“I noticed. Was he supposed to be here to meet us?”
“Yes. But that’s never how things work out, is it? Just hold your horses, as you say. And be quiet.”
Chapel frowned. He stared at the posters on the walls, advertising various music events. One showed Barack Obama wearing Kanye West’s trademark louvered sunglasses. He couldn’t read the names of the bands.
As tired as he was, he came very close to falling asleep on his feet. He barely noticed when a long car pulled up in front of the tea shop and two blond men got out. When they came in through the door, he stiffened, but so did all the other bodyguards.
The two newcomers were dressed in suits, but they weren’t wearing any jewelry. One wore horn-rimmed glasses so smudged Chapel wondered if he could see anything. The other one had a neatly groomed mustache with just a hint of silver in it. He looked around the room, sizing everyone up, then came to stand in front of Nadia and Chapel. Without even glancing at her, he spoke to Chapel.
“You ask for Bogdan?” he asked. “Yes? Yes?”
Nadia sat up and smiled. “He sent you?”
“Yes, yes, he sent me, and my friend. We take him to you now, okay? Yes?”
There were a lot of things Chapel didn’t like about the situation, but he looked around for cues before he did anything. This could just be the way business was done in Bucharest. Nadia didn’t seem too concerned. But one of the bodyguards, a big guy with a dollar sign hanging from a golden chain, was watching the two blonds very carefully. His hands kept squeezing into fists, and then releasing. He knew who these newcomers were.
Chapel caught the bodyguard’s eye. Maybe he could call on professional courtesy. He raised an eyebrow.
The bodyguard shrugged and started to look away. Then he shook his head in a gesture Chapel understood immediately. These two were bad news, the kind you definitely did not want to get involved with.
Nadia was standing up, reaching for her purse. Chapel took a step out from behind her chair, and the blond with glasses moved like he was Chapel’s reflection in a mirror, curving in to intercept him. As he did so his jacket swung open just a little, just enough for Chapel to see what was underneath.
“Is okay, yes. We take you,” Mustache said. “We go now. Yes?”
“Gun,” Chapel said.
Nadia reached into her purse, but Mustache grabbed her arm. She had just been trying to put her phone away. Now it chimed and everyone froze.
Mustache tried to keep Nadia from looking at the phone, but he failed. “This is from Bogdan. He says he’s on his way.”
“Yes, is fine, he says is fine, yes,” Mustache said.
But Chapel was already moving.
In Ranger school, Chapel had an instructor named Bigelow who taught him everything he knew about unarmed fighting. For months he had trained daily, learning all the special reversals and inversions and strikes, until he thought he could take anybody alive in a fight. Then one day Bigelow showed up with a paintball gun. He’d stood at the far end of the training room and told Chapel to use everything he knew, to come right at Bigelow with every deadly technique he’d been taught, but to stop the second he was hit by a paintball.
Chapel tried twelve different techniques. He tried feints and dodges and sweeps, tried to use the room’s furniture for cover or as improvised missile weapons, tried to trick Bigelow by pretending to surrender so he could grab the paint gun away after Bigelow lowered his guard.
Each and every time, Chapel had come away with a painful blue splotch on his uniform. “We’ve got a problem,” Bigelow said, when he finally called an end to the session. “There’s no way you’re going to win this. The lesson I’m supposed to teach you today is that up against a man with a gun, you can’t win if you’re unarmed. You have to put your hands up and surrender.”
Chapel, breathing hard and itchy with sweat, was pissed off enough at that point not to say “sir” and leave it at that. “How many shots does it take most people to learn that lesson?”
“Three. And that’s the problem. You’re a smart guy, Chapel. But for some reason when you’re beat, you get dumb. You get too dumb to just give up.”
In the tea shop in Bucharest, Chapel watched the gun swing at the hip of the blond guy with the glasses and he got real dumb, real fast.
Mustache already had Nadia by the arm. He was going to force her out into the street, into his car. Chapel could worry about that later. He saw Glasses start reaching for his pistol and knew what he had to do. Glasses was reaching across his body, using his right arm to go for the pistol on his left hip. Chapel grabbed the right arm with both of his hands and forced it downward, past the gun, and at the same time he lashed out with one foot to sweep Glasses’s legs.
The blond guy was fast enough to see the sweep coming and he took a step backward, but that was exactly what Chapel wanted. It put Glasses off balance, even as Chapel was still yanking downward on his arm. Glasses had no choice but to bend at the waist, while trying to get his arm free from Chapel’s grip. Eventually he figured out he could reach for the pistol with his left hand, which was still free.
Chapel couldn’t let him do that. He danced backward, pulling Glasses with him, and the guy went down on his face, down on the floor using his left hand to try to catch himself. He recovered quickly and reached for the pistol again with his left hand, so Chapel had to stomp on his left wrist, pinning it to the floor. That left Chapel in a bad position, though, his hands and one of his legs committed to keeping Glasses from moving. There was still Mustache to contend with — if Mustache let go of Nadia, he could come at Chapel with anything, any kind of attack, and it would connect. Holding Glasses’s right arm up in the air and pinning his left arm with his foot, Chapel looked up, expecting to see a fist — or maybe a knife — come at him from the side. If Mustache had a gun, too, this was all over.
It turned out he didn’t need to worry.
Nadia had one hand on the floor, pressing down to add leverage to the kick she’d aimed at Mustache’s chin. In that position she looked like a Cossack dancer, which might have made Chapel smile if he wasn’t so busy holding Glasses down. With just a sandal on her foot her attack couldn’t do much damage — Bigelow had never thought much of kicking attacks under any circumstances — but it did have one effect, which was to make Mustache rear back, his face pointed at the ceiling, his arms out at his sides for balance.
Nadia dropped to the floor and spun around — like a break dancer now — her legs stretched out to sweep Mustache off his feet. He went backward into the chair she’d been sitting in a minute before as if he just wanted to take a seat and watch her move.
Chapel wouldn’t have blamed him. He’d never seen anyone move like Nadia just had, not outside of a Kung Fu movie.
She spun around on her shoulder and then twisted herself up into a kneeling position in front of the chair. With both hands she reached under the bottom of the chair and tilted it backward until it slammed into the floor, leaving Mustache staring at the ceiling. She vaulted over the chair and landed with one shin across Mustache’s throat. Even over the blaring hip-hop music Chapel could hear Mustache gurgle out a scream.
It had been about two seconds since Chapel saw Glasses’s gun. He was panting like a horse and he had no idea what to do next. Nadia’s hair hadn’t even moved. She gave Chapel a wicked smile.
He glanced down at the gun, still hanging on Glasses’s hip. Nadia dashed over and grabbed the gun out of its holster. She took one quick look at Mustache — who was not moving — and ran for the door.
“Crap,” Chapel said. He had no choice but to follow her. He stomped on Glasses one last time and dashed out of the shop. Behind him he heard someone scream — maybe the girl who ran the counter. He didn’t turn around to look.