Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

“You’re lying about Monash. We got independent confirmation that Gobi shot him and dropped his body in the canal.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and who do you think was in that canal with him when he opened his eyes?”

“Word of advice, kid. Don’t shit a shitter.” Nolan grabbed back his files, shuffled them away, then picked up his coat and slipped it on, all business now. “Here’s the deal. You’re going to let Jeff here drive you back to the embassy, and you’re going to sit there like a good boy and let us do our job, and nobody’s going to mention anything about Zusane Zaksauskas ever again. Got it?”

“Sure,” I said. “There’s just one problem.”

Now he just sounded tired. “What’s that?”

“I don’t trust you to save my family. I don’t think you know half of what you think you know.” I pointed straight at him. “And I definitely don’t trust the CIA to do anything more than what serves its own purpose to help me out of here.” I looked back over at the guy who’d stood up when I’d called Nolan an asshole. “And that means that whatever arrangement you might have planned with Gobi, I’m about twelve hours from pulling the whole thing down on your heads in the most publicly humiliating way possible.”

Nolan turned red, then purple. His fists tightened at his sides, clenched and pink and somehow anal. On the satisfaction scale, it wasn’t quite on par with watching him try to pass a kidney stone, but it was close.

“You smart-ass little punk, what makes you think-” He stopped himself mid-rant, and his whole face went stone cold, all trace of emotion gone, all at once. “You do not want to get involved in this, Perry. I promise you. I will make your life hell.”

“Too late,” I said.

In my pocket, something began to vibrate.

Nolan had already turned and started walking away. “You ready to go?” he asked, angling toward the door.

I slipped my hand into the pocket of the heavy winter parka that Gobi had tossed me back at Erich’s and felt the small rectangular shape vibrating inside. After sneaking out the cell phone that I hadn’t known was there, I flipped it on and glanced at the three-word message on the screen.

men’s room now

I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “I gotta hit the bathroom before we go.”

Nolan gave me a distrustful glance. “It’s cold and dark out there, kid. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Don’t worry.” On the way past the bar, I brushed past Swierczynski, who’d been sitting there with a thick mug of coffee, to the heavy wooden door marked HERREN. In the background I heard Nolan’s voice continuing to warn me not to be stupid.

I swung the door open. The men’s room was freezing cold, and right away I saw why. The window was wide open and Gobi was standing in front of me with a thick slab of wood in her hands. For a second all I could do was stare at her in shock.

“You are late.”

“Gobi, how-”

She pushed past me and jammed the wooden beam against the door, wedging it into the tiles and blocking it shut from the inside.

“Crawl through window.”

“What happened to the-”

“No talking.” She boosted me through the open window and out into the darkness, where I fell straight down into a pile of flattened cardboard boxes and bags of trash. A cat squalled and took off running. Gobi, having crawled through and dropped down after me, took my hand and yanked me up onto my feet. As we ran around to the front of the restaurant, I heard voices from inside, Nolan and the bartender and good old Swierczy, shouting, coughing, hammering on the door. There was an ice machine pushed in front of the main entrance, blocking it shut, and thick smoke oozing from the slight gap, but the door wasn’t opening any farther than that.

I looked up at the roof.

“You blocked the chimney?”

“Watch out.” She pointed at the unconscious body of the driver sprawled on the ground next to the Peugeot, then opened the driver’s-side door. “You can still drive stick, yes?”

I got in and started the engine.

“We have to talk,” I said.

She pointed out the intersection up ahead, where a rectangular yellow sign read MULHOUSE, FR-50 KM. “Turn left here.”

“How did you escape from Paula?”

“Is not far from here. Roads are clear.” She checked her watch.

“How did you find me?” I looked down at the phone that she’d dropped in my pocket. “Does this thing have a GPS tracking beacon on it or something?”

She closed her eyes and sat back as if she hadn’t heard me.

“Are you even going to answer me?”

She didn’t move. The Peugeot’s tires hugged the road, its high-performance engine barely making a sound above the low, steady whir of precision engineering. My hands tightened on the wheel and I checked to make sure we were both wearing our seat belts. Coming around the next bend, I swung to the side of the road and slammed the brakes hard enough to make her sit up straight and stare at me. Her face was taut and strained, and the glare in her eyes could have smelted pig iron.

“That asshole back at the restaurant told me everything,” I said. “I know about…” Even then, as upset as I was, I couldn’t make myself say the words your brain tumor. “What’s happening to you.”

Gobi just kept glaring at me. Her silence was a void, like no other silence in the world. It seemed to collapse inward, sucking all other sound into it, like the aural equivalent of a black hole. For a long moment we just sat there, facing each other like the last two people in Switzerland.

“Is nothing,” she murmured.

“Bullshit.”

“Is epilepsy.”

“Bullshit.”

“Who tells you these things? Kaya?” She snapped a glance back in the direction that we’d come. “They lie.”

“Gobi, I saw the images of your brain.”

“And of course medical pictures cannot ever be altered. Images doctored. Different names put on.”

“If they’re lying, then why were you working for them?”

She stared at the window, and I felt my heart race harder, like a gallon jug glugging out its contents into the hole at the bottom of my chest. I didn’t realize until that moment how much I’d been hoping for another explanation, any explanation, hoping for anything besides what Nolan alleged to be true. Partly because I’d already decided that Gobi was the only way that I was going to save my family, but also because Gobi was Gobi. She was twenty-four years old. She belonged in the world-if not my world, than at least some version of it, somewhere.

“Look,” I said. “I know that guy Nolan promised you the operation if you took care of Armitage and Monash and Paula. He told me all about it.”

“Is not for you to worry.”

“Oh, okay, I’ll just stop. I’ll just switch off my worrier.” I reached for her hand, and she jerked away as if I’d given her a shock. “You know what, if you can’t stand me so much, why the hell did you even bother coming back for me?”

“You would not survive five minutes on your own.”

I felt a quick sting of anger. “Yeah, well, meet me in a year from now and we’ll see who’s doing better.”

She stiffened, drawing in a sharp breath, then exhaled with a little shudder and looked at me. The shadows across her face made it hard to see her expression, but her eyes gleamed around the rims in the light of the dashboard.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “That was harsh. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”

“You are doctor, Perry, yes? Go to medical school?”