“You!”
The blond man with the scar. The assassin from the Shanghai Hotel!
For a moment, Decker hesitated. For a moment only, but in that instant, the man lunged at him, swinging his elbows and arms out and striking Decker on the side of the chin.
Decker fell back to the railing. He saw stars as the man struck him again with his other elbow. Decker retreated again, almost tipping over the banister. Then the man was around him. He kneed at his groin.
Decker tore away from the banister. In the confines of the hallway, he could barely pull his arms back to defend himself. He threw out a thumb strike, gouging the man in the larynx. He followed this up with a jab at his pectoral muscles near the shoulder joint, trying to immobilize his right arm. The assassin fell back. He started to run down the hall to the office. Decker followed.
He caught the assassin as he lunged for the window. He spun him about.
The man punched him twice in the face. Then a shovel hook to the liver. Another blow square to the face and Decker fell back. The two men were pinned now between a drafting table and the desk by the window. The three people had vanished.
Decker rotated at the waist to generate power and threw an elbow strike to the face. The blond man countered with a hammer-fist to the temple. The blow glanced off but Decker was stunned. He fell back to the desk. He scrambled to right himself and felt something hard in his hand. Without even looking to see what it is, he picked up the object and struck the assassin on the side of the face. It was a stapler. There was a loud thwack and the blond man fell backward. Blood poured from his cheek.
Barely pausing, Decker grabbed the man by the collar, turned him over and flung him with all of his might into the side of a copying machine near the door. The man groaned and slid to the floor. Decker ran over, picked him up, and tossed him like a bag of dirty laundry onto the top of the copier. He slammed the lid on his head, over and over again, until the glass cracked and the man slithered off the machine. He fell to one knee, striking out simultaneously.
The blow caught Decker by surprise — in the groin. Pain shot through him like a bright, blinding light.
The blond man pulled himself to his feet, holding on to the copier. He issued a snap kick to Decker’s left knee. The blow barely connected but it was enough to send Decker down to the floor. He watched helplessly as the man rushed around him, as he slipped through the door.
Decker rolled to his feet. He lunged through the door and, in one single bound, leapt over the banister into the stairwell, thereby cutting off the assassin’s retreat. But the blond man wasn’t going downstairs. As soon as he saw Decker blocking his path, he made for the ladder leading back up to the roof.
Decker cursed and dashed up the steps in pursuit. He leapt round the banister and lunged for the two legs still scrambling up the black metal ladder. The assassin kicked at his face. Then he was gone. On the roof. Decker hauled himself upward, through the hatch toward the white snowy sky, only to see the flash of a knife at his face.
Decker ducked. He reached up with a tiger claw, trying to grab the man’s wrist, but missed. The knife swept backward and caught him on the flank of the forearm. Decker let out a scream. Then, something came over him. Instead of making him retreat through the roof hatch, the pain awakened in him something raw and primordial. It was as if everything that had happened to him, all his anger and bitterness, the dark tides he’d been storing within him for years were released all at once as the blood coursed down his forearm.
The pain was delicious.
Decker found himself scurrying up the last few feet of the ladder. He was out in the air, just in time to take another blow to the chest. But this time he managed to keep the knife edge at bay. He folded down on the arm, caught it under his armpit, and heaved forward.
The blond man grunted and let go of the knife. It clattered down through the roof hatch and fell out of sight.
Now, they were both out in the open. It was still snowing and a thin slippery layer covered most of the roof. Decker took in the assassin’s blue eyes, the scar on his cheek, the blond hair and all of that blood on his face. They were about the same size and build. A matched pair.
Decker lashed out with a knife-hand to the side of his neck. It connected below and slightly in front of the blond man’s left ear, sending a shock to the carotid artery, the jugular vein and the vagus nerve.
The blond man took a step backward. He tried to jab with his right but Decker clipped him with another knife-hand, this time to the radial nerve at the elbow. He followed it up with a palm strike to the man’s solar plexus. The assassin grunted and took another step backward. He staggered close to the edge.
Why does it always have to be on a roof? Decker wondered as he caught a glimpse of Congress Court far below. Why always someplace up high?
The blond man tried to recover. He slipped in from below, threw an elbow strike to the ribs.
Decker caught it with a twist of the arm.
The man issued a snap kick but missed. Then a round-house but Decker blocked it with ease. He was tiring. Decker could see that. The blond man was dropping his arms and there was a splinter of fear in his eyes.
He feinted once to the right, then pivoted, jabbing, but Decker deflected it with a whipping-hand block so jarring that the snap of the assassin’s right wrist sounded like a gun going off. He screamed, grabbed his arm and fell back still further.
It was as if the man were moving in slow motion now. Decker could anticipate each of his thrusts, every parry. And even when he did land a punch, Decker barely recorded it. The blows echoed inside him, like thunderclaps across a distant horizon. There was so much adrenaline coursing through his veins that Decker couldn’t feel a damn thing.
The man glanced over his shoulder. It was two stories down to the next roof, and then another to the alley below.
“Don’t do it,” said Decker, as if sensing the assassin’s intention. “You won’t make it.”
Decker stepped up to grab him. The man smiled and jumped off the roof.
For a moment, he seemed to hover at the same altitude, like some cartoon character, before plummeting down in an arc to the roof below.
He landed hard, rolled, tried to slow down the fall, but his momentum was simply too great, and he bounced once again on the snow-covered roof and then slid off the edge to the alley below.
Decker peered over the parapet.
The figure was splayed out in the alley, one leg wrapped underneath him, and his head hidden by the edge of a dumpster. He wasn’t moving.
A few minutes later, after first wrapping up his wounded forearm with a piece of his shirt, Decker started back down the stairs. He picked up the assassin’s gun on the landing and made his way through the back door to Congress Court.
The man still hadn’t moved. He wasn’t going anywhere. Decker could see that now as he drew near. One leg was broken. So was his right wrist, where Decker had blocked it with the edge of his forearm.
Decker knelt down beside him. The man’s eyes were open. One of them was bright red, a cobweb of broken capillaries. There was blood coming out of his mouth. And his nose. His back was probably broken. “Who are you?” asked Decker.
The man didn’t respond. He smiled and then arched his back as another wave of blistering pain coursed through his limbs. His right leg was wrapped completely under his body.
“So, you can still feel,” Decker said. “Which means that your neck isn’t broken. Not yet, anyway. That’s good.” He reached out and grabbed the man by the wrist. It was a compound fracture. The bone was protruding right through the skin. Decker pressed the nerve endings, ground them under his thumb. “Your name.”