Chapter 22
The sound was tiny. A dry click, almost inaudible, that didn’t belong to any of the sounds Ren had heard during his days of confinement.
He knew the groan of the pipes at three in the morning.
The hum of the heating system kicking on every hour and a half.
Sergei’s footsteps every forty minutes as he made his circuit of the hallway, a route Ren had timed with the precision of someone who has nothing else to do.
He knew the click of the electronic lock on the room at the far end of the corridor and the distant murmur of a television someone left on all night two floors below.
But this click was none of those things.
He opened his eyes in the darkness. His split lip still throbbed, swollen and warm, and his left arm protested when he leaned on it to sit up. He didn’t move fully. He waited. He counted the beats of his own heart against the pillow.
The second tap came twelve heartbeats later. Just as small, just as precise. Something striking glass.
He got out of bed without making a sound. His bare feet on the carpet didn’t produce so much as a whisper. He pressed himself against the side wall of the window, out of the sight-line of anyone looking from outside, and looked out.
Reznov’s garden under the moon was an orderly expanse of geometric hedges and white gravel that gleamed with an almost phosphorescent brightness.
Nothing moved. Not the programmed sprinklers, not the security cameras Ren had located at the corners of the perimeter wall during his dead hours of observation through that same window.
Then he saw them.
Two translucent spheres resting on the gravel directly below his window. Tiny balls, marble-sized, that shouldn’t have been there because that gravel was raked every morning and Ren knew it because he had watched the gardener do it three days in a row at seven o’clock sharp.
Someone had fired them at his glass.
His heart accelerated. He forced himself not to move, not to press his palms against the pane, not to do anything stupid. He breathed through his nose. The cold air of the room filled his lungs and emptied them slowly.
He looked beyond the property walls, beyond the dark crowns of the trees lining the street, toward the urban horizon blinking in the distance like a living organism.
The illuminated sign floated above the roof line roughly two kilometers away. An enormous advertisement mounted on the roof of some commercial tower block: the blurred silhouette of a man, a cologne bottle, and below it, in white letters pulsing against the night like a heartbeat:
Coming.
Ren went still.
Any other night it would have been advertising. Visual noise from a city that never slept. But those two translucent spheres on the gravel turned that word into something else.
A message.
He stepped back from the window and the darkness of the room swallowed him.
His mind was working at a speed it hadn’t reached in days.
He dismissed the possibility of a trap by Reznov because Reznov didn’t need traps: he already had him.
He dismissed the paranoia because the spheres were real and concrete and down there on the gravel.
Brody.
The name went through his chest like an electric charge. He had written him off for dead. He had cursed him for dying. And now two marbles against an armored window and a word on a lit sign were telling him that perhaps he had been wrong.
He had no time to feel. There would be time for that later, if there was a later.
He dressed in the dark with economical movements.
The jeans Reznov had provided, the black t-shirt.
He tied his sneakers in a double knot and pulled them tight until they cut off the circulation because he couldn’t afford a loose lace if he had to run.
He pulled his hair back with a hair tie he’d found in the bathroom two days earlier and kept out of instinct.
He took stock of the room. There was nothing useful as a weapon except the legs of the chair he had thrown at the window without success.
He took the chair, tipped it over, and pressed one of the side legs against the floor with his foot while pulling the backrest upward.
The wood cracked and gave. He was left with a fifty-centimeter length of wood with one end splintered to an irregular point.
He weighed it in his hand. Light. Fragile. Ridiculous against a firearm.
But not against a throat.
He went back to the window and looked at the sign. It was still there.
Coming.
Ren sat on the edge of the bed with the piece of wood across his knees and his eyes fixed on the door.
He waited.
The crash came from below.
Not a single noise but a chain: something heavy toppling, glass shattering into a thousand fragments against a marble floor, muffled shouts cutting off mid-sentence.
Then the unmistakable dry crack of gunshots—two, three, five—and more glass, more furniture being dragged or falling, more voices barking orders in a language Ren couldn’t quite make out.
He got off the bed with the length of wood gripped in his right fist. His heart was hammering his ribs so hard his jaw vibrated. He positioned himself beside the door, back against the wall, and waited.
But the door didn’t open.
The sounds were moving upward. They were no longer coming only from the ground floor but from the hallway too: quick, heavy footsteps, military boots against tile. Someone shouted in Russian and the shout was cut short by a dull, wet blow that Ren felt at the back of his neck.
Sergei.
Ren hit the door with his fist.
“Sergei!”
Nothing. He hit it again, harder.
“Sergei, open up!”
The bolt turned. The door opened and the Russian’s face appeared in the gap, flushed, eyes wide, a gun in his hand that Ren had never seen before. His body was turned toward the hallway, ready to fire at whatever came.
Ren spoke before he could.
“They’re coming for me.”
Sergei looked at him. Tense. His square jaw clenched like a vice.
“Don’t go after them. Hide, or you’ll end up dead, and I don’t want that for you.”
He said it in English and had no idea whether the Russian understood any of it, but it didn’t matter.
He said it with his eyes, with his whole body leaning toward him as though he could push him away from danger through sheer will.
Sergei had struck him. Sergei had locked him in every night.
But he had also looked at him with something close to respect after the fight, and Ren didn’t forget things like that.
The Russian didn’t move for three heartbeats.
Then he nodded. A single, sharp dip of his head, definitive. He lowered the gun. He took a step back and with his left hand pushed the door inward until it stood fully open for Ren.
And disappeared. The darkness of the hallway swallowed him as though he had never been there.
Ren stepped out.
The corridor was lit only by the emergency light blinking in a sickly orange.
It smelled of gunpowder and something chemical, acrid, that scratched at his throat.
To his right, the main staircase. To his left, the hallway stretched away toward the rooms at the far end.
The sounds were coming from the right, from below, but there was movement above too, somewhere over his head.
He pressed himself against the wall and moved left, away from the staircase. If anyone was coming up, he didn’t want to be the first thing they found. The piece of wood was sweating in his palm. He switched hands, dried his fingers on his thigh, gripped it again.
A door at the far end of the hallway was ajar. Ren remembered the partial layout of the floor because he had memorized it during the few times Reznov had walked him through the wing: that door led to a utility room with a back staircase descending to the kitchen.
He reached it. Pushed with his shoulder. Looked in.
Empty. Just a linen cupboard and, at the far end, a service staircase spiraling down in a narrow helix.
He took the steps two at a time, feet light, back grazing the wall, the piece of wood held out in front. The staircase ended at a small landing with a metal door opening into the service area. He pushed it open a centimeter.
The kitchen was destroyed. Pans on the floor, a body, one of Reznov’s guards, face down beside the central island with a dark pool spreading beneath his torso. Ren didn’t look twice.
He crossed the kitchen in a crouch. The main noise was coming from the sitting room, on the other side of the swing door.
More shots, more glass, the dull sound of bodies colliding with furniture.
Ren went the other way, toward the back door that connected the kitchen to the garage through a service passage.
He stopped dead.
A hooded figure blocked the passage.
Black from head to foot. Tactical vest, cargo trousers, boots, a balaclava that left only a strip of pale skin visible around the eyes. Large. The body filled the corridor from wall to wall.
Ren raised the length of wood. The splintered point aimed at the intruder’s throat.
The figure went still.
And then Ren saw them.
The eyes.
Gray. A pale gray that looked almost transparent under the emergency light.
With reddened edges, irritated, as though they hadn’t slept in days, or as though they had been crying, or as though the two things were the same.
He knew them. He had seen them above him, beneath him, beside him in the dark of a room that smelled of raisins and walnuts.
The piece of wood trembled in his hand.
“Brody.”
The name came out broken. Barely a breath that evaporated between them.