He heard footsteps—somebody racing into the cavernous space.
Another burst came from the AKS-74, directed not at Janson but at the unseen
arrival.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” It was Barry Cooper’s voice.
He couldn’t believe it: Barry Cooper had made his way into the abandoned
warehouse.
“Barry, what the hell are you doing here?” Janson called.
“Right now, I’m asking myself that. Heard all this gunfire when I was in the
car, got scared, and I ran in here trying to escape. Pretty dumb, huh?”
“Truthfully? Yes.”
Another fusillade brought up a storm of sparks from the concrete floor.
Janson stepped back from the pillar and saw what was happening. Barry Cooper was
huddled behind a large steel drum while the man on the catwalk began to
reposition himself.
“I don’t know what to do,” Cooper said in a half wail.
“Barry, do what I’d do.”
“Gotcha.”
A shot rang out, and the short, stocky man on the catwalk abruptly stiffened.
“That’s right, baby. Make love, not war, motherfucker,” Cooper yelled as he
emptied the entire clip of his pistol into the gunman overhead.
Now Janson could move around the pillar, and he immediately squeezed off a shot
at Ratko’s companion, who hovered with a knife near the trussed woman.
“Sranje! Shit!” the man called out. The bullet had struck his shoulder, and he
let the knife drop. The man sank to the ground, moaning and incapacitated.
Janson saw the woman snake a foot out toward the knife, and bring it close to
her. Then she wedged it between her two heels and, her legs shaking with the
effort, gradually raised it off the ground.
The Serb giant seemed torn between two targets, Cooper and Janson.
“Drop the gun, Ratko!” Janson yelled.
“I fuck your mother!” the giant Serb spat, and he squeezed off a shot at Barry
Cooper.
“Dammit!” Cooper bellowed. The bullet had penetrated both his arm and his lower
chest. His gun fell to the ground and he retreated, in agony, behind a row of
steel drums near the side entrance.
“You OK, Barry?” Janson called out, stepping behind another stanchion.
There was a moment of silence. “I dunno, Paul,” he replied weakly. “Hurts like a
motherfucker. Plus, I feel like I’ve fallen off the whole Gandhian-pacifist
wagon. I’m probably going to have to become a vegan just to get my karma
straightened out.”
“Nice shooting, though. Weather Underground experience?”
“YMCA summer camp,” Cooper said, sheepish. “BB guns.”
“Can you drive?”
“Not the Indy 500 or anything, but, yeah, I guess.”
“Keep calm and listen to me. Get into the car and drive yourself to a hospital.
Now!”
“But what about … ?”
“Don’t worry about me! Just haul ass.”
A bullet from the giant’s .45 echoed loudly through the steel enclosure, and a
piece of concrete landed near Janson’s feet.
It was a standoff now, between the two of them.
Two men, with nothing to lose but their lives.
Janson did not dare shoot blindly, for risk of hitting the man’s captive. He
took a few steps back until he could make out his target clearly. Ratko,
steadying his gun hand with his other hand for precision shooting, had his back
to her. A glint of steel told him that the woman was not as helpless as he
imagined.
With her one free arm, she had reached down, stretching farther than seemed
possible, and grabbed the hilt of the knife, which through extraordinary
contortions she had managed to raise to mid-thigh level. Now she was raising it
high, keeping the blade horizontal, the better to avoid the ribs, and—
Plunged it into the giant’s back.
Shock wiped out the menacing expression on his hideously scarred face. As Janson
stepped forward, the giant squeezed off another shot, but it went high. Janson
had one more bullet left in his magazine: he could not miss.
He assumed the standard Weaver stance and squeezed off his sole remaining shot,
aiming for the man’s heart.
“I fuck your mother,” the Serb rumbled, and then, like falling timber, he
pitched forward, dead.
Now Janson strode over to the woman captive. He felt a surge of fury and
revulsion as he took in the tattered clothes, the bruised flesh, the red marks
left by hands that had groped and grasped her flesh like so much modeling clay.
Wordlessly, Janson withdrew the knife from the Serb’s back and sliced through
the hawser, freeing her.
She slid to the floor, her back resting against the pillar, seemingly unable to
stand. She curled herself up, putting her arms around her knees, drawing them
toward her, and resting her head on her forearm.
He disappeared for a moment, returning with the white shirt and khaki trousers
that had been worn by the man with the gold-rimmed glasses.
“Take them,” he said. “Put ’em on.”
Finally, she raised her head, and he saw that her face was wet with tears.
“I don’t understand,” she said dully.
“There’s a U.S. Consulate General at Museumplein nineteen. If you can get there,
they’ll take care of you.”
“You rescued me,” she said in a strange, hollow voice. “You came for me. What
the hell would you do that for?”
“I didn’t come for you,” he snapped. “I came for them.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “Please don’t lie to me.” A quaver entered her
voice. She seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and yet she started to talk,
drawling through her tears, desperately clinging to the tattered vestiges of her
professionalism. “If you wanted to interrogate one of them, you could have taken
one alive and left. You didn’t. You didn’t, because they’d have killed me if you
did.”
“Get yourself to the consulate,” he said. “File an After-Action Report. You know
the regs.”
“Answer me, goddammit!” She rubbed the tears from her face desperately,
frantically, with the palms of both hands. However traumatized and battered, she
remained fiercely ashamed of the display of weakness, vulnerability. She tried
to stand up, but the muscles in her legs rebelled and she only ended up sinking
to the ground again.
“How come you didn’t take out Steve Holmes?” She was breathing heavily. “I saw
what happened. You could have taken him out. Should have taken him out. Standard
combat procedure is, you take the guy out. But all you did was disarm him. Why
would you do that?” She coughed, and tried for a brave smile, but it looked like
a wince. “Nobody uses a goddamn Havahart trap in the middle of a gunfight!”
“Maybe I missed. Maybe I was out of ammunition.”
Her face was red as she slowly shook her head. “You think I can’t handle the
truth? Well, I don’t know if I can. I just know that I can’t hear any more lies
right now.”
“Museumplein nineteen,” Janson repeated.
“Don’t leave me here,” she said, her voice cracking with fear and bewilderment.
“I’m scared, all right? These fuckers weren’t in the prep book. I don’t know who
they are or what they want or where they are. All I know is, I need help.”
“The consulate will help.” Janson started to walk away.
“Don’t you turn your back on me, Paul Janson! I almost killed you three times.
The least you owe me is an explanation.”
“Report back to work,” Janson replied. “Go back to your job.”
“I can’t. Don’t you understand anything?” Suddenly, her voice became thick; the
woman who sought to kill him was choking up. “My job—my job is to kill you. I
can’t do that now. I can’t do my job.” She laughed bitterly.
Slowly, slowly, she struggled to her feet, holding on to the pillar for support.
“Listen to me now. I met this American in Regent’s Park who told me some lunatic
story that maybe us Cons Op folks had got caught up in some big … manipulation.
That the bad guy we were supposed to take down wasn’t really the bad guy. I
ignored that, because if that were true, up was down and down was up. Can you
understand that? If you can’t trust the people who give you your orders, what’s
the point of anything? Later, I filed my Memorandum of Conversation about it,
just pro forma, and I get a phone call not from my boss, but my boss’s boss. And
he wants me to remember that Paul Janson is a genius liar, and was I sure he
hadn’t gotten to me somehow? Now I’m shivering in this godforsaken warehouse and
thinking if I ever want to learn what’s going on in the world, I’m probably not
going to get that from my bosses. Now I’m thinking that the only one who can
tell me what time it is is the guy I’m looking at.” Trembling, she began to put
on the clothes he had brought her. “The same guy I’ve spent forty-eight hours
trying to drill.”
“You’ve just gone through a traumatic experience. You’re not yourself. That’s