CHAPTER 17 #2
I had not driven anything since before the firm.
The seat was too far back and I did not fix it.
The mirror gave me the entire back seat and I made myself stop looking into it.
My hands got on with the job while my head stood off to one side explaining that this was not a thing I knew how to do, and the explanation lost, because there was nobody else in that car to make it to.
The barrels went down under the front of the car like the empty plastic they were, and then the closed lane, and then the roller, and then past it.
“Left at the yellow gate and then keep going until I tell you,” Luca said.
“Say the turns earlier.”
“Understood.” He turned in the seat and came back with more of it. “There is a gate well ahead of you on the left, it is yellow, and I want you out in the middle of the road until you can see it.”
“How far to the gate?”
“Two rises and a long left bend,” he said. “Then it is on your side and you cannot miss it.”
“Slow into this bend, and then hold it steady, and put your eyes further up the road than feels natural.”
Rian’s voice came up from the back through his teeth. “You are doing it right and I am not going to say it twice.”
“Then do not.”
Matteo said the road behind us was empty. Then he said it again in exactly the same voice, which was how I knew that he meant it.
Matteo had watched. That is what came into my head at the top of a rise with a bleeding man behind me, and I have not forgiven my head for the timing of it since.
Cassian came back onto the road ahead of us where a farm track met it, and put his hand flat out of the window and held it there until I was close enough to read it.
“Pull in behind me and stay there and do not stop again before the house,” he said on the channel.
“The round went through high and came out behind the shoulder,” Luca said. “He is talking, he is cold, and I have both hands on it.”
“They broke contact early,” Cassian said. “Four men do not break contact that early unless they already had what they came for.”
“What follows?”
“I do not have the rest of it yet.”
Harrow Point sat above a long field with a barn below the house and a gray line of river a long way off. Inside was colder than the yard, and the whole place smelled of nothing at all, which frightened me more than a smell would have.
The kitchen had a floor walked into a dip in front of the range, a table too heavy for two men to have carried in, and a dresser holding nothing but dust in the shape of the things that used to stand on it.
Every room in that house had been left in an ordinary way a long time ago, and the ordinariness was the only comfort on offer.
Luca put Rian on the table on his back with a folded coat under his head. There was no hospital anywhere in the conversation. There was one bottle in the case that Matteo said was better than nothing and considerably worse than everything else.
“I am going to pack it and it will be the worst part of your day,” Luca said.
“Then do it now instead of describing it to me.”
“Talk to me while I work,” Luca said. “Tell me the color of the ceiling or the name of a street.”
“Ceiling is filthy. The street is Water Street.”
“Tell me if the pressure goes wrong on the back side, because I cannot see the back side from here.”
Cassian lit the stove from nothing, one splinter at a time, with his hands doing it and his eyes on the table. When the iron began to take the heat the flue damper started pinging, slow and irregular, and it went on doing that all afternoon.
“Lift the arm for me,” Cassian said.
Rian got it to somewhere below his own shoulder and it stopped there. Matteo cut the sleeve away. The round had crossed high through the deltoid; the bone held, but the muscle around the track was already swelling hard. Rian tried to raise it a second time, because he is who he is.
“It goes to about here and then it quits.”
“Then it goes into a sling now, and when we have a signal a trauma surgeon gets the first opinion. You will not argue with me about that in front of her.”
My hands started when there was nothing left in them to hold.
I put them flat under the table on my knees, and I found my own pulse in both palms, which is a thing I had read about and never had.
Matteo came around behind me and crouched and said nothing at all about it.
He tapped twice on my sternum and waited, and I got a hand up and tapped twice back, and that was the entire exchange.
“There is no signal in this house until I put the repeater up on the roof,” he said.
“Tell me what that takes.”
“The ladder, the daylight, and somebody at the bottom holding the ladder.”
I held it. The rungs were slick with dew and my fingers came away wet and smelling of iron. He taped the cable up the mast, and I ran my thumb along the ribbed jacket of it where it lay against the metal, because it was something to do with a hand that had recently done something else.
“This house is mine and there is nothing anywhere with my name on it,” Cassian said behind me. “Nobody has ever been here before today. No client, no firm, no friend of mine.”
“Then tell me who knows the address, and tell me in the order you learned each of them.”
“Four men, one analyst, and now you.”
“That is a smaller number than I had prepared for,” I said. “Small numbers are the only thing I have ever trusted in my working life.”
“Keep it that small and we stay in front of him.”
The last room I went into had a window facing north and no lamp anywhere in it.
I stood at the glass with the medal shut in my fist and did the arithmetic I had been refusing to do since the farm track.
Kranz had four men, a stopped road, a car with a wounded man in it, and all the time in the world.
He had asked us politely to turn the engines off, and when we did not, he had taken one shoulder and gone home.
Men who want a thing do not go home. He had never been in a hurry. He had wanted us to believe that we had run.
They had not been trying to take me. They had been making sure I arrived.