Reamde

Suspiciously heavy.

He reached in and pulled out one of the boxes at random and wiggled it in the air. All its weight was concentrated in the base. There was a steel plate, or something, in there.

It was meant to sink when thrown into water.

It was spy gear and this was a spy nest, and the Russian-speaking Chinese woman worked here and was trying to shut the place down.

But she must not be Chinese or else she would not need to be so furtive. She was a foreign agent.

Sokolov dropped the purse into the garbage bag, reknotted it, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he walked down the hallway until he found the stairs. He descended a couple of flights, walked into another devastated and abandoned office, approached its blown-out windows, and made a reconnaissance of the street. The van—Sokolov’s ticket out of here—was still there, though there was a gap in the roof where something big had cratered it.

His eye was drawn by movement at the building’s front entrance. Two people wanted to leave the building. To that end, they were standing framed in its doorway. But they were somewhat torn between fear of what was behind them and fear of what was ahead. Behind them the building was undergoing a gradual, staged collapse, or settling, as one failed floor accordioned into the one below it and the weight of the structure was cruelly redistributed. Each of these events led to a vast exhalation of dust from all the building’s orifices including the front door; so the two people Sokolov was looking at tended to vanish at random intervals, for a few seconds at a time, as a nebula of dust puffed out of the door and then subsided. Nothing was quite horizontal or vertical anymore, so big messes of debris tended to skid off the top of the pile and accelerate toward the street and strike it with impacts that Sokolov could feel in his gonads and that must be even more impressive to those people in the doorway.

There was another great settling, another one of those horizontal mushroom clouds of dust; and when it cleared, the two people were gone. They had made their move. Sokolov scanned up and down the street, forcing himself to remain calm and do a proper job of it. He saw them running hand in hand away from the building, headed for an intersection about a block away where a vast crowd of spectators had gathered: cars that had simply come to a stop, and pedestrians crouching behind them to look back at the spectacle of the burning and collapsing building.

There was something familiar about each of the two runners. In other circumstances Sokolov would have known them by the color of their skin, but now both of them were chalk-white since, like so many other people in the neighborhood, they were coated with dust.

The tall one was the leader of the mujahideen from Apartment 505.

The short one was Zula.

Why were they running hand in hand? Were they somehow working together? He could not conceive of a way that this would make sense.

Then their feet struck each other, and both of them stumbled and staggered for a few paces, drawing apart. They let go of each other’s hands, and Sokolov saw that they were handcuffed together.

The rifle was at his shoulder. He advanced to a position where he could brace himself against the frame of the window, and he drew a bead on the tall black jihadist. From this distance the shot was feasible, assuming that the former owner of this rifle had taken decent care of it, but he would have to watch his breathing and he would have to wait for the target to stand still. Until then all he could do was track him and think about the fundamentals of the shot: how he was bracing himself and what obstructions might get in the way.

It suddenly became obvious where they were heading: a taxi had pulled to a stop, two wheels on the sidewalk and two on the street, and the driver had climbed out of it and was standing in the open door facing the scene of the disaster with his mouth hanging open and a cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

The man in Sokolov’s sights had noticed. Putting on a burst of speed and practically dragging Zula along behind him, he closed on the taxi, stopped his momentum by crashing into the rear driver’s-side door, bounced back, hauling the door open as he did so, wrapped Zula in a bear hug, and with a thrust of the legs dove sideways into the taxi’s backseat, pulling Zula in with him so that the two ended up lying there side by side.

This was perhaps the only thing that could have torn the taxi driver’s attention away from the collapsing building. He turned around and gazed in almost equal astonishment at the sight of four dust-caked legs protruding from the open rear door of his taxi. He tried to say something, discovered he had a cigarette glued to his lip, pulled it loose, stuck his head into the driver’s-side door, and stiffened up.

Sokolov knew why, even though he couldn’t see it: the jihadist was aiming a gun into his face.