Chapter 5 Uninvited Guests at the Penthouse
Hal went behind the kitchen island because she told him to, and because in nine years of moving freight he had learned that when the person who knows the building says move, you move first and you ask in the truck.
The dark was not total. Two walls of that apartment were glass and there was a city out there, and even with the tower dead the storm carried a gray working light that came in flat and low and made everything the color of wet cement.
He could see the shape of the range. He could see the pan with the rice still in it.
He could see Mina, standing exactly where she had been, not moving at all.
“Baby.”
“Shh.”
He shushed.
She had her head tipped very slightly. She was not looking at anything. He had watched her do this at a screen door in Poblacion for four seconds and had not understood it then either, and he understood now only that she was doing arithmetic with her ears.
Fifteen seconds went by.
“How many stairwells?” Hal said, as quietly as he could.
Her head came around.
“What?”
“Forty-one floors. You have got two elevator banks and a service car, and by code you have got two stairs minimum, probably three.” He kept it under the rain. “I looked at the plate in the elevator on Tuesday. Which one comes out closest to us?”
For about a second Mina did not say anything at all.
“North,” she said. “The north stair comes out by the utility door in the back hall. The other one is on the far side, past the elevator lobby.”
“Then that hall is the problem.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Hal said. “Then why are we standing in the kitchen, which is between them?”
And Mina Hermosa, in the dark, in her own apartment, on the second day of a typhoon, made a small sound that under any other circumstances he would have called a laugh.
“Because the kitchen has the knives, the cord, and one door,” she said. “Get down. All the way down. Behind the island, on the floor, and put your back against the cabinet, and whatever happens do not stand up in the middle of the room. Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes, mi reina.”
Then she was moving, and she was fast, and Hal, going down onto the tile with his back against a cabinet door, watched his girlfriend cross her own kitchen in the dark and take a knife roll out of a drawer he had cooked out of that morning, and not take a knife out of it.
She took the roll itself, cloth and all, and threw it under the sink.
Then she pulled the extension cord out of the wall behind the coffee machine, wound it twice around her left hand, and stood with her back flat against the wall beside the doorway, in the dark, and waited.
The waiting went on longer than Hal had any way to prepare for.
He had assumed, from films, that this part was short. It was not short. It was somewhere over three minutes, and he spent all of it on tile with his back against a cabinet door and his knees up, listening to rain and to the building.
The building made a lot of sounds. That was the awful part.
A dead tower is not quiet. Water went down a stack in the wall behind him, hollow, gulping, on a count.
The glass flexed and ticked. Nine floors down or nine floors up, impossible to tell, somebody was hammering on something, and a dog was barking, and a child was crying in the unbothered rhythmic way of a child who has been crying for a while and has settled into it.
And every one of those sounds arrived and had to be assessed and discarded, one at a time, by a man with no training whatsoever, in the dark, on a floor.
He thought about the freezer at Forest Park.
That was the strangest thing his brain produced in those three minutes.
He thought about the walk-in at the Forest Park facility, and the fact that it had a pull handle on the inside, and that in nine years he had checked that handle himself about four hundred times because a man in Macon had died in one in 2011.
That was the shape his mind wanted. Exits. He wanted to know the exits and he did not know them, and it was making him useless.
So he did the only thing he could do from a kitchen floor, which was to lie down flat on his side and look under the four-inch gap beneath the cabinets, out across the tile, at the strip of the back hall he could see from there.
Which is how Hal Rivera came to be the one who saw the light first.
He did not say anything. He could not have said anything. But Mina had turned her head to look at him, in the way she had been doing every fifteen seconds, and she saw the whole of him go rigid on the floor, and she followed his eyes down to the gap.
She put one finger up. Then two. Then a flat palm. Then she pointed at the floor, hard, twice, which meant stay down, and Hal put his cheek on the tile and stayed down.
Later he would try to lay it out for people and would find that he could not.
He got it out of order. He got it wrong in places, and he knew he had it wrong, because two of the things he remembered could not both have happened. That is the part nobody tells you. You expect the horror. You do not expect the filing system to fail.
Here is what he had.
He had the sound of the back hall door. Not a crash. A soft double click, the way a door sounds when somebody has worked the lock rather than kicked it, and then the almost-nothing of a hinge that Mina had had oiled because she was a person who had things oiled.
He had four beams of light. Small, hard, white, mounted on something, sweeping in an order that was a pattern and had been practiced, low then high then low.
He had a voice, male, flat, saying two words in a language he thought was German and later decided was not.
He had the first one coming into the kitchen doorway.
The man came in the way they train you to come in, shoulder first, weapon up, light forward, clearing the corner.
He was very good and it did not help him at all, because he was clearing the corner in front of him and Mina was flat against the wall in the corner behind him, and she let him take a full step past her before she moved.
Hal saw the cord go over the man’s head.
He did not see it as a cord. He saw a fast dark line in the air and then the man was going backward off his own feet with his chin up, and there was a sound Hal would rather not have in his head, and then Mina had put him face down on the tile with one knee in the small of his back and had the weapon off him and was sliding it away across the floor toward the sink.
She did not keep it. That was the thing Hal could not stop thinking about afterward. She had a submachine gun in her hands for about a second and a half and she got rid of it like it was a wet towel.
The second one came through fast because of the noise.
That one Hal got almost none of. There was the light, and there was Mina low under the light, and there was a sound of a body hitting the corner of a granite countertop that was so specific and so wet that Hal’s whole spine went cold, and then a second sound of the same body hitting the floor.
Then the third and the fourth came together, and that is when it stopped looking like anything.
Hal had spent a lot of his life around men doing physical work.
He knew what effort looked like. This was not that.
It was closer to watching a machinist, somebody who has done a thing ten thousand times and has stopped deciding.
She was never where the light was. She kept getting closer instead of further away, which every instinct in Hal’s body said was insane, and by the third time it happened he understood, from the floor, in the dark, that the closer she got the less their weapons meant.
She used the doorway. She used the corner of the island. She used the wall to take one man’s arm past her and put his elbow somewhere elbows do not go.
And at some point in it, one of them got a blade out.
Hal did not see the knife. He saw her turn her body about eleven degrees, and he heard fabric, and afterward there was a great deal of blood down her left forearm, and much later, when he had learned what he had actually been watching, he would understand that she had made a decision in that eleven degrees.
She had taken the angle on the outside of the arm because the alternative angle went across her throat, and she had known that at the time, and had chosen the arm.
The last one went down against the refrigerator.
Then there was a lot of noise that was only rain.
Hal stood up.
He had, at some point, without any memory of doing it, taken the cast-iron skillet off the range. He was holding it in his right hand down by his thigh. It was still warm.
Mina was standing in the middle of her kitchen with her chest going and her left arm hanging and blood coming off the ends of her fingers onto the tile in a rhythm.
She looked at him. She looked at the skillet.
“Hal, honey,” she said, “put down the pan.”
“Yeah.”
“You are not putting it down.”
“No, I know.” He looked at it. His hand would not open. That was a strange thing to discover about your own hand. “Give me a second.”
“Take the second.”
He took the second. Then his fingers worked and he set the skillet on the counter, and the sound it made was enormous.
Somewhere on the floor one of the men groaned.
Mina crossed to him without hurrying, did something to the side of his neck with her right hand, and the groaning stopped, and Hal heard himself say, from very far away, “Is he.”
“No. He will be up in twenty minutes and he will be extremely unhappy.” She was already moving. “Hal. Hal, look at me.”
He looked at her.
“You are going to want to sit down in about ninety seconds,” Mina said. “You do not get to. Not yet. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Good. In the hall closet behind the coats there is a black duffel. Bring it. Do not open it.”
“Okay.”
“Then in the second bedroom, on the desk, there is a silver laptop and a green external drive and a stack of printouts. All of it. Everything on that desk, and I mean everything, including the paper in the bin.”
“Okay.”