Gun Metal Heart (34 page)

“I speak to you from the U.S. embassy, from which General Cathcart controlled this humanitarian nightmare. I could not stand by and watch the slaughter of government officials, of women and children on Serbian streets. I stood up. I am an old man, but I stood up!”

Antic waved to his entourage in the background.

“These people have stood up. They are Serbian. They are Bosnian. They are Croatian. They stood up. They are Catholic and Muslim and Eastern Orthodox. And they stood up!

“American occupation of Afghanistan went unanswered by the world. American occupation of Iraq went unanswered. American aggression in Libya and Egypt and Syria went unanswered. So now the Americans turn to the former Yugoslavia. But we stand up. We cannot—”

“Hi! Hello! Hey!”

An American jumped up next to Antic, standing shoulder to shoulder—although much taller. The old man was startled. The camera operators weren't sure how to react, so they kept shooting.

It took the professor a second to realize it was John Broom.

John faced the camera but spoke to Antic. “I'm CIA. I used to be. I'm ex-CIA. Tell them, sir. Please.”

“What?”

“Talk to the people. Tell them!”

Antic's plan to frame the Americans, and to lure General Cathcart to the scene of the crime, had worked brilliantly. Now the rash young American, the one he'd met in Sarajevo, had stepped in. But not to stop the plan; the young fool was adding to it! Antic realized that John didn't speak his language. The idiot thought he was helping.

“This man is CIA!” the professor told the live audience. “He said so! He just admitted as such! The CIA and the U.S. Army, both here! Proof!”

“Thank you!” John hugged the old man—actually hugged him! He spoke in rushed English. He held up a cell phone.

“YouTube!” he shouted into the microphones hooked to the cameras. “YouTube! Twitter! This is trending. You understand? Trending?”

The rigger, on his knees by the production controls, knew enough English to realize John wasn't acting the fool. He drew a smartphone and accessed his YouTube account.

*   *   *

Daria had been trained by the best spy agencies in the world. And before that, she'd been raised as a child into the world of espionage. Consequently, she was proud of her many amazing abilities.

Not the least of which was her skill at running in stilettos.

As the tall blonde reached the gutted hulk of the Chinese embassy, Daria admitted she was no slouch either.

Daria slammed after Viorica. Her lungs began to burn and she could feel the stress in her legs. A year ago, she could have done this fight-and-flight festival without a noteworthy change in her beats per minute. But that had been before the damned superflu.

She pumped her arms and doubled down and sprinted after the mercenary.

*   *   *

Above the fight, the Hotspur and Mercutio drones waited five minutes for their next orders. The Hotspurs soared in circles; the Mercutios hovered.

At the five-minute mark, when no further orders were received from their controllers—in the silver van, across the river in the American Citadel truck and trailer, or from Idaho—the drones reverted to the previous order.

All three shooters and all six spotters turned their attention to finding the last declared target: Daria Gibron.

 

Forty-Four

Viorica made it to a vertical rupture in the ground floor of the Chinese embassy and ducked inside. The bright, low floodlights created harsh, theatrical light outside but made the interior obsidian black. She made it to the craggy gap in the wall and disappeared as utterly as if she'd been teleported aboard a spaceship.

It took her a moment to adjust from the harsh glare of the street-level floodlights to the gloom of the Chinese embassy. The building wasn't terribly wide, maybe only forty yards front to back, but it stretched the whole block. The ragged egress she'd spotted from the cab of her team's van was at the narrow northern end of the ruptured structure.

Once her eyes adjusted she realized that the interior was lit from without by the floodlights, through cracks and holes in the masonry, and from within by burn barrels. She spotted two of them as her eyes dilated. Human forms hovered around them, some standing, some sitting. She heard music: American rap. Her eyes adjusted. The people were young, scruffy, and stick thin.

Viorica thought she must have looked like a hallucination to them, in her tight leather tunic and skirt, her stilettos, and her doctor's bag.

She said, “Hello!” in Serbian.

A few shuffled forward. One was a young girl with stringy dirt-blond hair and sunken cheeks. Viorica noted the glowing Sterno stoves at their feet and the discarded plastic water bottles.

She set down the doctor's bag on the overturned skeleton of a shopping cart. She undid her wide leather belt and began undoing the stiff tunic.

One of the youths drew a box cutter from jeans that barely hung from his bony hips. “Who are you?”

Viorica dropped the tunic to the filthy, cracked floor. She wore a black silk camisole. “I'm from the Temperance League,” she said. “Just say no to drugs.”

She drew her Glock and shot the stoned girl in the heart.

*   *   *

Daria dodged as she heard the shot. She was still twenty paces from the gutted building. Some part of her reptilian brain told her she wasn't under fire, so she motored on.

She heard the whir of the hummingbirds coming from behind her; this far from the avenue traffic, she could distinguish their sound. One over her left shoulder; then a second over her right.

She hadn't heard any more explosions from Parliament.

She thought,
Uh oh,
and sped up.

She hit the tall V-shaped gap in the building wall and leaped through, then immediately juked to her left. She crouched, eyes useless.

She expected to be shot at. She expected the drones to home in on her. She expected a physical assault.

She did not expect her lungs to seize and her hands to begin shaking, blood pressure spiking, knees buckling.

It was the same panic attack she'd felt at the Florentine hotel.

… girl, soldiers, bombs, blood. Debris crushing ribs. Sounds: her own ragged breathing, diggers begging for help. Tastes: dirt and blood and adrenaline. Smells: charred flesh and plastique. Images: pitch-black eyes, pianist's fingers with cracked nails, lips pleading, apologizing, silent.

Her nightmares. The howling, haunting specter of all her fears, came to the fore.

She squeezed both fists against her temples. She shut her eyes tight, willed her breathing to calm down.

She crouched, tight and low amid the shadows.

She remembered where she was. She willed herself to calm down. It was like being dunked deep in a body of water, then needing to figure out which way was up.

The old fears were nowhere nearly as buried as she often hoped.

Combine that with her winded state, and she was in trouble. Viorica had been running like an Olympian. Daria's knees twitched and her lungs still heaved. It was the remnants of Asher Sahar's superflu.

… her Asher. Her childhood Asher. Whom Viorica knew …

Daria had warned Diego, back in Caladri, that she wasn't 100 percent.

Oh, she was close, to be sure. Eighty percent of normal? Eighty-five? Still more than a match for a lot of foes. But against someone like Viorica?

The calculus of chaos rarely favors the foolish.

She stood. Darkness receded. She saw shafts of harsh white light through punched-out holes in the wall. She saw two burn barrels. She saw nobody else. She could smell fresh cigarette and marijuana smoke. Others had been here, frightened off when Viorica fired that single shot, doubtless. Fired at … what?

As her eyes adjusted, she caught sight of the body. It was a girl, on her back, chest wound glistening in the glow of the fires in the rusted barrels. Her eyes were open. She lay spread-eagled. Lying next to her were a supple leather tunic and belt, plus a pair of four-inch Louboutin heels, the soles devil red. The dead girl was barefoot.

So much for chasing a lass in stilettos
, Daria thought.
My luck's rarely that good
.

She looked around. The first floor of the old embassy was a shambles. The floor had buckled in several places. One of the second-story walkways had snapped under the impact of the American's JDAM missiles, all those years ago. The northern half of the walkway had slammed into the ground floor, creating a sort of ramp to the second floor. Daria caught sight of marks on the canted surface, where dust and debris had been swept away.

She turned in a full circle, eyes up. A decent gun with a full magazine would have been a boon. But here and now, that was like wishing for a pony.

Daria could see holes in the ceiling, glimpses of the second floor. If Viorica chose to fire from up there she'd be a—what was the Americanism?
Shooting goose?

She doffed the hoodie; lilac, it glowed in the horizontal shafts of smoky light from the floods outside. The racer-back jog top was black. Better for skulking.

Daria studied the floor around the burn barrels. Several discarded water bottles, some still with water; others with a gooey brown-and-white sludge. She saw packages of cold pills, a dozen boxes still shrink-wrapped together, the tops of three boxes ripped open. A few pills had spilled to the filthy cement, lying amid the cigarette butts, used condoms, fire-blackened soup spoons, and hypodermic needles. She spotted a grease-stained cardboard box containing drain cleaner, camp stove fuel, batteries, and a red metal can of starter fluid. Also, one of those instant cold packs one buys for a sprained wrist or a backache.

Daria looked at her hands. The shaking was obvious. And not just from the flash image of her lifelong nightmares.

She knelt in the shadow of a burn barrel, grabbed a bottle of water, sniffed it first, and gulped some. It was warm and stale. She poured out the rest on the floor, then emptied two more bottles. She began adding ingredients from the cardboard box.

She studied the instant cold pack. It was a good source of ammonium nitrate.
Clever young felons,
she thought.

The so-called
shake-and-bake
school of producing methamphetamine had been known by soldiers throughout the world for years. It had obvious downsides. One—drug abuse—was obvious. The other less so, unless you knew what you were doing.

She smashed a handful of the cold pills, using the cracked half moon of a tea saucer as a mortar and the handle of the straight razor as a pestle. In the flickering darkness, she guessed about the quantities. But last time she'd done this had been under the plummeting glare of Fajr-3 rockets in Lebanon. She'd guessed then, too.

She filled three bottles with the nasty potion, carefully screwing on two of the caps and tightening them down, really tightening them, until her muscles strained. She couldn't afford any additional oxygen seeping into the bottles.

She paused, still on her haunches, checked the crumbling ceiling one last time, then gulped from the third bottle.

She winced. It was horrid. She fought back her gag reflex.

In low dosages, meth can increase energy levels, alertness, and concentration. The effects are fleeting. The damage to the nervous system is a real threat.

She squeezed her eyes shut, willed herself not to vomit.

She sealed the third bottle and stuffed all three in her backpack. There wasn't room for everything, so she threw away the sunglasses she'd been given by the Australian tourist.

Daria grinned, exposing her canines.

She grabbed her cutthroat razor, the blade enclosed in the steel handle, and leaped up, jumping onto the half-felled walkway and scrambling up to the second floor, using both her boots and her hands.

 

Forty-Five

Viorica's borrowed Chuck Taylor All Stars were red canvas and lacked laces. They looked silly with the twelve-hundred-dollar slit-leather skirt and nine-hundred-dollar satin camisole. She could forgive Daria Gibron for screwing with her scheme. But ruining her ensemble?

The situation had grown more complicated but not unmanageable. Daria appeared to have killed or wounded two of her oldest, most reliable associates. But Viorica had always had a utilitarian outlook on friends: don't use anyone you're not willing to lose.

It goes that way if you stay in the game. Everyone knows that.

Viorica harbored no burning hatred for Daria. Some annoyance, sure, but it was tempered by admiration. The Israeli was every bit as good as her reputation.

She remembered all the stories Asher Sahar had told her about the legendary wild child of the Shin Bet. She would be dishonest if she said she hadn't felt more than a bit of jealousy whenever Asher talked of Daria. No lovers could ever have quite the same bond as orphans who adopted each other on the streets to survive. Daria touched something vital in Asher that Viorica never could.

Now Viorica hoped to touch something vital in Daria. Any major artery would do.

The second story of the Chinese embassy was far riskier than the ground floor. It was structurally unsound, with fallen support beams, aging loops of dangling wires, and loose rubble everywhere.

Viorica had exceptional night vision, which was helpful as she snaked under a droopy air duct that looked like a giant's Slinky covered in metallic cloth. The air glistened in the remnants of the floodlights below. She hoped it was dust. More likely it was asbestos.

She found an exposed structural column; the sheet rock had been knocked off and exposed a crisscross of iron support grids.

Viorica loosened one of the twin straps on the doctor's bag and slid her weapon halfway in, as if it were holstered. The arced leather handle was wide enough that she could slide her hand through the loop, letting the heavy bag hang from her wrist. She slid a toe of one sneaker into the diamond-shaped cavity between the iron supports, reached up to grab another, and began hoisting herself up to the third floor.