The Last Piece
Crossfire in the Rain
The phone rang at eleven minutes past ten, and the sound of it cut through the rain like a blade through wet paper.
I was standing at the window of the motel room we'd taken on the east side of the city, watching water sheet down the glass in waves that turned the parking lot lights into smeared amber streaks.
Harding answered on the second ring, and I heard his voice go still in a way I'd learned to recognize over the past weeks.
The way that meant something had gone wrong.
"When?" A pause. "How long ago?"
I turned from the window. He was already reaching for his jacket, the phone pressed between his ear and shoulder, his free hand moving with the kind of economy that came from sixteen years of responding to emergencies.
The room was small and smelled of damp carpet and the faint chemical sweetness of the air freshener the motel used to cover worse smells.
Our bags sat by the door, packed and ready because we'd learned not to unpack. We'd learned a lot of things.
"We'll be there." He hung up and looked at me. "That was Jackson. Someone burned her source. She thinks they're coming for her next."
"She thinks or she knows?"
"She knows enough to be scared, and Sarah Jackson doesn't scare easy.
" He pulled on his jacket, checked the magazine in his service weapon, and slid it back into the holster with a click that seemed louder than it should have.
"She wants to meet. The alley off Van Buren, behind the old print shop. She said she'd have something for us."
"That's the same place."
"I know."
The alley off Van Buren behind the old print shop on Seventh.
We'd been there before, weeks ago, when this had all been new and I'd still believed there was a version of my life I could return to.
The memory of it sat in my chest like a splinter I'd learned to breathe around.
I didn't say anything else. I grabbed the manila envelope from the nightstand, the twenty-seven pages that had cost Julian Smith his life and might yet cost us ours, and I followed Harding out into the rain.
The storm had come out of nowhere, the way desert storms did, sudden and violent and indifferent to whatever plans you'd made.
By the time we reached the rental car the water was already ankle-deep in the low spots of the parking lot, and the air smelled of wet asphalt and ozone and something sharper underneath, something that might have been the city itself exhaling after too many months of drought.
Harding drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes moving constantly between the road ahead and the rearview mirror.
The windshield wipers beat a rhythm I found myself counting without meaning to.
"How many?" I asked.
"She didn't say. She didn't have time."
The streets were nearly empty, the kind of emptiness that came when the weather turned bad enough to keep sensible people indoors.
The few cars we passed were moving slowly, their headlights cutting weak tunnels through the downpour.
Phoenix wasn't built for rain. The drainage systems were an afterthought, and the water pooled in intersections and ran in sheets across the asphalt, carrying debris and the reflected glow of streetlights.
Harding took a corner too fast and the back end of the car fishtailed before he corrected, his jaw set and his hands steady.
"You've done this before," I said.
"Not in the rain."
I held the envelope against my chest and felt the edges of the pages through the paper.
I'd memorized most of them by now. The eighteen names, the six countries, the joint operational authority on page fourteen signed by Marcus Webb and Yuri Orlov.
The KESTREL network, a collaboration between agencies that were supposed to be enemies, built on the bones of people who'd never known they were being used.
Julian had been the controller. Julian had been a lot of things I hadn't known about.
The downtown buildings gave way to the older industrial streets, warehouses and print shops and businesses that closed after five and left the sidewalks empty.
The streetlights were sparser here, and the rain made the darkness feel heavier, more complete.
Harding slowed the car and killed the headlights.
"We walk from here."
We left the car in the shadow of a shuttered auto body shop and moved on foot through the rain.
The alley off Van Buren was narrow and lined with dumpsters and loading docks, the brick walls running with water that caught the faint light from a single bulb above a back door.
The old print shop was dark, its windows blank and its sign faded to near illegibility.
The rain hammered on the metal roofs and filled the air with a noise that swallowed every other sound.
I couldn't hear our footsteps. I couldn't hear my own breathing.
The world had been reduced to water and shadow and the weight of the envelope in my hands.
Harding stopped at the mouth of the alley and held up a hand.
I stopped beside him and followed his gaze.
There was a figure standing at the far end, half-visible through the curtain of rain, and even at this distance I recognized the precise, contained posture of Sarah Jackson.
She was holding an umbrella, which seemed absurd under the circumstances, a small domestic gesture in the middle of a nightmare. She saw us and started walking.
And then the headlights hit us.
The black sedan came from the north end of the alley, moving fast and throwing up a wall of spray that glittered in its own beams. It slewed sideways as it braked, blocking the entrance completely, and before it had fully stopped the doors were opening and men in dark coats were stepping out into the rain.
I saw the weapons in their hands and my body understood what was happening before my mind did.
I was already moving, already pulling back toward the wall, and Harding was already reaching for his gun.
"Get down," he said, and his voice was not loud but it carried.
The second vehicle came from the south end, an unmarked sedan with government plates, and it stopped with its front bumper nearly touching the back wall of the print shop.
Agent Jackson stepped out of the passenger side, and even through the rain I could see the sharp, intelligent eyes, the precise movements I remembered from the coffee shop.
She was not holding an umbrella. She was holding a pistol, and she was pointing it not at the men from the black sedan but at us.
"The papers, Mrs. Vance." Her voice cut through the rain with the clarity of someone who was used to being obeyed. "Put them on the ground and step away."
I didn't move. The rain plastered my hair to my face and ran down the back of my neck and I didn't move.
The men from the black sedan had fanned out, three of them, their faces obscured by the rain and the darkness.
One of them shouted something in Russian, and I saw Jackson's head turn slightly, her eyes meeting his for a fraction of a second.
It was not the look of two adversaries recognizing each other across a battlefield.
It was something else. Something that made my stomach go tight.
"Harding," I said.
"I saw it."
The Russian raised his weapon and fired, and the alley exploded into noise and muzzle flash and the sharp, percussive ring of bullets hitting metal.
I threw myself sideways behind a dumpster, the impact of my shoulder against the steel sending a jolt through my arm that I felt in my teeth.
The envelope was still in my hands, pressed against my chest, and I curled around it the way you'd curl around a child, the way you'd protect something that couldn't protect itself.
Harding was returning fire from behind the corner of the print shop, his shots measured and deliberate, each one placed with the kind of precision that came from years of training and the cold understanding that ammunition was finite.
I saw one of the Russians go down, clutching his leg, and then the CIA operatives were firing too, and the alley became a chaos of competing trajectories, bullets pinging off dumpsters and ricocheting off brick and punching through the thin metal of the loading dock doors.
"Eleanor!" Harding's voice was strained, pushed through clenched teeth. "The other dumpster, twenty feet to your left. When I say move, you move."
I looked. The second dumpster was farther down the alley, closer to the south end where Jackson's people were positioned, but it offered better cover and a clearer path to the side street.
The problem was the twenty feet between here and there, twenty feet of open ground lit by the headlights of both vehicles and crossed by at least three lines of fire.
"I can't," I said.
"You can." He ejected a spent magazine and slammed a new one home without looking down. "I'm going to draw their fire. You count to three after I move, and then you run. Don't stop. Don't look back."
"Harding."
He looked at me then, and in the strobing light of the gunfire his face was wet with rain and something that might have been exhaustion or might have been the same thing I was feeling, the thing that had been growing between us for weeks and had finally become too large to ignore. "I'll be right behind you."
He didn't wait for me to argue. He lunged out from behind the corner, firing as he moved, and he grabbed a length of pipe from the ground, a discarded piece of plumbing that had been leaning against the wall, and he threw it hard toward the black sedan.
It struck the hood with a sound like a gong, and for a moment every gun in the alley swung toward the noise. I counted to three and ran.