Matthew Dunn - Slingshot

Will walked slowly up the flight of stairs, avoiding three steps that he knew creaked. Reaching his front door, he put down his bag, moved to the side, listened, heard nothing, placed a hand flat against the entrance, and pushed. The door remained firmly shut. Withdrawing his keys, he eased one of them into the lock, waited, then gradually began turning it until he felt the lock spring open. He placed the keys back into a pocket, put a hand onto the door handle, tried to calm his breathing, and began easing the handle downward.

His heart was beating fast.

He wondered if there was a man on the other side of the door, waiting with a heavy-gauge shotgun.

When the handle was fully depressed, he pushed the door open and simultaneously moved away from the entrance.

Nothing happened.

Out of habit, his hand moved toward the place where he would often keep a handgun on his person. His hand stopped midair. Because he had no handgun, no weapon at all.

Lifting his travel bag, he held it before him. Inside the soft canvas carrier were clothes and toiletries. The case wouldn’t stop a.22 target round, let alone a high-velocity pistol bullet, but he held it anyway, ready to hurl it into the face of an intruder. He took a deep breath and swung into the doorway.

Everything before him was as he’d left it-a hallway full of packing cases and little else. Placing the bag on top of one of the cases, he pulled the door shut behind him and locked it. If there was a man inside his home, he had to make sure that person didn’t escape.

Moving through the pitch dark, he reached the kitchen, stopped, and placed fingers over the hallway light. He hesitated, knowing that the moment he turned the light on would be a likely opportunity for him to be attacked.

He switched the light on and braced himself.

But nobody came at him.

The light illuminated the kitchen and one of the bedrooms. Both looked empty. He moved back down the hallway and crouched beside the entrance to the second bedroom. Reaching into the room, he flicked on its light, instantly withdrew his arm, waited for two seconds, glanced into the room, and pulled his head back out.

The room was unoccupied.

He stood, walked slowly to the bathroom, repeated the same drill, and saw that it was empty.

One more room. The living room.

Pausing by the entrance to the kitchen, he saw the pans, plate, and cutlery he’d washed after cooking the pheasant dish four nights ago. Lying next to them on the draining board was the razor-sharp chef’s knife he’d used to prepare the meal. He grabbed the knife and held it close to his waist.

Beads of sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he inched closer to the living room door. It was shut, just as he’d left it before departing for Austria. He imagined where he would be in the room if he’d come here to kill the apartment’s occupant. Probably waiting flush against the wall, to one side of the door, with a handgun pointing at the height of a man’s upper body. One shot into the side of the rib cage, followed a split second later by another into the temple. Or perhaps he’d be on one knee at the far end of the room, positioned behind a sturdy piece of furniture, his gun pointing at the door, ready to put rapid two-round bursts into whoever came into view.

Or maybe he was dealing with a tough amateur. He hoped not, because their lack of training made them unpredictable.

He placed a hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open while keeping his body away from the doorframe and his knife low.

The room was silent.

Though that meant nothing.

More sweat ran down his back. He had to go in the room, had to decide where the man was waiting for him. If there was only one of them.

Placing his free hand against the frame, he readied himself, sucked in a lungful of air, held his breath, rocked back on his heels, and lunged through the entrance while simultaneously spinning and thrusting the knife toward the wall opposite his hand. It sliced into wood paneling. No one was there.

Yanking the knife out, he turned to face the rest of the room, expecting a bullet to strike his head as he did so.

But the room was empty.

He spent the next ten minutes making a more thorough search of his home-in wardrobes, under beds, in cupboards, as well as kicking all of the packing cases to see if any of them had increased in weight. Satisfied that there was no intruder in his home, he moved back to the living room and stared at the two windows. Outside, there were at least nine places where a man could comfortably position himself with a rifle and remove a large chunk of Will’s head-many more places farther afield, if the weapon was a military-spec sniper rifle and its owner was highly trained.

Lowering himself to the ground, he leopard-crawled along the floor, pulled both windows’ curtains shut from his prone position, crawled back along the floor, and stood. Grabbing one of the dining chairs, he positioned it in the hallway so that it was facing the front door at the other end, placed one hand on the living room light switch, the other on the room’s door handle, switched the light on, and immediately slammed the door shut.

If a man was observing the living room through binoculars or a telescopic sight, he’d know Will was home.

But Will was now in the windowless corridor, out of anyone’s sight.

He sat on the chair, stabbed the tip of the knife into its wooden arm, and stared at the front door. In the absence of complete privacy and professional assault gear, no one would be able to enter the property through the barred windows. They’d come for him through the main entrance.

He stayed like this for two hours before checking his watch. It was 9:30 P.M. He felt hungry and tired but dared not move.

He tried to keep his mind active by recalling memories-any that came to him, it didn’t matter.

He remembered a teacher announcing Will’s high school grades to the rest of his class and saying that they were good enough to take Will to England and Cambridge University; going home later that day to find four criminals holding his mother and sister hostage while they looked for cash; feeling utter fear and confusion after he’d killed the men with a knife similar to the one by his side; his older sister telling him that he had to run away; and flying to France the next morning to enlist in the Foreign Legion.

He recalled the brutal training, the feeling that his transition from boy to man was not supposed to be like this. But over time he became numb to most emotions.

Other images raced through his mind: the day he received his kepi blanc, placed it on his head, and was officially a legionnaire; earning his wings and being deployed to the Second REP; the mental and physical agony he’d felt as he underwent selection for the GCP; being given instructions by a DGSE officer and two days later placing a bomb underneath a car in Tripoli; and calling his sister from a pay phone in Marseille on the day his tour with the Legion had come to an end and her saying that she’d been wrong to tell him to run away after he killed his mother’s murderers.

Years later, he’d found out that Alistair and Patrick had covered up what he’d done.

He briefly took his eyes off the door to check the time. Nearly midnight. Outside, London was almost silent.

He remembered his four years at university and the sensation that the GCP legionnaire and DGSE hit man was gradually being turned back into someone more decent, more human. He saw himself, in his final year of studies, walking through the university’s Darwin College, clutching politics and philosophy books, and remembered the euphoric moment of feeling truly normal again.

It was the greatest feeling, and it lasted twenty-three minutes.