34. Viktor
VIKTOR
The drainage channel is thirty-one centimeters wide and runs for eight meters under the eastern perimeter wall.
I measured it from the satellite image four times before leaving Nocturne.
The resolution is low enough that the figure could be off by two or three centimeters either direction.
I am thirty-four centimeters at the shoulder without kit.
I remove the kit. I push it ahead of me through the channel on a length of cord and I follow it on my back with my arms pressed to my sides and I move by pushing with my heels and the back of my skull against wet concrete.
It takes four minutes.
On the other side I reassemble in a drainage ditch parallel to the interior fence line.
The blackout outside the compound is complete.
The compound's generator throws light only at the main structure and the security post. The gap between those two pools of light is shadow. I move into it and stay there.
The guard rotation runs on a roughly twelve-minute interval. I time two full rotations before I move.
The first guard goes down at the eleven-minute mark in the shadow beside the interior fence. Quietly, I drag him into the ditch. The second is at the north corner of the larger structure. He goes down the same way.
I move to the larger structure's east entrance. A service door, unlocked from the outside. I go in.
The interior corridor runs fifty meters under flat amber emergency lighting. Three doors on the left. One at the far end. I move along the right wall and listen at the first door. Nothing. Second, nothing. Third door, I stop.
A sound, rhythmic. Metal on metal.
Small increments, patient. Someone working a bolt.
I work both external locks and push the door open.
Jupiter is standing on the disassembled cot frame with a length of aluminum tubing extended toward the window, the blanket's satin binding wrapped around it for reach.
She spins toward the door. Fear crosses her face, then recognition, then something that breaks open so completely it takes a moment to resolve into relief.
She climbs down.
"I was almost there," she says. Her voice is steady, her hands are not. A slight tremor running through them, the residual of sustained concentration releasing all at once.
The improvised extension reaches within ten centimeters of the latch. I glance at her wrists, friction marks, red and raw, from the convoy extraction. At the bruise across her left cheekbone. Dark. Recent.
"Who gave you that?" I say.
"One of the men from the convoy. Not here. Ortega hasn't touched me." Her voice is steady.
I put it away.
"Malachi and Alessio breach the main gate in approximately nine minutes," I say. "We need to be moving."
She puts her shoes on, she'd taken them off to work in silence. Picks up nothing else, there's nothing else to pick up.
We move.
We get thirty meters before the world comes apart.
The security post guard rounds the north corner at the wrong moment.
My timing off because one of the exterior guards has shortened his rotation, a deviation I didn't catch.
The guard sees Jupiter. His arm comes up with the radio before the weapon, and I am already crossing the distance, but he gets two words into the transmission before I reach him.
Two words is enough. But two words into a dead-air transmission, the kind that bounces against blocked channels. Ortega's compound runs on a closed frequency. Whatever the guard transmitted, it stayed inside the perimeter.
I take the guard down hard, harder than necessary, the speed of the engagement carrying its own force. And the sound of it, bone on concrete, echoes off the metal walls. From inside the main structure, shouting. Feet moving. The compound shifts from dormant to active in the space of four seconds.
Then Malachi's team hits the main gate.
The explosion of force is simultaneous with the noise from the security post. Three vehicles, Renner's full team, the gate coming down in a single coordinated breach.
The compound erupts. Running feet from multiple directions.
Lights snapping on inside the main structure. Radios screaming at each other.
I turn to Jupiter. She's pressed flat against the wall, both hands on the concrete, eyes tracking. Not frozen, but reading. Waiting for me.
"Stay left. Close. Move when I move."
"Close," she says.
We break from the wall.
Open ground, forty meters to the main gate.
The firefight has already started. Renner's people engaging Ortega's guards coming out of the main structure, muzzle flash in the dark, the sound of it concussive and close.
I run with Jupiter on my left, her footsteps beside mine, my body angled toward anything coming from the right.
A guard comes from between the two structures. Fast, low, cutting off our line to the gate. I redirect him into the compound wall with a force that ends the conversation. Jupiter doesn't stop moving, doesn't look back, she keeps running.
Another. From the main structure doorway, coming wide. I catch him by the jacket and spin him, and the impact sends us both into the fence line. He's large and he recovers fast and for six seconds I am purely occupied with not letting him. Jupiter is ahead of me now. Ten meters. Fifteen.
A third man comes out of the secondary entrance on the north side. He catches her by the arm.
She goes down hard. Not thrown, taken, his weight coming over her to bring her to the ground.
I hear the impact, the sound of breath knocked out of her, and something in me goes cold and very fast simultaneously.
I am across the open ground in three seconds.
I take the man off her with both hands and I don't stop when he's off her, I keep going, and by the time I stop he's not getting up.
I turn.
Jupiter is already pushing herself to her feet. Her palms are torn from the ground. There's blood on her chin from where her face hit the concrete. She gets upright, she shakes her head once to clear it. Those eyes, steady, focused, entirely present despite the blood, find mine.
We run.
Malachi sees her first.
He's thirty meters away and coming fast and the moment he clears the secondary fence line his eyes find Jupiter and nothing else exists for him.
He covers the distance with a speed I've only seen from him when the thing at stake is the thing he can't afford to lose.
He reaches her and his hands go to her face.
Both of them, the same way he held her face in the corridor after the assassination attempt, after the charity event, every time the fear of losing her has been larger than his control, and he makes a sound into her hair that isn't a word.
She holds his wrists. She's breathing hard. "I'm all right. I'm all right."
He doesn't let go immediately.
Alessio is flanking my left, covering the main structure doorway where two of Ortega's guards are repositioning.
I move to take the right side. Standard formation.
Malachi should be covering the left flank with me, but Malachi is holding Jupiter's face in his hands in the middle of a firefight and Alessio has already stepped into his position without being asked.
This is what twelve years looks like. Alessio covering Malachi's blind side before Malachi knows he has one.
A guard comes out of the main structure's side entrance moving fast, coming wide around the firefight with his weapon up. He has a clear line to Malachi's back. Malachi still has his hands on Jupiter's face, he doesn't see it.
I see it.
I cover the distance in four steps and I am between Malachi and the guard when the shot fires.
Left shoulder. The impact rotates me and takes my legs and I am on the ground and the cold concrete is pressing against my cheek and somewhere above me the guard goes down. Alessio, from my right, fast and definitive.
Then nothing is moving.
Jupiter is beside me before I've understood I'm down.
Jupiter drops to her knees, before either of them, and her hands come to my shoulder and she leans over me and her face is all I can see clearly.
Torn palms. Blood on her chin. The bruise on her cheek.
She is battered and exhausted and she is looking at me in a way that will stay with me for as long as I live.
"Through and through," she says. Her fingers are reading the entry and exit with a precision that belonged to field training or to the particular intelligence of someone who refuses to fall apart. "It's through and through."
"Good," I say. My voice sounds distant.
"Stay still." She presses her hand against the wound. Firm, steady, not flinching. "Just stay still."
I stay still.
Malachi is on my other side. He got here in the seconds after Jupiter, and his hand comes over hers on my shoulder.
His pressure supplementing hers, holding the wound from two angles.
He looks at her. She looks at him. Above me, two people who have not resolved what happened between them holding me together on a compound floor.
The fact of it, the two of them here, together, doing the only thing that matters right now, tells me something about where this ends.
Alessio crouches at my feet. He does a rapid check. Eyes, breathing, color. He looks at Malachi. Some communication passes between them, twelve years of shorthand running in under two seconds.
"Renner has a medic at the gate," Alessio says. "Two minutes."
Malachi nods. He doesn't look away from Jupiter.
She doesn't look away from me.
"Viktor." Her voice is very quiet. Just for me.
"Still here," I say.
Her free hand finds mine on the concrete. Her torn palm against my knuckles. She holds on.
I think about everything she said in a safehouse kitchen. What it means to have been a weapon for eleven years and to be lying on this compound floor with the woman who showed me the man underneath the weapon holding my hand on one side and the man I would die for on the other.
Malachi stepped in front of Jupiter.
Alessio stepped in front of Malachi's blind side.
I stepped in front of Malachi.
None of us discussed it, none of us decided. We simply moved toward whoever needed covering, every time, without calculation, and that is the only true thing I know about what we are to each other.
The medic arrives. Jupiter doesn't let go of my hand until she has to.
Even then it takes a moment.