Thriller (63 page)

woman collapsed to the floor in a coughing fit. Barely able to hold

her head up, she vomited from the tear gas. Stella calculated that

she had a couple of minutes to work without interference. She

crouched below the window and inspected her surroundings as

she crawled over to lock the door.

Before she reached it, she sensed someone in the hall. She

stopped and aimed the shotgun.

“Friend!” Rack’s deep voice boomed above the din of the fire

alarm.

Stella lowered the shotgun, now certain he had military experience.

“Get your pretty ass back into the vault,” Rack said. “I don’t

know what the hell you’re thinking, but taking this woman as a

hostage isn’t going to mean shit to them.”

“Cover the hallway while you’re standing there.” Stella inventoried the office. Its standard furnishings provided no unusual options.

“That mob will rip you apart,” Rack said.

“You know as well as I do they’re going to loot this place, then

torch it. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not sticking around.” She rifled through a desk drawer. A private collection of Snickers bars,

Cadbury chocolates and a bag of Fritos was stuffed behind a cash

box. She ripped the wrapper from a candy bar and bit down. She

tossed Rack a Snickers, then shoved the rest of hers into her mouth.

“You’re nuts.” Rack looked out the window, then lowered the

blinds.

“Eat it. If you’re with me, I’m not going to risk your blood

sugar tanking.” She glanced at the woman who was still throwing up from the tear gas.

“Who the hell are you?” Rack asked her.

“A girl who needs the wind at her back and sunlight streaming toward her.” She flashed him a smile, then opened a metal

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supply cabinet. “I
am
going to get out of here.” She found duct

tape. “Guess this is the best I’m going to do.”

“I don’t like leaving everyone behind in that vault.”

“You’ll figure out a way to spin it before election time rolls

around. If I could save them, I would. Bernie’s the ranking officer—he has to stay. But the others are diplomats. They’d rather

be taken hostage than fight their way out.”

A chunk of brick smacked against the bent blinds. Stella didn’t

jump but only glanced up. She crawled over to the heaving

woman and gently patted her back to reassure her while she removed her light gray headscarf. She continued talking to Rack.

“If you’re with me, you need to find your own costume. I’m sure

there are several donors still groping around down there.” Stella

coughed. Smoke and tear gas were beginning to blow upstairs.

“Lock the door when you go. And try to pick up one of the Enfields to add to the illusion.”

Stella tied up the woman and pulled on her
jilbab
to begin her

transformation to a modest Muslim woman. Her arms stuck four

inches out of the sleeves and the hem hit between her ankles and

knees, a racy length she would have to compensate for with her

posture. She tied the scarf around her head, shoving every strand

of hair under it.

As she was about to leave, Rack returned, depositing an armful of white clothes and an old rifle onto the desk. “Here’s hoping that one of these pairs of Paki pj’s fits.”

“No friends with you?”

“I don’t do hostages—slow you down too much.” Rack thrust

his arm into the sleeve. The seams ripped. He tried the other one

on, but he could barely shove his large hand through the narrow opening. “I might have just screwed myself when I gave the

diplomats our guns and told them to lock the vault.”

Even the most hard-core rioters avoided burning buildings,

but Stella took only enough time in Thompson’s office to use his

CIA-issue disguise kit to darken their fair complexions and to

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rinse color through Rack’s blond hair and long sideburns. He

wore a wool skull cap and a pair of white
kurta
pajamas that

Thompson had stashed in his office, no doubt for a clandestine

rendezvous. Aside from the gas mask, he made a pretty good

local, albeit a large one.

Stella ran as quickly as the long, tight
jilbab
permitted. She put

on the gas mask, pulled up the coat and bounded down to the

first floor. The hallway was empty of intruders but filled with tear

gas and smoke. They didn’t want to risk going out a door and allowing more rioters inside. They had to find where they had broken in.

She crept into an office. The windows were partially broken,

but the grates were intact. She crossed the corridor and entered

another office, catty-corner from the one she had checked. She

searched the ground floor in a modified star pattern, careful not

to move along the same line, always staying a shade to the

oblique.

Rack found her, motioning that he’d discovered the rat hole.

She signaled him that she needed a moment. He disappeared into

the cafeteria.

It was time to add the finishing touch to her costume: a typewriter. In a land where most people paid scribes to type their papers, she would be the envy of the other looters.

She stepped inside an office, then froze. Two men lay motionless on the floor. One wore only his underwear. One of their

heads was turned a little too far to the left. Necks were not easy

to break.
The congressman’s trained—
if
he’s a congressman.

She grabbed an IBM Selectric typewriter. Hiking up the
jilbab,

she stepped over the bodies. She shuddered.

The hallway was still empty and the door that Rack had entered was shut. She put her hand on the knob, then stopped herself. Rather than enter as Rack would expect, she slipped inside

the kitchen and slinked over to where she could see Rack. He

crouched behind a serving counter, studying the crowd outside.

She crept into the room, staying below the tables, out of sight of

the protesters. Rack spotted her and waved.

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The cafeteria wasn’t as cloudy as the hallway, but enough gas

and smoke lingered to make breathing miserable. Stella put her

hand on the gas mask with the dread of someone about to jump

into an icy pond. She counted to three, then pulled it off. Her reluctant body inhaled. She coughed. Her eyes wanted to clamp

shut but she held them wide open. When they emerged from the

window, they had to appear as if they had braved the smoke of

a burning building.

She stood on tiptoe and spoke into Rack’s ear. “If anyone looks

at us too closely, here’s what to do…”

“Ladies first,” Rack whispered when they got to the window.

Stella handed him the typewriter. She wanted to hike up the

jilbab
so her legs could maneuver, but she didn’t dare break character. A mob circled the building at a cautious distance. Thousands of eyes were watching their egress.

The windowpane was shattered and pieces of glass jutted out

from the frame. She knocked away debris. Perching on the sill,

she swung her legs out in tandem, then dropped to the ground.

Rack lowered the heavy typewriter to her, then jumped down.

He swaggered with the rifle over his shoulder and his pants riding up on him. Stella slouched, but the
jilbab
was several inches

too short. They were the only show to watch as they crossed the

fifteen meters between the building and the crowd.

They were too exposed.

They weren’t going to make it.

She tugged at Rack’s pajama sleeve.

Suddenly, Rack threw his head back and shouted at the top of

his lungs,
“Allahu Akbar.”
He pointed the Enfield into the air and

fired.
“Allahu Akbar!”
His voice boomed.

Stella held her breath.

Rack emptied the rifle into the air, then waved it above his head.

“
Allahu Akbar! Allah is great!
” The crowd erupted with cheers

and joy shots. As they delved into the anonymous safety of the

mob, Stella shouted as loudly as she could,
“Allahu Akbar!”

This time, she meant it.

In the first draft of Robert Liparulo’s thriller
Comes a

Horseman
, the coprotagonists—FBI agents Brady Moore and

Alicia Wagner—were helped out of a particularly hairy situation by police sniper Byron Stone. Byron was a moody fellow, renowned as much for his reticence as for his skill with

a rifle. Ultimately, pacing considerations trumped Liparulo’s

(and early readers’) affection for Byron, and his scenes wound

up being edited out.

Byron, of course, wasn’t happy. He nagged at the edges of

Liparulo’s mind, always asking the same questions: What

makes me so gloomy? How did I become so proficient with a

gun? What’s my story? After a while, Liparulo started jotting

down answers, eventually explaining Byron’s life in the notes,

outlines and fragments of three yet-unwritten thrillers—

Recoil
,
Recon
and
Return
.

While Byron Stone draws blood from Liparulo’s own heart,

he’s also a compilation of Liparulo’s acquaintances, including a SWAT sniper and an FBI sniper (imagine
their
disagreements). These two shared the qualities of quiet, nearly

impenetrable machismo and subtly troubled spirits. The taking of lives made them each respect life that much more.

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They would kill only when it would save more lives, or a more

innocent life. But this creed allowed them only to pull the

trigger. Bad guy or not, a life is a life, and to hell with how

tough snipers act, their souls ache for each of the ones they

ended.

A sniper’s knowledge that his job is necessary, crashing

headlong into his humanity—this was the conflict Liparulo

wanted to explore with Byron.
Kill Zone
does not answer all

of Byron’s questions, but it opens a window on the police

sniper’s moral struggle.

The sweaty, beard-stubbled face wavered behind the sniper’s

crosshairs. The suspect’s eyes flicked around—to the kids, weeping in a corner; to the apartment door, propped closed with a chair

because he had broken the latch when he kicked it in; to the window, where he seemed to expect the peering faces of would-be

rescuers. Forget that it was five stories up, with no fire escape.

Keep looking, buddy,
the sniper thought.
All the better to keep

you in my sights.

It was bad enough that the gun-brandishing creep had provoked the wrath of the city’s SWAT team; now he had Byron

Stone’s rifle pointed at him. Most folks would have told the offender to jump out the window and get done with it.

Byron was as comfortable with a rifle as an accountant is with

a mechanical pencil. From his eighth birthday, when he was bequeathed his granddaddy’s .22 for plunking at cans and groundhogs (and stray cats when no one was looking), through boot

camp, Ranger training, sniper school and the police academy, he

figured he hadn’t gone longer than a week without shooting a

gun. Breathing required more thought.

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Now he was poised across the street and a floor up from the

commandeered apartment. He could see the perp, scruffy and

likely drunk, holding a woman in front of him with a thick arm

around her neck. In his other hand was a pistol, which he alternately held to the woman’s temple and pointed at the kids. The

sniper panned to the next window. The children were still there.

The boy was little, no older than three. The girl was about eleven,

his own son’s age. They were terrified.

He panned back to the man who was threatening them. He

tensed. The woman was no longer struggling. She was hanging

like a doll in the man’s grip. There was no blood and he’d heard

no shot. Could he have strangled her? Broken her neck? She

lifted her hand to touch her captor’s arm, and Byron relaxed

slightly. She had simply realized the futility of fighting, or was

too exhausted to continue. Now she was only partially blocking

the man’s face from Byron’s view, instead of randomly flailing her

head around, which wasn’t the brightest idea in situations involving snipers.

He watched the perp jerk her this way, then that, waving the

gun like a conductor’s baton. It appeared to be a .38 snub-nose

revolver, what they used to call a Saturday night special—cheap,

but lethal.

Eyeing the scene through the scope’s optics was like watching a television program with the volume turned off. The networks would have dropped this show a long time ago. The acting

was melodramatic, the plot was nonexistent. In fact, Byron did

not know the story at all. Was this a lovers’ spat gone off the deep

end? A fouled drug deal? Maybe the guy had chosen a door at

random: some people meet their soul mates in chance encounters; the woman and her children had met the devil. Whatever

ill wind blew the man to that apartment also stirred people like

Byron, people who made it their life’s work to stop bad guys from

preying on innocence.

Byron noticed the woman was wearing a waitress’s uniform,

light blue with white trim. A name tag clung to her left breast,

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but her constant flailing prevented him from reading its inscription. He felt a pang of sympathy for her. Two kids. A deadend job. Living in a one-room dive, in which the “kitchen”

amounted to a few appliances and a countertop running along