Chapter 24 #2
I have been studying the room since I arrived.
The room in grey. The fluorescent tube behind its wire cage.
The metal table bolted to the floor. The chair I am sitting in---not bolted.
Movable. The drain in the corner. The small sink recessed into the wall beside the door---a utility sink, stainless steel, with a single tap that the guard used to fill a cup of water an hour ago.
The tap handle is a lever. The pipe beneath the sink is exposed---a U-bend, copper, old enough that the joints show verdigris.
Old enough that the joints are weak.
I stand. The zip ties make this difficult---my balance is compromised, the centre of gravity shifted by the loss of my arms. The guard's eyes snap back to me. His hand moves to the baton at his belt.
"Water," I say. "Please."
The please is the performance. The please is the boy who says it in bed and means something else, but here it means: I am compliant.
I am harmless. I am asking for a basic human need in a voice that communicates submission, and the performance is designed for the specific audience of a guard whose job is containment rather than cruelty and who will process a polite request as evidence that the asset is cooperating.
He stands. He moves to the sink. He turns the tap. His back is to me for two seconds.
I kick the exposed pipe.
The kick is aimed at the weakest joint---the connection between the U-bend and the vertical supply line, where the verdigris has eaten the solder and the copper has thinned.
My bare foot hits the pipe with the full force of a body that has been sitting still for hours and has been channelling its adrenaline into the specific, focused violence of a man who has no weapons and no hands and who has decided that chaos is the only resource available.
The joint separates. The pipe splits. Water erupts---pressurised, cold, a jet that hits the ceiling and sprays the room with the force of a building's plumbing system discharging through a two-inch gap.
The fluorescent light sputters. The guard shouts.
The water hits the floor and spreads, pooling around the drain, running under the table, flooding the concrete with a sheet of water that turns the grey room into a lake.
The guard reaches for me. His foot slips on the wet concrete.
His balance shifts. He grabs the sink for support, and the sink---never designed to bear a man's weight---wrenches from the wall with a screech of metal, and he goes down, and the water goes everywhere, and the fluorescent tube---the one behind the wire cage, the one that has been bathing this room in cool white light---flickers.
Goes dark.
The room is black. The water is cold around my feet.
The guard is cursing in German---low, pained, the sound of a man who has fallen on wet concrete and is trying to stand.
I cannot fight him. My hands are bound. My feet are bare.
But I can do what the Jinx has always done: I can create conditions in which the plan cannot proceed.
I can make the room ungovernable. I can cost them time.
Time is the only currency I have left, and I am spending it with the reckless, magnificent conviction of a boy who has nothing to lose and everything to wait for.
The door opens. The corridor light spills in---a harsh rectangle that cuts the dark room in half.
The second guard. He sees the water, the burst pipe, his colleague on the floor.
He shouts for assistance. The shout echoes down the corridor, and the echo tells me what the concrete walls would not: the corridor is long, the terminal is large, and the men who run this place are now dealing with a plumbing emergency in a holding cell that was supposed to be quiet.
I am sitting in the chair. Wet. Barefoot. Hands bound. Smiling.
The smile is the Jinx. The smile is the boy who shoplifted at fifteen and ran cons at seventeen and painted a Modigliani that fooled a spectral scanner and who is sitting in a flooded cell in a Swiss airfield with zip ties on his wrists and chaos in the water and the absolute, burning certainty that the man who held him through the night is on his way.
The second guard hauls me to my feet. The water runs off me. The corridor is bright. They are moving me---dragging, pushing, the efficient roughness of men whose schedule has been disrupted and who are recalculating. My bare feet slap the wet concrete.
I hear it.
The sound is small. A cough. A mechanical exhalation, muffled by distance and by the suppressor that has converted a gunshot into something that a civilian would not recognise but that a Kavanagh boy---a boy who grew up in a house where guns were as common as kitchen knives---identifies in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Suppressed fire. Outside the terminal. Close.
The guard holding my arm hears it too. His grip tightens. His head turns toward the end of the corridor, where the terminal doors open onto the tarmac and the hangars and the dark Swiss night.
A second sound. The same mechanical cough. Closer.
The guard's radio crackles. A voice---fast, panicked, speaking Russian---says a word that I do not need to translate because the fear in the voice translates it for me.
The word is a name. The name is a warning.
The name belongs to a man who has crossed a continent and who is here, now, in the dark outside this building, and who is doing the thing that he was born to do.
The guard drops my arm. He draws his weapon. He runs toward the sound.
I stand in the corridor, soaked through, my bare feet on cold concrete. The fluorescent lights hum above me. The water from the burst pipe is spreading under the door of the cell behind me. The suppressed shots continue---methodical, spaced, the rhythm of a man who does not waste ammunition.
The cavalry is here. The Ghost and the Reaper and whoever else they brought to this field of tarmac and hangars and concrete, and they are coming through the dark with weapons and codes and the fury of men who do not negotiate for what they love.
I press my back against the corridor wall. I breathe. I wait. And the boy in the flooded corridor---wet, barefoot, smiling---is not afraid.