The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

Bo spoke to his guys in either Bosnian or Croat or Serbian. I had asked him one time which he spoke. He said everyone in his country spoke all three, sometimes at the same time. When he was done, he turned to brief me.

“All three are in the kitchen. They just brought food, so they’re eating together. No one is standing post.” He shook his head. “Stupid.”

“Did you see Harvey? Is he in there?”

“He is in a back room on the floor. I saw him through the window.”

“Is he alive?”

“I do not believe that three men with an arsenal would be guarding a corpse.”

The reference to Harvey as a corpse was disturbing, but, as usual, he had a point. I had to calm down or at least find a way to cha

“What’s the plan?”

“We take them.”

I looked at Bo. “Take them how?”

“Shoot the guards. Find Harvey. Bring him out.”

Shoot. Find. Bring. It sounded so simple. “Why do we have to shoot them? Maybe we should just try to-”

“Hit them over the head and render them unconscious?”

I had been about to say “subdue them,” but that worked, too. I felt the ridiculousness of that idea, the complete, television-informed naïveté. But Bo didn’t treat me as ridiculous. It was one of the things I liked about him.

“To subdue them,” he said, “would require that we get close enough to be killed ourselves. Or it might give them the chance to kill Harvey before we can get to him.”

“But we don’t even know who they are or why they took him. What if they’re, I don’t know, police? Or some other good guys?”

“They are not the good guys. This much I know.” He angled his head and studied me. “You have killed before, killed with your hands.”

“The only person I ever killed was trying hard to kill me back.”

He nodded sagely. “Then you will have no problem. These men will kill you if you do not kill them first.”

“I think I have to know that for sure, Bo. I think we have to give them a warning.”

He sighed deeply. I knew he was the expert, but I didn’t want him to count on me to shoot a man in cold blood if I didn’t think I could.

“We will give them a chance,” he said. “It will be up to them. Only if they shoot at us will we shoot back.”

“Yeah, but you have to tell them they have a choice.”

“Don’t worry.” He turned and said something to Timon and Radik. Of course, he could have been saying, “Bust in and blow their fucking heads off,” for all I knew. I didn’t know what else to do. The situation was what it was.

He laid out his plan, first in English for me, then for the guys in back. It didn’t seem to take as much explaining for them.

“What about the noise?” I said. “There are people in these other buildings.”

“The police will not show up in this neighborhood unless called, and no one will call them over a few gunshots.”

He reached back, and Radik passed him a black gym bag. I could tell it was the weapons bag from the heavy, metallic clank it made when Bo set it on the seat between us. He unzipped it, plunged in, and came out with what I knew were a couple of clean semiautomatics with suppressors. He offered them both to me. One was a Glock 30, like mine. I took it.

“Be sure to give it back,” he said. “Don’t take it home.”

“What about stray shots?” I looked through the windshield up and down the street. We were in a neighborhood. A very bad one, but a neighborhood nonetheless. Our target was in the middle of the block. The house on one side looked like a boarded-up crack den, but there were lights on in the one on the other side. “We could kill someone in the next house over if we’re not careful.”

“We must shoot them before they can return fire. You are a good shot. You will not miss. Aim for the-”

“Center of mass.” I knew that. I knew how to kill a paper target.

He waited for me to think up still more objections. I couldn’t, so I took a breath, adjusted my vest, and gave him the nod. We did a quick radio check. Then the four of us got out and started toward the house. I split off and went toward the back, where I was supposed to watch through the window and make sure they were in the kitchen where Bo’s reco

I slipped around and started creeping along the side of the house. I had to go slowly, because it was so dark and I didn’t dare risk using the flashlight. The stink of garbage wafted up as I maneuvered around the trash cans. Where there was garbage there were rats, so I tried to prepare myself for any unexpected movement at foot level. I got to the backyard and cruised along the fence line until I got as far in as the crumbling brick planter Bo had told me about. It marked the far boundary of a cracked and pocked patio, which meant it wasn’t too far out from the back of the house. I had to be careful. I moved in behind it and made myself as small as I could. Then I peeked over the top to look through the back window.

The blinds were closed. Damn. They must have just closed them.

“Blinds closed,” I whispered into the radio. “Moving closer. Hold on.”

I turned the radio down and crawled on my belly back to the fence and toward the house. When I got there, I flattened against the back wall. As I inched toward the window, I could hear them. There were two distinct voices. They were speaking something besides English. It sounded Slavic and guttural. There was a sliver of space between the sill and the lowest blind. I crept close enough to get my eyeball to the window to look inside the house.

There were two in the kitchen, not three. The one closest to me was balding. He wore the long and greasy strands of his remaining hair in a mutant ponytail that sat too high on the back of his head. The bigger man had on a black Judas Priest T-shirt. He was Bo-sized, if not larger. He was talking on his cell phone, holding the tiny silver device against his massive head. Bo had declared him the priority. I could see why.

I crept back to the cover of the crumbling wall, turned up the radio, and gave my report. “Two in the kitchen in the back. Repeat…only two in the kitchen. No sign of number three.”

“Positions?”

“Ponytail is standing…leaning against the sink with his back to the window…facing the inside doorway. Judas Priest is sitting at the table…back to the inside doorway…talking on a cell phone. Both have their hands occupied with pizza, beer, cigarette, or phone. No third man. Repeat, no third man in the kitchen. Over.”

Bo came back. “Third in the front room watching the door and the television. I will take care of this one. On my signal…”

I waited. The next thing I would hear would be the go sign. When it came, it was a short but ferocious burst over the radio that must have been something like Go! Go! Go! in Bosnian.

The shouting started almost instantly. Then came the shooting. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear. I knew when the bad guys were firing, because all our weapons had suppressors. The blinds crashed back against the window. It must have been Ponytail. Whoever it was, when he fell, he pulled the blinds down with him. From my position, it was like a curtain rising.

Judas Priest was hunkered down beside the refrigerator, clutching what looked like some kind of fully automatic, magazine-fed assault rifle. Timon and Radik were firing from outside the kitchen door. They had him pi