“That’s him,” Vladmir Karamotsav hissed across his vodka tumbler. Unlike her husband, she never drank hard liquor while working. She nodded almost imperceptibly that she knew that this man was Rourke, John Thomas, Case Officer, United States Central Intelligence Covert Operations Division, Central American
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Special Action Group. “Go up to the bar and refill your glass. Get a closer look. See if you can spot his gun. That might come in handy. He’s right-handed.”
“All right, Vladmir,” she whispered, not bothering to mention that had Vladmir read deeper into the file he would have learned that Rourke was, for all intents and purposes, ambidextrous. So was she.
The air was as heavy with smoke as it was with counterfeit American rock music as she drained off her glass and stood, catching up the skirt of her white ankle length gown and starting toward the bar where the American leaned, at once casual yet somehow seeming uncomfortable.
She knew his name, assumed his politics, knew why the CIA had sent him, but found herself wondering what he was really like.
Natalia reached the bar.
“Si —another Chablis Blanc, please. It was house brand I think.” The bartender— a greasy looking man in a white bolero length jacket —nodded and smiled at her as he took the glass, his hand intentionally touching hers for an instant. She dismissed it like accidentally touching a dirty doorknob. She glanced to her left, looking at this John Rourke. His forehead was high, but naturally so, his dark brown hair thick, healthy looking. As if he felt her watching him, he inclined his head toward her and before she averted her eyes, she saw his. They were brown, filled with steadiness and a hint of melancholy and she felt a nervous feeling suddenly deep in the pit of her stomach.
He was either very good at concealing a weapon — better than she would have thought he should be —or unarmed. She determined that as her eyes crossed over his body plane when the bartender brought her the glass of wine. There was no hint of a telltale bulge under his jacket. Perhaps an ankle holster, the trouser legs wide
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enough for one if it were worn properly. “Put the wine on our bill —over there,” she told the bartender, then ignored him and walked back from the bar. Vladmir stood but didn’t get her chair. She sat down, raising her glass to her lips, saying over it, “Either he isn’t armed at all or he’s better than anyone I’ve seen at concealing. He could have an ankle holster, but I didn’t see anything to indicate he did.”
“What did his file say?”
“He carries a ,45 automatic, a Colt, sometimes two of them.”
“Any mention of a backup gun?w “He carries a knife. An A.G. Russell Sting, it said, or sometimes a big Gerber.”
“Then we’ll take him easily enough. You can see him better. Who’s he talking to?”
She lit a cigarette and looked across the flame of the lighter toward the bar. John Rourke was speaking with a Latin wearing a white dinner jacket, the Latin smoking a cigarette, holding it carelessly in his right hand, gesturing with it as he spoke. His name was Armando Fernandez-Salizar and he was head of the pro-American government’s counter-terrorist unit, his identity a closely guarded state secret. Fernandez-Salizar must have been in a back room, because she had not seen him at the bar before this instant. Fernandez-Salizar did not know that his identity was known.
“What is he doing, Natalia? I don’t want to — ” “You’re in luck tonight, Vladmir. Fernandez-Salizar is standing at the bar with him. You can get the both — wait — ” “What?”
The American, Rourke, and Fernandez-Salizar were walking around the end of the bar, a door opening quickly, both of them disappearing through the doorway. “They’re leaving —it looked like a back room.”
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“Merde!” Vladmir hissed. Vladmir stood up, patting his pockets vigorously. Then, in a voice calculated to be heard over the loudness of the Latinized Rock, said, “I left that other pack of cigarettes in the car, sweetheart. Be back in a flash.”
She smiled, Vladmir leaving the room, heading toward the steps and the entrance.
Natalia took her beaded bag from the table beside her cigarettes and lighter, using the mirror in the purse’s flap to look toward the door beside the bar. It remained closed.
She picked up her cigarettes and her lighter, starting to put them away. “… cigarettes in the car . . .”meant that he was going to get the rest of the men. “. . . sweetheart” meant that she should follow the subject, in this case subjects, Rourke and Fernandez-Salizar. ” . . flash” meant they’d hit in ten minutes. She had already ticked off sixty seconds mentally and glanced at her watch. At eleven fourteen, Vladmir’s people would come in, some through the main entrance and some through whatever back door presented itself. There would be a bloodbath unless she could get Rourke and Fernandez-Salizar herself and defuse Vladmir’s operation.
Natalia stood up, tugging at her dress, letting it settle, turning her head toward the doorway through which Rourke and Fernandez-Salizar had disappeared.
She started toward the doorway, catching a glimpse of the bartender moving too quickly, his right hand snaking under the white jacket. “Senorita —it is prohibited!”
She stopped less than a yard from the door. She looked at him. He came under the bar’s drop leaf, his hand still under his jacket. “It’s all right. I’m expected,” she told him.
“Senorita —is prohibited.”
She shrugged her shoulders a little, making her cleav-
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age deepen, his eyes widening, her left hand brushing against the left side of his torso. The gun she’d thought she’d spotted earlier was there. She started past him, stopped.
“Senorita-”
She had her dress up over her left knee, her right hand to the garter sheath and the Bali-Song pressured against the inside of her left thigh. Her fingers closed over it as she let the skirt fall and turned toward him quickly, “Pero, senor —es muy importante —”
The click-click-click sound she had heard so many times, the sudden hardness in the eyes, the hand sweeping the gun out, but not in time, the Bali-Song’s blade tip gouging into the neck and ripping as she stepped back quickly so the arterial blood wouldn’t ruin her dress, the body lurching toward her, collapsing to the knees, the gun —a Walther P-38 —falling from limpen-ing fingers. She reached down quickly and in one fluid motion, had the gun in her tiny left fist, the Bali-Song’s blade wiped clean against the dying man’s coat sleeve and was moving toward the door. Click-click-click. She dropped the Bali-Song down her cleavage, her purse under her left upper arm, her left hand shifting the 9mm to her right, then sweeping across the slide. She had never trusted loaded chamber indicators or the fact that a double action pistol with a state-of-the-art safety system would be carried chamber loaded. As the slide snapped back, she heard the ejected cartridge hit the end of the bar. She heard a woman scream, then a man scream. The rock music was still playing annoyingly loudly.
The doorknob turned under her hand, but only enough to tell her it was locked.
Natalia stepped back, levelling the P-38 at the lock-plate on the side nearest the jamb, firing twice in rapid succession. She would have five or six rounds left, de-
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pending. She wheeled half right, her left hand bunching her dress up to her thighs as her left leg snapped up and out, the sole of her left foot hitting the lockplate, the door slamming open inward.
She ran through the doorway, seeing Fernandez-Salizar already turning around, another man wearing a black business suit and holding a riot shotgun wheeling toward her. There was no sign of John Rourke. Natalia pulled the Walther’s trigger, then again, blood flowering at the center of the shotgunner’s forehead and near his adam’s apple just over his shirt collar, the body rocking away as she wheeled toward Fernandez-Salizar. He was drawing a revolver. Her first bullet went through his right wrist and he shrieked with pain, falling back. But he still tried making his hand work enough to get the gun from under the left side of his coat, his formal shirt front splotching with blood from the first bullet’s secondary wound. Her second bullet went into his chest properly this time and, as he fell, she fired a third shot through his left eye. It was important that he be dead.
The Walther’s slide was locked open. There had only been seven rounds.
The shotgun was too obvious.
Natalia let the P38 drop to the floor.
She tore Fernandez-Salizar’s hand away from the butt of the revolver and pulled it the rest of the way from the shoulder holster (it was a four-inch nickel Colt Python, flashy, big and macho looking just as she had expected). Her right hand was sticky with blood from the grips. There was no time to wipe it off. There was no time to check the load.