Chapter 27 #2
We run. The opera house looms. Kazimir pushes through a service door on the eastern facade---unlocked, the building between performances, the interior dark and vast. We are inside.
The marble lobby swallows our footsteps.
The chandeliers are dark. The opera house in daylight is a cathedral without a congregation, and the emptiness amplifies every sound---our breathing, the slap of my borrowed shoes on the marble, the distant slam of the service door as our pursuers enter behind us.
* * *
We climb. A staircase---service access, concrete, the functional spine behind the building's ornamental facade.
My lungs are burning. Kazimir is ahead of me, his Glock up, his wounded arm trailing blood on the railing.
We reach a landing. A corridor. Offices.
Practice rooms. The building's administrative level, deserted.
Kazimir stops. He checks the magazine. He ejects it. He counts. His face tells me the number before his voice does: the tightening of his jaw, the calculation behind the grey eyes, the specific arithmetic of a man measuring remaining resources against remaining threats.
"Three rounds," he says.
Three rounds. Two pursuit vehicles' worth of Consortium operatives somewhere in the building below us, and the man who has killed a dozen men in the last twelve hours has three rounds left in the weapon that has kept us alive.
Footsteps. Below us on the staircase. Heavy, fast, the coordinated advance of men who are trained to clear buildings and who are doing it with the efficiency of professionals working within their skill set.
Kazimir pushes me into a practice room. He follows. He closes the door.
The room is small---a piano, a music stand, a window overlooking the plaza. The window is barred. The door is wood. The wood will not stop a bullet.
He positions himself beside the door. The Glock is up. His breathing is controlled---the discipline overriding the wound, the blood loss, the accumulated damage of a body that has been operating beyond its tolerances since the airfield. His eyes find mine.
"The hard drive," he says. "If I go down, you run. The consulate is six blocks east. You know the access protocol. Katarina's email is in your memory. Send the file. Finish it."
"Stop talking like that."
"Rory."
"Stop."
The door opens.
The first man through is fast. Kazimir fires. The round takes the operative in the chest. He drops. The second man is behind him---using the first as cover, a tactic that Kazimir himself would have deployed.
Kazimir fires again. The round clips the door frame.
The second operative returns fire. The shot punches through the wooden door and passes between us, and the sound is enormous in the small room, and the piano behind me takes the round with a discordant chord that fills the practice room with a sound that is nothing like music.
Kazimir fires his last round. The second operative falls.
The Glock is empty. Kazimir ejects the magazine. He looks at the weapon.
He looks at me. The grey eyes are calm---the calm of a man who has run out of ammunition and is calculating the remaining options and finding the list very short.
The third man enters the corridor.
He is not the same class of operative as the first two.
He moves with a different rhythm---slower, more deliberate, the gait of a man who does not rush because rushing is for men who are uncertain of the outcome.
He fills the doorway. He is tall. Lean, with the dense, ropy muscle of discipline rather than bulk.
His face is sharp. His eyes are the flat, professional emptiness of a man who removes his own humanity as a workplace requirement.
Not Pavel. Pavel lost his hands years ago. This is someone else. Someone newer, younger, carrying the same Bratva training that Kazimir planted in a generation of operatives and that has grown into a crop of men who use the Ghost's own methods to hunt him.
His weapon is up. It is pointed at Kazimir.
Kazimir is standing beside the door with an empty gun and a wounded arm and the expression of a man who has accepted the mathematics of the situation and is arranging his face into the mask that he has worn for thirty years and that he will wear to the end.
The operative advances. His finger is on the trigger.
His eyes are on Kazimir. His peripheral awareness of the practice room is focused on the door and the window and the primary threat, and the primary threat is the Ghost, and the Ghost is the target, and the boy behind the piano is not a variable he has been trained to track.
I reach into my pocket. The carbon-fibre handle is warm from my body.
The blade deploys with a click that is lost beneath the operative's footsteps. Ceramic. Four inches. The edge is sharp enough to part paper.
Rocco's voice in my memory, the massive Falcone enforcer's hands closing my fingers around the grip: Walk into every room knowing you can walk out.
I am a Kavanagh. My brother is the Reaper.
My brother-in-law is the Prince. The man I love is the Ghost. And I am the Jinx---the beautiful disaster, the screw-up, the boy who paints fakes and runs cons and has spent his entire life being underestimated by men who looked at his artist's hands and saw something fragile.
The operative is two steps from Kazimir. His weapon is levelled at Kazimir's chest. His back is to me.
I step out from behind the piano. The knife is in my hand.
My hand is steady. The hand that painted a Modigliani and fooled a spectral scanner and broke a pipe with a bare foot is holding a blade, and the blade is the bridge between the boy who creates and the family that destroys, and the bridge is four inches of ceramic and the absolute, burning refusal to let the man I love die in a practice room in Zurich while I hide behind a piano.
The operative does not see me. His focus is on the Ghost. His training is on the primary threat. The boy is furniture. The boy is meat with useful hands.
The boy is a Kavanagh with a knife, and the Kavanagh is moving.