Gatac

  There were three missed calls from Viktor on Anne’s phone, still safe and sound in the glovebox where she had left it this morning, a million years ago. There were three more on her old phone, which shouldn’t even have been powered on — Sean’s doing? Well, it didn’t matter anymore. The horizon of things that mattered was narrowing around her as she put more miles under her wheels, gliding through the city for, perhaps, one st time. She had just passed the toll booth getting onto the Triborough1Today officially the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. when her eyes fell back on the phone in the center console. She remembered one more thing that mattered outside the car, outside the destination, outside of Nikoi Dolzhikov’s death.

  The st phone call she pced was to the Hotel Superior. It rang four times, and if Anne hadn’t had some things to get off her chest, she might’ve hung up before the fifth ring got an answer.

  “…yes?” Alexander said.Not Mikhail. Too bad. She would have liked to speak to him again. “This is Simmons,” she said, sure as she was that Alexander had already guessed. “There are —”“You need to come in,” Alexander cut her off. “You need to come in right now so we can figure this out.”“No,” Anne said. No response, so she continued. “I am not coming in. I took care of one Dolzhikov and I am on my way to the other.”“Annichka —”“Simmons,” she corrected him.

  More silence.

  “Nikoi was working together with Ilya,” she said. “He was also behind Boris Dolzhikov’s disappearance. There is no telling what else he has pnned but I do not intend to give him a chance to deliver on it. He will die at my hands, this much I can promise.”“That is insane,” Alexander said.“The Captains never trusted me anyway,” Anne said. “They will tell you they were right about me all along. You only need to nod and say yes to them. It is the only smart move you can make.”“Annichka,” Alexander said, “please, you have to see this is…” He pulled himself together. “No. No, you don't get to do this. You don't get to just…to kill yourself. I'm your boss, like it or not, and I am ordering you to —”“You may wish to hold your tongue until I have said my piece,” Anne said. “What you have to understand first is that the problem doesn't end with Nikoi's death. There are still people who were involved. After Nikoi, I need to…I need to handle Detective Collins. Berkovitz never met you, did he?”“Annichka,” Alexander said, “please. We need to talk about this. You need to come in so we can talk.”Anne snorted. “So you can tell me you were working together with Nikoi, too,” she said.

  Yet more silence.

  “The timing of your visit to Leningrad and Nikoi’s appearance here was suspicious in and of itself,” she said, “but I did not want to believe you were involved in the plot. I did not act on these suspicions. Even after I had proof.”“What…proof?” Alexander asked. Quiet. Defeated. No attempt to deny it. Anne wanted him to deny it, to expin it all in a different way. But Anne never got what she truly wanted.“You are one of several people failed by Rusn Romanovich, I am sorry to say.” The bridge was just about to end. She had crossed the imaginary line into the Bronx to no fanfare. “He had with him an envelope, sent from what I assume to be one of Nikoi's haunts in Leningrad to a PO box in 11235 New York City, New York, United States of America. It is not a very nice envelope, I must add. And the letter was not in the envelope anymore. I am left to guess what it might have said.”“Annichka — Anne!” Alexander said. “Please…”“There were two stamps on it,” Anne contined. “A blue one reading “Avna” in Cyrillic and “Par Avion” below, as well as a nice big 50 kopek stamp — a red pnet and a gray moon meeting in the middle, with a shiny silver space probe in front.”2These are real period-accurate Soviet stamp designs, as far as I can tell. What I couldn’t find were period prices for actually sending international air mail from the Soviet Union to the USA in 1989. 50 Kopeks is about the rgest single stamp value I found, though.“Anne —” he pleaded.“And the two addresses were clearly written by two different people. The origin, I assume, was filled in by Nikoi. The destination…” She paused. “I taught you to write, Alexander,” she said. “I do not care about the details of your arrangement, but I should like to know your price.”“A cut,” Alexander said, all too quickly. “Just a cut. I didn't…I didn't have to do anything here. I was just promised a cut. Five percent and all I had to do was send the letter so Ilya would get it.” Alexander paused. “He…he let me pick the stamp.”3Space probes are cool. Agree with me on this.“That is all?” Anne said.“All?” Alexander cried. “His men killed my father. They killed Leonid and Szymon and they nearly killed you! Do you think I pnned that?”“No,” Anne said. “No.”“Don’t you see?” Alexander said. “It was all…it was all ruined before I could do anything, say anything — and all this time, I thought he was working with me, it was Ilya betraying him, it would all be good if I just trusted him —”“You should have trusted us,” she said.Alexander didn’t hear her, though. He was far too caught up in his own expnation. “Nikoi said I'd be in on it, next time,” Alexander continued. “I…I didn't know any details. I didn't know what he wrote to Ilya inside that letter. He said it was just instructions for how to pass off the weapons as his own deal, I didn't read it. I swear to you, Anne, I didn't know a thing about what and when and where it was going to happen, or what Nikoi wanted to do. It was just some business for us.” He waited for a moment. “We both know Boris wasn’t going to be in charge forever. But his son is now out of prison, he pns to come to America, and I am the first one he has made a deal with. I…I thought this would be great for us!”“For you,” Anne threw in.“For us,” Alexander said, “but it was supposed to be quiet, just to get us…get me started, to step up and make my father proud. A way to make our family better off. But then you got caught up in it and these animals killed — ”“We killed your family,” Anne said, accepting her part in it all, just like that. Your family, she had said. Not our family. Alexander barely breathed on the other side. “You invited them to our city,” Anne continued. “I made sure we were on top of their hit list.”“He set it up!” Alexander protested. “It's…no. No, it was…it was him. Nikoi…”“I know you,” Anne said. “Perhaps you were outsmarted, but you are not that naive.”

  The quiet line grew quieter yet.

  “You made a grave mistake”, she said. “You trusted a stranger over your family. That is nobody’s fault but your own. And now there is no way back. If you can’t accept that — if you can’t live with it — then you will find a way to die of it. Greater people than you or me have brought ruin on themselves by refusing to see the truth.”

  No response. Anne sighed. She would kill tonight, maybe a half dozen, maybe a dozen men. It seemed easier than this.

  “Shura,” she said. “I am sorry.”

  She heard him sob at the other end of the line. And as he cried, Anne tried to cry with him. But all she could think of was her mother. Terrible as it was for them all, this was the way of this world, too. Anne had learned it when she was Alexander’s age as well and all hope he would be spared the lesson was for naught. If not this way, she thought, then another. She found in this a measure of comfort, if not absolution.

  “You are not ready,” Anne said, spoken as softly as she had once heard the words. “But the world won’t wait for you to be ready.”“Just…” Alexander breathed. “I don’t know what do, Annichka. I just…I don’t know.”“What to do,” Anne mused. “Annichka can’t tell you what to do. Annichka only ever thought the best of you. She can’t see past what you mean to her.” She took a deep breath. It hurt. “But Simmons can, maybe,” she said. “Are you ready to listen to Simmons?”

  Alexander agreed, silently. So Anne said the worst thing she could think of.

  “Remember that I was not here to love you,” she began. She heard his breaths quicken. “Your father hired me to take care of you and I did, faithfully. But I am not your sister and not your mother. I am not even your friend. I have spent 15 years with your family and never belonged. Whatever I have done for your father is in the past. Anything I have done for you is in the past as well. My goals are no longer yours, if they ever were. Today’s deaths will help you, but I am not killing your enemies for you. I am doing it for myself. Once the day is done, only one true threat to you will remain and it will be me. I carry with me the proof of your guilt and I will hold on to it. It may be of use to me if we ever see each other again, because if we do, it will be as wolves.” She paused for a moment. “And if you still want to become a Thief, you will have to get your own hands dirty at some point. Go ahead and help yourself to my tools. I have no more use for them and Viktor can help you learn all you need to know. From there on, who lives and who dies is up to you…Mr. Ignatyev.”Alexander sobbed, one st time. “You’re terrible,” he whispered.“…I know,” Anne said.

  She hung up.

  Anne was just about five minutes out from her destination when he thoughts began to wander off the road ahead. Viktor wasn't wrong. Anne had no idea of the yout of the pce she was driving to assault, no idea where the lookouts might be, not even any notion of how many targets she was going to have to take on. Normally, biting the inside of her cheek or digging a fingernail into the meat of her palm was enough to bring her train of thought on track, but Anne was finding it all but impossible to get focused on the task ahead. Viktor wasn't wrong. All those second thoughts in her head weren't wrong, either. The basic question was whether she had to take a run at Nikoi at all, but she had almost entirely convinced herself of it. That took care of the what and left her to account for the much more numerous issues of how. Even now, free of all other considerations, she needed a few days to scope out the area, count heads and figure out schedules. She needed the right perch, her hunting rifle and Nikoi's self-satisfied smirk in her sights for just a few moments. She needed covering fire, a few good men ready to rush the entrances, maybe a Bumblebee.4Referring to the RPO-A ‘Shmel’, a Soviet rocket uncher with a thermobaric warhead designed to clear buildings or caves. Introduced in 1984, which I feel makes it fair game for Anne to have heard about it. The predecessor, the RPO ‘Rys’ used a napalm warhead and dates from 1979, so that might have been a safer bet for Anne to actually know about, but I think Bumblebee is funnier than Lynx, so there. For the rough US equivalent in use, if not form, there’s the M202 FLASH, the distinctive four-pack rocket uncher you may recall from such cheesy cinematic brilliance as Commando. She needed a gosh-darned exit strategy.

  All she had was a ticking clock on her cracked rib and a trunk full of weapons.

  The car was her first weapon, in a way, because it let her get close, flowing with the sparse traffic to go halfway around the block, hopefully without drawing any attention to herself. The office building was a skinny little four-story thing on a corner with its entire front cd in scaffolding and white pstic sheets. The adjoining house had obviously been torn down semi-recently and turned into a steadily shrinking pile of brown-red brick rubble, soon to gestate into a proper construction site itself. That eased Anne’s worries slightly; no wall-sharing neighbors and no way to see in or out of the windows. She drove past it anyway, kept following the metallic blue car in front of her around the next bend. She continued until she found a side alley big enough to pull into. She brought the car to a stop there, shut off the engine and tried again to clear her mind. The alley cut all the way through back to the target block. Just a hundred yards in the open, one street to cross, it wasn't going to get any easier. But it still left her exposed, and if anyone did see her walking that distance, they wouldn’t be able to ignore her. Even if the AKM fit under her coat, even if the duffel bag from her trunk looked harmless — even if being bck and walking with purpose wasn’t suspicious in itself.

  Then again, sitting here doing nothing wouldn't get her anywhere. She had already gone this far off the path, why not go a little further?

  The lidocaine was no problem because her side was numb from the ice, but mostly because she wasn’t thinking about it. It went in and it burned and she imagined it was just as effective as the first shot, though she moved entirely too much afterwards to be sure of it. Gearing up took five minutes that sent actual cold sweat down her back, five minutes of thinking that any moment somebody might walk into her little alley and ask her to expin herself, or shout for help, or just cut out the middleman and shoot her straight in the back. Earplugs went in; she rolled the little foam cones between her fingers while she used her other hand to reach over her head and pull on her ear. Each plug, once seated, she held down for thirty seconds to give it time to expand and settle into her ear canal.5Technically, if you roll and insert foam plugs correctly, they seat themselves, but I can’t get that to work consistently myself. And given what’s about to happen, Anne would want to be sure they’re really in there, but there’s a difference between holding them while they expand and pressing them down. If they’re not seated correctly, pressing down on them isn’t going to really fix it — best case that plug isn’t as effective as it could be because it’s kinked somewhere, worst case it starts working itself back out. It’s an understandable error to be made if you haven’t been taught better, though. I only bring it up because it’s a genuine safety issue you should be aware of when using ear protection yourself. She put on the gloves, the Kevr under the coverall, the load-bearing vest over it, the AKM's sling over her shoulders (racked the bolt, too, no reason not to be ready to go), the coat on top and the duffel in her hands. She spped the trunk closed again. She could barely walk without gear clinking against gear, and though she tried her best to wedge the AKM's buttpad into the crook of her left shoulder, the weapon swung with every step, tenting out the coat as she went.6Obligatory “Hey, remember the gearing up scene from I’m Gonna Git You Sucka?” here.

  The opening of the alley ahead grew wider on approach. Little snowfkes were falling, silhouetted against the dark skies above, nding on the hood of a gray sedan parked across from the building. The gray sedan from outside the precinct, she realized, but allowed herself no etion at the discovery. This was the right pce, but that didn’t make her task easier, just barely possible. By the time Anne had made it across the street and covered the hundred yards to the office building, her face was flushed and she was sweating like a hog under her coat. The approach at least was going entirely too well for this not to go wrong somehow, and while her brain kept insisting the prey she was hunting was, after all, only human, her gut refused to accept that everything in those st few days could be id at the feet of mere men. Surely, they had to have known she was coming, and this was a trap for her, some terrible surprise inside, another twist of Nikoi's plot to —

  Unproductive. She couldn’t dwell on what might go wrong. No, she had to focus on what she was here to do. Through was the only way out of this mess. Out of this city. Her thoughts snapped to the present with haste and she got to work.

  First floor windows were boarded up and she didn't check the front door except to note by its exposed hinges that it opened outward. Good old predictable fire codes.7Left as an exercise for the reader is paying attention to which way the doors open anywhere you go in your daily life. Odds are very good that the evacuation route, whatever it may be, has doors opening toward the escape. When they don’t, you get horror stories of people being trapped and even crushed in an emergency simply because with dozens of people all trying to follow you to safety, you will not have the room to swing a door open toward you — you might not even have the coordination to work a conventional door handle, hence pushbar fire exits. She found a shadow to set her duffel down into and got to browsing its contents. The first toy she retrieved from it wasn't gmorous at all. It was a wooden wedge, which she pushed under the front door and gave a good shove with her gloved hand to secure it in position. She gnced up at the scaffold, but dismissed it almost instantly — too noisy. Instead she circled around the back with careful steps, finding (and blocking) a side door that must have once connected the offices to the torn-down residential building, then proceeded to the back entrance. Steel door, new lock. Anne gave it a closer inspection. It had a suspiciously tall keyway. It seemed like she might have found the pce that fit Kyrill’s key.

  Of course, Anne thought, she didn’t actually have to go inside, if she could make sure nobody got out with another wedge. Granted, shooting out the plywood window covers and chucking a couple of firebombs into the building was a very inelegant solution, but given the right circumstances, elegance could slide. Then again, the scaffold up front was a ready-made fire escape, and given the state of renovation, there wasn't enough to burn inside anyway. All that plus guaranteeing she'd have to get away fast without watching her handiwork, no positive ID on anyone in the building plus the FDNY tended to be rather faster on the scene than the cops in this area, so —

  She just barely heard the footsteps from inside, closing in on the door. Anne dropped the duffel where she stood and pressed up against the building wall, almost catching the door as it swung open, hiding her for a crucial moment. A man stepped outside — leather jacket, shaved head, snake tattoo winding around his neck.8One of the many charming Russian prison tattoos symbolizing drug addiction. Seriously, there are a lot of those. Anne thought about it. Threaten him, find out how many people were inside and where they were, if Nikoi was even there. But what if, she thought, what if he screams?

  He saw the duffel bag. “Ty che blyad?” he muttered. He took a step toward it, but he didn’t reach for his gun.

  Then he screamed, well, tried to scream, because Anne had rushed up behind him and cupped her right hand over his mouth. Before he thought of what to do about her, she stabbed her knife into the side of his neck,9If you were wondering, the Rambo ‘draw a knife across the throat’ method is pretty bad at killing people. But it’s obviously much easier to film. spearing the snake though its head and releasing a spurt of warm blood all over the knife, her hand, her coat's sleeve and the man's leather jacket. With a quick jerk, she forced the knife forward, cutting the man's throat wide open, and after a few seconds of futile struggle he went limp and slumped out of her hold to the ground, never to wake up again. Anne slung the duffel over her shoulder and dragged him by his armpits into the building. Inside, she roughly wiped the knife clean on his brand new jeans10Not a ‘LOL fall of communism’ joke so much as merely pointing out that if you’ve just made your way from prison in Soviet Russia to the USA, you’re gonna want to buy some new clothes. and sheathed it again. Door closed as quiet as she could manage. Coat and duffel on the unfinished floor. Nothing squeaked. Good.

  “Dima?” she heard Nikoi call from above. “Guhdje tui, Dima?”

  Was it a bored call, unconcerned, or did she hear caution in it? She thought she didn’t, and she thought Dima was dead. She was still crouched down next to him, still hidden, still close to the exit. No time to honor him, though. No time to do any of this right. All doors were closed in the hallway stretching from the back door, at least the ones she could see. It felt like they were empty. She imagined they had to be and that made them empty, made it impossible for anyone to ambush her before she was ready. It had to. Focus. Nikoi's voice wasn't muffled like it might have been shouted through a close door, but the way it echoed — staircase. Not enough echo to be from higher than the second floor, either. The lights were on all over the building, including downstairs, she noticed. Not so good for hiding, but maybe making a trap more comfortable for the trapsters.

  Silently, she begged the devil for help and the devil obliged only too happily.

  He spoke to her, short and crisp. He repced doubts with what felt like facts. Half a dozen targets. Unlikely to be more in a building this size. They weren’t expecting her yet, would have posted guards if they had, but she would have to move fast before they sent someone to check on Dima. The devil helped her to her feet and pced her hands on the AKM, fed its stock into her shoulder. Like she’d been taught. Like she knew she would have to go through this. Nothing fancy, nothing nimble, just raw firepower pouring into targets until nothing in front remained. She glimpsed over the sights at the emptiness ahead. Then she made her move.

  “Dima?” Nikoi called again. Definitely upstairs.

  Anne heard nothing from the rooms to either side of the hallway, but then again, having her ears plugged up could do that. It was a chance she would have to take if she wanted to keep on going. A rubber pouch from the duffel was unzipped, yielding a hooded gas mask. Anne quickly donned it, then grabbed a pair of metal cylinders from the bottom of the duffel. Each was about the size of a can of string cheese, had a warning bel printed on the side that swam into nothing besides the two big letters ‘CS’, plus a pull-ring safety pin at the top. Anne left the duffel behind and walked down the hallway. Her left hand held the cylinders, while her right was on the pistol grip of her AKM, reasoning that accuracy wouldn't be much of a problem if she could just bring it up and swing it in the rough direction of a threat. Her theory was shortly put to the test when she walked up the stairs and her eyes met with Nikoi's.

  To be fair, Nikoi had no way of knowing Anne wasn't quite ready to kill him then and there. Ascertaining whether she was would have meant waiting for her to come into full view and giving her all the time in the world to actually get ready. Instead, just the sight of her masked head entering the picture was enough for him to turn around and take off at a dead run down the hallway he'd been standing in, throwing himself through an open door before Anne had the AKM properly raised. It was the only open door in the hallway, with light shining out of it. For the moment Anne took to drop the AKM into its sling, she wondered if she had seriously overestimated the threat of Nikoi's remaining men. Her now free right hand grasped one of the cylinders from her left hand, tearing out the safety pin in the process. She stepped forward to find cover behind a wall corner at her end of the hallway, then hurled the cylinder against the open door, both bouncing it into the room and setting off its impact fuse. Within the second, the shouts of the men inside overpowered the angry hiss and cnging sounds as the pressurized tear gas within the device started spewing out, spinning the grenade all over the floor. And just to make sure her point was well and truly taken, Anne readied the second device and tossed it the same way. This one actually dropped to the floor just outside as it released its payload, but the spray of gas obligingly rolled it through the doorway into the room, too. Anne shouldered the AKM and waited.

  Seconds ter, three men came filing out of the room, the threat of their drawn guns outmatched by them holding their free arms in front of their eyes in a vain attempt to shield themselves from the gas. Anne leaned out from her cover to properly welcome them to hell. In short order, thirty rounds of 7.62x39mm cycled through the AKM. Bullets zipped down the hallway, putting bloody craters into their helpless targets and blowing out the plywood cover of the window at the end of the hallway. Even with the earplugs in and the suppressor on, it was too loud to hear — it could only be felt.11Guns are loud. Firing full-auto is louder. Firing full-auto inside a building is incredibly loud. It’s a bit more manageable with modern suppressors and subsonic ammo, but Anne is using neither. The weapon rattled Anne's teeth with every burst, and she felt her breath pick up to a wheeze, straining against the filter of the mask and the resurgent pain in her side. It was only when two pulls of the trigger pushed no more death downrange that Anne realized she was out, and that this was a good time to not be exposed.

  She ducked back around the corner as the survivor's of Nikoi's inner circle stuck whatever guns they had on them out of the door and tried to return fire. By then, she was all but deaf to their shouts. Knowing their bullets flew past her, some even ricocheting dangerously close off the walls of the hallway, she felt an intoxicating rush, this feeling that for once she wasn't holding back, wasn't just making the best of a bad situation — no, this was her rge and in charge. This was more than surviving, this was winning. Well, waiting for them to realize she was winning, too. Never one to waste a few good seconds with nothing better to do, she unsnapped one of the magazine pouches on her belly. Her vest had four of them, each with two magazines, and each magazine topped off with thirty rounds. A few quick bursts with the first magazine had already taken three of Nikoi's men, albeit with the element of surprise. Still, Anne was pretty sure 240 rounds were enough to kill whoever was left, even if they were actually fighting back. She pulled out the first spare with her left hand and brought it forward to the magazine well, where a quick brush of the release paddle and a forward push with her thumb dislodged the spent magazine.12In contrast to the AR-15 line of weapons, AK mags are not simply inserted and dropped vertically from the magazine well. They have to be inserted at an angle to lock into a pivot point at the front of the magazine well and then rotated backwards until the magazine catch holds them in pce, i.e. rocked in, and then rocked out in reverse to remove them. If you’re a badass who’s too cool to worry about damaging their magazines, you need not exactly be careful in doing this and can shave a couple of moments off your reload time with this technique.

  The lights in the house went out almost as soon as the spent magazine hit the floor. Problematic. Her outside scan of the building hadn't shown any windows to the room they were holed up in, which meant it was both pitch bck and filled with thick smoke, making it that much harder to find her targets, while the shot-out plywood cover on the hallway window cast her approach in some remaining daylight. Anne quickly hooked the repcement magazine into the front of the well and rocked it back until it locked into pce. She turned the rifle to its side so she could reach across with her left and work the bolt13Another AK quirk — it ejects to the right, but also has the bolt handle to the right, so it’s not particurly convenient for either righties or lefties. Most other right-ejecting rifles of simir vintage try to have their controls on the left, and just about every recent assault rifle design will have ambidextrous controls, with the capability to switch which side to eject to also becoming more common. But this is 1989, and you take what you can get. — locked forward, no case jumping out when she pulled back, good, no stoppage at least on the first mag. Locked and loaded, she got down to the floor as close as she could and briefly peeked out her head for a glimpse of the action.14This particur trick I picked up from a read of the US Army field manual for MOUT (military operations in urban terrain). Seems obvious once you hear it — if you’re gonna poke out your head around a corner, don’t do it at a height where the opposition may expect a head to be poking out. The tear gas was thinning out already, getting sucked through the hallway's open window, and while someone inside was still coughing, nobody dared to step into her field of fire. The hard way, then. Anne boriously rose to her knees again, then reached for a little pouch on the right of her load-bearing vest, retrieving a sturdy fshlight. Light in her left and the AKM's pistol grip firmly clutched in her right hand15One more “This is what they had in 1989” thing. Due to how the AK-pattern rifles are designed, it was not easy to mount a weapon light up front. Good news, though: the AK-103M introduced in 2017 finally includes Picatinny accessory rails on its handguard as standard. As far as I’m aware, that’s the first out of the box solution for AKs - everything before that was aftermarket parts. By comparison, fshlight mounts on AR-type weapons appeared much earlier and Picatinny rails have been standard on those since the introduction of the M16A4 in 1998., she crept forward, trying to make out the hushed commands they were barking at each other over the coughs and the shuffling about. She also tried to keep her head underneath the assortment of bullet holes along that wall — she couldn't tell which ones were hers and which ones were theirs, she just knew she didn't want to be standing up when new ones got added to the mix, or give herself away by blocking the light streaming in. The loudest thing she could hear from inside the room was furniture scratching across the floor, a mostly futile attempt to barricade themselves — Anne had never come across a bulletproof table or couch, but that wasn't going to make it any easier to find and kill her targets. The fshlight felt heavier in her left hand.

  “Eedee!” Nikoi barked. “Eedee tuda!”

  Anne stuck the fshlight through the door and clicked it on, sweeping it in an arc before her as she rushed into the room, trying to minimize the time she spent in the actual doorframe silhouetted against the light outside.16To expand on the previous footnote about not showing yourself where the enemy is looking: a shocking amount of modern military tactics rely on stealth and camoufge. If you can be detected, you can be killed, no matter how big your tank or how fancy your body armor is. Silhouetting, then, is the act of making your outline visible against your background. Standing in a lit doorway is one way, as is standing up on a hill (silhouetted against the sky) or wearing camoufge that doesn’t match the terrain. Most soldiers are quickly cured of this vice, either by training, experience or bullets. The bright cone of her fshlight cast the scene in washed-out, near bck and white illumination. The men she shone her light on flinched away from it like an amateur Count Orlok17You’ve seen Nosferatu, right? I’m not the only one who watched a century-old horror movie, right?Also another mark of how damn long this has been sitting on my shelf: between my writing this and publishing it, Nosferatu went from semi-obscure old horror movie to having a modern remake in cinemas to being just about forgotten again. impression. One, two, three went down to short bursts from her AKM before they could save themselves, but getting the others was as simple as stepping around their impromptu cover and shooting the writhing shapes on the floor one after the other. Anne lost count, how many of them might have caught a stray bullet in her opening salvo, how many her bullets were just then touching for the first and st time, but by God she was as quick and thorough as she could be. When the AK's bolt clicked dry on an empty chamber again, the honeymoon part of this ambush was over. Anne's left hand dearly wanted to toss the fshlight and grab for her knife, but she forced it to hold on while she awkwardly tried to grab another spare magazine instead. That wasn't, strictly speaking, the worst possible idea. It just happened to be the wrong call.

  She hadn’t spotted Nikoi in the melee. The dark and the gas and the mask had narrowed her vision to almost nothing without the light.18Human field of vision is quite limited. Also there’s actually only a very small part of everything we can see that the eye can focus on in a moment, so we’re really seeing the world through a keyhole, at least as far as details are concerned — everywhere else, we’re mostly seeing light/dark and movement. Our perception to the contrary is down to some very clever brain trickery that, however, can break down under certain conditions. It’s even worse when constrained by a gas mask (excuse me, CRBN mask) or night-vision devices, the tter of which also mess with your depth perception. It’s gotten better over the years with newer night-vision devices, but still, always remember: just because you don’t see something in the corner of your eye doesn’t mean it’s not there. She hadn’t heard Nikoi creep up on her side but the devil did and the devil shouted, loud and clear. Her body swiveled towards the noise, thrust the gun towards the shape in the dark and futilely clicked the trigger once and twice and thrice. Her left hand held on to the fshlight while the magazine with the fresh rounds was wedged between her fingers. She wasn't doing anything sensible with either. By the time Anne was actually making choices, Nikoi was almost on her. His free hand grabbed onto the rifle while his knife shot forward, and even though he screamed when he brushed his hand against the hot suppressor19Hey, let’s repeatedly run fming hot gas through a thin-skinned metal tube, what could be unsafe about that? It doesn’t take a lot of bullets to heat up a suppressor to the point where it’s too hot to touch. You can find videos of suppressors getting all the way up to red hot from just a couple of magazines of rapid fire. AKs in particur also have a reputation for being easy to burn yourself on, suppressor or not, as their wood handguard covers substantially less metal then the enclosed pstic tube around AR-15-pattern weapon barrels — and after a few rapid-fire magazines, that metal is going to be hot., he held on to the wood furniture and pressed his attack.

  Anne had a simple call to make: Lose the gun? Get sshed? Or spend too long thinking and do both?

  Anne brought up her left arm, which was about as good as her many bad options were. Nikoi’s knife, sharp as it was, wasn’t wielded by a steady hand. Her forearm spped his wrist from inside his defense, turning the ssh away, then her arm sprung back in, smacking her full left hand against the side of Nikoi’s head. Fshlight and new magazine fell to the ground, her arm rebounding again to try and grab Nikoi’s wrist. For a moment, each had a hand on the other’s weapon. Anne took another gamble, sliding her left foot back to get her hips rotating, hoping to use the momentum to push Nikoi from the side with the rifle and get him off bance. Nikoi wasn't so easily shaken, though. He dropped to his knees and let himself be dragged in an arc, pushing his knife toward Anne's side. He was a few inches away from the gap between her fifth and sixth pair of ribs when his face met her knee. That gave Anne some space but cost her her own bance. She nded on her side, barely breaking her fall. Her foot kicked against the fshlight on the floor, sending it rolling across the room. Her back locked up in protest from the impact, but she had no time to worry about her shoulder bdes or even her vertebrae cracking, not as long as the strap on her AKM kept her tethered to a man with a knife and nothing to lose.

  So she kicked him in the face. And when he didn't take the hint, she kicked him again.

  The second kick didn’t measure up to the first, as he'd already turned away, ducking his head and turning his shoulder toward her to take the blows, but he let go and dropped, sshing his knife in the rough direction of her leg. Anne scooted backwards over the ground as well as her feet and shoulders could manage, but it was only a couple of seconds ter that the sideways whipping of her body got her to bang the back of her head against a wall. That got a yell from her. Her eyes automatically clinched shut, but she had to force them open, had to try to see what was going on, even if what she could see wasn't much. The fshlight was shining on the floor just ahead of her, illuminating a vague silhouette across the room, while Anne could barely see any part of herself. At least she saw her left hand was bloody. Cuts on the back of her fingers, small ones, where they had brushed against Nikoi’s knife.

  That was not going to help with the rest of the fight. As if it being a fight wasn’t bad enough.

  Whatever else was going on, Anne knew she had to get up off the floor. Her left arm as a whole still vaguely responded, and so she managed to prop herself up on her elbows, using her feet to scoot her back right up against the wall behind her. Her trembling right hand unsnapped another magazine pouch and —

  Movement up ahead.

  Anne's right hand went to her drop holster, all but ripping the Colt right out of the leather. She didn't aim, just snapped the pistol roughly on target and thumbed off the safety. BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG click. Anne let out another grunt and put the Colt down, looking at the body in front of her spyed across the fshlight’s cone of illumination. Not Nikoi. The door to the hallway smmed closed, so she was now closest to the brightest light source in the pce.

  Consider a word for being near a light in a dark room: target. In turn, consider a word for being the only target in a room: Fuck.

  To her credit, Anne had the AKM wedged between her thighs20As far as I could tell, this was an actual technique taught to Soviet soldiers for reloading their rifles with one hand. If you’re in the market for more ‘gun between thighs’ reloads and other things that make the pants of gunbunnies tighter, I recommend watching The Way Of The Gun’s final shootout. Just be aware the fancy techniques are paired with some really, really bad (but in-character) decisions. and a new magazine rocked into pce when shots started popping off from the dark. Anne let herself fall over to the side and crawled away under the fire, rifle dragging behind her by the sling. The bullets pinged off the concrete floor beside her. One smacked through her coverall into the back of her vest, but at an angle too shallow to dig through the Kevr. She hadn’t counted the bullets but she welcomed the brief silence as she pushed further. Her right hand found a body, still warm and slick with a puddle of viscera underneath. Anne half crawled, half slid around the body and ducked behind it best as she could when another volley thundered across the room. They made wet, spping sounds when they lodged into the dead body, two or three bullets in all, with the bance sailing over her head. When the fire paused, Anne reeled the AKM in, just in time to get shot at again, but nothing that came close to her — just a few shots in the dark.

  Then he called out to her.

  “Simmons?” he called, a question as unsure of his enunciation as her answer, but when the answer was silence, his next take seemed to pick up some steam. “Where are you, Simmons?”

  Anne wasn't taking part in the conversation. She tried to still her breathing, straining to listen to Nikoi's footsteps — and anyone else who might still be alive — through her thick ear protection. Again she tried to fix her rifle, this time by wedging it between her right shoulder and a nearby wall. Her right hand grasped the bolt handle and pulled it back as quietly as she could manage.

  “You pretend to be big bad gangster, Simmons?” Nikoi shouted. “You don't have balls. You are rat!”

  Still holding the bolt handle to keep it from snapping forward, Anne slowly worked herself against the wall until she was sitting up.

  “I own your city!” Nikoi continued. “Your friends are fake Thieves like you, Simmons! Tricked by biggest rat Boris! You forget ws, you forget meaning, you forget be hard! Nobody of you deserves name of Thief!”

  If he was still shouting like that, then he was still standing, Anne reasoned. That put him one up on her. Getting a magazine into her gun wasn’t even half the problem. She had to let the bolt snap into battery, then retrieve the fshlight to find Nikoi, then somehow muscle the AKM on target and shoot him. And in the eternity it would take, Nikoi had all the time he needed to shoot her in turn — if she didn’t bck out from shock first. This approach was, to put it mildly, unlikely to py out in her favor. She knew only one way to both shave a few precious moments off the time-to-BANG and reduce the likelihood of Nikoi getting her first: she had to do it without seeing a darn thing. Might have been easier if she had had any clue where Nikoi was lurking in the dark. Maybe if she got further upright? With a grunt, Anne pushed tighter against the wall, setting her feet on the floor for traction. What she hadn't considered was the pool of blood she was by then all but sitting in. One wrong move and she lost her footing again, falling down onto her left side.

  The bolt handle slipped through her tired fingers. Never in the collective history of Kashnikov-pattern rifles had a bolt locked into battery with a louder kck.

  Anne gas mask slid to the side in the mad scramble to move forward, away, somewhere other than where Nikoi's next hail of bullets was heading, but that’s when the st vestiges of her luck ran dry. A square-on hit to her chest punched the wind out of her, soon followed by another bullet fttening against her vest. That brought her cracked rib back into consideration, a fact it eagerly announced to Anne with a fresh stab of pain. Her rapid breaths shallowed, for fear of jagged bone piercing an organ. Her strength was fading and the gap between what was happening and what she was seeing grew wider. At least she still clearly heard Nikoi's footsteps, but they were going away from her, until she resolved herself to sucking on some tear gas and ripped the mask off her head —

  And then there was light.

  He stood at the entrance, left hand inside the circuit breaker panel and right hand on a pistol — not his, because if he had that when she came in, he could have just shot her a bunch instead of showing off his ck of knife skills. In fact, he had a second pistol tucked into the front of his pants, slide locked back, and Anne’s blood pressure rose at the sight — he must have run dry when he first stopped shooting and searched for another pistol to keep it up, and if she had just known that, capitalized on it, somehow — well, then maybe she wouldn't have been at his mercy, of which she expected very little. His once-gray suit was positively covered in blood from head to heels, way too much for it to be all his own. A gnce down at herself showed Anne not being much cleaner herself. And despite everything — despite darn near a dozen bodies on the floor, despite the bloodied ruin his face had turned into, despite him having to know he wasn’t walking away from his mess as a winner, even if he killed her — despite all that, he was chuckling to himself. The only good news was the gas wasn't bothering her too much. The devil in her ear wondered if maybe it had actually gone bad during the years in her safe, meaning she had just smoked out this bunch with the equivalent of a few huffs of theater fog. She tried to bring up the AKM to her shoulder, but her right arm was out of steam, too, and even if she could keep from screaming outright, she wasn't feeling up to the considerable challenges ahead of her.

  “Not so big without big gun!” he shouted. His ears must have been ringing, if he hadn’t a ruptured ear drum or two. “I do not know this country very good. How do you kill rats here?” He waved his knife at her from a distance. “Do you stab them?” Then, he raised the pistol in his other hand to finish her off. “Or shoot them?” BANG! That one went into the wall above her. He flinched as the gun jumped in his hand. Yeah, he was paying for trying to shake hands with the devil.21This charming phrase goes back to bcksmiths burning their hands through carelessly touching hot metal. I imagine it’s a memorable experience. “Speak, Simmons!” he shouted. BANG! And that one was just to the side of her numb left arm. “I said speak!” he shouted.

  Click.

  “You are out,” she gasped. Nikoi looked at the pistol in his hand. Looked at it and noticed that it looked a little funny, a bit too long in the back, the slide was all the way back, it was —22Of course, Nikoi had no good way to check how many bullets were still in the magazine while the room was dark. All the more reason not to waste his shots for theater, though.

  RATATATATATATA

  Anne's AKM roared to life, stock wedged under her right arm while her left was across the top of the feed cover to keep it from rising too high. But rise it did, picking its way off the floor. It nearly punched a hole through Anne's right foot before it not just nearly punched a hole through Nikoi's shin. Gravity worked faster than his nerves could rey the pain, and it took the better part of him crumpling to the floor before his broken face turned from surprise to agony. The rest of the AKM's magazine bsted past him, shredding the door behind where Nikoi had stood, but the damage was done. Another click.

  The gun was empty again.

  Anne sucked in the pain and some air to go with it. Nikoi wasn't moving away from where he had fallen. Anne let the AKM drop to her side again, then rolled onto her padded knees and her right hand. A few breaths ter, she had one foot on the ground. With the help of the wall and some huffing and puffing, she managed to rise the rest of the way. AKM dangling from its sling, she shambled toward Nikoi. She had long since lost the privilege of moving without pain, but she had to take a few extra steps to circle around him and make sure he was out of the fight. Lying on his back, right arm at his side twitching, hand cramped around the grip of his empty gun. Eyes squeezed closed, teeth clenched so tight even the curses weren’t getting through. Yeah, he was out of the fight.

  “It is done,” she wheezed. “You are the…st one. Now…drop it.”

  She wedged the AKM between her thighs for the familiar ritual, bending down to knock the spent magazine out with a fresh one before seating it and racking the bolt one more time, never taking her eyes off him. Her lower legs were starting to compin — a little heat, a little getting burned from contact with the hot rifle. Anne was sure she could've smelled some burned polyester if her nose hadn't already been assaulted by the remains of the CS gas.

  “You…fought well,” she added, as if to appease him.“Poshhol na hui!”23Now you know how to say “Fuck you!” in Russian. Nikoi cried. He tried to raise his right arm off the ground, tried to get the spent gun aimed at her.

  Anne pushed the AKM forward to let the sling lend it some stability, then leveled her aim at Nikoi's right arm. POP POP POP. The bullets left just a bloody smear over cratered concrete where his wrist used to be.24Note that firing down into a concrete floor has a very high potential for ricochets and high-velocity concrete chips flying around. So this is a terrible idea, but then again, what in this book isn’t? His hand, still clutching the spent pistol, dropped to the ground, tearing loose from the st pieces of skin and flesh holding it in pce as it did so. Nikoi screamed again, with half strength at best. He dropped the knife from his other hand to futilely reach for the bloody stump, cupping a hand over the spurting artery. No amount of pressure could have stemmed the flood squeezing through his fingers, dripping into the puddle beneath him. No one drop of his blood was more important than anything already spilled in there. Anne came closer and kicked his knife under the blood-spttered remains of a couch. For her encore, she stomped her left foot down on his belly, pinning him in pce. Then she pointed the AKM's smoking business end straight at his head, where the tears streaming down his face made one st valiant effort to clean off the blood. His filing attempts to push the gun away, to buy a few more seconds, to escape…they all came to nothing.

  “Nikoi,” she breathed, “that is enough.”

  POP POP

  In a second, Nikoi Borisovic Dolzhikov was as dead as a man could get. He left this world with a big bloody hole where his face used to be and the scrambled blood/brain/bone mixture that made up most of the mass of his head oozed out of every hole of the same. The AKM slumped back into its sling and banged against her leg, lingering there for too long. The suppressor was still hot enough to scald her skin through her coverall, leading to one final fearful adrenaline spurt that pushed the weapon clear of her body and coincided quite well with Anne's vision blurring out. This wasn't the bckout creeping up on her again, not quite yet. Her body was crying again and absolutely no part of her arms was even remotely clean enough to wipe her face with. Anne's stomach might as well have spent the st ten minutes in a paint can shaker. Maybe she had stopped dealing with Arkady’s death and started feeling it. Or maybe she had to amend her injury list with a count of concussion. The bodies lying everywhere she looked, the smell of iron and burnt powder, the viscera that seemed to be reaching for her from all directions — it all was too much, even for her.

  She was no longer thinking about getting caught here. That piece of her mind had been shut down to deal with the many emergencies she had come up against in this pce, and it would be several more minutes before she'd start worrying about it again. Instead, she reached into her vest to retrieve a folded-up length of duct tape, peeled off the end with the help of her teeth and wrapped the whole thing around the cuts on her left hand. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't sterile, and it wasn't comfortable, but it covered the wounds for the moment, and that was all she cared about.25And this is a super-bad idea. Don’t do this. In addition to the issues Anne can think of, duct tape sucks at soaking up blood, but excels at sticking to skin and body hair. So not only is this less likely to clot and stop bleeding in the first pce, but it stands a really good chance of tearing open the wound when it’s removed. Use a sterile wound dressing on top of the wound, that’s what they’re there for, and keep it in pce with something that won’t be a nightmare to remove in the hospital. I want to specifically point this out because, moreso than stuff like pcing a central line or trying to inject lidocaine, I can see people with cuts and other open wounds actually thinking about using duct tape to stop the bleeding, and want to emphasize again: don’t do this. She took a knee over Nikoi, quickly patting down his corpse, looking for — well, she didn't know what exactly she was looking for. That made it all the more surprising to her when she found it. It was almost nothing, a small notebook bound in red leather, which went well with the bloody fingerprints she was leaving on it when she tried to thumb through it. She saw notes, addresses, codenames, bank accounts, neatly organized and written in terse script. Not the same as on the envelope, so not Nikoi’s handwriting. She stuffed it into one of the now empty magazine pouches on her vest. Then she looked at him some more and felt the determination which had gotten her this far make way for a new fear. Fear of what she had to do next, now that the easy part was done. She unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it aside, trying to get a glimpse of Nikoi's story, and found his tattoos — stars on his shoulderbdes, a madonna with child covering his chest, a tiger on his left pectoral26Aside from the stars signifying his rank, the madonna indicates that Nikoi entered prison at a young age, while the tiger says he killed somebody while inside. A thief’s home is prison, after all., drowning in a sea of more ink, surrounded by signs she hadn't seen before on Grandpa or Arkady or Viktor. A story she knew she wouldn’t understand.

  “And he said,” Anne muttered, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”27Luke 23:42, which is quite popur at burials of Russian criminals, apparently. So for all fans of Uncharted 4: sorry, but the mafiya was into St. Dismas before it was cool.

  Anne had to work hard to keep her bance as she limped out of the building. In the grand accounting of weight, she'd only left behind about two and a half pounds of ammo, maybe another pound with the tear gas. Then, of course, there were the ear plugs somewhere in the bloody mess, and who better to represent rounding error in those rough guesses? Whatever it amounted to, then, it was not nearly enough weight off her shoulders. Her chest felt tight and stiff all over, even if the cold pack still held back some of the pain, and the AKM shoulder strap was biting deep into knotted muscle. Her left arm was burning all the way down, which was either the nerves still working or dying. She willed it to be the former, and in any event it got a little better when she improvised a sling by putting the wrist through a loop on the carrying vest. She knew the pills would have to take care of the pain, for now, but screw Dolr and pying it safe: if she had had just one more ampule of lidocaine, she would have rammed that sucker right in there and taken her chances.

  The advantage to having her ears unplugged was she could hear the hissing of a propane line she'd cut open on the way out. Heard it all the way, in fact. Propane wouldn't have been her choice for this, would have preferred diesel for better control of the spread, but they had no generator on the site — already hooked to the city grid. Temporary heating, though, they had that, in one of the other rooms upstairs she had to check on the way out, just to be sure. And one of those poor souls she had killed had to have been the guy to run the heater — TV-sized gray box thing on caster wheels, some vague “Temp Solutions” company name or whatnot engraved on a pte mounted to the side28You want a heat unit in your construction site for more than just comfort, though. Proper temperature control is important for concrete curing. — and just in general make sure this construction site, conveniently uncrewed for the week, was nice and toasty for Nikoi’s grand ambitions. She tried to match one of the faces frozen in terror before her to the mental image of That Guy in every crew who lugs propane and takes lunch orders and gets shouted at when the trash bags get too full. The guy who, when one of the other stooges got drunk and relieved themselves in a toilet that wouldn't flush without the water hookup to the site, would have to get the pstic bag and the rubber gloves and get to cleaning, because this was just how the gmor and excitement of organized crime manifested itself sometimes.

  Well, whoever it was, they no longer had these kinds of problems.

  Her mind turned so readily to such humanizing thoughts of her victims because it was a good way to trick her brain into not thinking about how the nauseating smell of the propane's odorant29As in, the stuff that smells like a gas leak: ethanethiol. Now you know what deodorant is the opposite of! was stinking up the entire house already. She sucked it up with every shallow breath, like a rotting skunk curled up in the far reaches of her crooked nose, and while Anne permitted her body a few tears of pain and some grunts whenever an unfortunate step brought injured arm to cracked ribs on her left, she had firmly resolved not to throw up. And she held to her resolve, no matter how much she felt like she had to give in to something if only to remember what relief felt like.

  She made it out. Her tired eyes scanned the dirt backlot for an audience, finding nobody. Hard to believe nobody had heard the massacre, not so hard to believe nobody had called the cops. It was still snowing, barely so, and the fkes danced around her when she limped away, just far enough away she felt almost safe, then put down the duffel bag. From within, she retrieved a screw-top forty half-filled with gasoline. It was wrapped in a ring of duct tape, holding a storm match to the bottle.30Don’t try this at home, kids. There are no "good" molotov cocktails but this is a shitty one. Once again using her legs, she kept the bottle in pce while she hunted down one of the several disposable lighters31Two is one and one is none. bouncing around in the duffel. A few clicks of it sufficed to light the match. She took the bottle into her right hand, rose up straight and leaned back just a tad, intending to put everything she had into a good, precise toss right through the shot-out plywood cover over the second floor hallway window. Then she hurled it, and it wasn't the worst toss she could have pulled off. In fact, considering her injuries, it was a surprisingly powerful one. As, accuracy proved cking, and the bottle burst against the wall next to the window, spreading its contents wide.

  Where they came into contact with the storm match.

  Which ignited the gasoline.

  Which, in turn, touched off the propane gas filling the house.

  In a way, it had been less than clear-sighted of Anne to block every door except the one she was nearest to. This ensured the fireball from inside the house roared two or three meters out of that exit, the sight of which nearly made her fall over onto the ground when she reflexively turned away from it. By the time she'd sorted out the whole instincts vs. conscious decisions issue again, the fireball had come and gone and turned into a load of bck smoke pouring out of the house's orifices, obscuring all but the brightest fmes still burning within. Once more, Anne wished she had been able to use diesel fuel for this, but this was not the time to be picky.

  This was the time to grab the duffel, limp back to her car and make good her escape.