Kevern lay in a hedge of some kind at the far side of the restaurant and watched pedestrians craning their heads toward the sound of the collision on the other side of the building. He heard the unmistakable rivet-driving sound of an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol. He heard screams, saw the pedestrians retreating, heard the pause to reload. He heard the ripping of the second magazine. He saw people running away now, heard the screaming of the motorcycles as the riders full-throttled them onto the expressway. Then the grenade blast and the immediate explosion of the first gas tank, and then the second one.
People yelling. The pedestrian flow stopping now, reversing itself, and surging in the other direction as people headed toward the explosions and the billowing smoke.
That was the anatomy of a killing. People reacted the way people always did, terrified, then horrified, then, as the assassins fled, curious as hell.
He had checked all of them as he was fighting his seat belt. He had seen a lot of people die. He had seen a lot of people dying. It was creepy how you knew instantly. You didn’t have to check the vital signs; you just threw them a look, and you either saw death looking back at you or you saw death crawling onto them like a little monkey, impatient to get inside at the first chance. When you saw that, you didn’t wait around.
He looked at the street again. He was on the back side of the restaurant, looking around the next corner, where sitios sometimes waited for customers. There were a couple of them, the drivers out of their cars, craning their heads toward the direction of the disaster.
When a small group of people fled the restaurant and took the first sitio, Kevern knew he couldn’t wait. Grimacing with pain, the pressure in his stomach intensifying, he crawled out of the hedge and staggered toward the second sitio. The driver, seeing a second group of people fleeing the restaurant, was getting ready to take them, when Kevern ran up to him and showed his automatic. The deal was done.
They got into the black Lincoln and drove away.
Mazen Sabella left through the courtyard of the building and made his way to the street. At every corner, he waited, scanning the cars parked along the street, scanning the windows in the buildings opposite, taking a moment longer to consider every darkened doorway.
In some ways, it was more difficult to escape surveillance in the rain. People running surveillance were taking cover from the rain, hiding from the weather as well as from their targets, and therefore doing a better job of concealing themselves. And for the target, the rain itself was a distraction from detecting surveillance.
But in other ways, the rain offered possible advantages. In hiding from the rain, the surveillers often sacrificed a wider field of vision to stay dry, sometimes opting to squint through a narrow space or peer through a foggy window.
Either way, Sabella took it all into consideration without even thinking about it, these small adjustments having become second nature to him. Every compensation made to adjust to the environment was only a reflex now, embedded long ago into his unconscious.
The car was only a few doorways away, but it wasn’t parked on the street. It was behind a closed garage door that opened right onto the street.
The rain had been coming in waves, a hard, driving downpour, followed by a momentary letup, and then another hard, driving deluge. Sabella waited in the corridor doorway for the downpour, waiting the way a dancer waits for his body to get into the stride of the music before he moves into the stream of dancers.
And then it came, a roaring, thunderous downpour. He stepped out into it and ran, ignoring the rain and the swollen gutters. He was concentrating on timing and on what his eyes picked up along the street. Did a parked car suddenly turn on its wipers? Did he see a hand wiping the fog from the inside of a window?
He punched the button on the garage-door opener and darted into the garage without even breaking stride. The keys were in his hand as he opened the car door, and he was already turning the ignition by the time the garage door hit its stopping position above the car. He backed out into the street and drove away in the rain.
With one hand on the wheel, his eyes darting to pick up any movement outside the windows, his right hand flipped on a radio receiver sitting on the passenger seat. The reception was strong.
“My advice,” Baida said. “If you get a chance to kill Vicente, do it.”
“Wait! Listen-” Bern’s voice was frantic.
“Listen to me, my friend,” Baida said, his voice taut, urgent, impatient. “The deal for my cooperation was my guaranteed safety. That isn’t happening, is it? And it doesn’t look like it’s going…”
Sabella continued listening to the tense situation in the apartment above the pharmacy overlooking the plaza at Jardin Morena. It was a riveting exchange, and the farther he got away from it, the better he felt.
But he wouldn’t be able to relax just yet. Learning that Mondragon was alive and in pursuit had been a stunning surprise. It had almost panicked him. But then, through the fog of sudden dread, Sabella had had a revelation: This new development was actually a hell of a piece of luck, an opportunity to turn the fast-moving and unstable events to his advantage.
Now, as he leaned toward the windshield to peer through the sweeping rain, he listened closely to the transmission from Jardin Morena. If he knew anything about human psychology, about hatred and revenge, then he knew that he would soon be hearing a familiar voice. When he did, then he would know that all of his meticulous planning was about to pay off. It would soon be over. Finally.