Gone Tomorrow

SEVENTY- ONE

I hefted the bag over to the bed. About eight pounds, I figured. It hit the rucked sheet and made a satisfying metallic sound. I unzipped it and parted the flaps like a mouth and looked inside.

First thing I saw was a file folder.

It was legal sized, and khaki in colour, and made of thick paper or thin card, depending on your point of view. It held twenty-one printed-out sheets. Immigration records, for twenty-one separate people. Two women, nineteen men. Citizens of Turkmenistan. They had entered the United States from Tajikistan three months ago. Linked itineraries. There were digital photographs and digital fingerprints, from the immigration booths at JFK. The photographs had a slight fish-eye distortion. They were in colour. I recognized Lila and Svetlana easily. And Leonid and his buddy. I didn’t know the other seventeen. Four of them already had exit notations. They were the four that had left. I dropped their sheets in the trash and laid out the unknown thirteen on the bed for a better look.

All thirteen faces looked bored and tired. Local flights, connections, a long transatlantic flight, jet lag, a long wait in JFK’s immigration hall. Sullen glances at the camera, faces held level, eyes swivelling up towards the lens. Which told me all thirteen were somewhat short in stature. I cross-checked with Leonid’s sheet. His gaze was just as bored and tired as the others, but it was level. He was the tallest of the party. I checked Svetlana Hoth’s sheet. She was the shortest. The others were all somewhere in between, small wiry Middle Eastern men worn down to bone and muscle and sinew by climate and diet and culture. I looked hard at them, one through thirteen, over and over again, until I had their expressions fixed firmly in my mind.

Then I turned back to the bag.

At the minimum I was hoping for a decent handgun. At best I was hoping for a short sub-machine gun. My point to Springfield about the baggy jacket was to make him see that I would have room to carry something under it, slung high on my chest on a shortened strap and then concealed by the excess fabric zipped over it. I had hoped he would get the message.

He had. He had gotten the message. He had come through in fine style.

Better than the minimum.

Better even than the best case.

He had given me a silenced short sub-machine gun. A Heckler & Koch MP5SD. The suppressed version of the classic MP5. No butt or stock. just a pistol grip, a trigger, a housing for a curved 30-round magazine, and then a six-inch barrel radically fattened by a double-layered silencer casing. Nine-millimetre, fast, accurate, and quiet. A fine weapon. It was fitted with a black nylon strap. The strap had already been tightened up and reduced in length to its practical minimum. As if Springfield was saying: I heard you, pal.

I laid the gun on the bed.

He had supplied ammunition, too. It was right there in the bag. A single curved magazine. Thirty rounds. Short and fat, shiny brass cases winking in the light, polished lead noses nearly as bright. None-millimetre Parabellums. From the Latin motto Si vis pacem para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. A wise saying. But thirty rounds was not a lot. Not against fifteen people. But New York City is not easy. Not for me, not for Springfield.

I lined up the magazine next to the gun.

Checked the bag again, in case there was more.

There wasn’t.

But there was a bonus of a kind.

A knife.

A Benchmade 3300. A black machined handle. An auto-opening mechanism. Illegal in all fifty states unless you were active-service military or law enforcement, which I wasn’t. I thumbed the release and the blade snicked out, fast and hard. A double-edged dagger with a spear point. Four inches long. I am no kind of a knife fetishist. I don’t have favourites. I don’t really like any of them. But if you asked me to rely on one for combat, I would pick something close to what Springfield had supplied. The automatic mechanism, the point, the two-edged blade. Ambidextrous, good for stabbing, good for slashing either coming or going.

I closed it up and put it on the bed next to the H&K.

There were two final items in the bag. A single leather glove, black, sized and shaped for a large man’s left hand. And a roll of black duct tape. I put them on the bed, in line with the gun and the magazine and the knife.

Thirty minutes later I was all dressed up and locked and loaded and riding south on the R train.