POV: Aria
Sofia wasn't supposed to be there.
That was the first thing. The second was the explosion.
It came from the south approach, the road I rejected three days ago for exactly that reason, too narrow, too exposed, one entry and one exit and no room to think. I heard it before I saw it, a hard flat sound that the city absorbed wrong, and then the night lit up orange two blocks behind me and the radio in my ear went to static and I knew what had happened before any of the pieces settled.
The convoy had been hit.
Three vehicles. Mine at the front, Mika behind me, and the cargo van running last in the sequence. The explosion came from the last position. The cargo van, which had been carrying Matteo's substituted cases and a tracker I hadn't been told about until that morning.
Mika's voice cut through the static. "Van's gone. I don't know if Santos got out."
Santos was the DeLuca man Matteo sent to run cargo security. I didn't know him well enough. I knew he had a daughter because he mentioned it twice in the briefing and I filed it and was filing it again in a different and heavier way.
"Keep moving," I said.
"Aria"
"Keep moving. North exit. We talked about this."
I pushed the car to sixty and the north exit was three blocks and I took the first turn hard and let the speed carry me through and I was running the route in my head, the secondary escape I built after I saw the two unscheduled cars, the one I didn't put in the documentation because the documentation was compromised before I received it.
The radio crackled. Mika again. "There's another car. Behind me. Moving fast."
"Colour."
"Dark. No plates."
"How far."
"Two lengths. Maybe less now."
Not Victor's men following up their own attack. Victor's men would have been positioned to intercept at the north exit, not chasing from behind. That was the second car from the approach road. The one the unknown number said didn't belong to Victor.
Three seconds. I made a decision.
"Mika. Next junction, go left. Hard left, don't slow down. I'll come around and cut behind you."
"That puts you between me and them."
"That's the point. Go."
I took the next right, accelerated to the end of the block, cut through the service gap between the buildings, the one I found two years ago running a different job in that part of the city, and came out on the far side of the junction exactly as Mika's car punched through the left turn and the dark car behind him overcommitted to follow.
I hit the dark car's left rear quarter at thirty miles per hour.
Not a crash. A surgical tap, the kind that disrupted direction without destroying momentum, and the dark car went sideways and mounted the kerb and stopped against a fire hydrant with a sound that carried two blocks. Mika was already gone.
I didn't stop to check on the car. I accelerated north.
"That was either very good or very stupid," Mika said on the radio.
"We'll find out later," I said.
I was three blocks from the safe point, the secondary location Matteo didn't know about, the address I kept for exactly that kind of night, when Sofia's voice came through on the frequency.
Sofia was not supposed to be on that frequency. She was supposed to be contained, secured, away from anything connected to the job. Matteo gave me his word. I believed it because I chose to and because believing it was necessary to function and then her voice was in my ear and every choice I made based on that belief was recalculating.
"Aria." Her voice was flat in the way it got when she was already past the thing she was describing. "I'm two blocks south. Don't ask why. The second vehicle from last night followed me from the safe house at eight this morning. I've been running it since."
Twelve hours. She had been running a tail for twelve hours without reaching out.
"Are you clear," I said.
"I was," she said. "Ten seconds ago I was."
The sound that came through the radio next was not words. It was the particular acoustic signature of a car losing control at speed, the squeal and the impact and then the longer sound of metal on asphalt that went on longer than it should and ended wrong.
Then silence.
"Sofia."
Nothing.
"Sofia."
The radio stayed silent and the city went on around me and I was three blocks from the safe point and I had a split second to decide whether I went there or went south and the decision was already made before I finished forming it because I had known since the parking structure that I simply couldn't run the version of this where I kept moving and told myself she'd be fine.
I went south.
Two blocks down I saw it. Her car on its roof, driver's side against the kerb, rear end in the intersection, wheels still spinning. The dark car that hit her was already gone. Moved before I arrived. Planned or fled, I didn't know yet and it didn't matter right then.
I stopped thirty feet away. I got out. I kept moving.
The driver's window was gone and I could see her and she was moving, which was the only thing that mattered, she was moving and her hands were on the door frame and she was working out how to get through a window that was now sideways and she was doing it methodically, which meant she was conscious and she was Sofia.
"I'm here," I said.
She looked at me through the window. Blood at her hairline, not much. Eyes focused.
"The second car," she said. "It wasn't following me. It was pushing me toward you."
I looked at the intersection. At the position of her car relative to the road I had just come down. At the angle.
She was right. Wherever I went that night, that car ended up in my path.
I was the destination.
My phone lit up in my pocket. Not the clean line. My personal phone, the one I left at the building with the monitors, the one Matteo's people had.
I took it out.
One message. No number. Four words in capitals.
WE HAVE THE CARGO.
And below that, a single additional line that told me the second car, the one that wasn't Victor's, had been playing a longer game than anything I mapped.
And we have Matteo.