NIGHTFALL: THE BROKEN SON-IN-LAW'S LAST WAR

Chapter 9: The Shipyard

The scream cut off as suddenly as it started.

Then a voice came from a loudspeaker bolted to the warehouse wall, cool and amused, the same voice I'd heard on the radio in the Prescott mansion.

"Good evening, Nightfall. Right on time. I was told you were always on time."

I pulled the black mask down over my face and stayed in the shadow of the gate post.

"Your mother-in-law has a beautiful voice," she went on. "She sings very loudly when I hold her hair. Come inside, and walk in the middle of the yard where my men can see you. If you hide, she screams again. If you run, she stops screaming forever."

The speaker clicked off.

She wanted me in the open, walking down the center of the yard like a target at a fair. She'd have the rooftop rifle on me the whole way.

So I didn't go through the gate.

I went along the fence line instead, low and fast, to the spot I'd marked from the hill that afternoon, where the chain-link had rusted away from its post. I slid under it on my back and came up in the black shadow of a ship hull taller than a house.

The two walkers were the first. They moved in a slow loop through the hulls, always the same path, always ten steps apart; I'd timed them for four hours. The first man passed the corner of a rusted propeller, and I stepped out behind him, wrapped my arm around his neck, and held on. He kicked twice, then went limp. I lowered him gently into the mud and zip-tied his wrists and ankles from the bundle on my belt.

The second walker heard something. He stopped and turned, his rifle half-raised, staring into the dark between the hulls.

"Pavel?" he whispered in Tarkovan. "Pavel, where are you?"

I answered from the shadows behind him, in his own language.

"Pavel's sleeping."

He spun around, and the butt of my pistol caught him just above the ear. He folded into the mud without a sound. I tied him beside his friend.

Two.

I didn't kill them. I'd made that choice up on the hill, watching them smoke and laugh and stretch their legs like ordinary men. The six in the mansion had come with rifles into a room full of unarmed people, and I'd had no time to choose. Tonight, I had time. Tied men could talk to the police. Dead men couldn't tell anyone anything.

And somewhere deep inside, a quieter voice said something else: if I start tonight, I might not stop.

The gate man was easier. He'd wandered toward the open gate to watch for me, his back to the yard, and he never saw me coming. Three.

That left the roof.

The sniper lay flat near the edge of the warehouse roof, his rifle aimed at the yard where I was supposed to be walking. To reach him, I climbed the rusty ladder of an old crane that leaned close to the warehouse wall, rung by rung, slow and careful. The metal groaned under my weight, and I froze. Below, nothing moved. I kept climbing.

At the top, the crane's arm stretched within six feet of the warehouse roof.

I jumped across the gap.

I landed hard on the metal, and the whole roof boomed like a drum. The sniper rolled over, swinging his rifle toward me, his mouth opening to shout into his radio.

I reached him before the shout did. Four seconds later, he was asleep with his own rifle strap tied around his wrists.

But the noise had done its job. The radio on his collar was crackling.

"Josef? Josef, what was that? Answer me!" It was her. Then, colder: "He's on the roof. Everyone inside, now."

Four.

The fifth man came bursting out of the side door below, looking up, his pistol raised. I dropped off the edge of the roof onto him from a height of one floor. We hit the ground together, hard, and I got up first. He didn't get up at all, but he was breathing. I tied him too.

He opened one eye as I pulled the last tie tight. "She'll kill you," he gasped in Tarkovan. "The Major... she never misses twice."

"She missed once," I said. "That's enough for me."

Five.

My left shoulder burned where I'd landed on it. My ribs ached. For a second, standing in the dark with my breath steaming in the cold air, the yard tilted, and I smelled burning diesel and heard a harbor full of screaming men.

Not now.

In for four. Out for four.

The yard came back, cold and dark and real.

The side door hung open. Beyond it, a set of metal stairs climbed into the dark toward the upper floor, toward the windows covered in black plastic. I went up them one slow step at a time, keeping my weight on the edges so they wouldn't ring.

Halfway up, I stopped. My hands had started to tremble again, not from fear, but from the old feeling rising under my skin, hot and hungry. Five men down, and part of me wanted more.

I pressed my palm flat against the cold wall until it passed.

At the top was a long, empty room lit by one hanging bulb. Old shipping crates lined the walls. Water dripped somewhere. In the middle of the floor, under the light, Vivian sat tied to a metal chair, her pink suit torn and filthy, her perfect blonde hair hanging in her face. The tape had been ripped off her mouth, leaving a raw red mark.

She saw me in the doorway, a man in black with a mask over his face, and she didn't know me. She shrank back in the chair, shaking her head, too frightened to even scream.

And behind her, stepping out of the shadows with one arm in a sling and a pistol pressed against the back of Vivian's head, was the woman from the van.

She was tall, with platinum hair cut close to her skull and pale grey eyes so light they were almost colorless. A thin white scar split one of her eyebrows. She smiled at me, and there was no warmth in it at all.

"Hello, Nightfall," she said in perfect, careful Westrian. "You're shorter than the stories say."

"Let her go."

"Six of my people are lying in your city's morgue," she said. "Good men. Men I trained myself, some since they were boys. Do you know what it's like to send boys into a house and get back nothing but a radio full of silence?"

"Yes," I said. "I know exactly what it's like."

Something flickered in her pale eyes, and then it was gone.

"Take off your mask," she said. "I want to see the face of the man who killed my team."

I didn't move.

She pressed the gun harder against Vivian's skull, and Vivian whimpered.

"I'll count to three," the woman said softly. "One."

Vivian's eyes were locked on mine through the holes in my mask. Something changed in them. Recognition. Disbelief.

"Two."

I reached up, slowly, and pulled the mask off.

Vivian Prescott stared at me, her mouth falling open.

"Adam?" she breathed.

The woman's smile widened. "There he is. The famous God of War." Her finger tightened on the trigger. "My director sends his regards. Three."