To keep her balance against the push, she stepped forward onto the narrow balcony support.
Finn was still holding on. Through his grip Paige felt a sudden back-and-forth movement of his body. She pictured him waving with his other arm, silently calling one of the guards over. She imagined the man nodding, already briefed on this, crossing the room and drawing his Beretta as he came. Finn gave her arm another shove, forcing her to take a second step. She was three feet out on the narrow beam now, at the extent of Finn’s reach. Nowhere at all for her to go.
Finn released her arm.
A second later she heard the Beretta’s slide being racked behind her.
Finn stepped away from the projected hole and gave Boyce a clear line of sight to make the kill. Boyce paused just outside the light cone, hesitant to let it touch him. Then he shrugged, stepped into the light and faced the hole.
Finn watched him assess his prey. Watched his expression take on the fake, wired kind of calm that spoke more of testosterone than real composure.
“She’s cute,” Boyce said. “Sure we have to rush this? It’s not like anyone’s gonna find the body and swab it for DNA.”
Finn took a step closer to him and spoke evenly. “If I ever hear you advocate unnecessary suffering again, you’ll be the one standing out there. Do you believe me?”
Boyce looked at him. The bullshit calm receded from his eyes. “Yes, sir.”
“Make it painless. Shoot her in the back of the head, centered in a line between the ears. Don’t miss.”
“Yes, sir.”
Boyce raised his Beretta.
He extended it a foot through the opening.
He thumbed off the safety.
And then a hand came out of nowhere, from outside the opening on the right edge. It locked onto Boyce’s wrist and yanked it downward. Boyce had just begun to flinch when a second hand came through, this one holding a SIG-Sauer P220. It jammed the barrel into Boyce’s eye and fired, blowing his head apart. A fragment of skull hit Finn in the face. He staggered back from the opening. In his peripheral vision he saw Kaglan, still in position at the door, reaching for his own weapon—but the SIG was already coming up to level on him. A tenth of a second later it fired again, three shots in a tight pattern. Kaglan screamed and went down. He managed to return fire, but his aim was all over the place, most of his shots missing the opening and cratering the windows beyond it. The SIG shooter stepped away from the opening on the far side until Kaglan ran dry, and then the weapon came back through the hole and began rapid-firing blindly into the room.
Finn threw himself flat and crawled behind the couch, for whatever cover it could provide. He heard the SIG fire dry, and it crossed his mind to get up and hit the off button on the cylinder, but already he heard the metallic scrape of the SIG’s magazine dropping out, and almost on top of it came the smack of a fresh one being rammed home. Half a breath after that the shooting started again, fast and wild, hitting everything. Finn counted seven shots. Then silence. Which was strange: a SIG 220’s clip held eight rounds. He glanced up and saw Kaglan struggling to move, blood seeping heavily from a wound in his side. And then the eighth shot hit Kaglan in the temple and took the top half of his head off.
Finn vaulted to his feet and threw himself toward the walnut table and the black cylinder. The reload would have to be slower this time—the shooter would have to fish in his pockets for another magazine, if he had one. In the split-second before he slammed his thumb down onto the off button, Finn raised his eyes and caught a glimpse of the opening. The shooter had stepped aside again, but the woman, Paige Campbell, was just visible, crouching low on the narrow beam. Her eyes found Finn’s at the exact instant he hit the button, and as the circle shrank to nothing, the last thing he saw through it was her hand coming up—and giving him the finger.
Chapter Twenty
They ran until they reached the skeleton of the Ritz-Carlton. They stopped then, and turned, and the three of them watched the avenue to the south. Watched the framework of the high-rise, what they could see of it past the birches. Watched for the telltale burst of sunlight that would give away the opening of the other iris—from the cylinder Finn still possessed. It never came.
They climbed the oak to the Ritz’s third floor girders. Bethany switched on their own cylinder, and thirty seconds later they were inside the hotel room, in the present, standing at the windows and looking south at the high-rise in the summer sun.