Page 121 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
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Jack jogged up the stairs, ignoring the stink of the garbage chute, and dashed into his apartment, running through a mental checklist of things to do before he left, starting with packing. The clock was ticking. But he wanted to clean the place up, too. Sweep, vacuum, put the dishes away, strip his sheets and toss them in the laundry. He didn’t want to leave the apartment in worse shape than he’d found it in, partly because that was the way he was raised, and partly because he really liked the landlords.
He also needed the distraction. Helpless despair was crouching at his door. Better to forget everything and get the hell out of Dodge.
He headed for the bedroom to start packing. He flung the closet door open, glancing at the floor where his bag was stored. Instead, he saw a scuffed leather Oxford that wasn’t his—
The heel of a hand bludgeoned Jack between the eyes. Theblow was blunted slightly when the man’s arm crashed into the partly opened closet door, but it still hit home.
Bright lights flashed in Jack’s eyes just as the pain exploded in the front of his brain.
He staggered backward a few steps as a dark-haired man in a janitor’s uniform lunged out of the closet with an old-school leather garrote strung between his hands. As tall as Jack but thinner, the charging man thrust both balled fists into Jack’s chest, knocking him backward against the far wall, stunning him again, and sending the hanging picture frames crashing to the floor in a shower of glass.
Reeling from the blows, Jack struggled to focus on the wiry man, who suddenly grabbed Jack’s shoulders and spun him around with a powerful twist. Before Jack could catch his footing, he felt the thick leather thong wrap around his neck. The sharp spike of a knee against his spine corresponded to the vise grip of leather choking off his windpipe.
Years of CQC training dulled the panic welling in Jack’s gut. He was just moments away from blacking out and certain death, but the limbic-system dump of pure adrenaline cleared his brain.
With his arms out of reach of his attacker’s face, Jack’s only recourse was to grab the leather thong and drop his body weight to the floor. The man’s grip didn’t falter, which Jack had counted on. The man stumbled forward as Jack’s back hit the floor.
But now the man’s head was just above Jack’s, the perfect place for Jack to thrust his knee into the top of the man’s skull with a sickening thud.
The man grunted, but his grip didn’t loosen at the first blow. Jack kept pummeling his skull with a series of bicycle kicks, alternating his left and right knees, battering the man intosemiconsciousness. His grip finally loosened enough that Jack could breathe a little.
Jack grabbed the leather garrote and pulled the man down to the ground next to him, where he rained a series of well-aimed elbow strikes just behind the man’s temple, cracking the pterion, the weakest part of the human skull, where the frontal, parietal, temporal, and sphenoid bones all joined.
The man lost consciousness entirely, finally releasing his iron grip.
Jack unwrapped the garrote from his throat, struggling to breathe. He stared at the sudden swelling on the side of the man’s head. The broken bones had ruptured the middle meningeal artery, exactly the outcome Clark’s training had told him to expect. Jack was fighting for his life, and his training took over.
He stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. That’s when he saw the ice chest sitting in the bathtub next to a stainless-steel bone saw, a bottle of bleach, and a box of heavy-duty garbage bags.
A cold chill ran down his sore spine. Bad enough that someone had just tried to kill him, but the vision of his own head in that cooler made him shudder, and the idea that more than one killer—first the woman in Slovenia, now this guy—was trying to behead him and transport his skull to someone else made him realize his life really was in danger.
Who the fuck was this Iron Syndicate, anyway? And what had he done to earn their hate?
Jack splashed cold water on his face and checked his throat. Definitely red and a little swollen. If that guy had used piano wire, it probably would’ve cut his head off right then and there. To judge from the bone saw and heavy-duty garbage bags, the man was planning on doing his wet work inside the bathtub, andcutting up Jack’s body into pieces and hauling it away in the bags, then cleaning up the DNA evidence with bleach.
Strange that he launched out of the closet the way he did, Jack thought. Normally you come after a guy from behind with a garrote. He must have surprised the shitbird when he opened the closet door.
Now what?
Well, he still had to pack.
But what to do with the asshole in his bedroom?
—
Jack stuck his head out of the front door to make sure no one was around, then hauled the wiry man by the shoulders onto the landing and heaved his slim frame headfirst into the garbage chute.
The man’s body clanged inside the fetid metal tube as it hurtled toward the dumpster three stories below. The man was still breathing, but in the reeking filth he was about to land in, that might not be to his advantage.
Jack rushed back into the apartment and, having wiped the items clean of his fingerprints, went back into the hall and tossed the man’s ice chest, bone saw, bleach bottle, and garbage bags in after him. He tossed the broken picture frames into a separate bag. The sound of their tumbling and crashing echoed in the tube.
Jack shrugged. Given the beaten assassin he’d tossed into the dumpster, the busted closet door, and the broken picture frames, Jack figured his Airbnb guest rating would probably suffer a few hits.
Time to go.
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