, opens his other palm in a show of harmlessness, and shakes his head. Evan nods and brushes past him.
Ten minutes later, halfway back to the city, his knotted chest still prevents him from drawing full breaths.
His next stop is the abandoned textile factory. As he enters, darting through the warren of giant fabric rolls, the trim Estonian appears suddenly. He holds a no-shit Kalashnikov, its curved magazine protruding like a tusk. Evan has brought a pistol to an AK-47 fight. They are standing by the industrial weaving loom where they met before.
The Estonian cocks his head with benign curiosity, but his grip stays firm on the assault rifle, his small eyes hard like pebbles. Even at this hour, roused from sleep, he wears neatly pressed trousers and a tailored shirt, though one flap remains untucked. The door to the office behind him is closed, but a smudged glow illuminates the fogged glass of the window.
The men square off in an uneasy truce, not aiming their weapons but not putting them away either.
“I need your help,” Evan says. Slowly, cautiously, he raises the Makarov, then fiddles with the slide. “It keeps jamming.”
The Estonian’s smile appears, a neat arc sliced through soft pink cheeks. “That is because you did not buy it from me.” He reaches for the gun. “But seriously, this is a statistical near impossibility. Makarovs do not jam.”
Evan knows this, but it was the only excuse he could fabricate in the moment.