Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

“Once we’re out of here with Gobi,” Paula shouted, “you’ll get a phone call. Your parents and your sister will be released unharmed.”

“What if I don’t believe you?”

“Who says you have a choice?”

She had a point. It was snowing harder now, big fat flakes drifting down from the sky, clogging my eyelashes. I brushed them away and took in a deep, throat-aching breath of cold air.

“Who’s in charge now that Armitage is dead?” I asked.

That adrenalized grin came blazing back again. How had I never noticed how white her teeth were before?

“That depends,” Paula said, “on who ends up with Gobi.”

“What do you mean?”

Paula gazed appreciatively at Gobi. “She’s a human weapon, Stormaire. The best mercenary around. One in a million. Armitage seriously underestimated her capabilities, and it cost him his life. I won’t make that mistake.”

“It’s not like she’s programmable,” I said. “She’s not just some machine that will do whatever you tell her.”

“I think she will, once she finds out what I’m offering.”

“And what’s that?”

“Clearly more than you ever could.”

“She doesn’t kill people for money, Paula.”

“You’re standing up for her. How gallant.”

Throughout all of this, Gobi still hadn’t said anything. Some part of me was just waiting for her to snap into motion, dodging bullets while she opened fire on Paula and the helicopter. Paula must have been waiting for it too. The grin disappeared and her eyes went cold, and when she spoke again her voice was both louder and sharper, an announcement of ultimatum marking the close of play.

“Gobija Zaksauskas,” Paula said.

Gobi didn’t budge.

“This is the situation. If your next move is anything except putting down that gun and coming with me now, Perry’s whole family is going to die in the most horrible way that you can imagine.” Paula kept the gun pointed straight at her. “Let me repeat that. Either you come with us now, or I will kill Perry and his family. Is there anything about this scenario that you don’t understand?”

Nobody spoke. I realized that I was holding my breath. We all knew the stakes. If there was one miracle left in the night, I prayed for it to happen now.

Gobi raised the machine gun, turned, and looked at me.

“As atsiprasau,” she said. “I am sorry, Perry.”

“Wait,” I said. “Just-”

Behind the pistol, Paula tensed, getting ready. I saw the bald sharpshooter on the helicopter coil tighter around his rifle. The red dot on Gobi’s head held perfectly still between her eyes, the punctuation mark that waits for all of us somewhere in the end.

But, Gobi just put down her weapon on the tarmac and walked over to the helicopter. She got onboard without a backwards glance.

It lifted up and flew away, leaving me standing there alone.

A half-hour later I found myself back in the center of town. The fire was finally out at the Hotel Schoeneweiss, leaving Main Street smelling like the biggest ashtray on the planet. Everywhere I looked, dozens of scorched and blinking Santa Clauses were still roaming the streets, dazed and bewildered, and the singed ClauWau banner was dangling from one of the buildings. Blue flashing police and fire truck lights flickered off the blackened foundation of the old liquor store, which had already been cordoned off by emergency crews. An upside-down sleigh lay half buried under a pile of bricks. A reindeer dipped its head to drink from a black puddle with a Santa cap floating in it.

Everywhere I looked, Swiss cops and soldiers stood with high-intensity LED flashlights, shining them on the faces of passersby, lining up eyewitnesses against the wall, asking for ID.

I turned and slunk up the other way, down an alley, and disappeared into the darkness.

I took the wad of euros that Gobi had given me out of my pocket and counted them with only slightly shaking hands. There was a few hundred here, along with the fake ID that she’d given me back in Italy, a picture snapped at a train station photo booth, a face I barely recognized as mine. I could get on another train, if I had the slightest idea where to go.

Or I could just give up. Wave the white flag. Sweet surrender. It had never been more tempting. Even if I could get my family back again, what would life back in America be like? Was “normal and ordinary” still any kind of option? Had it ever been?

A clumsy, scraping splash rang down from the far end of the alley. I heard a muffled curse and a series of slowly approaching footsteps.

Halfway down the alley, the man switched on a flashlight, and I saw his face.

The beard.

The sneer.

The camera.

There was no mistaking that combination-Swierczynski.

He was wearing a long, shabby coat with tails that practically dragged the ground behind him so that they picked up little scraps of debris along the way, which was probably his idea of going undercover. I could tell by the way he was moving that he hadn’t seen me yet.

I felt a surge of adrenaline-it felt good to be mad about something I could do something about right away. I might not know the first thing about fighting, but at this point, I didn’t care what happened to me, and that alone gave me the advantage.

Edging back into the shadows, I put my back to the wall and waited, hearing his boots shuffle closer, waiting until he was right in front of me. I remembered back in Venice when he’d tried to grab Gobi’s shotgun. He hadn’t been particularly quick about it-without the element of surprise, he had no advantage at all.

I reached out, grabbed the camera by the strap, and twisted.

He grunted and went down, already on his back by the time my knee landed on his chest.

“Still trying to tail Gobi?” I got right into his face, close enough that I could smell the pickles and sour vodka on his breath. Whatever Kaya was paying this guy, it was too much. “I might be able to help you with that.”

“Where is she?”

I climbed off his chest. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“On your feet,” I said. “We’re going to see Kaya.”

He blinked at me, not understanding.

“Right now,” I said. “It’s time to visit your boss.”

A quick, dismissive head shake. “Is not possible.”

“Oh, is possible.” I gave him a cold smile that had nothing to do with any of the ordinary reasons that people smile-happiness, humor, hope. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my tour of Europe, it’s that as human beings, we’re all a whole lot more flexible than we might think.”

“But I cannot-”

“I want to talk to Kaya. You have a contact number, an e-mail… You tell him I want a meeting right now, tonight.”

“I cannot make promises.” He was sounding more Slavic by the moment. “Is not my decision to make.”

“Ask yourself how pissed off Kaya’s going to be when he finds out that you lost Gobi,” I told him. “She was working for him, right? And you’re supposed to be her babysitter. In other words, you had one job and you screwed it up. How much of your ass do you think he’s going to chew off for losing her in Switzerland?” I waited, silently counting to ten before adding, almost off-handedly, “Especially when I can tell him where to find her?”

He recrossed his arms and glared at me even harder, then muttered something in Russian.

Twenty minutes later, we were on a train.

There was a car waiting for us at the Lausanne train station, a gunmetal blue Peugeot 306. Its driver never said a word as he drove us out of the lot and into the Alpine night. Through tinted glass, I watched snowcapped peaks and summits slide past us in a darkly winding blur of ear-popping dips and hairpin turns, the driver hardly slowing, barely steering, as if the car knew the way by itself. Slouched in the back beside me, Swierczynski brooded in morose eastern European silence, breathing audibly through his beard and doing everything in his power to make the expensive leather upholstery smell like a Ukrainian deli. I would have been okay with opening one of the windows, except that the wind was really howling outside and it felt like it was getting colder by the minute.