off, accelerating to second, making her way up the lane. She slowed at the top of the road, turning right, then edged forward until the Volga nosed out onto the street enough for her to look down toward the front of 14 Uzbekiston, almost one hundred meters away. There were street lamps on this side, though poorly placed, and they failed to offer enough illumination to reveal her at the corner, at least from this distance.
Some forty meters down, in the glow of one of the lamps, she could see the second watch car, another Volga, its driver’s door open and the driver standing outside the vehicle. Another of the walking guards was just now passing the car, heading away, toward the stronger illumination at the front of the house. Beyond that, darkness swelled again, concealing the last car, and, presumably, the last walker.
Chace felt her heart beat so strong it seemed to be thumping in her ears. Her lips were dry, and when she ran her tongue over them, she tasted the tang of her adrenaline. Barely coming off the clutch, she turned her car to the top of the lane. The slope downhill was slight, but enough, and she put the car into neutral, letting the vehicle coast toward the nearest Volga. She stayed off the brakes until she was perhaps twenty feet from the car, then let her foot come down gently, hoping they wouldn’t squeak.
They squeaked.
The driver of the second car turned, startled by the noise. Then he recognized the vehicle, or he seemed to, because instead of reacting with alarm, he stepped farther away from his car, raising an arm in greeting. His arm was still raised when Chace came down full on the brakes, stopping beside him. Through the open passenger window, she could see the man’s midsection, watched as his arm came down and he began to lean forward, and she pointed the pistol at him and fired twice. He staggered, bumping against the frame of his car, then falling backward into his seat.
Chace dropped the hush puppy on the passenger’s seat, came down on the clutch, starting the engine again, and then popped the Volga into first gear, accelerating. Ahead, just beyond the wash of the closest streetlight, she watched as the walker turned, confused and tracking the source of the noise. Chace scooped up the gun, came down on the clutch and the brake together, and this time emptied the gun, firing the remaining three shots as she came alongside. Her first shot caught him high in the chest, below the shoulder, the second in the throat, the third missing altogether. She waited until he hit the ground before dropping the gun once more, then rammed the stick into reverse, and backed up the lane as fast as the Volga could bear it. The whine of the engine was tremendous, and she had no doubt that it would carry down the street, to the remaining car, and the remaining guards.
At the top of the lane she braked, went back into first, and turned, accelerating hard as she came around the next corner, then flooring it. She raced the Volga back down the narrow lane, past the corpses she’d made there. Taking her hand from the stick, she ejected the magazine from the hush puppy, then, using her knees to hold the wheel, retrieved one of her spares and slipped it into place, chambering the first round.
She slowed at the turn, fighting the urge to simply race around the final corner. The radio beside the pistol was still silent, and Chace was beginning to wonder if it really was on. She’d half expected the alarm to be raised by now.
Expected, but not hoped. What she had hoped for was that the sound of the Volga reversing up Uzbekiston would have pulled the remaining walker up the street. He’d find the last body Chace had dropped soon enough, and yes, that would raise the alarm. But he’d do one of three things then. Either he’d run to the next car, to see if it had been hit as well, and perhaps decide to use the radio there; he’d run to the house, and raise the alarm; or he’d run back to his staging vehicle, where his partner was behind the wheel.
Chace was hoping for option three, but one and two seemed just as likely.
She edged her car around the corner, once again going as slowly as she could bear, and saw the last car parked in the shadows up the street. It was too dark to see any sign of the driver.
Inspiration hit her then, and she turned on the Volga’s headlights, then started up the street. The lights splashed the remaining car, and she saw the driver of the vehicle opening his door, emerging and raising a hand to shield himself from the glare as he looked her way. She tried to read his expression as she closed the distance, thought she saw there his recognition of the vehicle, but she was closing too fast to take the time needed to process it. Hopefully, this driver was experiencing the same thing.
She kept the headlights on as she came to a stop, and the driver dropped his arm and started toward her, moving outside the spread of the beams. Chace put the car in neutral and set the brake, and it was a reassuring sound to him, she could see it, a sound he expected. Now that she was close enough, she could read his manner as well as his face, and it was clear to her, then, that he suspected nothing.
Why would he? All he had heard was a car reversing up Uzbekiston, nothing else, nothing more.
Chace waited until he was perhaps ten feet from her, then opened the door, and came out firing. She used two bullets this time, because she could use both hands to shoot, and each went where she wished it, and the man fell, his expression of bewilderment clouding into pain, then freezing there.
One left.
Being careful to stay out of the headlights to avoid casting a silhouette, Chace moved up the street, to the last car, in time to see the last walker sprinting toward her. She heard him call out, saw the pistol in his hand, and he called out a second time, and she realized he was shouting the name of the driver. She adjusted her grip on the hush puppy, holding it with both hands, low, breathing through her nose. The cold air burned, and she smelled exhaust and coffee and fried food, and a piece of her mind that had somehow remained detached from everything that had happened in the last two and a half minutes concluded that the driver had been having his dinner before she’d killed him.
When he was perhaps twenty-five feet away, the walker faltered, almost skidding to a stop, and Chace knew he had seen something, perhaps her silhouette, perhaps the body of the last driver. He started to bring his pistol up, but she had been ready, and beat him on the index, firing twice, then twice more. In the distance and the darkness, she couldn’t see her hits, but she saw the results, and the man twisted on his feet, a top in its final stages, then toppled.
Chace took a moment to catch her breath.
Then she turned back to her Volga, climbed once more behind the wheel, and drove up to the front of the house, parking at an angle, half on the driveway, half off. The lights on the ground floor were burning, but the lights above were all out. A single fixture burned above the door.
She left the engine running and walked up the path, setting the slide lock on the hush puppy as she made her way to the door. This time, silence would be more important than volume. The light dug at her eyes, killing off the last vestiges of her night vision. There was no peephole on the door, which was a marginal surprise, and no cameras posted above or around, which was not. Chace tried not to think about the men with the room-brooms on watch inside.
She knocked firmly, twice.
She raised the hush puppy in both hands, and waited.
The door rattled, parted, and she saw a slice of a man’s face. She fired, stepping forward and shoving the door, and managed to catch him before he hit the floor. It struck her that he looked awfully young, and for a moment she was afraid she’d made a mistake and had the terrifying but fleeting fear that she’d done all this work only to enter the wrong house. But as she laid the body down on the carpet, beside the rows of shoes left by their owners, she saw the MP-5K resting on the sideboard.
Chace shut the door quietly, working the slide on the hush puppy and removing the empty casing, tucking it into her pants. She’d dumped the spent shells from the garage at the cemetery, so they wouldn’t collide and ring in her pocket. Then she slipped the hush puppy back into her jacket and brought out the knife at her back.
She listened, and for several seconds didn’t hear anything.
Then she heard distant waves rolling onto a shore.
She followed the sound, taking each step as its own movement, keeping her progress deliberate. A stairway ran to the second floor, carpeted, but she ignored it for the moment, pressing forward. The sound of waves disappeared, replaced by a man’s voice, speaking Russian, and she could make out enough to know she was hearing commentary to a football match. A second voice joined the first, and then both laughed.
She came off the hallway, through an open archway, into a kitchen, the sound of the television growing gently louder. She passed the light switch as she entered, and threw it, turning the room dark. A dining room opened up in front of her with a view of the backyard, a semidarkened hallway to her left. She took the hallway, still moving
