He saw them while the fellow was still in the glass building laying out his $15 for the super wash.
Tear shaped, dark, held in place not by two arms but by a stout elasticized strap as insurance against vigorous action, with insectoid, convex lenses under polyurethane frames, the curvature of the lenses extreme so that the polarized plastic, strong enough to stop buckshot, also protected the wearer’s peripheral vision, just the thing to pick up the approach of a fast-moving assaulter from three or nine o’clock. They were Wiley X’s, of the style called AirRage 697s, big in Tommy Tactical contractor culture.
Ray slipped low, between cars, not panicking, but breathing hard. Then he had a spurt of rage. How did the motherfuckers find me again? There had to be a leak somewhere, goddamnit, and he swore that if he got out of this, he would brace up old man Swagger so hard he shook his dentures out. Every fucking time Swagger showed, these goddamn bastards were right behind him.
But he got his war mind back fast. He pretended to polish a wheel cover of an already shining BMW convertible, and slipped a quick recon glance at the dude just as he emerged from the building and sat under an umbrella on a kind of patio where the owners waited and watched as the towel boys worked over their cars.
Guy was wearing a black baseball cap without insignia and some kind of bulky raincoat as if it was cold out and of course it wasn’t. You could hide a lot under that coat. Cruz continued to steal seconds of examination, noting next that the Tommy Tactical made an obvious show of disinterest in the cars before him, not hunting for any particular one, not noticing his own car—it must have been that Dodge Charger, just coming out of the steam, its wet skin glinting in the sunlight—but adapting a quick posture of lassitude and sloth as he flopped casually in a plastic chair and began to examine his nails.
Cruz shot a glance at the man’s shoes: Danner assault boots, though unbloused, the crumple of the sloppy hems denoting that they had been smartly tucked commando style until just a few minutes ago.
“Hey, guy, are you trying to win the Nobel Prize for that tire or what?” someone said, and it was the car’s owner, impatiently leaning across the trunk to hurry the pitiful illegal onward.
Ray smiled obsequiously and backed off, waving the man onward.
As he turned to work on another vehicle, he let himself look down the one-way course of Howard Street and saw another guy whose face, though far off, appeared obscured by the tactical shape of the ultracool combat shades and that guy was coming along, and would be here in a minute or two.
Run? He could pretend to mosey backward, hit and roll over the wall, and head down the alley to—but he didn’t know what was down the alley and cursed himself for the operator’s most basic mistake: he hadn’t had the energy to learn all the back streets, all the fast exits, the fallbacks, the shortcuts, the near invisible secret passages.
Besides, the guy on the street was drawing closer, ever closer, and now it was too late to make a sudden break. He saw how it had to go; they would wait a few more seconds, until the walker got right up to the courtyard, then he and the sitter would go to guns fast with whatever big mean black toys their coats concealed, and converge, catching him between fire from two angles, with nowhere to go but down.
He had a Glock 19 concealed in a Galco horizontal shoulder rig under his beat-to-hell Harvard hoodie and long-sleeved T-shirt, and two extra fifteen-rounders on the off-side, giving him forty-five rounds of 147-grain Federal hollow point. He turned his O’s cap backward on his head, so its bill wouldn’t protrude into the top zone of his sight picture. He reached inside the outerwear, unsnapped the Galco, felt the small, heavy automatic pistol slide into his hand and, under these circumstances, he took joy from its touch. It was found money, getting laid on the first date, all black on the range, a nice word from the colonel.
Okay, motherfuckers, he told himself with another deep, calming breath, going hard into his war mind, you want me, you come and get me.
Taking care not to directly confront or track his target, Mick Bogier eased into one of the plastic chairs sloppily, arms and legs all over the place, and tried to be a guy with no particular place to go getting it cleaned up real nice while sitting in the sun. As he oriented himself, he could see Crackers moving down the street, not rushing, not tactical, but—Crackers had a lot of combat and a lot of ops behind him—totally selling the pic of another innocent stroller shuffling along, maybe to the liquor store for a six of Bud and a lottery ticket, maybe to the library for a new thriller, maybe to the Mickey D’s down the street for a Big Mac with fries and a Diet Coke. Crackers just walked along.
A plug ran from Mick’s ear to a throat mike dangling just alongside his chin before the cord disappeared inside his jacket and linked to his cell.
“You got him?” he asked, trying not to speak loudly or even look like he was speaking.
“I saw him duck. Yellow baseball cap, maroon sweatshirt, he’s behind that brown Galaxy, working the tires. Seems to be a tire guy, that’s his specialty.”
“How’s he moving? I’m too close to look directly.”
“Like any shine boy. A little monkey. He hasn’t made us yet, he’s trying to get the shine on that Galaxy wheel.”
“When you get to the entrance, you slide into the lot and index on me. At that point, I’ll head out there like I’m reclaiming the car, swing behind the Galaxy, yank the five and give him a mag. When I fire, you dump a mag high into the glass of that building. That should scatter the fuckin’ ducks. Then we roll the wall and Z picks us up. You got that, Z?”
“Am pulling into street now,” said Z, from his spot a block away.
“I am watching you, you are watching him, any movement?”
“No, now that I’m close I can see him really scrubbing on that—oh, now he’s moved to the front tire, other side from you. Still ain’t made us, snoozing the day away. This is going to be easy.”
Crackers veered in from the roadway sidewalk, slid on the oblique through the wide entrance in the brick wall which the customers pulled into as they edged their way to the payment booths and the vacuum station up ahead.
Close enough to make eye contact now, Mick nodded through his dark lenses at Crackers as the other man unbuttoned his coat with his left hand, slipped his right hand through the slashed pocket to grip the cocked-and-not-locked MP5, a dandy little subgun from Heckler und Koch that had delighted the spec ops boys for three decades now, and Mick said, “Fast and total. He’s good, don’t forget. Okay, peanut gallery, let’s rock.”
He stood, his jacket already unbuttoned, and with a smile and a nod to the phantom fellow who’d just finished drying his car, he beelined to the Galaxy, circled behind it, shivered to shrug the cloaking of the coat over his own German dandy gun, felt his hand grip it expertly—he shot well enough to fire one-handed—and raised it to discover his target had spun and was a split second ahead of him on the action curve.
Ray shot him five times in the chest.
That gunfire ignited screams, panic, crazed evacuation, a whole festival of human behavior at the furthest extreme of escape frenzy. People blew every which way, some to the wall to clumsy attempts to climb over it, some back toward the glass building as if it offered cover, some racing into the mouth of the torrential downpour that was currently frothing up an Escalade in the tunnel. For a brief moment, that perfect world of equality so longed for in some imaginations actually existed on earth as Salvadoran illegal and Baltimore hedge fund manager and energy executive’s well-turned-out wife and Sid the cabbie fled outward with equal passion, though never quite ruthless disregard for the other. The good behavior and fundamental politeness of the typical Baltimorean was in play on the war field as much as the adrenaline-powered survival instinct.
Crackers was not concerned with surviving, however, but with killing. He had that rare gift of natural aggression that made him a god in battle, funnily unfunny with his buddies, and a nasty prick everywhere else. He just believed: if you weren’t war, you weren’t no
thing. He rotated right, seeing Mick go down, looking for his target who was clearly among the abandoned cars gleaming and dripping in the sun. Bracing the gun against his shoulder via its stubby, compacted telescoping stock, he fired a short burst into the cars, seeing glass spider-web and metal puncture and dust and water fly, while the gun roared, the spent shells cascading free in a brass-glinting spurt like flung pebbles across a lake. Great special effects but to no seeming result.
His urge was to run to Mick, but he saw that Mick had spun, low-crawled out, and was now rising on this side of the Galaxy, reacquiring his German machine pistol, though moving stiffly from the bruising hits on his Kevlar.
“Converge, converge!” Mick was screaming. “Z, get your ass in here, goddamnit, and come over the wall on him, he is hot, live, and still moving.”
Saying that, Mick raised the subgun above his head, angled it down, and squirted a long burst into the space where he thought the sniper Cruz should be, mostly tearing up dust and asphalt debris from the deck. Then he rammed through a superfast mag change, tossing the empty box—God, was Mick smooth!—seating the new one, throwing the bolt, and began to move through the corridors between the now bullet-dinged automobiles. At the same time, Z had arrived, slalomed off the road and up to the other side of the brick wall, only with a pistol though, and he too hunted for the sniper. They had him three on one, with no place to go . . . but where the fuck was he?
It’s better to be lucky than smart, rich than poor, smart than dumb, but in a gunfight, best of all is to be smart and skinny. That was Ray, who had gone to earth after putting the five hard ones into the big guy from nine feet and slithered across the ground to, er, nowhere, and then, being quite agile, actually wiggle-waggled sideways under the dripping-wet pickup truck next to him. He came up in another aisle between cars, rolled, and popped up like a Whack-a-Mole game in a Toyland, two hands on the gun, oriented, as it turned out, slightly toward the oncomer, not the original assaulter.
In the naturally firm isosceles, triangles within triangles for structural solidarity, his hunched, tensed muscles controlling the pistol between his crushing grip, Ray shot that guy twice, high left-side chest, knocking him back and off stride, even as he was now catching on to the concept of body armor not in words but in an image that decoded instantly into all he needed to know. He felt things in the air nearby and cranked down, realizing that the other shooter, seeing him fire, had vectored on to him instantly and put a burst into him, but that between the two of them, unseen in the intense focus of advanced extreme pathological war-fighting Zeitgeist, neither had realized that the cab of a Honda Civic lay between them and so while that burst chewed the crap out of the windows, splintering, shivering, fragmenting them, the passage through two glass barriers also skewed the bullets mightily and they rushed off at one remove from their target. By the time that shooter realized and came around for an unimpeded shot, Ray was to ground again, crawling like a muskrat under the cars.
“Can you get a shot?” Mick yelled at Z, who had two-handed support of his SIG over the top of the wall.
“That way, that way,” screamed Z, sliding northward down the wall, craning his eyes through his AirRages for a glimpse of something to shoot, but seeing nothing.
Bogier looked back to Crackers, who, though he’d never gone down, had been staggered and briefly stunned by the two bolts that had cracked into his body armor and would leave him bruised blue and purple for a month and a half.
“Close, close, close,” yelled Bogier as he himself darted between cars, not quite having figured out that Cruz’s tactical improvisation was to move under the cars, not between them, and that he was skinny enough to do it. It didn’t occur to him to lean down and spray-paint the entire 180 to his front under the cars and thereby hit the guy if only once or twice.
There was a frozen moment. Bogier and Crackers, guns loose and fluid in their hands, faces sweaty and bug eyed with concentration, moved stealthily through the fleet of parked, shot-to-shit cars, spurting ahead now and then to unzip a blind spot, while from the other side of the wall, with his SIG like the mighty Excaliber, Z too hunted but also covered them.
A siren heated up, then another.
Then Crackers went down.
• • •
Ray froze. He was trapped. He was on his back under a Chevy cab, this fucking thing turned out too low to get quite all the way under and he knew that he needed to make a strong, wretchedly awkward maneuver to get himself out the way he’d come in. And he couldn’t cover anything to his left, under his feet, or above his head. But he heard the faintest scuffle of tread to ground, and saw a Danner-booted foot just a few inches from his head. Without much thought, he shot it.
He heard the scream, saw the blood fly, and in a second, a man was lying next to him, almost parallel, not three feet away. It was Dodge City, only horizontal, under cars, with cool modern black guns, as the guy, seeing him, eyes bulging with fear or excitement, tried to wedge his MP under the car for the shot, while Ray had to twist, pivot on his shoulder, and bring the gun to bear in a new quadrant. Intimate, nasty, graceless, only speed mattered, and—crak! spurt of muzzle flash, jerk of recoil, drama of slide rocking back and forth in supertime, leap of spent shell—Ray got his shot off just a split second sooner and shot the man in the throat, causing him to jerk and vomit blood, then shot him higher in the face, just below the eye, hammering a black hole into it and imposing terminal stillness on the body.
Cruz dug his feet into the ground and propelled himself forward, expecting to emerge into blue sky and the sight of two armed men with submachine guns about to dump mags into him, but instead he was unimpeded. Sirens sounded.
He pulled himself up, knowing that he was cut, abraded, bruised, scored, ripped, whatever in about two thousand places, just to see the two survivors hit their parked SUV and gun it to life. Coolly, one of the guys opened the door, cantilevered himself half in and half out and fired a burst. Ray tracked the trajectory of the burst until it splattered into the hood and grill of a blue-white first responder, and that police unit tanked left, hit a parked car, jarred itself sideways, hit another, and halted.
Ray thought, I should get a shot off, but by the time that imperative made itself clear, he was too late, and the SUV had zoomed away.
Silence. Steam rose, automobiles still ticked or issued death sounds, but there were no fires.
Go on, move your goddamned ass, he told himself.
He ran backward through the car wash complex, came to a cyclone fence, and scaled it. He climbed a hill to a railroad track, rolled down the other side, climbed another fence, came out into a yard, cut between two tiny houses. He didn’t remember replacing it, but the gun was back in the holster under his T-shirt. Now he did a neat thing. He pulled off his crimson hoodie and dumped it, to reveal a T-shirt, an orange-and-black long sleeved, proclaiming sans serif loyalty to a team named after a bird. He flipped his Orioles lid away and out of his back pocket came an all-purple ball cap, again with bird loyalty as its primary message. He strode on blindly, waiting for a cop car to pull him aside, but none did, though farther along, on a major street, he could see them rushing to the site of the gunfight.
At last he came to a bar. It seemed to be what you might call “old style,” meaning it attracted old Baltimoreans who remembered the town as a nesting place of grim taverns filled with smoke and grunge, a five o’clock city that worshipped Johnny and Brooksie. Everyone in the joint was fat and neckless and looked like they wanted to fight if you made eye contact—even the women. But it was also the sort of place where nobody noticed a thing. He found a place at the rail, ordered a beer, and watched the game. The Orioles won, 9–7 with a late comeback. It was pretty thrilling. Then he took a cab to another neighborhood, had himself dropped at the wrong address, cut through two yards, and found his car, untouched, where he’d left it fifteen or so hours ago. He got in, started the engine, and drove to his motel in Laurel. After a shower, half an hour of watching the gunfight and bas
eball coverage on TV, he called Swagger.
FOUR SEASONS HOTEL
SUITE 500
M STREET NW
WASHINGTON, DC
2300 HOURS
Her neck was slender, her skin alabaster, her teeth brilliant and blinding. She wore jewels only a king could have given her. Tawny blond hair piled on top of her head in a cascade of swirls, torrents, and plunges, secured by pins and a diamond tiara. Her eyes were passionate, dewy. Do you want me? Then take me. Make me do bad things.
Too bad she was only in a magazine.
Zarzi put the thing down. He sat alone with his watches. He wore a silk dressing gown and an ascot, was freshly bathed, groomed, and powdered in all the delicate man places. Alexander’s blood moved in his veins, that was the original strain. But it had mixed over the generations with a thousand injections of mountain warrior DNA, possibly a Mongol element or two, since the odd squadron of Genghis Khan’s cavalry had surely passed through the valleys that nurtured his line, leaving memories of rapine and strapping progeny that combined with the odd brave European explorer’s, and finally with the entrepreneurs who turned the Western need for the poppy into billions. And it all climaxed in him, he the magnificent, he the extraordinary, he the potentate, the seer, the visionary.
“I want my Tums,” he called. “My stomach is aflame.”
A servant stole in and laid the two wonder tablets before him on a silver platter.
“Ah,” he said, delicately ingesting them, feeling them crunch to medicinal chalk beneath the grind of his strong molars. R-E-L-I-E-F, he thought, as the glow spread and the fires were quenched beneath the balm.