Gone Tomorrow

‘Partially.’

‘Does he know you’ve got it?’

‘I haven’t got it. But I know where it is.’

‘Does he know that?’

I nodded.

Lee said, ‘So you made a bargain with him. Get me and Docherty and Jacob Mark out of trouble, and you’ll lead him to it.’

‘The bargain was designed to get myself out of trouble, first and foremost.’

‘Didn’t work for you. You’re still on the hook with the feds.’

‘It worked for me as far as the NYPD is concerned.’

‘And it worked for the rest of us all around. For which I thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

She asked, ‘How are the Hoths pla

‘I don’t think they are. I think that option disappeared a few days ago. I think they expected things to go more smoothly than they have. Now it’s about finishing the job, do or die.’

‘Like a suicide mission?’

‘That’s what they’re good at.’

‘Which makes it worse for you.’

‘If they like suicide, I’m happy to help.’

Lee moved on the bed and the tail of her shirt got trapped underneath her and the silk pulled tight over the shape of the gun on her hip. A Glock 17, I figured, in a pancake holster.

I asked her, ‘Who knows you’re here?’

‘Docherty,’ she said.

‘When is he expecting you back?’

‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

I said nothing.

She said, ‘What do you want to do right now?

‘Honest answer?

‘Please.’

‘I want to unbutton your shirt.’

‘You say that to a lot of police officers?’

‘I used to. Police officers were all the people I knew.’

‘Danger makes you horny?’

‘Women make me horny.’

‘All women?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not all women.’

She was quiet for a long moment and then she said, ‘Not a good idea.’

I said, ‘OK.’

‘You’re taking no for an answer?’

‘Aren’t I supposed to?’

She was quiet for another long moment and then she said, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘About what?’

‘About it not being a good idea.’

‘Excellent.’

‘But I worked Vice for a year. Entrapment stings. We needed proof that the guy had a reasonable expectation of what he thought he was going to get. So we made him take his shirt off first. As proof of intent.’

‘I could do that,’ I said.

‘I think you should.’

‘You going to arrest me?’

‘No.’

I peeled my new T-shirt off. Tossed it across the room. It landed on the table. Lee spent a moment staring at my scar, the same way Susan Mark had on the train. The awful raised tracery of stitches from the shrapnel from the truck bomb at the Beirut barracks. I let her look for a minute and then I said, ‘Your turn. With the shirt.’

She said, ‘I’m a traditional kind of girl.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You would have to kiss me first.’

‘I could do that,’ I said. And I did. Slowly and gently and a little tentatively at first, in a way that felt exploratory, and in a way that gave me time to savour the new month, the new taste, the new teeth, the new tongue. It was all good. Then we passed some kind of a threshold and got into it harder. A short minute later we were completely out of control.

Afterwards she showered, and then I showered. She dressed, and I dressed. She kissed me one more time, and told me to call her if I needed her, and wished me luck, and walked out through the door. She left the black bag on the floor near the bathroom.

SEVENTY- ONE

I HEFTED THE BAG OVER To THE BED. ABOUT EIGHT POUNDS, I figured. It hit the rucked sheet and made a satisfying metallic sound. I unzipped it and parted the flaps like a mouth and looked inside.

First thing I saw was a file folder.

It was legal sized, and khaki in colour, and made of thick paper or thin card, depending on your point of view. It held twenty-one printed-out sheets. Immigration records, for twenty-one separate people. Two women, nineteen men. Citizens of Turkmenistan. They had entered the United States from Tajikistan three months ago. Linked itineraries. There were digital photographs and digital fingerprints, from the immigration booths at JFK. The photographs had a slight fish-eye distortion. They were in colour. I recognized Lila and Svetlana easily. And Leonid and his buddy. I didn’t know the other seventeen. Four of them already had exit notations. They were the four that had left. I dropped their sheets in the trash and laid out the unknown thirteen on the bed for a better look.

All thirteen faces looked bored and tired. Local flights, co

Then I turned back to the bag.

At the minimum I was hoping for a decent handgun. At best I was hoping for a short sub-machine gun. My point to Springfield about the baggy jacket was to make him see that I would have room to carry something under it, slung high on my chest on a shortened strap and then concealed by the excess fabric zipped over it. I had hoped he would get the message.

He had. He had gotten the message. He had come through in fine style.

Better than the minimum.

Better even than the best case.

He had given me a silenced short sub-machine gun. A Heckler amp; Koch MP5SD. The suppressed version of the classic MP5. No butt or stock. just a pistol grip, a trigger, a housing for a curved 30-round magazine, and then a six-inch barrel radically fattened by a double-layered silencer casing. Nine-millimetre, fast, accurate, and quiet. A fine weapon. It was fitted with a black nylon strap. The strap had already been tightened up and reduced in length to its practical minimum. As if Springfield was saying: I heard you, pal.

I laid the gun on the bed.

He had supplied ammunition, too. It was right there in the hag. A single curved magazine. Thirty rounds. Short and fat, shiny brass cases winking in the light, polished lead noses nearly as bright. None-millimetre Parabellums. From the Latin motto Si vis pacem para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. A wise saying. But thirty rounds was not a lot. Not against fifteen people. But New York City is not easy. Not for me, not for Springfield.

I lined up the magazine next to the gun.

Checked the bag again, in case there was more.

There wasn’t.

But there was a bonus of a kind.

A knife.

A Benchmade 3300. A black machined handle. An auto-opening mechanism. Illegal in all fifty states unless you were active-service military or law enforcement, which I wasn’t. I thumbed the release and the blade snicked out, fast and hard. A double-edged dagger with a spear point. Four inches long. I am no kind of a knife fetishist. I don’t have favourites. I don’t really like any of them. But if you asked me to rely on one for combat, I would pick something close to what Springfield had supplied. The automatic mechanism, the point, the two-edged blade. Ambidextrous, good for stabbing, good for slashing either coming or going.

I closed it up and put it on the bed next to the H amp;K.

There were two final items in the bag. A single leather glove, black, sized and shaped for a large man’s left hand. And a roll of black duct tape. I put them on the bed, in line with the gun and the magazine and the knife.