He turned and faced the door.
Maybe ten feet from it. From them. It seemed inconceivable and ridiculous that a mere door could save him. He could almost smell their need. He was sure Joanna could’ve.
Call 911.
This time he could actually tell them his address.
He could summon a patrol car. Scare them away.
Make them think they were coming any minute.
The phone was on the other side of the apartment. It seemed as vast and impassable as the Sahara.
Wait. He didn’t have to call. He just had to pretend to.
“Yes, is this the police?” he suddenly shouted. “Yes, I’m at 341 West 84th Street, apartment 9G. Someone’s trying to break in . . . Yes, that’s right . . . You’ll be here in two minutes? Thank God.”
Oddly enough, his fake phone call didn’t cause the man or men to stop. No.
Maybe he should’ve asked himself why?
Maybe if it wasn’t five in the morning, and if he wasn’t scared out of his mind, and if he was just a little brighter about these things, he would’ve.
Then he would have understood that the only reason a fake phone call to the police wouldn’t deter someone from breaking into your apartment is if they knew it was a fake phone call.
And the only way they could know that is if they knew you didn’t have a phone.
If, say, they’d taken the precaution of disconnecting it.
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.
THIRTY-FOUR
J ungle gym.
The Jungle Book.
In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.
Jungle boogie.
Joanna was reciting the entire known canon of jungle references. She was being her own google.com. Some of these jungle references were clearly sanitized, the jungle made friendly. Something to dance to, sing to, for four-year-olds to innocently clamber over.
There were other, scarier references.
The concrete jungle.
It’s a jungle out there.
She would just as soon not think of those.
The real jungle, the humid infestation of invisible buzzing, shrieking things and rotting, tangled vegetation, was scary enough.
For one thing it was dark.
Darker than dark.
A suffocating canopy of branches blotted out whatever moonlight there was. It was like stumbling around a closet—the kind children are convinced harbors hideous monsters.
There were definitely things going bump in the night. She could hear them directly above her head. Rustling branches, sudden growls. Monkeys? Or something worse?
Jaguars, ocelots, boa constrictors?
Joelle had woken up soon after they’d made it down a small clearing and into the thick trees. She’d begun wailing for food—or because she was cold or just plain sick. Joanna didn’t know. She was still learning the foreign language of infancy—something Galina seemed to have down pat. It didn’t matter. She had no baby formula with her, and she couldn’t do anything about the surrounding chill the baby blanket was doing little to counter.
“We’re going home,” she whispered to her daughter, though it was solely for her own benefit. Speaking out loud helped pierce the darkness, let her know that she, at least, was present and accounted for. Of course it might’ve been doing the same for any animals in the vicinity. Human or otherwise.
Occasionally, invisible flying things smacked her in the face. She nearly swallowed an enormous moth—just managing to spit it out, then bending over and retching when she realized what had been fluttering around her mouth.
She had no idea where she was going.
She’d decided she’d maintain a straight line from the house. Even if she didn’t know where she was headed, she’d know where she was headed from. There was a problem, though—as with all thought-out, rational plans of attack. The enemy had a vote.
The jungle wasn’t cooperating. There were innumerable obstacles in her way—massive tree trunks, several of which she almost walked into, sudden steep drops, a black stream complete with invisible waterfall that sounded, for one instant of comfort, like TV static.