66. Alexei

66

ALEXEI

The doorman stared suspiciously at me. I lifted an eyebrow and stared back at him. Maybe he thought—correctly—that I looked Russian. But there were lots of Russians in this part of Chicago. And my clothes matched all the other guys in the line: shirt and jeans. Plus, a drunk blonde in a tight red dress who’d lost her friends and kept calling me Boris had surgically attached herself to me in the line and was doing a good job of distracting him. Eventually he sighed and waved both of us forward. He made sure I went through the metal detector and gave me a pat down, just to be sure, but he didn’t find anything because I was unarmed. He gave me a last frown and nodded for us to go in.

Inside, I made sure the blonde found the friends she’d lost and then made an excuse and slipped away.

I made my way up to the men’s bathroom on the third floor, which I figured would be the quietest, and into the last stall on the right. The extractor fan was right where it had been on the blueprint, a big ugly white box built into the center of a windowpane.

I climbed up onto the toilet and then put my hands on the tops of the stall walls and heaved myself up like a gymnast on the parallel bars. I bent my legs and kicked the fan as hard as I could. Nothing happened. I kicked it again. Again. This better work. Because otherwise I was unarmed and not much good to anyone. I grunted and kicked again?—

There was a cracking sound and the sealant holding the fan in place gave way. The extractor fan disappeared into the darkness and a few seconds later there was a distant crash as it hit the ground three floors below, barely audible over the thumping music.

Panting, I lowered myself down until I was standing on the toilet. Then I took off my bracelet: one of those outdoorsy, survival ones, fifty feet or so of parachute cord woven into a thick band. I unraveled it and dropped the end out of the hole in the window.

A moment later, I felt a tug on the cord. That meant Gabriella, who’d been waiting in the alley, had done her job. I hauled the cord all the way back up. Tied to the end was a black bag of guns.

I jumped down into the stall and started hiding the guns under my jacket. When I was done, I threw the bag and cord out of the window and stepped out of the stall. I caught my reflection in the mirror and stopped for a second, straightening my collar. “ Vse yeshche ponyal ,” I muttered with pride. Still got it.

Then I went to find a place to hide.