Outside, Angelo was working his way, careful step by careful step, down the corridor. The trick was to listen for street noises outside, like the rumble of a passing truck, and use them as cover for your moves. Trouble was, this was such a quiet neighborhood that it seemed to Angelo the only thing he could hear in the darkness was the thump of his racing heart. He remembered what they had told him at the physical about the high blood pressure and how the heart attacks come at times like this from sudden stress. Not now, he begged some ill-defined deity, not now.
Somewhere up in the darkness he heard a dog bark. Oh shit, he thought, not that. Don’t let there be a dog around here. He stopped to listen for voices to see if more than one person were in there. He heard none. For a second he considered what his moves should be when he reached the door, now ten feet away. The guy in there had killed his own brother a couple of hours ago. And that thing he had could blow the whole Village away. You wouldn’t want to just tap on the door and say, “Hello-police,” at a time like this.
He resumed his advance. His pistol was pointing down, his finger outside the trigger guard. It was hard to see there, but he could whip it up and get off a fast hip shot if he had to. It was a heavy-barreled Smith and Wesson .38 because Angelo knew well the longer the barrel, the more accuracy you got. And it was a very impressive weapon if you ever had to face off anybody.
Inside, the word “CORRECT” gleamed in the reading window of the bomb’s control case. Kamal tapped on the keyboard the code to open the case, then removed the blank thirty-minute BASF tape his brother had placed inside. He picked up the original tape bearing its firing instructions for the bomb preprogrammed in Tripoli. As he did, a strange, incongruous memory overwhelmed him. It took him back several years to a windswept plateau above Damascus. His squad of fedayeen, out on a training mission, had stumbled on a bird’s nest filled with newborn birdlings. The squad leader had placed one in each of his recruits’ hands. Crush them, he ordered, crush them with one swift, brutal gesture. That, he had explained, was how a fedayee had to learn to stifle his emotions: coldly, completely, at the first stirrings of life.
It was a lesson Kamal Dajani had never forgotten. He could almost feel once again in his palm the slick pulp of the life he had snuffed out that day as slowly, deliberately, he fitted the original tape back into its sprockets in the detonation case.
Angelo was at the door. He froze. Outside, the wail of sirens was drawing closer. He cursed himself. Why didn’t I tell them to come in silently?
They’ll scare the guy. He inched forward and peeped inside. He could see a man’s head, bent over, and there it was right in front of him, the barrel they were all looking for, a long black object in the shadows. Despite his efforts to keep himself under control, he trembled sighting it.
He could barely see the figure behind its dark form. The guy was down there on his hands and knees working. All he was giving him was a head shot. And there was the barrel. You’d have to aim high so you didn’t hit that. The thing to do, Angelo understood, was to try to move him away from the barrel, then hold him away from it until help came up.
Angelo eased himself flat against the wall inside the doorway to narrow the angle of the return shot the guy could fire at him. Slowly he drew up his gun, pressing it to the wall for support. Angelo was no gun buff, you’d never find him out at a shooting range Sunday afternoons like some guys, but he was good reliable shot, in the nineties when he shot for the record twice a year at the police range up at Rodman’s Neck. He took his halfbreath, then roared the stock phrase that was drilled into every police officer in the city: “Police-don’t move!”
Kamal was so concentrated on the bomb’s detonation box that Angelo’s shout took him completely by surprise. Instinctively, he dove to the floor behind the barrel. Angelo fired.
He missed. The shot went high, just over the barrel. Kamal’s flashlight, jarred from his hand in his sudden fall, rolled down the loading ramp and tumbled with a thud onto the floor, two feet below. He reached for his own weapon, a Browning 9mm. fifteen-shot automatic. As he was falling, he had glimpsed the American in the doorway. Kamal stretched until he could peer around the end of the barrel at the vague outline of the doorway. Swiftly he sent a burst of fire tearing into the darkness toward the door, a pattern of six shots stitching it up and down.
Angelo wasn’t there. He was sprawled flat on the floor, his eyes clenched in fright, listening to the rounds roar past his head, then the whir of the ricochets bouncing around the doorway. He had dropped to the floor the instant he fired his first round, reacting without thinking, changing his stance from the one Kamal had seen at the instant he looked up in response to his shout.
He tried to lie still, his face pressed against the damp concrete, hoping the guy would think he’d killed him and make another move. Outside he heard footsteps racing down the corridor, then Rand’s voice shouting, “Angelo, Angelo, are you okay?”
In the street outside, two parked cars and the first Emergency Service truck screeched to a halt. The Emergency Service men, giants in helmets and bulletproof vests, leaped out, grabbing their shotguns from the long green boxes in the van of their truck, throwing shells of double-O buck into them as they charged for the door.
“Who’s in there?” they shouted at the first patrolman who had reached the scene.
“Two of our guys,” he answered. “Big guy in a gray topcoat, a guy in a gabardine raincoat.”
At the end of the corridor, Rand was drawing up to the doorway. Again Angelo could hear him shouting, “Angelo, are you okay?”
Don’t move into that doorway, kid! Angelo wanted to scream the warning. He lay there forcing himself into the floor, listening for the first warning rustle, watching for the first movement behind the barrel.
“You all right?”
For Christ’s sake, kid. It was as though Angelo was trying to shriek his thought to Rand by mental telepathy across the wall separating them: Don’t step into that fucking doorwayl
“Angelol”
Lying in the cement and filth, Angelo heard the two quick steps. Then everything happened at once: the head rising behind the barrel, the automatic banging away in the dark, five quick shots tearing over his head as he raised the Smith and Wesson in both hands and fired. The head behind the barrel jerked up, then tumbled backward. From behind him, Angelo heard a strange voice shouting, “Police-don’t movel” A burst of light from the Emergency Service lanterns flooded the room, and with it came the terrible boom of exploding shotgun barrels, two of them riddling Kamal Dajani’s body with double-O buckshot.
Angelo rolled over, limp with fear and spent emotion. He staggered to one knee. Rand was just behind him, crumpled against the back wall of the corridor where the force of Dajani’s bullets had hurled his body. The detective lurched to him. “Get an ambulancel” he yelled. “Get an ambulancel”
He knelt down beside Rand. One of Kamal’s shots had torn into his face just below the nose, turning his handsome features into a mush of blood and bone. Two other shots had hit him in the upper body, and blood oozed over his shirt, his jacket and his raincoat. Angelo cupped an arm behind Rand’s neck and lifted the bloody, unrecognizable face toward his, realizing as he did that they wouldn’t be needing an ambulance for Jack Rand. He pressed the lifeless head against his chest like a mother consoling a weeping child, only it was he who was weeping.