Spartacus took the desk first.
The man at the desk had three-quarters of a yawn left in him when the head came in through the window above the back of his chair, and he did not finish the yawn. The jaws closed on his collarbone and his neck and lifted him out of the chair and shook him once. The chair, freed of his weight, tipped forward and went over. The Uzi on his lap went into a corner of the room and lay there. He went into the wall.
The two kidnappers on the mattresses came up firing.
They fired into the place Spartacus had been a quarter-second ago. The ceiling and the wall behind it took rounds in a rough horizontal stripe that put a string of small holes through the plaster the size of a man’s fist. Spartacus had moved. He moved laterally along the upper part of the wall in the way no animal native to the planet had ever moved on a wall, his clawed hands gripping the studs through the lath, and then he came down on the first man like a falling cabinet.
The first man got off three more rounds. They went into the floorboards. He had time to look up, briefly, into the open mouth above him, before he stopped having time for anything.
The second man ran for the door of the office.
He made it as far as the doorframe.
On the ground floor, Perseus and Orestes were finishing.
Perseus had come through the front door at a low feet-first leap that took the door off its hinges and four barrels of olive oil out of their stack. The barrels split on the cement floor. The oil went in long slow tongues across the floor. The first card-table kidnapper, on his feet, slipped and went down on his back in the oil and was still going down when Perseus’s foot came down on his sternum.
Orestes was at the loading-dock door, which he had taken off in pieces. He had one of the table-men by the leg and was, as a matter of physics, dragging him backwards through the dock door into an alley that was, behind the building, very dark.
The table itself had broken in half. Cards lay in the oil. One of the cards, an ace of clubs, floated in a slow circle on the slick.
Two kidnappers ran for the front door.
They hit the door, both at once, shouldered through it together, fell out onto the asphalt slick with each other’s bootprints, came up running.
The door of an SUV, fifty yards down the street, opened.
Nick stepped out into their path with the H&K low.
They were not running at him. They were running across him, panicked, eyes on the next corner. They saw him at four paces. They opened up with their Uzis. He went down behind the rusted hulk of a Peugeot 405 that had been on its rims for ten years.
The rounds tore chunks of metal off the Peugeot a hand’s width above his head. The chunks were rust and paint and a small confetti of dried mouse-droppings from the engine bay. He held the H&K low and let the magazines on the Uzis run their three seconds.
Then Perseus came around the corner of the warehouse behind them.
It was over in two motions. Perseus took the first man down from behind in a rolling tackle that left the man face-down on the asphalt. He came off the man turning, and he had the second man’s shoulder before the second man’s Uzi had cleared the half-magazine he was burning, and he tore him sideways into the wall of the Peugeot.
Nick stood up, slowly, with the H&K up.
“Good work, Perseus.”
The raptor turned. The eyes had the wet hot color they had when the blood was up. Nick held still.
“Good work.”
Perseus chuffed. The chuff was a small thinking sound. The raptor regarded him for a long second longer than was comfortable, then went past him at a trot toward the warehouse, the way a dog goes past a man it has not, exactly, decided to dismiss.
Nick went into the warehouse.
The ground floor smelled of olive oil and copper and gunpowder and the small ammoniac stink of a man emptying his bowels at the moment of his death, which was a smell Nick had been around enough times to no longer be surprised by. He stepped over the splintered table. He stepped over the body of a man without a face. He stepped over an Uzi that was, even in the slick, hot at the muzzle. The oil under his boots was four inches deep at the lowest place in the floor. He had to walk on the balls of his feet to keep his footing.
He reached the foot of the iron stairs.
He listened.
Quiet upstairs.
He changed channels on the headset. He spoke softly.
“I’m in the building. No resistance apparent. Shut them down. Repeat. Shut them down.”
He climbed the iron staircase, weapon up, squeezing past the body of a kidnapper hanging upside down from the railing with an arm and a half. He reached the top.
He stepped into the office.
Spartacus was there. So was Orestes, who had come up the back stairs while Nick was on the iron staircase. Spartacus had blood on the side of his head, a long matted sheet of it from where one of the kidnappers had caught him with a burst before going down, and the metal of the regulator box had a dent in it from the same burst. The dent had taken a corner off the box. A small thread of insulated wire was hanging out of the corner.
Spartacus had one foot resting on the upturned arm of a big upholstered easy chair.
Both raptors faced him. Their colors were flat brown. Their eyes had not gone down.
He took a step.
Spartacus hissed.
He froze.
The room around him was a wreck. Blood on the walls. Mattresses torn. A body half out the window from which Spartacus had come in, the legs in the office and the head in the alley. The blanket on the chair had not moved.
“Where is she.”
A growl from Spartacus.
“You’ve done good work here. Outstanding. Where is the girl.”
He saw the chair under Spartacus’s foot. He kept his eyes on the raptor’s eyes. He spoke without moving anything but his lips.
“Back. Move back.”
Spartacus held him a long second. The damaged regulator box on the side of his skull made a small click, the click of a piece of plastic settling against a piece of metal it had not been designed to settle against. Spartacus felt the click. The eye on Nick’s side narrowed, and the eye widened. Spartacus blinked, slow.
He shifted his weight off the chair, slow, slow, and stepped back two paces.
Orestes, the radio-control reaching him at last, had begun to nod off.
Nick stepped to the chair. He lifted it.
A small figure under the blanket. Not moving.
He took the edge of the blanket. He lifted.
Isabel Chartiers was curled in the fetal position with her hands over her ears and her eyes shut tight and a small steady tremor running through her shoulders. The tremor was the tremor of a child who has decided, by the means a child has, that she has not been seeing what she has been seeing.
“Isabel.”
No answer. The breathing under the blanket was steady.
“C’est moi. Je suis l’ami de Maya.”
A pause. The eyes opened.
He saw the eyes for the first time.
She was a little girl, ten years old, with a small heart-shaped face and grey-blue eyes and a chip in her front tooth.
“Tu peux venir avec moi,” he said. “Les méchants sont partis. Spartacus est un ami. Il t’a gardée.”
She looked past him. She saw Spartacus. The shoulders did not, on seeing the eight-foot bio-engineered killer covered in blood with a damaged regulator box on the side of his head, do anything at all. The shoulders had reached, in the previous days, a place past where shoulders did things.
He lifted her out of the corner.
She was lighter than he had expected. Her arms came around his neck. The fingers were small and cold and they had a chocolate stain on the right pinky, the fingerprint chocolate of a child who has been allowed, in spite of everything, a small piece of a candy bar.
He turned, slowly, to the door of the office.
Spartacus stepped aside.
Spartacus, wide as a refrigerator, blood-slicked, bipedal in ways no animal of his weight class had ever been bipedal, stepped aside with the kind of neat polite step a man steps aside in a doorway when a man is letting a woman go through it first.
Nick carried the girl down the iron stairs.
Outside, vehicles screeched up. Joyce was barking surround the warehouse and Maya was on her side of the radio shouting hold your fire. Nick came out of the warehouse door into a wash of floodlights, with a small girl clinging to his neck. The mercenaries had their rifles up. The medics had the ambulance doors open.
“Sont réels les monstres que j’avais vus?” Isabel whispered into his neck.
“Non, non. C’est seulement un rêve.”
He carried her past Joyce. He kept his eyes on Maya at the rear of the convoy.
“Ces gens te porteront a tes parents. C’est fini, ton cauchemar.”
He handed her to the medic. Maya took her at the next pair of hands. Isabel’s small fingers had hold of his collar. They held a half-second longer than he had expected. They let go.
He turned away.
“Not a scratch on her,” Joyce said behind him. “How are the boys?”
“Spartacus is shot up pretty bad. There’s. There’s a lot of cleaning up to do in there.”
Joyce signaled to Zeiss. Zeiss and his men moved past Nick into the building.
Maya stepped close.
“You okay?”
He heard himself laugh. He heard, in the laugh, the wrong note. He had been in the run, he had executed the run, the run had ended and the girl was out, and the body had given him the hot wash of an outcome it had been built to want.
“Never better,” he said.
She looked up at him, level. She looked at the flush in his cheeks, the wrong color of it. She had seen this face in another country, on another man.
She kept her mouth shut.
She helped close the ambulance doors. The doors swung. They latched.
Above the harbor, somewhere, a single early gull began to call against a sky that had not yet decided to be morning.
In the warehouse, Spartacus stood with his head turned sideways, the regulator box on the side of his skull broken in a way Sherman would not, under fluorescent light four hours from now, immediately recognize as broken. The thread of insulated wire hung free. Spartacus felt, for the first time in his short life, a clean line into his own thinking, and he did not yet know what to do with the line, and he stood, in an olive-oil warehouse on the Tangier waterfront with the bodies of seven men around him, and he counted.
He counted seven.
He counted, also, that the man Nick had not, on coming up the stairs, raised the weapon at him.
He filed the count.
In the back of the ambulance, Maya wrapped Isabel in a thin foil blanket and put a small soft cap on her head and watched the medic open a vial of warm saline. The medic was a young woman from Casablanca with the small careful hands of a person who had been a violinist before she had been a medic. She tapped the vial twice. She drew the dose. The girl did not flinch when the needle went in the back of her hand.
Maya took the small chocolate-stained hand in her own. She held it. The medic worked.
Outside the ambulance, on the tarpaulins coming out of the warehouse, the bodies of the kidnappers were being loaded into the second truck for transport to a Grendel facility outside Casablanca that did not, on any map, exist. The men loading them were Zeiss’s men. They worked with the efficiency of men who had loaded bodies before. They had a weighted body bag and a roll of tarp tape and the small bottle of disinfectant a man uses on the back of a glove when he has come up wet.
The truck doors swung shut.
Maya leaned out the back of the ambulance and watched them go.
“Spartacus,” she said, half to herself.
In the warehouse, Spartacus heard her in the cleanup team’s open headset.
He cocked his head.