Reamde

They were distracted by a crisp mechanical clunking noise from the other side of the room. Sokolov looked over to see that Igor had pulled the rifle out of the case. It was some sort of AR-15 variant. The sound had been made by him drawing the bolt carrier back, locking the action into an open state. As Sokolov watched, Igor plucked out one of several loose cartridges that had been rattling around loose inside the case, manually fed it into the breech, and slapped the side of the weapon, releasing the bolt and letting it slam the cartridge into firing position.

Sokolov noticed that his Makarov was in his hands, aimed at Igor.

Olivia rang the doorbell.

“Get down!” Sokolov shouted in English. Unsure whether she’d heard him, he pivoted and fired a round through the door, far above Olivia’s head. That should give her the general idea.

“Kill him!” Igor shouted, apparently to Vlad. Then he raised the rifle and aimed it at the front door.

Vlad was fumbling in his pocket. But he was poorly trained and was having trouble getting the weapon out. “Run out the back door,” Sokolov suggested. “There’s no one there.”

“How would you know?” Vlad asked.

“Do it or I’ll fucking kill you,” Sokolov said, aiming his Makarov at Vlad.

“I told you, he’s setting us up! Motherfucker!” Igor shouted, letting the barrel of the rifle drop and using his free hand to pull a revolver out of the waistband of his trousers.

Sokolov pivoted and fired two rounds into Igor’s midsection, waited for him to hit the floor, then fired one more.

Vlad was crouching on the floor next to the PC with his hands on top of his head, completely unmanned. An utterly ruthless, animal instinct within Sokolov told him to simply execute this miserable person, who could only cause trouble for him. But he could not bring himself to do it.

“I suggest you run. Fast,” Sokolov said.

“Why bother? Didn’t you say we were under surveillance?”

“By someone,” Sokolov said. He had crossed the room and picked up the rifle. Setting his pistol down for a moment, he hauled back on the rifle’s bolt carrier, ejecting the round that Igor had chambered, then set the rifle into its case, which he slammed shut. He carried it to the front door, which he opened. Olivia was no longer there. The SUV was in motion, making a three-point turn in the middle of the cul-de-sac, getting turned around into position for a getaway.

Then it stopped.

Nothing happened for a few moments.

Then she kicked open the passenger door.

EXCEPT FOR THE part about his niece being held hostage and he himself being the captive of murderous jihadists, this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one’s normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one’s mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true—the way small children experienced things—precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life.

Which Richard was totally incapable of, normally. Looking back, he could see that the majority of his breakups with the women who lived on in his superego as the Furious Muses had occurred in conjunction with attempts to go on vacation. He had never gone on vacation in any place that did not have high-speed Internet. Even the private jet in which he flew to those vacation sites had its own always-on Net connection. This probably qualified him as a serious head case, but he liked nothing more than to sit on a beach underneath a palm frond cabana in Bali, stripped to the waist, sipping an exotic drink from a coconut shell, watching waves roll in from a blue ocean, while wandering around T’Rain via the computer on his lap, firing off memos and bug reports to his technical staff. He could think of nothing more relaxing.

Except for what he was doing now. If only the bad parts of it could be done away with. He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.