Before either man couldprotest, Gwynn tucked her pad and pen back into her bag and headedeast on Sixteenth. At the top of the stairs to the church, shechecked her watch and sighed. It had been eighteen minutes since Anyasprinted from the scene. She could’ve been three miles away on footby then, and God only knew how far she could be if she’d stolen abike or a car.
Gwynn pulled her cellphone from her bag and dialed her boss’s number, but she couldn’tgarner the strength to press the send button. Still torn, she shovedthe phone back into her bag and pulled open the old oak doors to thechurch. Inside, a smattering of parishioners milled about, some ofthem praying while others whispered to each other. The massive churchwould take a team of agents hours to adequately search, but thepolice officer hadn’t said Anya was hiding in the church. He saidshe’d escaped out the back. If out the back was, indeed, where Anyahad gone, then there was no place Gwynn would rather be. Wasting timesearching a massive church would only give the former SVR assassinmore time to vanish.
The courtyard behindthe church was massive on a scale Gwynn had not imagined possible inManhattan. Other than Central Park, open-landscaped real estate wasalmost unheard of. The southern edge of the courtyard was walled bynumerous shops with signs threatening anyone who dared trespass. IfGwynn didn’t find her favorite Russian before Washington, D.C.found out she was missing, trespassing would be the least of herconcerns. Homelessness and prosecution would claim the top two spotson that list.
Trying to think like anassassin, she scoured the area, hoping against hope that Anya wasonly hiding from the NYPD and not running from the JusticeDepartment. She concluded that hiding, even doing so in a courtyardof this magnitude, would be a terrible plan in case the policecontinued their search for the mysterious leg breaker. At that point,searching the courtyard became a search for exits from the courtyard.
All of the shops couldserve as an escape route if the doors weren’t securely locked. Anyalikely didn’t have a set of lockpicks in her pocket, so she’dhave to rely on the absentmindedness of a shopkeeper to make use ofone of the back doors. Gwynn ran along the row of shops, pulling onevery door, but none budged.
A gazebo, with acollection of smokers huddled beneath, rested on the only high groundin the courtyard. Gwynn trotted toward the structure, leapt to therail, and propelled herself onto the roof. The height gave her tenfeet of advantage over the ground, so she scanned the area in alldirections. There was no exit from the space except through itssurrounding building. Gwynn stood exasperated on the roof of thegazebo as the collection of smoke-filled onlookers beneath firedquestions and curses toward the crazy woman on top of their shelter.
Resigned to press sendon her cell phone, Gwynn let her legs hang over the edge and sat onthe sloping, octagonal roof. With her phone in hand, she cast onefinal look around the courtyard and caught a glimpse of somethingthat didn’t quite fit its surroundings. She pocketed the phone andslid from the roof, landing like a cat beside a filthy cigarette buttcan. The thirty-second sprint that delivered her to the site of whatshe’d seen from her previous perch felt like it took hours. Finallystanding at the base of a tree six feet from the low-roofed shops,she gazed upward at the broken tree limb with its splintered joint atthe trunk, glaring white from the interior wood that had never seenthe sun.
Imagining where thelimb would’ve reached before being broken, she drew a line with hereyes to the edge of the roof over the shop. The gutter was bent intoitself as if the knee of a fleeing Russian had landed there onlyminutes before. She scampered up the tree to the next higher limb andmade her way to its limit toward the shop. With a powerful lunge, shelaunched herself through the air and performed a perfectparachute-landing fall on the metal roof, just as she’d been taughtat the Academy. Back on her feet, she ran to the front edge andpeered downward onto the sidewalk some fifteen feet below. Not evenAnya was crazy enough to attempt that fall. Broken ankles have a wayof becoming the premature ending of an escape. Glances left and rightprovided the answer she’d been seeking. A construction scaffold wassecured to the roofline fifty feet away. Gwynn covered the distancebefore she’d realized she was moving. Seconds later, she was on thesidewalk in a crowd of ecstatic tourists and disgruntled New Yorkers.If the courtyard and church were too large to search efficiently, theborough of Manhattan might as well have been the surface of the moon.The Russian was a ghost—a spirit on the wind—and forever gone.
Instead of dialingAgent White, Gwynn redialed the last call made from her phone, andthe car appeared in minutes.
The driver stepped fromthe car and held open her door. “How did you get all the way overhere?”
“It’s a longstory.”
The driver closed thedoor and took his place behind the wheel. “And where’s yourfriend?”
“That’s an evenlonger story. Just take me back to the apartment, please.”
They pulled from thecurb and crawled along with the snail’s-pace traffic.
The driver checked themirror. “You missed all the excitement outside Barney’s.Apparently, there was a guy who stole a kid or whatever. I couldn’tsee it all from where I was sitting, but somebody said a dude ran outof the crowd and kicked the guy’s ass. The kid is okay, but theycarried the dude out in an ambulance. Can you believe that?”
“Yeah, I can believealmost anything in New York City.”
The driver huffed. “Youcan say that again, lady.”
Throughout the rideback to Times Square, Gwynn eyed her phone as if it were her ticketinto Hell. Perhaps it was, but the longer she waited, the worse therepercussions would be.
Soon, the massivestories-tall electronic billboards filled the windshield, and Gwynnstepped from the car and climbed the stairs into the building whereshe’d likely never again sleep down the hall from her partner andfriend.
16
SOBYTIYECHERNOGO GALSTUKA
(BLACK TIE)
After practicing theconversation a dozen times, Special
