Page 83 of Nobody's Hero
‘Even if wewereprepared to sacrifice a bunch of cops, which I’m not, best-case scenario is we all get arrested. And if you’re right about Tas entering the end game, we don’t have time to wait for Smerconish to bail us out.’
‘Assuming it wasn’t Smerconish who sent these assholes.’
Hobbs turned on his stool. ‘I can help,’ he said. He seemed frightened. Which, for a man about to be rescued, seemed counterintuitive. He should have been looking relieved.
‘How?’ Draper said.
‘Give me a gun. Even the odds.’
‘What a marvellous idea,’ she said. ‘You wantme, the person who’s just tortured your daughter, to giveyou, a professional killer, a gun? Not even Koenig is stupid enough to fall for that bullshit.’
‘You don’t know these guys!’ Hobbs said, frantic now. ‘I do. They’re butchers, not surgeons. Mr Koenig was right – you can’t sit back and let them reach our apartment. They aren’t interested in letting anyone live. They’ll blow the door off its hinges, then lob in grenades until they’ve turned us into ground beef. Our only way out of this, the only wayHarpergets out of this, is if we engage them on the stairs.’
‘I’m not giving you a fucking gun.’
‘Your cell still has a signal?’ Koenig asked Draper.
She nodded. ‘It does.’
‘They can’t stay there forever, though; they’re standing out like pepper in salt.’ He turned to Carlyle. ‘Bess, when this starts, can you cover the fire escape? Make sure they don’t come at us from the rear. I doubt they’d be so stupid, but we can’t ignore the possibility.’
‘I will.’
‘I can tell you what the plan is,’ Hobbs said quietly.
‘I know what the plan is,’ Koenig said. ‘They’ll do exactly what you said – they’ll blow the door off and throw in grenades. Stun or fragmentation. Maybe white phosphorus.’
Margaret stepped away from the window. It looked like she was pressing ahead with her tea. Brits, Koenig thought. Think there’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a cuppa. When he’d trained in the UK, he’d been told that during the Falklands War, Royal Marines Commandos took cover and stopped fighting the Argentineans so they could brew up.
‘Don’t get too close to Hobbs, Margaret,’ he warned.
‘I won’t, dear.’
‘I don’t mean their plan now,’ Hobbs said. ‘I mean Jakob Tas’s plan.’
It was a good ten seconds before anyone spoke.
‘You know what Jakob Tas is planning?’ Draper said.
‘Some of it.’
‘And you’re only remembering now? How convenient.’
Hobbs sighed in frustration. ‘You might not like what we do, but wearegood at it,’ he said. ‘And that means even when we get a referral from a trusted source, we don’t go into the meeting blind. When Jakob Tas arrived at the Holiday Inn in North Dakota, a venue he’d chosen, he assumed it was neutral.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘No. I arrived late, and that allowed Harper to subdue one of the servers. She took their uniform and bused Tas’s table. She did this to make sure I wasn’t walking into an ambush.’
‘And she overheard them discussing their master plan?’ Draper said sceptically.
‘No, Tas is no James Bond villain,’ Hobbs said. ‘But she did hear a phrase, a phrase I think might be important. It wasn’t something Tas said, it was the Russian guy who travels everywhere with him. A monosyllabic brute called Konstantin. He said it and Tas shushed him.’
‘Bullshit,’ Draper said. ‘We asked Harper the same questions we asked you, remember? She didn’t mention overhearing anything.’
‘That’s because she didn’t understand the significance of what Konstantin said. I did. She thought it was a throwaway comment, a bit of nonsense, but I spent time in Russia when I was a young man and—’
‘I don’t think you should be bothering everyone with this twaddle, dear,’ Margaret said. She then took the Roman hairpin from her bun and pressed it into Hobbs’s ear, all the way in like she was skewering a baked potato.