Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters (5 page)

Another American recovered and joined the tattooed half-breed. He was a mess, covered in food, probably from some tray of hors-d’oeuvres he’d fallen on. He grinned like a timber wolf though, and Karin soon recognized him through the shrimp cocktail sauce as he translated for his agent.

“
A goat is eating up a wolf
. Or something like that. My colloquial Russian is rusty.”

His Russian was fine. Indeed, it was exceptional.

Donald Trinder.

So it was OSCAR then. Not the FBI or Echelon. If the FBI had come for her, Trinder would have been some anonymous bureaucrat in an off-the-rack suit. Were this an Echelon op, she would likely have been disappeared well out of public view. But the presence of Trinder confirmed her first suspicion.

Clearance. Much worse than the feebs. Not quite as bad as falling into the web of Echelon’s dark Spider-Queen Caitlin Monroe. The Clearance agent ordered her to drop the weapon, by which Karin imagined she meant the katana she still held. She’d all but forgotten it, as though it had grown from the end of her arm many years before.

One of the operators from Final Solutions was back on his feet, and looking as though he’d woken up in the wrong bed. She could almost feel his confusion.

No. She actually could feel it when she looked at him. His name was Tony Keel. An Englishman, ex Royal Marine. He looked to her for orders, for clarification. His supervisor, Clarissa van der Hoeff, was of no use. Most of her body lay facedown near the rear window where the
monstr
had forced its entry. But now Keel was just as confused and unsettled by the arrival and threats of Trinder as he was by…

Pr’chutt un Theshrendum un Qwm
.

Karin wondered what Keel would do if she barked a command at him to shoot them all down, and part of her knew he would do exactly as he was told. However, there were so many firearms pointed at her now that any sudden movements or noises would serve only to get her killed.

“It’s okay, Tony,” she smiled, dismissing him.

Trinder repeated the order for her to lay down the sword, pointedly addressing Karin by her military rank when he did so. She looked into his eyes and understood that he wanted her to resist, to try and escape. She carefully lowered the gore-covered weapon to the ruined floor and took a few steps away from it. At this point in an American movie, as her would-be captors relaxed just fractionally, she would produce two guns from somewhere within her cocktail dress and unload a scarcely credible amount of automatic fire upon them.

But all she was armed with now were her wits, and they had been dulled by the events of the last few minutes. She raised her hands and stepped back from the Nagayuki katana. Trinder ordered one of the tactical operators forward to secure it. The operator looked as though he was about to kick the ancient weapon to one side, and she wondered whether he might inadvertently toe it back within her reach. Again, in a movie she would perform some trick, nimbly kicking the sword into the air and carving a path to freedom through the growing ranks of heavily armed men and women.

In the real world she carefully took another step back away from the man and the weapon.

“Just pick it up,” Trinder said.

The man did and then screamed as his arm fell off, blood fountaining out under pressure.

Karin was as stunned as anyone. Her double take would have been comical had she been able to see her own face. But she could see the faces of the Americans, a horrified tableau of shock, incomprehension and sudden animal fear. The man had screamed more in surprise and violation than pain, she thought, and the idea was not distant and abstract. It was intimate, and again she realized that she
knew
his feelings, not by guess or intuition, but much more intimately. As though shared between them on some unknown level.

The connection dropped out as the man fainted, blood still gushing from the clean-cut stump of his severed forearm.

And just as she had felt his fright and horrified amazement, she now felt the surging flood of raw emotion from the others in the room, much of it swirling and churning in panic and disorientation, but not all. She tasted hot and bitter iron in her mouth, felt acid roiling in her stomach, and her hands balling into fists. But these sensations were not hers, they radiated, like a burning heat, from Trinder, and Karin Varatchevsky began to fall to her left long before she understood that her fists were not clenching—that was the feeling of Trinder’s hands closing around the stock of his shotgun and his index finger squeezing the trigger.

She did not need to look at the muzzle to know he had it lined up on the center of her chest. She did not have to tell herself to dive out of the line of fire. Time stretched as it will in these moments—the body turbo-charging itself, the senses accelerating, everything outside the warm and cozy world of subjective existence slowing to half speed, and then slowing even more.

The dark, black hole of the shotgun muzzle turned white with the contained explosion of super-heated gases and the swarm of deadly tungsten pellets that rode within it. Karin felt hot claws raking at her shoulder and upper arm. Her cheek and one ear stung wickedly. But she was still moving, still breathing, still diving when Trinder racked the slide and pulled on the trigger a second time. She was moving so quickly that the second shell spat its contents through empty air, save for one pellet which she felt as a distinct puncture in her left calf.

Karin landed in a judo roll. The most basic of the break falls she had first learned in gymnastics class, and then practiced an unknowable number of times in the training halls of the GRU. She had dived, without thinking, toward the katana, which lay next to the severed arm. This was another maneuver practiced again and again in her childhood—diving and rolling on ribbons and batons in the gymnasium—and then with even greater focus and intent as a young woman in training, when Spetsnaz instructors dropped knives and guns on hard concrete floors, barking at her to pick them up mid-roll, and kicking her when she failed.

She did not fail now, gathering the katana, diving and rolling again to pick up the long, lacquered scabbard, and coming up out of the second roll, partly shielded by the bulk of the dead Threshrend. Shotgun pellets ground against torn meat in her shoulder. She expected her injured leg to shriek and possibly even collapse under her weight as she prepared herself to override the body’s natural mechanisms. But Karin found her feet without stumbling. In fact, the pain in her leg and shoulders was fading so quickly she wondered whether she had imagined it.

There was no imagining what happened next though. Karin Varatchevsky lived it and then relived it repeatedly for the next few days, trying to understand the inexplicable.

She took off at a sprint, not thinking, just giving herself over to the flight reaction of her oldest, most primal instincts. There could be no fighting this enemy, and not this many of them. She was overmatched, outgunned, unarmed save for the edged metal artifact she had dived for without conscious thought. Her way clear stood open as it had before; a dash to the rear fire escape. She was aware that Trinder would have more agents closing off that avenue down on the street, but it was marginally more open than any path she might try to cut through the Americans up here.

As she started to run she remembered her feet, now bare, and then ignored the pain as she trod on a broken wineglass. The glass crunched underfoot, jagged slivers sliding into her flesh, oddly painless after the initial sting. Annoying, like a stone in a shoe, but nothing worse.

The Americans opened up, but their fire seemed lazy, as though the shooters were half asleep and reacting slowly. She had the unmistakable impression of the fire falling behind her, as though she were a bird, a fast one, and the hunter had forgotten to lead the shot. Her back muscles tensed, as she expected to be shredded by gunfire at any moment. But she made the corner where a small corridor led away to the catering kitchen. Leaping over the body of Clarissa van der Hoeff, she landed on the balls of her bare feet, clutching the sword and sheath as bullets cracked past behind her.

Karin ran down the narrow hallway, dodging around a waitress cowering against the wall, and a slow-moving man in a suit emerging from the kitchen. A very slow-moving man. His face was a droll study in surprise when he saw her, but everything on it, the widening O of his mouth, the eyebrows climbing his forehead, they all moved with studied lack of haste. It was like watching a video on half speed, except that she was in the video and running in fast forward.

The man, another Federal agent, had been advancing with a pistol in a two-handed grip, but pointed down at the floor. He was raising the weapon now, but with no more speed than his sluggish facial reactions suggested. Karin dodged to her left, using the hard scabbard to sweep aside his nearest arm. She felt his bones break. Both of them, radius and ulna. The dull shock on his face as it drained of color spread no more quickly than his previous expression. She hip-checked him on the way past and he crashed into the wall and then she knew…

The world had not slowed down.

She had sped up.

###

The kitchenette was empty and remained in good order compared to the turmoil out in the gallery. A tray of braised Sardinian lamb rib sliders stood ready to be distributed. The microwave was beeping incessantly, but not slowly, she noted as she reseated the katana in its scabbard. She had no time to ponder the weirdness piling upon the madness of the night. A gun fired and plaster dust fell on her head. She knew without looking that the agent she’d knocked aside and injured was shooting at her. Badly. But all he needed was one lucky shot. She knew because…he knew this.

Karin had set herself to shoulder through the door onto the fire escape, but it was open already, probably to let out the heat of the tiny kitchen, and allow the two chefs to sneak out for a smoke. They were nowhere to be seen now.

A bullet struck the brushed metal door of the fridge, sounding like a hammer on a hollow anvil. She charged through the fire escape, ready to run through anyone out there, but the old metal stairs were empty. They were also hard on her bare feet, but not nearly as hard as they should have been, she thought, as she hammered down them.

The alley flashed and roared with gunfire, but as before it was strangely slow and sporadic. And just as poorly aimed. Trusting her instincts, Karin vaulted the safety rail while she was still ten or twelve feet up from the ground. As she dropped through the warm air she told herself it was no different from the ten thousand dismounts she’d performed as a child. She also imagined herself coming down poorly, a slightly turned foot landing badly and her ankles shattering in a terrible, crippling eruption of broken bone and torn skin.

She landed perfectly, the sword still in her left hand.

There were two cars in the laneway, identical black SUVs.

She
felt
Trinder’s agents lock in on her. Felt their confusion and lack of clear intent as a real, subjective truth. Like her own hunger. She was suddenly, wildly, ravenously hungry. She hadn’t eaten much before the opening. The cut of the Stella McCartney dress she had ruined left no room—not even for a single cocktail onion.

A crazed, irrational part of her wanted to fly back up the fire escape and into the kitchen to scoop up a double handful of those braised rib sliders. It seemed almost as important as dodging these
pindosi
of Trinder’s.

Almost as important, but not quite.

“Federal agents!” they yelled. They always did.

And again she perceived their resolve hardening, their bewilderment dissipating. But she could still taste that underlying confusion, actually feel it somewhere inside her. It had weight. It had mass, and…possibilities. It was a real thing and the more she thought about it, the greater its weight felt to her. The more too, she believed she could pick up whatever this feeling was and wield it like a sword.

She launched herself forward, drawing the katana. It was just like before, when she could feel Trinder’s need to pull that trigger on her. Feel his murderous intent as if the hands holding that shotgun were hers. She had that same feeling now, coming from one of the Americans ahead of her. A woman. She stood out in the dark like a glowing ember in a hearth at the end of the night. Where her comrades were undone by their lack of will, by their confusion and even their fear, this one had a will of iron and she was exercising it right now.

Karin leaped to her right a fraction of a second before the woman pulled the trigger on her handgun, rapidly pumping out three shots. When she had avoided the woman whose single-mindedness burned with dull heat, she moved towards the weakest link in the cordon standing between her and freedom. A police officer, in uniform, panicking like a child who has jumped into a pool and found there is nothing beneath his feet but cold and inky depths.

Raising the katana for a one-handed stroke which would open him from shoulder to belly, she bellowed her
kiai
, which had the effect—she was actually aware of it—of completely paralyzing the man. Karin Varatchevsky did not kill him. She spared his life out of consideration for herself. She had not yet killed any of the Americans and putting one down at this point would do nothing to aid her. It would merely guarantee a more determined response by their security services and needlessly complicate any negotiations for her eventual exchange, should they indeed capture her. Instead of executing the killing stroke she drove a knee into the man as she sped past him. And speed past she did. Karin knew now that she moved with animal swiftness and, although the source of her speed remained a mystery to her, she was resolved to use it to the fullest advantage.

The police officer doubled over. All of the air rushed out of him with a loud
oof
, and he started to collapse. Karin shoved him into the next man along. A Clearance agent most likely, given his suit and body armor. The cop’s feet left the road surface as he flew into the agent and the tangle of their bodies and limbs as they crashed together created enough confusion and cover for her to leap—yes, actually
leap
—over the nearest SUV, surprising even herself.