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Csongor didn’t answer.

 

“Did you not see what happened to Wallace in my building?” Peter demanded.

 

“That’s a good way of putting it. I did not see what happened to Wallace. I saw Wallace go into a room. I saw a long bundle being carried out. Obviously we were meant to think it was Wallace’s dead body. I’ll bet it was fake.”

 

“Fake!?”

 

“Yeah. They took him in there and said, ‘Listen, Wallace, we need to scare the crap out of these two Americans, so play along. Shut up and go limp for a minute and we’ll roll you up in a piece of plastic and carry you out and make it look like we just killed you.’ He’s probably sitting in his flat in Vancouver right now playing T’Rain.”

 

“I doubt it,” Csongor said.

 

“I suppose that is theoretically possible,” Peter said, “but I think it is insane and irresponsible of you to bet our lives on it.”

 

“None of this is real,” Zula said. “It is all gangster theater.”

 

A couple of loud booms echoed down the stairway.

 

After a brief silence, they heard several different fully automatic weapons firing at the same time.

 

Peter swiveled his head around and fixed Zula with a look.

 

“Either that, or I’m wrong,” Zula said.

 

“THAT’S ENOUGH!” THE locksmith exclaimed, barely audible above the sound of gunfire and of stray pieces of broken glass and debris rattling down onto the roof of the van. “I’ve had it!” He was half lying, half sitting on the floor of the van, legs folded up in front of the passenger seat, body wedged in under the radio, reaching up to work on the ignition lock. His brain was telling him to hurl himself out of the vehicle and run as fast as he could, but it was going to take a little while to extricate his body.

 

Yuxia looked out the windshield. The PSB cop was backing away from the building, looking up just like everyone else on the street.

 

Something really bad was happening, and Qian Yuxia was an accomplice to it.

 

She reached down and slipped her hand into the locksmith’s as if she were going to help pull him up. Instead of which she pinned it against the steering wheel. She used her other hand to grab the dangling manacle and snap it over his wrist.

 

“You can try to pick that handcuff while I’ve got my fingernails in your eyes,” she said, “or you can start the engine while I sit here quietly. Your choice.”

 

IN THE WHOLE world, there might have been as many as ten thousand people who were better than Sokolov at falling and rolling around on hard surfaces. Circus acrobats and aikido masters, mostly. Also included in that group would have been many of the younger Spetsnaz men. The remaining six billion or so living humans did not even enter the picture.

 

Sokolov had come to it a bit late, since he had not been recruited into Spetsnaz until after serving a couple of tours in Afghanistan. But for exactly that reason his trainers had been ruthless with him, making him dive and fall and roll on concrete floors over and over again until blood had seeped through the fabric of his uniform wherever there’d been bone anywhere near the skin. The point being that if you did it right, there shouldn’t be blood, or even bruises.

 

Different special forces units around the world had different philosophies as to what was the best way to conduct close-quarters fighting. In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons. Knees, hips, shoulders, and elbows should be used as fluidly as the soles of one’s boots. Hands, though, should be reserved for holding things, such as guns. Sokolov had been trained accordingly and had maintained that standard of training for as long as he had stayed in Spetsnaz. After he had moved into the private sector, he had continued to practice SAMBO: a Soviet martial art, similar in many respects to jujitsu, that involved a huge amount of falling and rolling. He had done this because, when you were working as a security consultant, trying to keep things safe for private clients—clients who might be, say, movie stars at ski resorts or CEOs’ wives at shopping malls—there were times when you just wanted to get someone on the ground or place them in a submission hold as opposed to riddling their corpse with bullets and shotgun pellets.

 

Usually, of course, he warmed up a bit first and swept the floor to make sure it was clean and free of little bits of hard stuff that could cause minor injuries. Those niceties were lacking here, but the fact that a tall black man—evidently an Islamic militant of some type—was swinging a loaded and cocked AK-47 over the table at him gave him all the motivation he needed to skip the preliminaries and go into motion.

 

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