The Last Piece #2
The twenty feet felt like twenty miles. My shoes slipped on the wet asphalt and my lungs burned with the effort of breathing air that was more water than oxygen.
A bullet struck the wall beside me and sent a spray of brick fragments across my cheek, and I felt the sting of it but didn't stop.
I reached the dumpster and threw myself behind it, and the envelope was still in my hands, still intact, still the only thing standing between us and the complete erasure of everything Julian had died to expose.
Harding was still firing, still moving, and I watched him work his way toward me in short, controlled bursts, using the cover of the dumpsters and the loading docks and the rain itself.
The Russians were shouting to each other now, their voices tight with the realization that this was not going as planned, and Jackson's people were falling back toward their vehicle, their fire becoming more sporadic.
I saw Jackson herself standing beside the unmarked sedan, her pistol still raised, her eyes still tracking Harding's movement.
She was not firing. She was watching, and the expression on her face was not the expression of someone who was losing a firefight.
She was waiting.
I looked across the alley and saw one of the Russians looking back at her, and again there was that glance, that brief, almost casual exchange of recognition. It lasted less than a second, but it was enough. It was more than enough.
They were not enemies. They were not even rivals.
They were something else, something I didn't have a word for, and the realization of it hit me with a force that made the gunfire seem almost incidental.
The CIA and the KGB, the two agencies that were supposed to be locked in a cold war that had defined half a century of global politics, were standing in a rain-soaked alley in Phoenix and coordinating their fire like partners who'd been doing this for years.
"Harding," I shouted. "They're working together."
He reached my position and dropped into a crouch beside me, his back against the dumpster and his gun held ready. His breathing was harsh and uneven, and there was a smear of blood on his forehead where a fragment of something had cut him. "I know. I saw it."
"What does that mean?"
"It means KESTREL wasn't just a joint operation. It means the collaboration is still active." He wiped the blood out of his eye with the back of his hand. "It means we're not just running from two agencies. We're running from one agency with two faces."
The firing had slackened. The Russians were pulling back toward their sedan, dragging their wounded man with them, and Jackson's people were doing the same.
The sudden quiet was almost worse than the noise had been, the rain rushing in to fill the space the gunfire had left.
I could hear water running in the gutters and the distant wail of a siren somewhere in the city, and I could hear my own pulse beating in my ears, fast and light and insistent.
"We need to move," Harding said. "Now, while they're regrouping."
"Where?"
"The side street. There's a storm drain access at the end of the next alley over. If we can reach it, we can get underground before they reorganize."
I looked at him, at the blood on his face and the exhaustion in his eyes and the way he was still holding himself between me and the direction of the gunfire, his body a shield he hadn't hesitated to offer.
The gratitude I felt was not a gentle thing.
It was sharp and fierce and complicated, tangled up with fear and adrenaline and the growing recognition that whatever existed between us had stopped being a professional alliance weeks ago and had become something I didn't know how to name.
"You first," I said.
"Not a chance."
"Harding."
"Eleanor." He said my name the way you'd say something you were afraid of losing. "We don't have time for this. On three. One."
I tucked the envelope inside my jacket, felt the paper press against my ribs, the twenty-seven pages that had already cost one man his life and were threatening to cost us ours. "Two."
He reached out and touched my wrist, just for a moment, his fingers cold and wet and steady. "Three."
We ran.
The side street was narrow and dark and filled with the runoff from the main alley, water swirling around our ankles as we splashed through it.
I heard shouts behind us, the slam of car doors, the screech of tires on wet pavement, and then we were around the corner and into the next alley, a narrower passage that ran between two windowless brick buildings and ended in a chain-link fence.
Harding found the storm drain access, a heavy metal grate set into the asphalt, and he grabbed the edge of it and pulled.
It came up with a shriek of rusted metal, and he gestured me toward the darkness below.
"Go."
I went. The ladder was slick with water and rust, and I climbed down into the darkness hand over hand, feeling the rungs bite into my palms. The sound of the rain faded as I descended, replaced by the echo of dripping water and the distant rush of the storm drain itself.
Harding followed me down and pulled the grate back into place above us, and then we were standing in waist-deep water in a concrete tunnel that smelled of earth and rot and the particular metallic tang of a city's hidden infrastructure.
I couldn't see his face in the darkness, but I could hear his breathing, still harsh, still uneven.
I could hear the water moving around us, and I could hear the muffled sounds of the street above, the sirens getting closer, the shouted orders in two languages.
And underneath all of it, I could hear the silence between us, the thing we hadn't said, the thing that had been building since the first interrogation room and had finally become too large to fit inside words.
"You're bleeding," I said.
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing."
He didn't answer. The water flowed past us in the darkness, carrying whatever it had collected from the streets above, and somewhere in the distance a light flickered, a single bulb mounted on the tunnel wall, too far away to reach us. I found his arm in the dark and held on.
"They were working together," I said. "The whole time. The CIA and the KGB. It wasn't just KESTREL. It's everything."
"It's worse than that." His voice was tired, the kind of tired that went deeper than sleep could fix. "If they're coordinating in the field, it means the collaboration goes all the way up. Webb and Orlov aren't rogue operators. They're following orders."
"Whose orders?"
"That's the question, isn't it."
The water rose another inch while we stood there, and I felt the cold of it seeping through my clothes, reaching for my skin.
The envelope was still pressed against my chest, the pages still dry, still intact.
I thought about Julian, about the promises he'd made on the cruise ship, about the future he'd painted for us in colors so bright I'd been willing to ignore the shadows at the edges.
He'd known what he was carrying. He'd known what it would cost him.
And he'd put it in my bag anyway, because he'd trusted me to finish what he couldn't.
Or because he'd had no one else.
"We need to keep moving," Harding said. "This tunnel runs south for about half a mile. It comes out near the rail yard. We can find shelter there, figure out our next move."
"Our next move is Vienna."
"Vienna is a long way from a storm drain in Phoenix."
"I know." I let go of his arm and started moving, feeling my way along the tunnel wall with one hand.
The water tugged at my legs, and the darkness pressed in from all sides, and somewhere above us the sirens were still wailing, and the men who wanted us dead were still searching.
But the envelope was still in my jacket, and Harding was still behind me, and I was still breathing. "But we're going to get there."
I heard him follow. The water sloshed around us as we walked, and the single bulb in the distance grew slowly brighter, and the sound of the rain faded until it was nothing but a memory, a whisper at the edge of hearing.
The tunnel stretched ahead into the dark, and we walked into it together, and I did not look back.