The Leveling

Alty was still frantic, trying to shimmy up the column. Decker grabbed his belt and yanked him to the ground. “Run for the fence!”


Alty tried to run, but his wounded leg kept giving out on him, so Decker half dragged him across the lawn. When the second dog tore up, crazed and barking wildly, Decker offered his left arm, which the German shepherd took in its jaws. With his right arm, Decker plunged his knife deep into the dog’s chest, twisting it as he heaved up. He threw the dog several feet up in the air and left it writhing on the ground.

A guard ran out, gun drawn, from a grove of limbed-up plane trees not far from the main entrance gate. The perimeter fence was still a good hundred feet away. Decker hadn’t wanted to escalate matters by using his gun, but as the guard took aim at them, he pulled a Sig Sauer P226 from his nylon thigh holster and shot the guy in the chest. He grabbed Alty around the waist just as a volley of shots rang out.

Alty’s body jumped. Decker returned fire, but he didn’t have a good sense of where the new threat was coming from. A quick glance at Alty’s neck told him the kid was either dead or would be within seconds.

More shots rang out. Decker felt a bee-sting-like prick as a bullet grazed his left shoulder.

Time to get the hell out of here, buddy.

Using Alty’s body as a shield, Decker tried to advance toward the border fence. By now, he’d figured out that whoever was shooting at him was doing so from behind a low stone wall near the front of the mansion. Then someone started shooting at him from another angle.

One of the shots hit the slide of Decker’s Sig.

Decker didn’t drop the gun, but when he went to fire it, nothing happened.

Goddamn motherfucking sonofabitch…

He started pulling Alty back toward the house, still using the kid as a shield. No way he could make the front fence, not unarmed with two guys taking potshots at him.

He’d try for the back fence instead. It was farther away, but the forest of trees in the rear of the estate would provide cover. He got to a row of hedges in front of the mansion, ripped Alty’s iPhone out of the kid’s back pocket, let the boy drop, and sprinted on all fours, behind the hedges, toward the back of the mansion.

Decker was remarkably fast for such a big man, and the wild shots into the hedges all missed their mark. But then a third security guard ran out from the rear of the property. And then a fourth, blocking yet another avenue of escape.

With a working pistol, it wouldn’t have mattered. Without one, he was trapped.

Or maybe not.

Earlier that night he’d scaled the roof from a secluded alcove on the side of the mansion. Using the hedges in front of the mansion for cover, Decker sprinted to that alcove now, grabbed a vertical copper gutter with both hands—pulling it partially out of its wall anchors—and began to climb. Near the top, someone shot him in the thigh. For a moment he thought he might fall, but with one last Herculean burst of strength he lifted himself over the lip of the roof.

He scrambled as fast as he could up the tiles, dove into a wedge between the roof and one of the five chimneys, and pulled a tourniquet off of his stripped-down chest rig, snapping the rubber band that had held it in place. After determining that the bullet hadn’t hit his femoral artery, he used the tourniquet to hold a pressure dressing in place, being sure not to completely cut off the flow of blood above the wound.

What he wouldn’t give for a link to a Predator feed right now, he thought, working as fast as he could on the dressing. He had no eyes above and no weapon; the enemy had the advantage.

When he finished the dressing, he pulled out his Sig and inspected the slide. No time to fieldstrip, no time to fix.

Fuck, you are in a bad place, buddy. Gotta face reality.

He pulled out Alty’s iPhone. He was breathing heavily. The tiles underneath him became slick from the blood dripping from his thigh.

A couple of bullets ricocheted off the chimney. Decker had positioned himself so that the guards couldn’t get a good shot off at him from the ground, but he knew they’d be on the roof itself any minute.

He used his thick finger to tap Alty’s iPhone to life.

What was Holtz’s e-mail address?

He closed his eyes for a moment.

Pull yourself together.

You’re not going to make it.

Not Holtz. Sava. And Daria.

He opened the e-mail app, typed [email protected], CC’d Daria, and attached a photo Alty had taken with his phone, and then another. The pictures were lousy, but they’d have to do—there was no way he had time to transfer all the high-res photos and voice data he’d collected.