Gun Metal Heart (35 page)

At this point her mission was simple: keep Daria Gibron distracted. Keep her away from the real mission: Professor Zoran Antic's televised call to arms back at the ambassador's residence.

That was the only place the Israeli could do any real damage.

*   *   *

The camera operator didn't speak English, and wasn't sure what John Broom was babbling about. But he held a smartphone toward the camera, and one of the operators shrugged and focused on it.

The man was a hired gun. Nobody paid him to make critical decisions.

The rigger had opened his own smartphone. He peered up at John Broom's phone, then turned back and used his thumbs to tap the controls. He scrolled through some YouTube feeds.

“—the cause of Slavic hegemony!” Zoran Antic was addressing the camera, as well as the audio operator with the long-handled boom mic. “This man kneeling here is American Army.”

He gestured to General Cathcart, who held his rapidly swelling knee in both hands.

“This man is CIA.” He gestured toward John, who, incongruously, winked at him. John understood little of the Bosnian polemic but got the initials
C. I.
and
A.

“You tell 'em, Prof. Keep 'em focused on me.”

Antic couldn't believe that the American idiot was being so helpful.

Behind the cameraman, the rigger's eyes bulged.

The broadcast was going out, and was being picked up around the globe. But on Twitter the hashtags were …

#Oldsoldier? #Crankydude?

#Yugoslobbering?

The old man was being made to look like an ancient, babbling idiot!

The rigger shot a glance at the grinning American. He understood.

“Wait!” he burst out, interrupting the professor. “Stop talking! Stop!”

The rigger went to his tool kit and drew a screwdriver. It was the only “weapon” he'd been able to get past the Marines and their metal detectors.

He advanced on John Broom.

But every eye in the room turned to a scuffle near the door. Two figures emerged. One was a uniformed Marine, at the top of a stairwell that likely led to a wine cellar. The man was on his knees, bleeding freely from a badly broken nose.

The other was Diego, sans cowboy hat, wrists cuffed behind his back. He had a splotch of blood on his forehead—from the Marine's broken nose, John figured.

Diego's wild hair flew as he dug his cowboy boots into the carpet and sprinted for the alcove with the TV cameras and lights.

The camera operator, confused, went with his role and kept filming.

The rigger held his screwdriver like a combat knife and advanced on John. Diego leaped and caught the guy in a midair cross-body block. Diego and the rigger smashed into the audio operator and the three men fell in a scrum.

Professor Antic surged forward, eyes on the cameraman. “Wait! Stop! The broadcast—”

The rigger rose first. Diego, cuffed, lay on the floor. The handle of the screwdriver emerged from his stomach, and blood began seeping around the wound.

Silent in his pain, Diego kicked out with one foot, his Spanish heel catching the rigger in the teeth. Blood and broken teeth gushed. The rigger toppled back, unconscious.

John fell to his knees, tearing off his new suit coat, and applied pressure to Diego's stomach wound.

Diego grit his teeth, tears running down his scarred, pocked cheeks.

To Zoran Antic's dismay, the camera operator caught the whole melee on live broadcast.

*   *   *

Daria clamored up to the second floor like a little kid going the wrong way up a playground slide. She spotted the truncated remnants of a support column, now no taller than she, and skittered behind it. As a desert dweller she'd always been proud of her visual acuity in the brightest sunlight. That skill was less handy in the old embassy. But her eyes were growing accustomed to the dark.

She recognized the meth rush—the blast of euphoria that swept away her fatigue and her aches. She knew it wouldn't last. It never did on the battlefield.

Daria rose and crossed quickly but cautiously down the blocklong floor. Once upon a time there had been offices up here. The walls between them had been cheaply made, and had crumbled under the assault of the American missiles. Stand in the right place and you could see the entire distance of the building to the rectangular hole that might have been an overpass to the next building a dozen-plus years ago. Daria could see city lights through the opening.

Big, round holes, two to three meters in diameter, dominated the ceiling and the floor. That's where the American missiles had cut through, back in the day.

She pivoted, never moving in a straight line, going from busted wall, to still-standing water pipe, to the remnants of a stairwell. Neither her knees nor her hands shook any longer, but her heart was racing abnormally fast. Aftereffects of the shot of meth she'd gulped.

A shot rang out.

A .45 bullet ripped through the stairwell drywall as if it were cheesecloth. Daria zipped back to the water pipe—not very wide, but tall and iron. She stood ramrod straight behind it, doffed the backpack, holding it by the shoulder strap. She took out one of the water bottles.

The shot had come from above, from the third floor.

“Viorica?”

A disembodied voice echoed from three directions. “Well, if I've learned anything from all this, it's that one person
can
make a difference!”

The psychotic was in full blossom
, Daria thought.

“Punkin? Did you kill Winslow and Danziger?”

Daria shook the water bottle very hard. She spoke to cover the noise. “Which ones are Winslow and Danziger?”

“Nerd in the van? Guy built like a bison?”

“Ah. Yes. Sorry.”

“No, no. Just doing your job.”

Daria let go of the backpack. She gripped the bottle and the bottle top, gingerly applying a hint of pressure. Then a hint more. She had secured the top well, and it held. She spied a largish hole in the ceiling leading to the third floor.

She saw dust filter down from the ceiling. Viorica was moving.

The bottle top gave a bit. Daria felt the soft plastic in her hand expand, as the tiniest gasp of air slipped into the bottle. The plastic started to grow warm.

Daria stepped out and underhanded the bottle upward, toward the hole in the ceiling.

A bullet snapped off the water pipe at face height. Sparks and rusty bits of shrapnel flew, temporarily blinding her. Daria fell straight down, making a tiny target, head between her knees, arm over her shoulder.

The water bottle arced through the hole, and the volatile methamphetamine within erupted in a caustic, white-hot fireball.

The ceiling reverberated. Dust and debris clattered. Something hard and heavy clipped Daria's hip on its way down. The floorboards under her sagged.

She waited. When she lifted her head, the vision in her right eye was fine. Her left eye was slick with blood. Shrapnel had dug into her skin in a parenthesis above, around, and under her left eye.

It had spared her eye, though.
Another day, another scar.

She listened to the clatter of falling debris realigning itself.

The lyrical voice rang out. “Holy freakin' fuck-balls!”

Daria wiped blood away from her eye. The wounds didn't hurt. Yet. She saw an exposed iron-grid support behind smashed drywall. It could double as a perfectly fine ladder. She sprinted for it and started climbing.

“Shake-and-bake meth!” Viorica laughed, high and brittle-bright. “No wonder crackheads stopped using that method! Get the ingredients cooking, add a little oxygen, and boom! You got a firebomb! And I left you on the ground floor with all the ingredients. Wotta ma-
roon
!”

Daria cleared the third floor, landing and rolling as fast as she could behind a little aluminum rectangle, four feet high. It took her a moment to recognize it as a water fountain.

Completely and hopelessly nonbulletproof. But beggars, choosers, and what have you.

She used her bare shoulder to wipe blood away from her left eye. She felt tiny flaps of facial skin rub against her shoulder. That was going to leave a scar. She peeked out from behind the water cooler.

Daria saw the leather skirt and long legs and ridiculous red canvas sneakers disappearing up a stairwell, headed to the fourth floor.

Daria gave chase.

A thought nagged at her: Why are we chasing? Why did Viorica run in here in the first place? Surely she's noticed I've not fired at her.

Was this all misdirection? Was Daria being led into a trap?

She couldn't be bothered to work it out just now. She started up the stairs, blade folded and in her fist.

Fully extended, the cutthroat razor made a lovely hand-to-hand weapon, because it increased her reach and because it was so sharp that even incidental contact drew blood. But it was useless as a throwing blade. The damn thing spun unpredictably, like a child's toy boomerang.

She drew the second of the three meth bottles out of her backpack, held it in two hands: one gripping the bottle, the other ready to release the cap and introduce air to the volatile mixture.

Many—perhaps most—of the risers and steps were broken or missing. Especially in the center. Daria had to stick to the wall, handrail pressed against her hip, and sidle slowly up. The stairs curved twice in forty-five-degree right twists. She rounded each quickly, body low. Nothing.

She got to the top.

The devastation here was much worse: you could see that the third floor had once been office space. But not so the fourth floor. Here was an expanse of utter desolation. No interior walls remained. No water pipes, no doors. It was just an open space, forty yards wide and a whole block long, filled with mounds of knee- to hip-high debris. The western wall was perforated with three vaguely round holes, six feet wide, each with a few standing bricks that looked like teeth in a screaming cadaverous maw.

The entire space was a jagged, meter-deep playground of downed walls and wires and cabinets and desks and ceiling joists and crossbeams and bits of shiny, concave shrapnel that might have been pieces of the missiles' fragmentation sleeves.

Up here, the light, which had entered the lower floors almost horizontally, shown in from below. Serbian dignity had insisted on nighttime spotlights hitting each round strike point. They cast weird, undulating shadows amid razor-sharp cones of light. They made Daria's depth perception falter.

She saw no way up to the remnants of the upper floors. But then again, the evidence before her suggested that the upper floors were right here, that they'd pancaked down to the fourth level when the missiles hit.

Viorica wasn't doing any more climbing.

She was somewhere on this floor.

 

Forty-Six

Viorica had studied ballet as a child, gymnastics as a teen, and tai chi in her twenties. They served her well. Moving silently through the thigh-high landfill of the Chinese embassy's fourth floor took a combination of balance, strength, and stealth.

The footing was completely unreliable. The debris was rusty and jagged and shifted under her weight. The American missiles had smashed out the flooring, leaving the thick piles of debris painfully and precariously balanced on the metal crossbeams that had supported the flooring. It was the world's biggest Jenga game. Guess wrong, and plummet to the third floor. Or all the way to the bottom. Worse yet: you'd likely take a metric ton of debris with you.

Viorica had a flash image of Wile E. Coyote and an anvil, both falling from a cliff at more or less the same rate of descent: thirty-two feet per second per second. If she guessed wrong and fell through the floor, would she land atop the sharp shrapnel of a long-gone war? Or would it land atop her?

The good news: Daria didn't seem to have a gun.

The bad news: Daria had firebombs.

Viorica was a chess devotee. She liked to lay out fifteen, twenty scenarios well in advance, then use her natural intelligence to pick and choose from the best. She detested improvisation, which she always thought was the lazy person's term for dumb luck.

She saw movement by the stairwell: Daria, wearing a black jog top and holey jeans. The left side of her face glistened with blood. She appeared but ducked for cover too quickly for Viorica to spot up on her.

Dark skin, dark hair, dark clothes, and fighting in the dark. Viorica had platinum locks and Nordic skin tones. Less helpful.

She hunkered low behind an overturned desk that was torn in half. She noted gobs of decades-old chewing gum still adhered to the underside of it. Icky. The ground-floor floods cast crazy arcs of light and shadow on the remnants of the ceiling, reflecting it down on their madcap playground.

The Israeli's low voice rang out. “What are we doing up here?” She spoke with no known accent: or maybe with the mélange of every accent Viorica had ever heard.

“Two crazy kids? Caught up in the moment?”

“No. I mean: What are we doing
here
? Why did you lead me on a merry chase to this spot? You're too fucking smart to be chased into a dead end.”

Viorica grinned. A pretty woman, she banked on being underestimated by opponents. She almost always was.

Daria Gibron probably relied on the same. Check.

“There's this guy from Sarajevo. He's gotta be three hundred years old. Weighs in at about twelve pounds soaking wet. This guy paid me a commission to set up a number of variables.”

Viorica slowly, quietly cocked her auto. If a shot came, quarter-seconds would make the difference.

“The variables included a naïve, bitter Serb soldier turned politico. Some dim-witted American military types. A software genius from the military-industrial complex looking to snare a couple million bucks, tax-free. And some wicked-bad drone tech.”

Viorica heard clatter; the sound may have come from her two o'clock, but the confined debris field and the three round, gaping holes in the western wall confused the acoustics.