Gone Tomorrow

I said, ‘Step back and lean on them:

They complied. It made them more immobile. Safer. I said, ‘You’re not mother and daughter.’

Lila said, ‘No, we’re not.’

‘So what are you?’

‘Teacher and pupil.’

‘Good. I wouldn’t want to shoot a daughter in front of her mother. Or a mother in front of her daughter.’

‘But you would shoot a pupil in front of her teacher?’

‘Maybe the teacher first.’

‘So do it.’

I stood still.

Lila said, ‘If you mean it, this is where you do it.’

I watched their hands. Watched for tension, or effort, or moving tendons, or increased pressure on their fingertips. For signs they were about to go somewhere.

There were no such signs.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

In the silent room it made a tiny sound. A whir, a hum, a grind. A rhythmic little pulse. It jumped and buzzed against my thigh.

I stared at Lila’s hands. Flat. Still. Empty. No phone.

She said, ‘Perhaps you should answer that:

I juggled the MP5’s grip into my left hand and pulled out the phone. Restricted Call. I opened it and put it to my ear. Theresa Lee said, ‘Reacher?’

I said, ‘What?’

‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to call you for twenty minutes.’

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘Where are you?’

‘How did you get this number?’

‘You called my cell, remember? Your number is in the call log.’

‘Why is your number blocked?’

‘Precinct switchboard. I’m on the landline now. Where the hell are you?’

‘What’s up?’

‘Listen carefully. You have bad information. Homeland Security got back to us again. One of the Tajikistan party missed a connection in Istanbul. He came in through London and Washington instead. There are twenty men, not nineteen.’

Lila Hoth moved and the twentieth man stepped out of the bathroom.

EIGHTY-TWO

SCIENTISTS MEASURE TIME ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE picosecond. A trillionth of a regular second. They figure all kinds of things can happen in that small interval. Universes can be born, particles can accelerate, atoms can be split. What happened to me in the first few picoseconds was a whole bunch of different things. First, I dropped the phone, still open, still live. By the time it was down level with my shoulder whole lines of conversation with Lila were screaming in my head. On the same phone, minutes ago, from Madison Avenue. I had said, You’re down to your last six guys. She had started to reply, and then she had stopped. She had been about to say, No, I’ve got seven, like earlier, when she had started to say, That’s not close to me. The voiced dental fricative. But she had stopped herself. She had learned.

For once, she hadn’t talked too much.

And I hadn’t listened enough.

By the time the phone was down level with my waist I was focusing on the twentieth guy himself. He looked just like the previous four or five. He could have been their brother or their cousin, and probably was. Certainly he looked familiar. Small, sinewy, dark hair, lined skin, body language bridging wariness and aggression. He was dressed in a pair of dark knit sweatpants. A dark knit sweatshirt. He was right-handed. He was holding a silenced handgun. He was sweeping it through a long upward arc. He was aiming to bring it level. His finger was tightening on the trigger. He was going to shoot me in the chest.

I was holding the MP5 left-handed. The magazine was empty. The last round was already chambered. It had to count. I wanted to change hands. I didn’t want to fire from my weaker side, under my weaker eye.

No choice. To change hands would take half a second. Five hundred billion picoseconds. Too long. The other guy’s aim was nearly there. By the time the phone was down around my knees my right palm was slapping upward to meet the barrel. I was turning and straightening and tucking the grip back towards my chest. My right palm stopped and cradled the barrel and my left index finger squeezed the trigger with exaggerated calm. Lila was moving on my left. She was stepping out into the room. My finger completed its squeeze and the gun fired and my last round hit the twentieth guy in the face.

The phone hit the floor. It sounded like the padlock. A loud wooden thump.

My last spent shell case ejected and raffled away across the room.

The twentieth guy went down in a clatter of limbs and head and gun, dead before he hit the boards, shot through the base of the brain.

A head shot. A hit. Not bad for my left hand. Except that I had been aiming for his centre mass.

Lila kept on moving. Gliding, swooping, ducking down.

She came back up with the dead guy’s gun. Another Sig P220, another silencer.

Swiss manufacture.

A nine-round detachable box magazine.

If Lila was scrambling for the gun, it was the only one in the apartment. In which case it had been fired at least three times, through the ceiling.

Maximum six rounds left. Six versus zero.

Lila pointed the gun at me. I pointed mine at her.

She said, ‘I’m faster.’

I said, ‘You think?’

Way off to my left Svetlana said, ‘Your gun is empty.’