She dropped to hands and knees, reached up, and hit the kill switch on the laser device.
MI6 had sent in a hit squad. They were doing it now. But they had forgotten to advise her.
Or perhaps they had just decided that she was expendable.
SOKOLOV HAD SEEN many strange things already this morning, and yet still he was taken aback when he swung out of the shattered window and scanned the front of the building to find it cluttered with young Chinese men crawling around on it like spiders.
Then he remembered that, sixty seconds earlier, his greatest concern in the world had been what to do about a cabal of Chinese hackers. These must be them.
He understood and approved of the decision that the hackers had made to avoid the building’s stairwells and escape via its exterior surface. It would have been easy enough to follow their lead down to the street, and in a sense this was the obvious decision to make, since they knew the terrain much better than he did. Often, in unfamiliar territory, it was wisest to pattern one’s movements after the locals’.
On the other hand, there was this thick bundle of wires running from a point on the building’s facade not far from where Sokolov was now, across the street to an office building under construction. The wires, in aggregate, must be a lot heavier than Sokolov, and so would probably support his weight. He favored the idea of using them as an escape route, for two reasons. First of all, simply getting down to the street might not help him that much, since, unlike the hackers, he could not blend in. He would be noticed and arrested very quickly. But if he could get into the other building he would have some chance of hiding somewhere, long enough, at least, to devise a plan.
Second, the apartment he had just left was full of high explosives and was on fire.
Now, compared to the typical layman, Sokolov was not especially worried about the proximity of ANFO and open flames. Like most high explosives, the stuff was difficult to set off. Fire alone would not suffice. Some sort of primer was needed: a detonator, such as a blasting cap. So it was quite possible that the entire building could burn to the ground without any sort of explosion taking place.
And yet this was a simplistic reading of the situation. There was a lot of other stuff in that apartment besides ANFO. During the few, frenzied moments he had spent there, Sokolov had not been able to make a systematic inventory. But if they were planning to use the ANFO, as seemed likely, then they must have some blasting caps in the place; and if they were planning to use it soon, then it was likely that they had already assembled some complete explosive devices in which the detonators had been mated with the ANFO. And anyway, in that devil’s kitchen he had just left behind, there was no telling what other stuff they might have mixed up: the terrorists had recipes for other explosives besides ANFO that were much less stable. And so there was a strong argument for getting away from the building as fast as he could. The wire bundle offered him that.
The main argument against it was that the terrorists could easily shoot at him as he was suspended in the air above the street right outside their windows.
But he could hand-over-hand his way along a stretched wire about as fast as most men could run. And the few terrorists who were still alive must be rather preoccupied. So that made the decision easy. He clambered over a series of window grates and other stuff to the wire bundle, reached out with one hand, grabbed, and slowly transferred his weight. The bundle didn’t rip loose from the wall. Good. He let go of the apartment building altogether, swung out into space, reached, and made another grab. Then another. Then another.
Then felt himself descending and saw the bundle receding into the sky.