use; and when he did, it was still only a penknife. If he somehow managed to get it out and open and offer to fight with it, this man—this professional assassin—would laugh at him and then kill him.
He left the knife where it was. It couldn’t help him. Probably nothing would help him, but it was worth trying a lie. He’d got good at lying these last four years. “No,” he said, trying for the urgent cooperation of someone with nothing to hide. “He did a runner last night. I’m just minding—”
He never got the sentence finished. He’d been right about the gun. The outline of the man against the landing light, which had barely moved in the long seconds since it appeared in the doorway, moved now: not extravagantly, not flashily, but with an incisive speed that was awe-inspiring. Horn gasped and recoiled.
There wasn’t much he was too slow for, but he was too slow now. The intruder had chosen to use his weapon in a manner for which it had not been designed but was nonetheless highly effective—cripplingly effective, and all but silent. He palmed the ugly weapon and slapped Horn across the jaw with it.
Pain exploded through his face and ran like molten steel down his spine. His strong limbs went to string and his fit young body spun half a turn before crashing to the floor. The light had gone out before he hit the carpet.
CHAPTER 2
BUT HE WASN’T unconscious long. Pain drilling every tooth in his left jaw yanked him back. He lay in a fetal curl under the window, arms cradling his raging head. He heard himself whine like a kicked puppy, but his vision was worse than useless—a dark mist laced with shooting stars. He’d always thought that was a comic-strip invention, but like most clichés it was an accurate observation first.
He didn’t know which way was up, he hardly knew what had happened, but he knew he had to get back on his feet. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to move, for fear of making the pain worse, for fear of being hit again. But primordial instinct wanted him to live even more than it wanted to spare him pain, and it drove him back ruthlessly to the reality of that cold, unlit room and the killer he shared it with. If he went on lying here he was going to die on this square of grubby carpet, adding his blood to the sum of its uncertain stains. That was going to be his obituary: a packet of Shake ‘n’ Vac in his landlord’s shopping cart.
Probably he was going to die anyway, but he had an element of choice about how. Nicky Horn had faced death many times, much more often than was reasonable for an otherwise rational man in peacetime. But he’d never faced it groveling on the floor, whining about being hurt. He put out a hand, groping for something he could use to pull himself up.
To his muddled surprise, someone helped. He still couldn’t see anything but stars, but only the two of them were here, so it had to be the man who’d hit him. His reeling brain wasn’t up to working out why: he let the strong hands gripping his shoulders lift him to his feet, and was too groggy to note that someone holding him with both hands must have put his gun away.
The man propped Horn against the wall and held him there, quite gently, with one hand in the middle of his chest. It wouldn’t have stopped him from throwing a punch, but then it wasn’t meant to. It was to stop him from sliding back down the wall. After a short contemplation the man leaned forward, peering into Horn’s face. “Can you walk?”
Even Horn knew it wasn’t solicitude. The man wanted to take him away from here, a house he shared with a dozen other people, to somewhere he could finish his job without fear of interruption, somewhere he could leave the detritus that it mightn’t be found for weeks; and he wanted Horn to leave under his own steam in case someone saw them. The assault was carefully calculated to knock all the fight out of him without leaving him so incapable he’d need to be dragged, with the attendant risk—even at this time of night—of attracting attention. Horn went to shake his head, thought better of it, carefully mumbled, “No.”
The man smiled. Horn couldn’t see the smile but he