I undid the lock and put three fingers into each of the handles and heaved. The frame moved an inch, and stuck. I increased the pressure. I got close to the force I had used on the barred cages in the firehouse basement. The frame shuddered upward, an inch at a time, sticking on the left, sticking on the right, fighting me all the way. I got my shoulder under the bottom rail and straightened my legs. The frame moved another eight inches and jammed solid. I stepped back. Night air came in at me. Total gap, about twenty inches.
More than enough.
I got one leg out, bent at the waist, ducked through, got the other leg out.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I ignored it.
I went up the iron ladder, one slow quiet step after another. Halfway up my head was at the level of the third-floor sills and I could see both front-room windows.
Both had closed drapes. Old soot-coloured cotton material behind soot-stained glass. No apparent light inside. No sounds. No evidence of activity. I turned and looked down at the street. No pedestrians. No passers-by. No traffic.
I moved on upward. To the fourth storey. Same result. Dirty glass, closed drapes. I paused a long time under the window where I had seen movement. Or imagined movement. I heard nothing and sensed nothing.
I moved up to the fifth floor. The fifth floor was different. No drapes. Empty rooms. The floors were stained and the ceilings sagged and bowed. Rainwater leaks.
The fifth-floor windows were locked. The same simple brass tongue-and-slot mechanisms I had seen below, but there was nothing I could do about them without busting the glass. Which would make noise. Which I was prepared to do, but not yet. I wanted to time it right.
I hauled the strap around until the MP5 hung down my back and I got a foot up on the window sill. I stepped up and grabbed the crumbling cornice high above my head. I heaved myself over it. Not an elegant process. I am no kind of a graceful gymnast. I finished up panting and sprawled face-down on the roof with a face full of weeds. I lay there for a second to get my breath and then I got to my knees and looked around for a trapdoor. I found one about forty feet back, right above where I judged the stairwell hallway would be. It was a simple shallow upside-down wooden box sheathed in lead and hinged on one side. Presumably locked from below, probably with a hasp and a padlock. The padlock would be strong, but the hasp would be screwed into the frame, and the frame would be weak from age and rot and water damage.
No contest.
Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: attack from the high ground.
EIGHTY
THE LEAD SHEATH AROUND THE TRAPDOOR HAD BEEN beaten with felt hammers into gentle curves. No sharp corners. I got my gloved fingers under the edge opposite the hinge and yanked hard. No result. So I got serious. Two hands, eight fingers, bent legs, deep breath. I closed my eyes. I didn't want to think about Peter Molina. So instead I pictured Lila Hoth's insane smile at the camera right after she checked the Kabul taxi driver's departed pulse.
I jerked the lid.
And the night started to unravel, right there and then.
I had hoped that the hasp's screws would pull out of either the door or the frame. But they pulled out of both together. The padlock with the hasp still attached free-fell ten feet and thumped hard on the bare wooden floor below. A loud, emphatic, tympanic sound. Deep, resonant, and clear, followed immediately by the tinkle of the hasp itself and the patter of six separate screws.
Not good.
Not good at all.
I laid the trapdoor lid back and squatted on the roof and watched and listened.
Nothing happened for a second.
Then I heard a door open down on the fourth floor.
I aimed the MP5.
Nothing happened for another second. Then a head came into view up the stairs. Dark hair. A man. He had a gun in his hand. He saw the padlock on the floor. I saw the wheels turning in his head. Padlock, floor, screws, vertical fall. He peered upward. I saw his face. Number eleven on Springfield's list. He saw me. The cloud above me was all lit up by the city's glow. I guessed I was silhouetted quite clearly. He hesitated. I didn't. I shot him more or less vertically through the top of his head. A burst of three. A triple tap. A brief muted purr. He went down with a loud clatter of shoes and hands and limbs, with two final big thumps as first the remains of his head and then his gun hit the boards. I watched the stairs for another long second and then vaulted through the open trapdoor and fell through the air and landed feet first next to the guy, which made another loud noise.
We were all through with secrecy.
Eleven rounds gone, nineteen remaining, four men down, two still up.
Plus the Hoths.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
Not now, Lila.
I picked up the guy's gun and opened the door to the front room on the left and backed into the shadow. Rested my shoulder on the wall and looked out at the stairs.
No one came up.
Stalemate.
The gun I had taken from the dead guy was a Sig-Sauer P220, with a fat silencer on it. Swiss manufacture. Nine-millimetre Parabellum, nine rounds in a detachable box magazine. The same ammunition I was using. I thumbed the rounds out and dropped them loose into my pocket. I put the empty gun on the floor. Then I stepped back to the hallway and ducked into the front room on the right. It was bare and empty. I paced out the studio layout as I remembered it from below. Closet, bathroom, kitchen, living room. I made it to what I guessed was the centre of the living room and stamped down hard. One man's ceiling is another man's floor. I figured Lila was directly below me, listening. I wanted to shake her up, way back in the lizard part of her brain. The scariest feeling of all. There's something up there.
I stamped again.
I got a response.
The response came in the form of a bullet smashing up through the boards three feet to my right. It tore a splintered hole and buried itself in the ceiling above me and left dust and traces of smoke in the air.
No gunshot. They all had silencers.
I fired back, a triple tap vertically downward, straight through the same hole. Then I stepped away to where I guessed their kitchen was.
Fourteen rounds gone. Sixteen remaining. Nine loose in my pocket.
Another shot came up through the floor. Seven feet from me. I fired back. They fired back. I fired back one more time and figured they were starting to understand the pattern, so I crept out to the hallway and the head of the stairs.
Where I found that they had been figuring exactly the same thing: that I was getting into the rhythm. A guy was sneaking up on me. Number two on Springfield's list. He had another Sig P220 in his hand. With a silencer. He saw me first. Fired once, and missed. I didn't. I put a triple tap into the bridge of his nose and it climbed to the middle of his forehead and blood and brain spattered on the wall behind him and he went back down where he had come from in a heap.
His gun went with him.
My spent brass tinkled away across the pine.
Twenty-three rounds gone. Seven left, plus nine loose.
One guy up, plus the Hoths themselves.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
Too late for bargains, Lila.
I ignored her. I pictured her crouching one floor below, Svetlana at her side. One last guy between them and me. How would they use him? They weren't dumb. They were the heirs of a long and tough tradition. They had dodged and weaved and feinted through the hills for two hundred years. They knew what they were doing. They wouldn't send the guy up the stairs. Not again. That was fruitless. They would try to outflank me. They would send the guy up the fire escape. They would distract me with the phone and let the guy line up through the glass and shoot me in the back.
When?
Either immediately or much later. No middle ground. They would want me either surprised or bored.