When he was perhaps twenty-five feet away, the walker faltered, almost skidding to a stop, and Chace knew he had seen something, perhaps her silhouette, perhaps the body of the last driver. He started to bring his pistol up, but she had been ready, and beat him on the index, firing twice, then twice more. In the distance and the darkness, she couldn’t see her hits, but she saw the results, and the man twisted on his feet, a top in its final stages, then toppled.
Chace took a moment to catch her breath.
Then she turned back to her Volga, climbed once more behind the wheel, and drove up to the front of the house, parking at an angle, half on the driveway, half off. The lights on the ground floor were burning, but the lights above were all out. A single fixture burned above the door.
She left the engine running and walked up the path, setting the slide lock on the hush puppy as she made her way to the door. This time, silence would be more important than volume. The light dug at her eyes, killing off the last vestiges of her night vision. There was no peephole on the door, which was a marginal surprise, and no cameras posted above or around, which was not. Chace tried not to think about the men with the room-brooms on watch inside.
She knocked firmly, twice.
She raised the hush puppy in both hands, and waited.
Just need to use the toilet, she thought, and then found herself fighting a giggle, because, in fact, she was sure she did.
The door rattled, parted, and she saw a slice of a man’s face. She fired, stepping forward and shoving the door, and managed to catch him before he hit the floor. It struck her that he looked awfully young, and for a moment she was afraid she’d made a mistake and had the terrifying but fleeting fear that she’d done all this work only to enter the wrong house. But as she laid the body down on the carpet, beside the rows of shoes left by their owners, she saw the MP-5K resting on the sideboard.
Chace shut the door quietly, working the slide on the hush puppy and removing the empty casing, tucking it into her pants. She’d dumped the spent shells from the garage at the cemetery, so they wouldn’t collide and ring in her pocket. Then she slipped the hush puppy back into her jacket and brought out the knife at her back.
She listened, and for several seconds didn’t hear anything.
Then she heard distant waves rolling onto a shore.
She followed the sound, taking each step as its own movement, keeping her progress deliberate. A stairway ran to the second floor, carpeted, but she ignored it for the moment, pressing forward. The sound of waves disappeared, replaced by a man’s voice, speaking Russian, and she could make out enough to know she was hearing commentary to a football match. A second voice joined the first, and then both laughed.
She came off the hallway, through an open archway, into a kitchen, the sound of the television growing gently louder. She passed the light switch as she entered, and threw it, turning the room dark. A dining room opened up in front of her with a view of the backyard, a semidarkened hallway to her left. She took the hallway, still moving slowly, still hearing the television, now finally able to discern its light at the end of the corridor, beyond a half-opened door. Along the left-hand side were two doors, closed; on the right, one, partially ajar, and she could make out bathroom fixtures within.
Halfway down the hall, she heard movement from the room with the television, the creak of furniture springs losing their tension. She retreated as quickly as she could to the kitchen, then turned and put her back to the wall on the opposite side of the opening to the hall as the light switch. She spun the blade in her hand into a stabbing grip, trying to keep her breathing steady, steeling herself.
It was called wet work for a reason.
A man stepped through the archway. She saw him in profile as he squinted in the darkness, then muttered a curse. He half pivoted away from her, the MP-5K on a strap over his shoulder, reaching to turn on the light with his right hand. She saw he was perhaps an inch or two shorter than her, broad-shouldered, and bald.
Chace stepped behind him, bringing the knife up in her right hand, reaching around with her left to cup his chin, pulling it toward her. She stabbed horizontally into his neck, jabbing once, twice, and again and again and again in rapid succession, and blood sprayed out of the man, hot on her hand and face. She stabbed into his neck a sixth time, but he was deadweight on her now, and she had to kneel to avoid dropping him completely. A ragged breath broke through his perforated skin.
That was the last sound he made.
Chace got back to her feet, saw that the knife in her hand was jumping slightly, a tuning fork catching some stray vibration, and that her hands were trembling. She cleaned the blade on the back of the man’s shirt, then stepped over him and back into the hallway, dimly aware that her front, even down to her trousers, was stained and slick with blood.
She checked the television room first, and found no one there. Working back, she hit the rooms on the hall, opening each door with painful care, just enough to glimpse what was inside. Each room housed two more men, sleeping.
She let them sleep and headed upstairs.
Chace found Stepan first, the toddler curled in a crib in a room with balloon wallpaper, his bottom thrust up into the air, as if he’d fallen asleep while preparing to somersault. She hesitated, then backed out, finally locating the master bedroom after two more doors.
Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov slept in a king-size bed, but only on one side, the one nearest the door. The light from the hallway bled into the room, and Chace recognized him from the photograph Riess had shown her on his digital camera. A positive identification. The way he slept surprised Chace for a second, because she’d expected him to take the opposite side, that it would have been his wife who had wanted to be nearest their son. But of course, that was the reason, wasn’t it?
Chace wondered if Ruslan had changed the sheets since Dina had been murdered.
She approached the bed carefully, not wanting to wake him until she could make certain he’d stay silent, mindful of the four guards and their four submachine guns sleeping below. Reaching his side, she crouched down on her haunches, then put her right hand over his mouth, sealing it with her palm, but keeping his nose free.
He came awake almost instantly, and as soon as Chace saw his eyes open, she put her mouth to his ear and began whispering, “Friend,” in Russian, over and over. Ruslan surged upward, eyes bulging, and Chace couldn’t blame him for that; if someone had woken her like this, clapping a gore-slicked hand over her mouth, she’d have tried to scream bloody murder. She shoved him back down, rising up to add her weight to the press, trying to keep him relatively immobile.
“Friend,” she kept repeating.
Ruslan’s arms came up, straining to break her grip, one going to her forearm, one reaching for her face. Then, abruptly, they dropped to his side, and she saw the confusion come into his eyes, stealing away the panic.
“Understand?” she asked, sticking with Russian.
Ruslan nodded.
“Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov?”
He nodded again.
“I’m here to take you and your son to London.”
There was the briefest pause, the confusion again awash in his eyes, before he nodded a third time.
“Quietly,” Chace whispered. “Four still asleep downstairs.” She removed her hand, stepping back from the bed, showing him her empty palms.
Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov sat up gasping for air, staring at her, half in horror, half in amazement. She couldn’t fault him the look; her clothes were covered with blood, much of it still wet, and she stank of gunpowder, sweat, and death. She resisted the urge to touch her hair, to try to brush it back into place, gave him another second to stare, then stepped closer.