36. Pavel
PAVEL
Going loud is a young man's mistake. Tonight I was counting on the phantom making it.
Someone who stays invisible for thirty years doesn't step into the light for money.
He does it for an audience. Roth had spent his whole life as a rumor, and rumors don't get coronations.
So he'd called the underworld to watch him finish HELIX and crown himself a god at midnight, and the instant he did that, he had to be somewhere real.
A broadcast has a body behind it. A live one has a room.
Find the room, and the phantom stops being a phantom and becomes a man with a spine I could reach.
We'd been staged in the dead industrial flats on the east side since dusk, waiting on the single thing money can't buy a careful man, which is a fixed address.
Luna's duel handed it to us. While she kept his engine busy on her screen, she walked his voice back up the wire a hop at a time, and somewhere around the ninth hop it stopped moving.
A cold storage building that officially held nothing was drawing power like a small city.
"Got him," Zoya said in my ear. "She pinned the signal. Sending you the door now."
"How much time does she have?"
A pause I didn't like. "He's on her channel. He has Danny on a live feed and a clock running, and he's telling her to finish HELIX for him or watch her brother die. It is short, Pavel. Minutes."
Everything in me that counts exits went quiet and cold. "Then we run her clock, not ours. Kirill."
"With you," Kirill said, and the big man fell in on my shoulder like a wall that had decided to walk.
"Give me the inside," I said.
"Working off her trace and the building's own hunger for power," Zoya said.
"Ground floor is loading and storage. The core sits dead center, no windows, its own feed.
He is above it or behind it, and I cannot tell which from here.
Whatever else happens, do not put a round through that core before her trap is inside it, or we win the room and lose the war. "
"I know what the core is for."
"I know you know. I am saying it so that when you are angry in there, you remember it anyway."
The first ring of them was posted at the loading doors, and they were good, which told me they were expensive, which told me I had the right building.
I don't enjoy this part. I'm only very good at it.
Kirill took the left and I took the right, and we moved through them the way water moves through a house that has forgotten to keep its doors shut.
It was fast and ugly and it didn't take long, and I won't pretend to you it cost me anything it should have.
"Second team, the one that came up from the north," Zoya said. "They doubled back. They're behind you now, in the yard."
"Let them come behind me. Behind me is the worst place in this building to stand."
I put my back to a steel pillar and let the yard bring itself to me one careless silhouette at a time, and I counted them down the way I count everything when the world narrows to a single corridor of things that must happen in order.
Six of them, then four, then the last two, until the yard went quiet and Kirill was breathing hard beside me, and somewhere three miles west a woman I loved was being asked to choose between her brother and her conscience by a man who thought he already knew her answer.
He didn't. But she was going to need a third door, because the two he'd offered her both ended with someone she loved in the ground. So I gave her one.
"Luna." I put it on the private line, the buried one only she and I have ever read. "Do not argue, because I'm about to be occupied. Do not finish HELIX. Finish the other one. The build we salted."
Her voice came back thin and much too fast. "The poisoned copy isn't tested. If he looks too close at the core, he'll see the trap sitting in it."
"He won't look. He has waited eleven years to hold this thing. A starving man doesn't inspect the meat. Give him the salted build, let him believe he has won, and let his own greed swallow the hook."
"You're sure it holds?"
"Nothing holds. It only has to fool him longer than his patience lasts, and his patience died the second he saw the finish line."
"And if the trap doesn't take?"
"Then I reach the room before it matters. Run the salt build, Luna. Buy your brother the ninety seconds it takes me to walk in and end this."
"Where are you?"
"Close. Do it now, and stop talking to me, because you're better than both of us when no one is speaking to you."
I killed the private line before she could hear whatever was coming next, because a person fighting for her family doesn't need the sound of me fighting for mine.
The inside of the building was a maze built by someone who plans for the day a man like me arrives.
There were blast doors and choke points, and a corridor built so that anyone walking it fast becomes a target and anyone walking it slow runs out of clock.
I didn't have the luxury of slow. Kirill and I took it in the only way that survives a corridor like that, which is together, one of us always moving while the other holds the angle, trading the lead back and forth without a word because we have done this since before either of us was the man he is now.
"Talk to me about Kirill's left," Zoya said. "He is favoring it."
"I'm favoring nothing," Kirill said. "I am pacing myself. There is a difference."
"There is not," I said.
"There is when I say there is."
"Save the argument," Zoya cut in. "You have company at the next junction. Four, maybe five, dug in behind the freight lift."
"Then they have picked a poor place to be patient," I said.
"They always do," Kirill said. "It is the one thing all our enemies share. They mistake a wall for cover."
We took the junction. I'll spare you the choreography of it. It ended as these things end when Kirill and I want the same thing in the same second, which is fast, and with a silence afterward that has a weight to it.
The server core was the heart of the place, a cold white room stacked floor to ceiling with the machines that were Nightjar, the last door before the inner one where the feeds and the phantom lived.
Three men had been left to hold it, and one of them had carried in something heavier than a pistol, and I saw the muzzle of it come up on Kirill's blind side while I was still a full second too far away.
A second is the entire distance between a living man and a story you tell about him afterward.
Kirill didn't move away from the gun. He moved in front of it.
He put his own body between the muzzle and the racks, because he'd heard me say a hundred times that if Nightjar's core died before Luna's trap was inside it we lost the whole war, and Kirill listens even while he's pretending he stopped listening years ago.
The burst caught him across the shoulder and the side and turned him halfway around, and he stayed on his feet, which a man his size has no right to do, and he put the shooter down with two flat shots and then sat against the rack all at once, as though the floor had reached up and asked him to.
"Kirill." I was on him. There was blood, a great deal of it, dark and moving too fast.
"It went through," he said, mild as a man checking a coat for rain. "Mostly through. I have had worse from Zoya's driving."
"Stop talking."
"You need the room, not my conversation.
" He pressed one enormous hand flat over the worst of it and leaned his head back against the machines he had just bled to keep breathing.
"I will hold the core. It is the one job left that a sitting man does well.
Go and get the boy, Pavel. Do not make my bad night a wasted one. "
"Zoya. Medic on Kirill, now."
"Three minutes out," she said, and her voice had gone very flat, which is what Zoya sounds like when she's frightened. "Three minutes, Pavel. Keep him talking. Kirill, tell me something stupid."
"Bex owes me forty dollars," Kirill said to the ceiling.
"For what?" Zoya said, seizing the thread like a lifeline.
"She bet me Pavel would smile before the year was out. I told her never." A wet laugh climbed out of him. "I am about to lose forty dollars. He has been grinning like a fool for a month."
I didn't answer that, because it was true, and because a bleeding man's joke has earned the right to land without me stepping on it. I left him telling Zoya about the bet, because the last gift I could hand the man was to make his choice mean something.
The building's speakers woke with a click I knew too well, because I'd heard it on a hundred channels wearing my own stolen voice.
"You are very close, Pavel." The phantom, calm, piped into the corridor like weather.
"Closer than anyone has come in thirty years.
I want you to understand that I am not afraid of you, and I never have been.
I hold the one thing you came all this way to save, and she is finishing my weapon while you bleed your friends across my floor.
You will reach an empty chair and a lit screen, and you will have arrived exactly too late to matter. "
"You talk like someone who has never had a door taken off its hinges," I said, to the ceiling, to all of him at once. "Keep talking. It tells me which wall to come through."
He laughed, once, warm and terrible, and the speaker died. He had spoken only to slow my hands, and it had cost me four seconds, and four seconds was the whole point of it.
The inner door was steel, and it was locked, and I didn't have the time a lock like that deserves.
So I gave it the time I had instead, which came in a shaped charge and a count.
On one channel Zoya was saying Kirill's name and a thin stream of numbers that meant a medic and a chance.
On the other, faint, I could hear Luna breathing and the patient warm voice of the thing that wore a kind face, and under both of them a countdown eating its way down to nothing.
"Ten," Zoya said, reading Luna's clock instead of Kirill's now. "Her count, Pavel. Nine."
I set the charge.
"Eight. Seven."
I have breached a hundred doors in my life. I've known the far side of every one of them before it opened, the number of men, the lines of fire, the exits. I had no idea what waited past this one, and for the first time I can remember, I didn't care about the exits at all. I only wanted the room.
"Three. Two."
The door went in ahead of me and I went in after it with the phantom's name in my mouth and the whole of my life aimed at the space where Danny and the clock and the man without a face were supposed to be.
And every screen in the building went black at once, all of them, in the same breath, and I was through the door and I couldn't see what she had chosen.