Detour

THIRTY-THREE

He felt his sheer strength at first.

The overwhelming, undeniable thereness of it.

The knotty muscle. As if the door weren’t made of steel, but the man who’d burst through it was. CCCP, he thought.

One moment Paul was standing ten feet from the door with the Ginzu in his hand. The next, an amorphous black shape was hurtling straight at him.

He lunged at the black apparition with his knife, but the man deflected his arm with almost comical ease.

The knife went skittering off somewhere on the floor.

Before the man could kill him, Paul kept going.

Momentum carried him past the man’s swatting arm and back into the kitchen, where he attempted to ransack the second drawer without slowing down. But he cut himself on one of the other Ginzus—perhaps the apple-corer they’d received free because they’d acted now. His hand came up bloody and, more important, empty.

The man was right behind him. He could hear him breathing hard, as if the exertion of kicking in the door had tuckered him out.

Only momentarily. Not enough to make him stop.

Paul zigzagged into the bedroom like a broken-field runner. He slammed the door shut.

No.

The man had made it to the other side of the door just before Paul could actually close it.

He was pushing back.

Adrenaline was a kind of drug, Paul thought. He could feel every single muscle crackling with energy. He felt powerful, relentless, even indomitable.

He didn’t stand a chance.

Adrenaline could only do so much. The person on the other side of the door wasn’t human. He was a freakish force of nature. The door was moving backward.

One inch.

Two inches.

Paul’s hand was slipping in his own blood.

“Fuck!” Paul shouted. “Fuck!” Grunting, trying to summon a last reserve of strength.

He could bellow all he wanted. He could push and scratch and fight and pray. He was going to lose.

It ended with a bang and a whimper. The door slammed into the wall with a loud crack. Paul went backward; no—he flew, soared, catapulted. He careened off the bed. He grabbed for the phone—dead.

The man came for him.

Paul put his hands up to defend himself. He screamed. Nothing came out.

The man had put one hand around his mouth, the other against his windpipe.

He felt like a rag doll whose head was about to be smashed.

But the man didn’t smash Paul’s head.

He spoke to him.

Whispered even.

“Breathe,” he said. “Nice and easy. That’s it.”

There was no Russian accent. No Colombian accent either. That was the first surprise.

There was another.

LATER, AFTER PAUL HAD STOPPED SHAKING, THEY TALKED ABOUT old times.

Not really old times. Fairly recent in memory, just far enough away from now to be ancient history.

The delay in Kennedy.

The layover in Washington, D.C. Eight excruciating hours sitting on the tarmac with nothing to do.

Only it hadn’t seemed excruciating for the man. No. He’d sat there with utter calm staring at the seat back in front of him.

He was used to waiting, he’d said. Remember? he asked Paul.

He was a bird-watcher.