I stepped away, panting.
Lila faced me, panting.
The room felt burning hot and it smelled of coppery blood.
I said, 'One down.'
She said, 'One still up.'
I nodded. 'Looks like the pupil was better than the teacher.'
She said, 'Who says I was the pupil?'
Her thigh was bleeding badly. There was a neat slice in the black nylon of her pants and blood was running down her leg. Her shoe was already soaked. My boxers were soaked. They had turned from white to red. I looked down and saw blood welling out of me. A lot of it. It was bad. But my old scar had saved me. My shrapnel wound, from Beirut, long ago. The ridged white skin from the clumsy MASH stitches was tough and gnarled and it had slowed Lila's blade and deflected it. Without it the tail of the cut would have been much longer and deeper. For years I had resented the hasty work by the emergency surgeons. Now I was grateful for it.
Lila's busted nose started to bleed. The blood ran down to her mouth and she coughed and spat. Looked down at the floor. Saw Svetlana's knife. It was mired in a spreading pool of blood. The blood was already thickening. It was soaking into the old boards. It was running into the cracks between them. Lila's left arm moved. Then it stopped. To bend down and pick up Svetlana's knife would make her vulnerable. Likewise for me. I was five feet from the P220. She was five feet from the magazine.
The pain started. My head spun and buzzed. My blood pressure was falling.
Lila said, 'If you ask nicely I'll let you walk away.'
'I'm not asking.'
'You can't win.'
'Dream on.'
'I'm prepared to fight to the death.'
'You don't have a choice in the matter. That decision has already been taken.'
'You could kill a woman?'
'I just did.'
'One like me?'
'Especially one like you.'
She spat again and breathed hard through her mouth. She coughed. She looked down at her leg. She nodded and said, 'OK.' She looked up at me with her amazing eyes.
I stood still.
She said, 'If you mean it, this is where you do it.'
I nodded. I meant it. So I did it. I was weak, but it was easy. Her leg was slowing her down. She was having trouble with her breathing. Her sinuses were smashed. Blood was pooling in the back of her throat. She was dazed and dizzy, from when I had hit her. I took the second chair from the kitchen and charged her with it. Now my reach was unbeatable. 1 backed her into the corner with it and hit her with it twice until she dropped her knife and fell. I sat down beside her and strangled her. Slowly, because I was fading fast. But I didn't want to use the blade. I don't like knives.
Afterwards I crawled back to the kitchen and rinsed the Benchmade under the tap. Then I used its dagger point to cut butterfly shapes out of the black duct tape. I pinched my wound together with my fingers and used the butterflies to hold it together. A dollar and a half. Any hardware store. Essential equipment. I struggled back into my clothes. I reloaded my pockets. I put my shoes back on.
Then I sat down on the floor. Just for a minute. But it turned out longer. A medical man would say I passed out. I prefer to think I just went to sleep.
EIGHTY-FOUR
I WOKE UP IN A HOSPITAL BED. I WAS WEARING A PAPER GOWN. The clock in my head told me it was four in the afternoon. Ten hours. The taste in my mouth told me most of them had been chemically assisted. I had a clip on my finger. It had a wire. The wire must have been connected to a nurses' station. The clip must have detected some kind of an altered heartbeat pattern, because about a minute after I woke up a whole bunch of people came in. A doctor, a nurse, then Jacob Mark, then Theresa Lee, then Springfield, then Sansom. The doctor was a woman and the nurse was a man.
The doctor fussed around for a minute, checking charts and staring at monitors. Then she picked up my wrist and checked my pulse, which seemed a little superfluous with all the high technology at her disposal. Then in answer to questions I hadn't asked, she told me I was in Bellevue Hospital and that my condition was very satisfactory. Her ER people had cleaned the wound and sutured it and filled me full of antibiotics and tetanus injections and given me three units of blood. She told me to avoid heavy lifting for a month. Then she left. The nurse went with her.
I looked at Theresa Lee and asked, 'What happened to me?'
'You don't remember?'
'Of course I remember. But what's the official version?'
'You were found on the street in the east Village. Unexplained knife wound. Happens all the time. They ran a tox screen and found traces of barbiturate. They put you down as a dope deal gone bad.'
'Did they tell the cops?'
'I am the cops.'
'How did I get to the east Village?'
'You didn't. We brought you straight here.'
'We?'
'Me and Mr Springfield.'
'How did you find me?'
'We triangulated the cell phone. Which led us to the general area. The exact address was Mr Springfield's idea.'
Springfield said, 'A certain mujahideen leader told us all about doubling back to abandoned hideouts twenty-five years ago.'
I asked, 'Is there going to be any comeback?'
John Sansom said, 'No.'
Simple as that.
I said, 'Are you sure? There are nine corpses in that house.'
'The DoD guys are there right now. They'll issue a loud no comment. With a knowing smirk. Designed to make everyone give them the credit.'
'Suppose the wind changes direction? That happens from time to time. As you know.'
'As a crime scene, it's a mess.'
'I left blood there.'
'There's a lot of blood there. It's an old building. If anyone runs tests they'll come up with rat DNA, mostly.'
'There's blood on my clothes.
Theresa Lee said, 'The hospital burned your clothes.'
'Why?'
'Biohazard.'
'They were brand new.'
'They were soaked with blood. No one takes a risk with blood any more.'
'Right-hand fingerprints,' I said. 'Inside the window handles and on the trapdoor.'
'Old building,' Sansom said. 'It will be torn down and redeveloped before the wind changes.'
'Shell cases,' I said.
Springfield said, 'Standard DoD issue. I'm sure they're delighted. They'll probably leak one to the media.'
'Are they still looking for me?'
'They can't. It would confuse the narrative.'
'Turf wars,' I said.
'Which they just won, apparently.'
I nodded.
Sansom asked, 'Where is the memory stick?'
I looked at Jacob Mark. 'You OK?'
He said, 'Not really.'
I said, 'You're going to have to hear some stuff.'
He said, 'OK.'
I hauled myself into a sitting position. Didn't hurt at all. I guessed I was full of painkiller. I pulled my knees up and tented the sheet and moved the hem of my paper gown and took a peek at the cut. Couldn't see it. I was wrapped with bandages from my hips to my rib cage.
Sansom said, 'You told us you could get us within fifteen feet.'
I shook my head. 'Not any more. Time has moved on. We're going to have to do it by dead reckoning.'
'Great. You were bullshitting all along. You don't know where it is.'
'We know the general shape of it,' I said. 'They planned for the best part of three months and then executed during the final week. They coerced Susan by using Peter as leverage. She drove up from Annandale, got stuck in a four-hour traffic jam, say from nine in the evening until one in the morning, and then she arrived in Manhattan just before two in the morning. I assume we know exactly when she came out of the Holland Tunnel. So what we have to do is work backwards and figure out exactly where her car was jammed up at midnight.'
'How does that help us?'
'Because at midnight she threw the memory stick out her car window.'
'How can you possibly know that?'