“Air … port,” Jones said for a third time, in a tone of just-barely-contained fury, accompanied with a little tossing movement of the pistol in his left hand. The driver finally turned around and shifted into gear. The taxi moved about three inches and then stopped to avoid hitting a staggering, dust-covered refugee. But at least it was moving; the taxi driver had something to think about besides the strange pair in his backseat. A few moments later, he claimed a full arm’s length of pavement. And from there, it only got easier. As if the crowd, having conceded the taxi’s right to move one meter, could no longer begrudge it the next ten, or the next hundred.
SOKOLOV WATCHED THE slow dissolution of the taxi into the crowd with professional admiration. He was a highly trained and experienced warrior, operating completely on his own, free to hide in this building for a while or emerge at a time of his choosing. Even so, he had rated his chances of escaping from this situation at essentially zero. And yet this Muslim Negro, the victim of a surprise raid, handcuffed to an unwilling hostage, and squarely in Sokolov’s rifle sights, had apparently managed to make good his escape simply by taking advantage of an opportunity that had presented itself at random. Of course, the distraction posed by the explosion and collapse of the building had helped him enormously, but it was admirable nonetheless. From long experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist’s movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.
And so what moved him onward and down the office building’s stairway was not any sort of foolish hope that he could actually be saved, but competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic.
CSONGOR RECOGNIZED HIS savior as one of the hackers: Manu, as they had been referring to him. “Manu” showed Csongor how to make his way out of the cellar to the back door on the alley. Csongor then followed him down the alley to the side street and down that to its intersection with the bigger street that ran along the building’s front. This got them far enough away from obvious danger that “Manu” felt comfortable turning around to look curiously at Csongor.
“Thank you,” Csongor said.
“I am Marlon,” said the other.
“I am Csongor.” They shook hands in a curiously stiff, formal way.
“What happened?” Marlon wanted to know.
Csongor, not fully trusting their ability to communicate in English, shrugged to indicate he hadn’t the faintest idea.
Not far away, someone had been honking a car horn. First it had been a series of long blasts, and now it was a long string of random taps, culminating in “shave and a haircut, two bits.” The neighborhood afforded many distractions at this time, but finally Csongor turned to look and noticed the van sitting there about ten meters away. Projecting below the open driver’s-side door was a pair of blue boots. Yuxia’s head poked up in the vacant window frame, to see if she had gotten their attention yet.
“Would you like a ride?” Csongor asked, extending one hand toward the van, like a limo driver welcoming a movie star at the airport.
Marlon shrugged and grinned. “Okay.”
As they drew closer, Yuxia ran out from behind the door and got in front of the van, crouched, and grabbed a snarled length of rusty rebar that was torquing up into the air in front of the bumper. It was rooted in a sizable chunk of busted-up concrete that was preventing the van from moving forward and that was too heavy for her to move alone. Marlon and Csongor helped her drag this obstruction out of the way, then climbed into the back of the vehicle as Yuxia got into the driver’s seat. She put it in gear and started to rumble forward over smaller debris that, while it made for a bumpy ride, didn’t prevent the wheels from rolling. Marlon and Csongor busied themselves for a few moments pushing the concrete lintel out the side door. The door wouldn’t latch because the entire frame of the van had been distorted by impact, and so Csongor just held it shut. Marlon lay on his back in the wreckage of the seat, got his feet braced against the punched-in roof, and pushed up with all his might, shoving the sheet metal up quite a distance, partly sealing the hole in the roof and greatly increasing the amount of space inside the van. Beyond that, his strength did not suffice to move the metal any farther, and so he and Csongor both ended up on their backs kicking at the ceiling, pounding the metal up like blacksmiths. It gave them something to do and it took their mind off the way Yuxia was driving, which, had they paid attention to it, might have been the most frightening thing they had seen all day.
“Where are we going?” Csongor finally thought to ask. For he could not make sense of Yuxia’s decisions.
“To the same place as that taxi,” she answered, nodding indistinctly at a mote in the sea of people and traffic ahead of them.
“Why?”
“Because my girlfriend is in it,” Yuxia answered. She turned to fix him with a look. “My girlfriend, and yours.”
“I wish!” Csongor remarked, before he could haul the remark back.
“Then don’t you want to know where she is going?”
SOKOLOV REACHED THE ground floor, ejected the clip from his rifle, cleared its chamber, and threw it down the stairwell. He stepped into the hall that led to the building’s main entrance and broke into a run. When he reached the lobby, he slowed to a brisk walk, pushed through a pair of inner doors, strode across the entryway, and shouldered his way through one of the outer doors.
Just in time to watch the van drive away. Like a horse dropping a turd, it disgorged a large piece of concrete as it accelerated.