Chapter 19
nineteen
RODRIGO
I’ve hung up the phone and placed it in my pocket, and now, my only concern is finding a weakness in the man standing in the doorway of my hotel room.
He’s tall— very tall— and he knows it. The gun is already out, already level.
He moves like someone who has done this before, which means I need to be faster than someone who has done this before.
The overhead bulb flickers on when the door opens because it’s on a sensor, and for half a second we are both blinking at each other under its terrible yellow light.
I need to survive to help Billie. She is in Barcelona, and I am her only chance.
I grab the lamp.
It’s a bedside lamp– small and ceramic and shaped like a pineapple, which is a detail I will think about later and possibly laugh at.
Right now, it is a weapon, and I bring it around in a wide arc and catch the man across the side of the head before he can fully correct his aim.
It makes a sound I don’t love. He staggers.
The gun swings wide. I don’t wait— I close the distance between us immediately, because in a small room with a man that size, distance is not my friend.
His hand comes back up. The gun comes back up. The barrel is level with my chest.
There are moments that slow down. This is one of them. I can hear the radiator ticking. I can see his trigger finger, which has not moved yet. I’m surprised he hasn’t taken a shot. Maybe he doesn’t want to draw attention by risking a missed shot— he needs a clean, quick kill.
I go sideways instead of backward, which surprises him, and I get both hands on his gun arm and fold it against the natural direction of the joint.
He makes a sound. The gun doesn’t go off.
He actually seems surprised I’m fighting back.
Maybe his other targets generally choose to flee.
I use this to my advantage and elbow him in the face.
He jerks back and throws a left hook that lands in my shoulder and sends me flying against the wall, but that’s okay because the gun is in my hand now.
We’re both a little surprised at this fact.
The man comes at me and swings. He is very large and the swing has real intention behind it. I level the gun at him.
He stops.
“Siéntate,” I say, which is not something I practiced for this particular situation, but seemed appropriate. Sit down.
He looks at me. He looks at the gun. He looks at the lamp, which is on the floor, the pineapple broken neatly at the stem. He does what I’ve asked and sits on the bed.
I back toward the duffel bag, which is where I left it— on the chair by the window, still packed. This is a good habit, the not-unpacking. I’ve learned it gradually, over months of situations that required rapid exits.
I get the bag onto my shoulder without taking my eyes off him. He is watching me with a look that says he’s recalibrating his options, and I have maybe forty-five seconds before he decides his options have improved. I go to the window.
It opens outward, which is not ideal, but I’ve made worse exits. One story down, there’s a narrow ledge that juts out. Below that, a fire escape and a five foot drop to the street. Doable. There’s a cat meowing in front of the pharmacy, but otherwise, no witnesses.
I go out feet-first, grab the sill, and let myself down until my boots find the stone ledge. I grab onto the fire escape and climb to the bottom. It holds. I take a breath, let go, and drop.
The landing is hard. My knees absorb it, my shoulder takes a small complaint from the duffel, and I am standing in an empty Barcelona street.
Above me, the window is still open. I don’t look up to see if he’s there.
I start running.
* * *
Many blocks later, I decide I’m far enough away that the man will not find me. I find a doorway on a side and stop to catch my breath. The gun goes into the duffel bag. The duffel bag goes back on my shoulder. I take out my phone and call Melissa.
She picks up on the first ring, which tells me she’s been waiting.
“Rodrigo—” she starts.
“New plan,” I say.
A pause. “Why? The old plan was pretty good.”
“Things just got… more urgent,” I look back down the street in the direction I came from. Nothing moving. Not yet. “I had a visitor with a gun come to see me at the hotel.”
Melissa gasps. “Are you?—”
“I’m fine.” I say it before she can finish asking. “Listen to me. I need you to do something.”
She listens. She is good at that when she needs to be, which is not always obvious about her until the moment you need it. “I’m going to go straight to Alana and give her what she wants, which is me.”
“You’re going to use yourself as bait.”
“Sí. Maybe I can convince her to let Billie go and cancel the hit she took out on me.”
“That’s insane,” she says.
“Probably,” I agree.
“You could just— wait. You could go to the Interpol contact and let them?—“
“There’s no time for waiting.” I say it quietly.
The street is narrow and old, the kind of Barcelona architecture that’s been here for three hundred years and doesn’t particularly care what's happening on the street level. Laundry lines the buildings. “I need to find Billie before Alana decides she’s no longer useful. You understand?”
Another silence. “Yes,” Melissa says.
“I’m sending you and Steve a contact. His name is—” I check the name on my phone.
I give it to her. “He knows a woman high up at Interpol. My cousin Benny has worked with him. You tell him everything. Everything, Melissa. Don’t decide what he needs to know.
I’m going to set my phone so you can find my location.
Once I link up with Alana and Billie, send Interpol after us. Don’t wait.”
“Okay. Rodrigo?” she pauses. “Good luck.”
I stay in the doorway another moment after I hang up.
The Barcelona night has the kind of quiet that isn’t ever completely silent.
Faint music echoes from somewhere, the distant murmur of traffic; I go into my phone settings and enable location sharing.
Melissa will now be able to see where I am at all times.
I think about Billie. I think about that unique steadiness in her eyes that she probably doesn't know she has, the same quality that made me think, when I first saw her, of something small but unbreakable. There’s a Spanish phrase I’ve heard my whole life: resistencia silenciosa.
Silent resistance. The kind of strength you carry before you know you have it.
She has it. She just hasn’t been told yet.
I’m going to make sure someone tells her.
I open a new message to Alana.
I type: I know you’re in Barcelona. Where can I meet you? Then, painfully, I add a heart emoji at the end.
I send it before I think too carefully about whether it’s wise.
The reply comes in less than one minute.
She’s sent a pin with our meeting spot, along with the time she wants to meet— just two hours from now.
I Google the pin’s location. It’s a compound, according to the satellite view. The images online show a concrete building set back from the road; a property that was intentionally built to be hard to approach.
And I’m going there with a stolen gun, a duffel bag, and hope.
I push off from the doorway and start moving.
A cat appears on the street, and I notice he looks just like the one that stood outside the pharmacy near my hotel. I wonder if he followed me here? If he was able to follow me, maybe the man who attacked me did the same. I move faster, waving at the cat as I go.
Buena suerte, I think. Good luck. The cat disappears.
The night swallows me up, and I walk toward it.