for the kill.
Chapter Four
As Ambler gulped air, his entire body quaking with muscular fatigue, a flicker of the big man's eye told Ambler what he needed to know: the man was going for the coup de grace-a single roundhouse punch to the jaw, with all the immense upper-body strength he possessed.
Except that Ambler did the one thing he was capable of doing, the one thing no professional would think of doing: he dropped to the ground, with exquisite timing. And the bare-knuckled punch connected with the trunk.
As the man howled in pain, Ambler sprang upward, butting his head into his opponent's solar plexus, and then, before he even heard the reflexive expulsion of breath, he grasped the man's ankles and heaved. At long last, the gunman spilled out of the stand, and Ambler plunged down after him. On top of him. Ambler, at least, had something soft to break his fall.
With fast, deft movements, Ambler yanked off the man's Kevlar-lined camouflage jacket and combat vest. Then he detached the long-barreled rifle from its sling and used the sling to tie the gunman's hands behind his back. The center two knuckles of his right hand were red, bloodied, and beginning to swell, obviously broken. The man moaned in agony.
Ambler looked around for the Beretta. It glinted from beneath the thorny coils of the multi-flora rose, and Ambler decided to put off retrieving it.
"Kneel, GI Joe," Ambler said. "You know the position. Cross your ankles."
The man did so, moving with reluctance but without uncertainty, like someone who had forced others into the same position. He had obviously had standard U.S. combat training. Undoubtedly he had had a great deal more.
"I think something's broken, man," the man said in a low, strangled voice, clutching his ribs. Deep South-Mississippi, Ambler would have guessed.
"You'll live," Ambler said shortly. "Or not. That's really for us to decide, isn't it?"
"I don't think you understand the situation," the man said.
"Which is exactly where you come in," Ambler replied. He started patting the man's trouser pockets and extracted a military-style pocketknife. "Now we're going to play a little game of truth or dare." He swung out the pocketknife's fish sealer and held it to very close to the man's face. "See, I don't have a lot of time. So I'm going to have to go straight to the meat of the matter." Ambler worked to control his breathing. He needed to seem calm and in command. And he needed to focus on the kneeling man's face, even as he menaced it with the fish sealer. "First question. Are you working alone?"
"No way. A bunch of us here."
He was lying.
Even dulled by the carfentanyl, Ambler knew it, the way he always knew it. When colleagues would ask how, he found himself giving different answers in different cases. A tremble in the voice in one case. A tone of voice that was too assertively smooth and insouciant in another. Something around the mouth. Something around the eyes. There was always something.
Consular Operations had once assigned people to study his peculiar faculty; to the best of his knowledge, nobody had ever managed to duplicate it. Intuition was what he called it.
Intuition meant: he didn't know. Sometimes he even wondered whether his gift wasn't so much a capacity as an incapacity: he wasn't able not
to see. Most people filtered what they saw when they looked at someone's face: they operated by the rule of inference-to-the-best-explanation, meaning that whatever didn't sync with the explanation that made the most sense to them they ignored. Ambler lacked that ability to tune out what did not sync.
"So you're alone," Ambler told the kneeling operative. "As I would have expected."
The man protested, but without conviction.
Even without knowing who they were or what they wanted, Ambler realized that they must have figured it was a long shot that he'd show up here. There were fifty other places he might have gone to, and, he guessed, there were people positioned at those other places, too. Given the odds and the short notice, strategy would dictate a single watcher at each. It was a question of manpower.
"Next question. What's my name?"
"I wasn't informed," the man said in an almost resentful tone.
The claim seemed incredible, but the man was telling him the truth.
"I don't see a subject photograph in your pockets. How were you going to identify me?"
"No photo. Assignment arrived a few hours ago. They said you were forty years old, six foot tall, brown hair, blue eyes. To me, you're