Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

When the gun and the suppressor were free in her hands, she bowed again, let each rest in the nest of her sleeves, and quickly cleared the tape from them, then reattached the strips on the inside of the fabric. Straightening a final time, she fingered the end of the suppressor, feeling the threads on its end through the gloves, positioning it against the barrel of the Walther, and then swiftly screwing it into place.

She held the gun in her right hand, resting against her left forearm, inside her sleeve, as she got to her feet and turned, fighting the desire to hold her breath.

There was no one behind her. She hadn't been seen.

Chace backed against the wall of the alcove, into the small protection it afforded, listening hard. Most of the foot traffic seemed to have died down, and the voices she was hearing now seemed to float out of the air in every direction, whispering.

She edged forward, peering around the lip of the arch into her alcove, looking toward the one she'd seen el-Sayd enter. There were no shadows to give anyone inside away now, either because it was empty, the sun had moved, or the occupants were being cautious. She glanced back down the way she had come, saw only a lone Yemeni man at the end of the hall, facing away from her, lying on a square of rug.

Chace guided the Walther out of her sleeve, pressed it against the front of her balta, concealing it with her other arm. With a deep breath, she slipped around the corner, took ten steps, and turned into the shadowed alcove to the north.

There were two men inside, both kneeling in prayer, one in a black thobe, the other in white, and neither was el-Sayd, and one of them Chace didn't recognize at all. Either the one in black saw her from the corner of his eye or heard the rustle of her approach, but whichever it was, it was enough. He raised his head, turning to her, and Chace saw with murderous clarity the heavy lines of age in his face, the cataract blur of his right eye, the gray beard peppered with black.

Faud.

His mouth began twisting in outrage, and he opened it to speak, and Chace already had her left hand supporting the Walther, her right index finger ready on the trigger, and she had the shot, and the Walther popped softly, and the first bullet entered Faud's brain through the right eye. She fired again immediately, and the second bullet hit lower, splitting his upper lip and driving into his mouth.

She pivoted to her right without pausing, saw the astonished look on the other man's face, the man who wasn't el-Sayd and was simply in the wrong place at the worst possible moment. She shot him twice, two more pops from the Walther, sounds like a child's clapping hands, and hit him in the left eye and left ear. The man collapsed, still astonished, and Chace fired a third time, at the back of his neck, where it met the skull.

Then she pivoted back and put the remaining bullet from the Walther into Faud, also at the base of the skull. She dropped the Walther onto the rug, not hearing it land, and with her foot shoved it beneath Faud's body.

Chace turned and walked from the alcove, head down, stripping the gloves from her hands and tossing them aside into the shadows. She made her way back along the colonnaded walk, trying to keep her pace steady and normal, fighting the urge to run, mind whirring through the last minute of events. El-Sayd had to have already departed, he couldn't have known the hit was coming, or else he would have warned the others. Which meant that whatever the business el-Sayd had come to conduct, it had been brief, or postponed, perhaps.

The Israelis wouldn't be happy, but that wasn't her problem. It would be Crocker's and would remain Crocker's whether or not Chace could make it home. At least she'd hit Faud.

At the corner, turning toward the entrance, Chace heard a shout of alarm and felt her insides turn to ice. A man shouting, and then again, but the tone wasn't what she expected, not a cry of outrage but one of anger, and she heard someone rushing up behind her and lowered her head farther. The old Yemeni she had seen before moved to her side, shouted at her, and she nodded, understood, and he gestured sharply toward the entrance, and Chace moved faster.

Not fast enough, and the man shouted at her again, cuffing her along the back of her head. Others were sitting up, looking to the spectacle, and when Chace stopped to try and retrieve her shoes, the Yemeni man cuffed her again, then reached for the jambiya tucked at the sash on his belt.

Fuck the shoes, Chace thought, and she moved quickly through the doorway and onto the street. The bodyguards were to her right, waiting, bored, and she turned left, moving into traffic, feeling the ground grinding the stockings at the soles of her feet. The Yemeni man was still shouting at her, and she heard others laughing, and she dropped her chin all the way to her chest, fighting the urge to break into a sprint. Something dug into her right foot, a sharp pain that made her gasp, and she was sure it had drawn blood, and she wondered when she'd last had a tetanus booster.

Then she was past an ironmonger's stall and down into an alley, and there was no laughter and no shouting, and she slowed, heading west, then turned south down another narrow street, past the San'a' Palace Hotel, one of the old tower buildings that had been converted to accommodations, the first few floors built of basalt, with brown brick for the higher levels. Chace doubled back, taking the ground-floor entrance to the restaurant, then headed for the stairs.

On the second floor she found one of the shared bathrooms, empty. She locked the door, stripping off her veil, hijab, and balta. There was no wastebasket, and she bundled the whole kit together, slipped it behind the back of one of the few Western toilets she'd encountered outside of the Taj Sheba. She untucked her shirt, took a moment to check her foot, and discovered that a shard of glass had embedded itself in her heel. Blood and dust had caked over the wound enough to slow the bleeding, and she cursed silently, debated, then decided there was nothing for it.

She limped back downstairs and caught a cab back to her hotel. • She departed Yemeni airspace three hours and twenty-seven minutes later. She'd removed the glass from her heel before checking out of the Taj Sheba and rose twice during the flight to Frankfurt to change the bandage. It looked worse than it was, and it felt even worse than that, and Chace wondered idly if she could convince Crocker to give her a couple of days off.

After all, she reasoned, job well done and all that.

Hertfordshire-St. Albans, Crocker Family Residence 10 September 0114 GMT Paul Crocker had snuck into each of his daughters' rooms, first Ariel's and then Sabrina's, part of the ritual he performed every night he was home, and wished them each a whispered good night. Neither woke, but that was hardly the point, and convinced that both were safely asleep, he turned to his own bedroom, where Jenny had fallen asleep, book open in her hand, the television murmuring nonsense.

He was as far as putting on his pajama bottoms when the phone on the nightstand rang, and he lurched for it, trying to catch it before his wife woke, an exercise doomed to failure. Jenny sat up with a start, glanced at the alarm clock, and frowned.

"It's bad," she said. "It's always bad when it's this late."

Crocker nodded, answering the phone, and expecting the Duty Ops Officer.

Instead, he got Angela Cheng.

"How's Chace?" Cheng asked him.

"Not on this line."

"See, I know how she is," Cheng continued, as if she hadn't heard him. "That's just to give you a taste of what I know. And I know something else, Paul. What I know is that you need to get your ass into your office in like, say, the next hour, and have an escort meet me in the lobby so I can come up to see you."