Chapter 2
He glanced toward the counter.
Elisa was working the espresso machine, her back to the room. And then she stopped.
It was nothing, from a distance. The most minimal thing. Her shoulders had been curved inward all afternoon—the posture of someone who expected to be criticized—and then, for just one half-second, they squared. Her head turned slightly toward the window, the movement precise and controlled in a way that had nothing to do with anxiety.
Through the glass, a white cargo van crawled past on the Via Martelli.
Too slow. The wrong kind of slow. Not lost-driver slow. Not looking-for-parking slow. The slow of a vehicle maintaining position.
Elisa’s right hand drifted toward the front pocket of her apron. Her fingers found something there, pressed against it briefly, withdrew. The whole gesture lasted less than a second.
The van rounded the corner and disappeared.
Elisa exhaled—a small release, controlled, the breath of someone who had decided the threat was still at a distance—and turned back to the machine.
Dominic Ferrante had not reached the position he occupied by ignoring things that were almost nothing.
He watched her differently now. The trembling was still there when she carried the replacement espresso across the room, but he was looking beneath it, and beneath it he saw something that made his stomach tighten. The trembling was in her hands. Not in her feet, which moved with too much sureness for a woman who kept bumping into chairs. Not in her eyes, which tracked the room in intervals that were too regular to be idle. Not in the way she set the cup down—carefully, yes, but not with the anxiety of someone afraid to spill.
With the care of someone who needed both hands free a moment later.
She was performing.
He had no time to complete the thought.
The window behind the two old men detonated inward.
The first shot was a single crack that his brain registered as wrong before it registered as dangerous. Then the second, and the old man on the left dropped across the table, and his companion’s scream lasted only until the third shot ended it. The woman with the tablet dove sideways, her chair clattering. Sandro and Ricci reached for their weapons.
Neither one made it.
Two sounds. Two bodies.
Dominic was already moving, or trying to—his legs understood the situation approximately one full second ahead of the rest of him—when something hit him from the left with the force of a much larger person. The floor rushed up. He landed hard, the air hammering out of his lungs, and the marble counter beside him exploded in a white cloud as bullets tore through it at precisely the height his head had been occupying.
Weight on top of him. Small. Fast.
Then it was gone.
He heard a table go over, the flat boom of solid wood hitting floor. He heard something being dragged, and then a hand closed on his collar and pulled with authority.
“Move,” Elisa said.
Her voice had changed so completely that for one disoriented moment Dominic thought someone else had entered the room. Gone was the apologetic half-whisper. What replaced it was a flat, carrying tone that expected obedience and communicated, at some frequency below language, that it had earned the right.
He moved.
She had already put the heavy table on its side between them and the entrance, and behind it she had drawn two weapons from beneath her apron with a smoothness that looked practiced to the point of reflex. Not furtive. Not desperate. The smooth draw of someone for whom this was a vocabulary they had spoken for so long it no longer required thought.
Glocks. Both of them. Compact, reliable, the tools of someone who knew exactly what tools they needed.
The front door didn’t open. It came apart.
Six figures in tactical black poured through the wreckage, rifles tracking in overlapping arcs. Elisa rose above the table edge for the fraction of a second it took to find the first man’s face shield and put two rounds through it. She was already down again before his body registered the decision to fall.
May you like
The second breacher tracked her movement and fired where she had been. She emerged two feet to the left, at a different angle, and dropped him with a single shot placed in the gap between his vest and his helmet.
“Two down,” she said, and it was the tone of someone counting inventory.
