Chapter 34
ROMAN
The warehouse sits back from the waterfront behind a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate that one of Pavel’s men cuts through in four seconds flat.
I count twelve vehicles in the lot. Three vans, two of which match Viktor’s description close enough to matter, four sedans, and the rest utility trucks that could belong to anyone.
The building itself is two stories, with a loading bay on the left side, three ground-floor windows on the right, all covered from the inside.
A single light is burning on the second floor.
Someone is home.
Pavel crouches beside me behind the fence line and looks at the building and points out two entry points, loading bay, and the side door on the east face. I tell him the loading bay is a kill box, we go east, and he nods and starts moving, and the ten men behind us move with him.
The east door is steel, padlocked, alarmed by a panel on the frame that Kostya’s contact told us to expect. Dimitri, who has been handling this kind of panel since before I knew his name, puts his kit on it and has the alarm bypassed in ninety seconds. He looks at me. I nod. He cuts the padlock.
We go in.
The corridor inside is dark except for emergency lighting running along the base of the left wall, a thin orange line that turns everything above it into shadow.
I go first. Pavel is two steps behind me, the others spreading into the corridor behind him, and I move through it with my weapon up and my eyes moving across every doorway, every junction, every shadow that is the wrong shape.
The first man comes out of a door on the right.
He sees me, gets his weapon up, and Pavel puts him down before he clears the holster. The shot cracks through the corridor, and somewhere ahead of us a voice shouts in Italian, and then there are footsteps, multiple sets, coming fast from the far end of the building.
Three of them come around the corner at the same time.
The corridor fills with gunfire, close, deafening, muzzle flash strobing in the dark.
I’m moving to the left wall, shoulder against the concrete, firing twice at the leftmost figure who goes down.
Pavel takes the second, the third fires, and I hear someone behind me curse.
I fire again and the third figure hits the floor and the corridor goes quiet except for the ringing in my ears and the sound of someone behind me breathing through their teeth.
I turn. One of Pavel’s men has his hand pressed against his right forearm, blood between his fingers, his face doing the work of someone who has decided the pain is not relevant right now.
“Move,” I say.
He moves.
The staircase is at the far end of the building, metal, open-sided, the kind that transmits every footstep up through the frame.
I take them fast anyway because slow on an open staircase is worse than fast. At the top landing another man comes out of the door to my left, and I put my shoulder into him before he can raise his weapon and drive him back into the wall, and the wall wins.
He goes down.
Pavel is behind me on the landing and ahead of us the second-floor corridor is longer than the first, four doors on the left side, a window at the far end throwing pale waterfront light across the floor.
I move to the first door. Locked. Second door, locked.
Third door, a padlock on the outside hasp, new, the kind you put on something you want to keep in rather than keep out.
I look at Dimitri.
Ten seconds.
The padlock comes off.
I push the door open, and I see her.
She’s in a chair against the far wall with both hands pressed flat against her stomach and her eyes on the door and when she sees me something happens in her face that I don’t have a word for, a collapse and a reconstruction happening simultaneously, and she stands up and she takes one step toward me and I cross the room and I have her before she takes the second.
She’s shaking.
I can feel it through my jacket, a fine constant tremor running through her whole body.
She has both hands between us still pressed against her stomach, and her face is in my neck and she’s not crying, just breathing, fast and shallow, the breathing of someone who has been holding themselves together for hours on will alone.
“The baby,” she says into my collar.
“We’re going to the doctor right now,” I say. “Right now. Let’s go.”
She pulls back and looks at my face, and her eyes are scanning me the way people scan for damage when they’re too shaken to be subtle about it, and I let her look because I understand the need.
“Can you walk?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Then walk. Stay behind me. Do not stop for anything.”
She nods.
I take her hand.
We go back through the corridor with Pavel ahead and two men behind, and Elena’s hand in mine and the building making the sounds buildings make when a fight has just moved through them, settling, groaning, the orange emergency lighting still running along the base of the walls.
She doesn’t look at the men on the floor.
I watch her not look at them, the deliberate forward focus of someone who has decided that seeing less is how she gets through the next five minutes.
At the staircase, she hesitates for half a second at the first step and I tighten my hand around hers and she goes.
In the corridor on the ground floor, there are voices ahead, Marchetti voices, and Pavel holds up a fist and we stop.
I push Elena back against the wall behind me and there are three seconds of silence, and then Pavel’s men go around the corner and there are two shots, close together, and then nothing.
Pavel looks back at me. Clear.
We move.
The east door is still open. Cold air hits us when we step through it, the waterfront smell, the thin winter light of late afternoon, and Elena makes a sound beside me when she sees the open sky above the fence line. Not a word, just a sound, and I understand it completely.
The car is where I left it at the cut fence. Viktor has it running. I open the rear door, Elena gets in, and I get in beside her. Viktor pulls out of the lot before I’ve told him to.
Elena is sitting with both hands still pressed against her stomach, and she’s looking at the seat in front of her, and she’s still shaking.
I put my hand over both of hers.
She looks down at my hand covering hers, and she turns her hands over, and she holds on, and I let her hold on, and I do not move my hand for the entire drive.
“Mara,” she says, after a while. Her voice is quiet, stripped of everything except the question in it.
“She’s at the Kessler facility,” I say. “She’s out of surgery. She’s stable.”
Elena closes her eyes.
Her hands tighten around mine.
I look at the road ahead and I think about a corridor full of gunfire and a padlock on a door and her face when I walked through that door.
I think about Mara in a recovery room saying bring her home, and I think about twelve weeks and both hands pressed flat against a stomach in a cold room in New Jersey for however many hours she sat in that chair alone.
I don’t let go of her hand.
Viktor drives and the city appears on the other side of the water and I sit in the back of the car with my wife’s hands in mine and I do not let go.