Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

I went down and over his prone body, my back smashing into the concrete pavement, and I felt the wind rush out of my lungs. Now he quickly rolled over and got on top of me. His full weight on me, he held me down by the right lapel with his left hand and immediately started raining blows on my head with his right.

I was in pain. I grunted. This was not going to be recoverable.

I groaned with pain, tasted blood.

I was in big trouble. I had only one option: I hugged his left arm to my chest, avoided the next blow by shifting my body to the right, and then hooked my left foot over his right ankle, hugging it to my left buttock.

Then I bridged up sharply using my right leg and levered him over my left shoulder. I rolled with his momentum and landed on top of him. I shot my right hand deep into the gap between the right side of his neck and his collar, then grabbed his left lapel with my left hand.

And I yanked hard.

My heart was hammering.

I had him in a classic cross-collar choke. He flailed and struggled, but I had him.

He lost consciousness in a matter of seconds.

A house door opened nearby and quickly shut again.

I was out of breath and needed to rest, but I couldn’t afford the time. I grabbed his weapon from a holster on his left side. A Beretta. A semi-automatic pistol. I ground its muzzle into his left ear, and he came to.

But barely.

The man was groggy, punchy. He blinked slowly, his eyes searching. His nose was copiously bleeding.

“Name,” I said.

He looked at me, and his eyes slowly came into focus. “Fuck you,” he groaned. A trace of an accent of some kind?

“You’re really going to make me do it?” I said, twisting the muzzle against the skin of his temple. “Because I will if I have to. Who are you working for?”

He stared defiantly.

I searched his pockets for a wallet, but all I found was a car key for a Hertz rental. I stuffed it in my own pocket.

“All right,” I said, grinding the muzzle of the gun into his temple again. “I got no choice.”

He was just about to say something, I could tell, when I caught a shimmer of movement in my peripheral vision. I looked up and over my shoulder and saw the man with the scarred eyebrow. He was holding a gun, and as I spun around and pointed the weapon, something hit me, hard, on the back of the head.

And everything went dark.

It might have been a minute later, or it could have been longer, but I came to and found both men gone. Fireflies swam in my field of vision. I got to my feet gingerly.

My head throbbed. It felt as fragile as an egg.

I looked around, oriented myself toward Mass. Ave., and began to walk, slowly and carefully. I stuck a hand in my pocket and found that the key to the rental car was still there.

The man with the scarred eyebrow had the opportunity to kill me but chose not to. I wondered why.

Slowly I crossed Mass. Ave., and I could hear a siren nearby. Someone on the block had seen the struggle and called the cops. By the time I reached the other side of the street, a police car was turning down the street where I’d taken down the Bluetooth guy. Since I was right near the record store, I decided to stop in and say hi to Gabe, as planned. I wanted to make sure he was okay.

He wasn’t at his usual place at the back of the store. Sitting at the desk, instead of Gabe, was the guy I recognized as the owner, a heavy man with a close-shaved gray beard and thick glasses. “You all right?” he said to me.

“Yeah. I’m looking for Gabe.”

“Not here,” he said testily.

“Is he on break?”

“Gabe took his last break. He doesn’t work here anymore.”

“He doesn’t? What happened?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m his uncle.”

“Well, Gabe misses too much work, that’s the problem with Gabe. He’s fired.”

‘‘I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Look, I have two employees. I can’t afford for one of them to keep taking sick days when he’s not sick.”

“Give him another chance,” I said, but I could see he didn’t want to argue about it.

On my way out of the store, I took out my phone and hit Gabe’s number. It rang and rang. Finally his voicemail came on. I left a message: “Call me.”

Strange, I thought when I’d hit End.

I retrieved the Defender, which was parked on Franklin Street, and drove over to Gabe’s dilapidated house on Putnam. I rang the buzzer and waited.

Nothing.

I rang again, and a voice came over the intercom, faint and crackly.

“What?” Not Gabe.

“Gabe there?” I said.

“No.”

“This is his uncle. Any idea where he is?”

A pause. “He left this morning.”

“For where?”

“Hell do I know?”

“When?”

“Early. I don’t know. He woke me up with all his noise.”

“Tell him to call his uncle Nick, please.”

Returning to my office, I tried Gabe’s mobile phone several more times. No answer. Finally, I left a message sternly instructing him to call me immediately.

And I wondered: Could someone have gotten to Gabe — knowing that he was my vulnerability?

While I waited for him to answer, I called Hertz.

When I finally reached a human being, I said, “I’m calling to extend the rental period on my car. That’s plate number—” And I read it off the plastic key fob.

A few seconds later, the woman said, falteringly, “Is this... Mr. Malka?”

“Yes, but don’t mix up my account with my brother’s again.”

“Mr. Elad Malka?”

“Yes, it is.” An Israeli name, it sounded like. “Where am I supposed to return it again?”

“That would be the Hertz office at Boston’s Logan Airport.”

The trick is to play the dunce. “Right, of course. I forget which credit card I have on file.”

“Yes, sir, it looks like your corporate card, B. P. Strategy. Is that the one you wanted to use?”

“Which one is it, again? Can you repeat the name on the card, please?”

She did.

I wrote it down. B. P. Strategy . I had no idea what that was.

The man was named Elad Malka, somehow connected with a firm named B. P. Strategy.

Dorothy emerged from her cubicle after I hung up with Hertz. “My God, what happened to you?”

“How bad do I look?”

“Like someone beat you up.”

“He certainly tried.”

“More than tried. Looks like somebody took you down.”

“Nearly, but not quite.” I gave her a quick recap of what had happened.

Her eyes widened, and her mouth came open. “Good Lord, who did it?”

“Someone working for a company called B. P. Strategy. Can you look that up?”

“Be right back.”

A few minutes later she stood at the threshold to my office. “B. P. Strategy is the trading name for Black Parallel,” she said.

I’d heard of them. Black Parallel was a private Israeli intelligence firm with offices in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris. They liked to employ ex — Mossad agents. The guy, obviously a skilled professional, was likely an operative who’d once worked for Israeli intelligence. No wonder he was such a difficult opponent. Or at least such a persistent one. Also, they did Krav Maga.

“I think the guy who knocked me out might have been Black Parallel too.”

“No doubt.”

“To keep the first guy from talking to me, I assume. But why were they following me in the first place?”

“Working for Kimball, I bet.”

“But for what?”

“Watching to see if you find the Tallinn file.”

“Or to find out where I live.”

“Could be.”

“You haven’t heard from Gabe, have you?”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Because he just got fired from his job at the record store, and his roommate doesn’t know where he is.”