sure he was the one to kill her. He was utterly lost.
Jane had one final chance, and she would have to use Brian Vaughn’s eyes to know when it came. She could hear footsteps coming up the walk toward the front door behind her. She heard a shoe on the bottom step, then one on the top. She tensed her muscles and watched Brian Vaughn’s eyes.
At the instant the door behind Jane opened, Brian Vaughn’s eyes flicked toward it. Jane leapt and spun to throw her shoulder into Vaughn’s chest as she wrapped her arm over Vaughn’s so it was clamped in her armpit, and used both of her hands to squeeze his fingers. The gun discharged into the wall beside the door. The man who had been coming in dived to the floor as Jane bucked to jerk her head into Vaughn’s face. In the second when she felt him loosen his grip on the gun, she wrenched it out of his hand and dashed out the doorway the man had left open.
She veered to the right without having to choose, because it was harder for a right-handed shooter to follow a target moving in that direction. She dashed across the neighbor’s flower bed and reached the first tree before the man on the floor could make his way back to the open door. He fired his first shot into the ground behind her feet, then overcompensated and fired again four feet ahead of her, and by then she was beyond the corner of the next house.
Jane ran up the next driveway toward the back of the house. She could hear heavy feet pounding the sidewalk along Brian Vaughn’s street, then moving more cautiously up the driveway behind her. She could see this house had a six-foot board fence like the one behind Vaughn’s. She had no time to look for a gate. She ran hard, took two long steps, sprang upward to grasp the top of the fence, and used her momentum to roll over it. She came down hard in the middle of another flower bed. She fought the urge to rise to her feet instantly. Instead she crawled ten feet on her belly along the bottom of the fence.
When the men fired through the board fence, they pierced it several times at the place where they had seen her go over it. She stood and dashed straight for the space between this house and the next. She couldn’t run for her car. They were so close behind her that she could not hope to get it unlocked, climb in, and start it before they shot her. Instead she cut across the front lawn of the house, across the sidewalk and the street, then along the opposite row of houses to put the bodies of parked cars between her and her pursuers.
Jane ran for the corner of the fifth house, where she remembered there was an alley that separated the residential stretch of street from the beginning of a small business district. The alley was a logical place to park a car, so she had walked the route she was taking now in daylight and in the dark. It had turned out to be wrong: the far end opened on a municipal parking lot. It had been blocked by a row of steel posts set in concrete so only pedestrians could get into the parking lot that way. But she had kept it in mind because it had looked so right. She decided that tonight she would take it at a sprint, going as fast as she could run over the rough, potholed pavement where they would have to tread with caution. If some of them were following her in a car, this would be the place to strip away that advantage.
Jane glanced over her shoulder at the block of houses behind her, trying to detect moving figures, then turned to enter the mouth of the alley.
The sight of the man made her gasp. “Hold it!” he called. “F.B.I.”
Jane veered away from him and dashed up the sidewalk along the first storefront. She had timed everything wrong. The face-changers had arrived hours early, and so had the F.B.I.
Now she could hear the footsteps of the F.B.I. agent on the pavement behind her. She knew she had to run faster, to make her legs pump harder and stretch for distance at each pace. She had done this to herself. She had intentionally put herself in the way of a group of men who were coldly, pragmatically violent. Next she had intentionally attracted the attention of a government agency whose whole purpose was meeting people like that with overwhelming force. But then she had failed to get out from between them.
The only way she had to get out of it now was to bet everything on her speed, to keep herself from thinking about how it felt to run blind into the darkness, what would happen if she twisted an ankle or didn’t see an obstacle. She had to throw herself into the space ahead of her and hope that nothing had been left there that wasn’t imprinted on the map she carried in her memory.
She turned up the next alley, looking for a place to hide. She ran a few paces, then saw the steps. A three- story brick building ahead and to her left had steel rungs built into the side so maintenance people could climb to the roof. She had no time to stop and judge exactly how much of a lead she had on the F.B.I. man, or to figure out the positions or numbers of agents with him. She had to move before she could think, or the lead would be used up. She came to the building at full speed, jumped high so her foot landed on the third rung, and began to scramble up. She knew she had to get out of view before the F.B.I. agent reached the alley entrance, so she raised her face to the night sky and climbed.
She could hear his feet on the sidewalk beyond the alley now, and they seemed to be hitting much more rapidly than she had expected. She tried to climb faster. Her foot slipped, her body dropped, but her terror had made her hands clutch the rung above her so tightly that when her arms extended, she stopped. She hung for a second, found her footing, and began to climb again. She was more timid now, cold and breathless. Maybe all she would have to do was get above his normal eye level, and he would pass.
She heard one foot hit hard, then stop. His voice was below her, off to the left. He called up to her, “Stop, or I’ll have to shoot.”
Jane had been half-expecting the words, as she had heard them in her imagination for years. The sound was not as she had expected. The words were softer, less angry and brutal than they had been in her mind. He wasn’t shouting them out so some witness would testify later that he had killed her legally. The words were for her, to remind her what they both knew he was supposed to do.
Jane gritted her teeth, gazed up at the sky, and thought, “I did this.” Her legs pumped and her arms stretched above her, following her eyes up into the sky. As she climbed, she listened for the loud noise and relaxed her muscles to receive the pain. She was aware that there had never been the night when the average F.B.I. agent could not drop her in one shot. She had not climbed more than thirty feet of the way up, and he was maybe another thirty feet from the foot of the ladder.
Why was he hesitating? Was he deciding whether he had meant it? No, he must be aiming. Jane climbed faster, and the shot came. It was so loud that she cringed, trying to protect her ears with her shoulders. Then there was an aftersound that hung in the air as though the report had jarred the molecules and changed them somehow. She scrambled higher.
That had been the warning shot. The next one was going to shatter her spine. Her right hand reached up for the next rung and slapped down on a flat, abrasive surface. Her hand had touched the roof.
Her fingers spread to get a firm hold on the level, featureless spot. She forced herself to relinquish the left hand’s grip on the last metal rung to press both palms downward, pull herself up onto her belly, and slither onto the flat, tarry surface.
She lay there for a moment, panting, as she finally allowed herself to feel the terror. She assured herself she was up, out of sight, and he had not shot her. She heard a metallic ring, and her next breath caught in her throat. It was the sound of his shoe touching the lowest rung of the ladder.
She raised herself to her feet and spun her body to look around her frantically. She had assumed there would be something up here—a door, a vent, anything she could pry open to slip down into the building. But she was on a flat, open rectangle of black tar. On all sides she could see the roofs of other buildings, at varying distances. She looked back the way she had come. She couldn’t go back down the ladder, because he was on his way up from the alley. On the opposite side was the street. She whirled her head from side to side. The closest building was the next one along the alley.
Jane walked, less quickly than she wanted to, toward the edge of the black rectangle where she was trapped and looked toward the other roof. It seemed to be about eight or nine feet away. Jane gnashed her teeth, scared, frustrated, and angry at herself. She was more afraid than she had been when she had thought it would be a bullet. She tried to be rational. There were people who could take a running start and jump twenty-seven feet. This was one-third as far. She was uninjured and in good physical condition. She was a terrific runner.
But as she was marshaling the arguments, trying to convince herself, she knew that the arguments worked only if she could goad herself into running straight for the gap between the roofs at full speed. If she judged the paces wrong and stutter-stepped, or lost her nerve at the edge and hesitated, she would fall to the pavement below.
Jane cautiously approached the edge of the roof in a crouch, unable to stand up straight for fear she would
