POV: Aria
I pocketed the phone. Matteo came later. Sofia came now.
She was most of the way through the window by the time I reached her, pulling herself out on her forearms with the effort of someone who had decided stopping was not an option. I got a hand under her arm and pulled and she came clear and we were on the ground and I did a fast check, hands moving over her arms and ribcage, looking for the things people missed when adrenaline was running.
"I'm okay," she said.
"I'm checking anyway," I said.
Nothing broken that I could find. The cut at her hairline was shallow. She was moving everything and her eyes were tracking and she pushed herself to standing before I told her to, which was the most Sofia thing she could possibly do and I felt something release in my chest that I didn't have a name for.
"The phone message," she said.
"I know."
"Is it real."
"I don't know yet," I said. "We move first, then we figure out what's real."
The street was quiet the way streets went quiet after something loud. Two buildings with lights on. One window with a face that disappeared when I looked up. No sirens yet, which meant nobody called or that part of the city had learned not to.
I got Sofia to my car and was opening the passenger door when the first shot hit the roof.
I didn't think. I went down and pulled Sofia down with me and we were behind the car and the second shot was closer and I tracked the angle, high and left, a rooftop or upper floor, the trajectory coming from the east.
"How many," Sofia said.
"One shooter so far. Might have a spotter."
"The car gives us thirty seconds before they adjust position."
She was right. I looked at the street. My car, Sofia's wreck, a skip bin twenty meters north, a recessed doorway beyond it. The skip bin was not cover from a high angle. The doorway might be.
"Doorway," I said. "On three. Low and fast, don't stop."
"There could be someone in it."
"I know. Three."
We ran.
The third shot went wide right and I didn't know if they missed or adjusted late but we made the doorway and I put Sofia against the wall and took the other side and breathed.
"My radio is dead," she said. "Yours."
I tried Mika. Static. I tried the logistics channel. Nothing. The clean line gave me a tone but no answer and I stood in a doorway with a shooter above me and the message about Matteo in my pocket and did the only productive thing available, which was think.
Someone had known I would come south for Sofia. Someone had positioned the shooter for that moment. Which meant they knew Sofia would be there, which meant they either followed her to that street or put her there, which meant the tail she had been running for twelve hours was not trying to catch her.
It was positioning her.
I looked at Sofia. She was watching the street with the expression she got when she was already three steps into a problem.
"The safe house," I said. "How did they know where you were."
She held my eyes. "I don't know."
"Matteo placed you there."
"Yes."
"And Matteo is now apparently taken," I said. "Which either means whoever took him got the safe house location from him, or they already had it. If they had it before, this was running before the job started."
"Before we agreed to the job," Sofia said.
"Before I agreed," I said. "Before the parking structure."
The shooter hadn't fired in forty seconds. Long enough to mean one of two things, they were moving or they were waiting for us to move first. I was betting on the second because the doorway was good cover and they had patience and they didn't need a difficult shot when they could take an easy one.
I looked at my car. Twenty meters. Too exposed.
I looked the other direction. An alley entrance, narrow, five meters away, going west and eventually connecting to the service road I used two nights ago on the prep run.
"Alley," I said. "Can you run."
"Yes," she said.
"Then we're going to run and not stop until the service road."
I moved first. I didn't tell her I was moving because telling her would cost a half-second she might use to argue. I broke from the doorway and ran and I heard her footsteps behind me and I heard the shot a fraction after I heard it hit the ground two feet to my left and I adjusted right and kept going and we were in the alley and the angle was gone, the shooter couldn't follow us into a narrow west-facing alley from an east position.
We ran.
The service road took ninety seconds. We came out of the alley and onto it and I stopped and listened and the street was quiet and there were no cars and no footsteps and nothing that suggested immediate follow.
I turned around.
Standing at the far end of the service road, between us and the only other exit, were two men I hadn't seen before. Not the shooter. Different, patient. They had been standing long enough that their posture was comfortable, which meant they had been placed there and had been waiting.
One of them had a phone in his hand and he lifted it and said something too low to hear and then put it away and both of them started walking toward us.
The other exit was behind me. I looked. A third man. Same posture, same patience, already in position before I turned.
We were enclosed.
Sofia was beside me and I could feel her running the same calculation and arriving at the same answer.
The man closest to me stopped at four feet. He looked at me without expression, the way people looked when doing a job and I was the job, and he reached into his jacket slowly and produced a phone and held it out.
"He wants to talk to you," he said.
I took the phone.
The voice that came through was not the unknown number, not Carver, not Victor, not Luca. It was a voice I had not heard before, older, very calm, the particular calm of someone who was two moves ahead and knew it.
And behind me, I heard the unmistakable sound of a weapon being raised, close, and felt the cold specific pressure of it touching the back of my head.