Flashback

They’re all dead. Coyne, Monk, Gene D., Sully, Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin. All dead.

The fingers of his left hand flicked against nothingness.

Val skidded to a stop, stepped back, jumped and swung his left arm vertically, guessed where the rungs must be, and leaped blindly.

His left hand caught a rung but his weight almost pulled his shoulder out of its socket. He dropped the Beretta and mask, caught both of them against his rising thigh, grabbed them clumsily in the darkness, and used that hand to find the next rung, fighting not to drop the gun again even as three fingers on his right hand gripped the rung.

He was climbing, his feet found rungs, and he was up. Val heaved himself onto the dry concrete of the higher passage that headed east and he could feel his breath puffing dust up against his face.

Bleeding, hurting—although he was fairly sure that none of the barbed flechettes had caught him—Val struggled to his feet and began staggering down the corridor with his left hand sliding against the south wall of the tunnel. Thank God it only went one way from the vertical standpipe he’d come up. If he’d had to choose directions in this total darkness, he would have been lost for sure.

Val was less than a hundred feet down the tunnel when he heard a slipping, sliding noise behind and to his right.

Rat?

Even before the thought was complete, he was blinded by a flashlight beam directly in his eyes.

Cops! Would they allow him to surrender or just gun him down? If the other guys had hit Advisor Omura with their wild firing, Val thought he knew the answer to that question.

He still started to raise his hands in surrender when Billy Coyne’s voice from behind the circle of blinding light said, “I always knew you were a total pussy, Val.”

Incredibly, absurdly, Val’s terrified but not panicked mind flashed on the old James Bond and Bourne and Kurtz movies that he and the Old Man used to watch. “The villains’ ultimate undoing,” the Old Man said from the couch, the popcorn between them, “talk, talk, talk. They always explain, and keep talking rather than just shooting the hero and getting it over with.”

“I’m gonna flash on this tomorrow when I’m flying to Moscow with my mother—in first class, asshole,” said Coyne, his voice still high and weird and adrenaline-driven as it had been back at the gunslits, “and I’m gonna get off thinking about how a hundred barbed flechettes just tore your fucking wimp body to…”

Val fired the Beretta through the bunched-up ski mask that concealed it.

Coyne said, “Ugh,” and dropped the flashlight, which hit on its metal side and did not shatter. The beam of light rolled in a slow circle.

Val threw himself to the right, trying to stay out of the beam of light. It was too fast, but it crossed him and kept going.

Val dropped to one knee, braced his right arm, and aimed the pistol low.

The flashlight beam came to a stop on Coyne on his knees, using the big OAO Izhmash as a sort of crutch to keep himself upright. Coyne was staring at his own chest where, just above and to the right of Vladimir Putin’s pale brow, a small red circle was beginning to blotch wider and spread.

Coyne looked up with a stupid, smirking grin. “You shot me.” He sounded almost amused. He began struggling with the bulky flechette sweeper.

Val didn’t think that Coyne had the strength to lift and aim the thing, but he didn’t care to wait and see if he was wrong. He shot Coyne again, in the throat this time.

Coyne’s head snapped back as his neck exploded, then the boy fell forward into the circle of the flashlight beam. The sound of his teeth snapping off as he hit the cement face-first, jaw wide open, would stay with Val always.

More shouts from behind and below.

Val was panting as if he’d run a hundred-yard dash. He felt a queer numbness spreading through him and doubted if he could walk now, much less run the distance he had to. He grabbed the flashlight and had started to turn away when a voice from Coyne’s corpse said, “Vy rasstrelyali nas, vy ublyudok!”

Val whirled and crouched, Beretta extended. Coyne lay still on his face. The pool of blood continued widening.

Approaching warily, Val set his sneaker to Coyne’s right shoulder and rolled him over.

Coyne’s eyes were wide and sightless, his mouth with the shattered front teeth opened wide. The throat below the bloodied jaw was shredded. The second shot had almost decapitated the boy.

Vladimir Putin sneered up at Val, the thin-lipped little mouth snarling, “Ty ubil nas, svoloch. Vy proklyatye fucking parshivo…”

Knowing he was wasting a bullet and not caring, Val shot Vladimir Putin directly between his beady little eyes.

The AI stopped talking.