Page 79 of Agency

Okay.

I had to shrug, and kind of give him that. Because that was actually sound logic. After all, I was kind of selling her out to buy us time. Not that he could know I was trying to buy time, of course. And not that I intended for my actions to actually come off that way, either. But I could sure get how someone who was trying to kill all of us might see the situation from that angle.

“Look, man,” I said as his hand began to twist the knob. “I swear to you, only thing you’re going to find on the other side of that door is a really pissed off former Special Forces operator. Your target is over here.”

He snorted. “But what about the third man? There were three of you last night, were there not?”

I glanced to the closed door I was standing next to.

“You cannot be…”

I shrugged as he trailed off.

“You truly expect me to believe a disciplined soldier did that?”

I held his gaze for a long time before speaking: “You’ve seen her before, right? Like even just some picture in a file?”

“Fair,” he said. “Never mind, that is not a stretch of the imagination.”

Our eyes stay locked, and my shoulders tensed as I began to focus on how I was going to take him down. Because, if one of the guys, or both, actually were on the other side of that door, this whole thing was about to go down before I was ready.

There were five meters between us, and he was a trained operator with a 9mm. What did I have? A kitchen chair and my boxer briefs. Silently, I began to will whichever one of my men was in that room to wake up and get ready, because this asshole was coming in no matter what I did to try and stall him.

Joergensen went to open the door. He turned his attention that way as he did, and his weapon’s coverage shifted as well.

My hand went down on the back of the kitchen chair as soon as he’d looked away, and I gripped the backrest’s top, wooden rail as he began to push the bedroom door open. Then, as he brought the weapon around to focus on any incoming threat, I was lifting the chair.

The feet came up.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

Too late, now. I was committed. I was in the fight, in the zone, in the liminal space between life and death, where every wrong move could end terminally. I kept coming with the chair, and put all my weight forward as I wrenched my only weapon around from behind me and slung the piece of furniture through the air.

His gun didn’t move, not at first. But, then, he must have caught the sailing chair in his peripheral, because he whipped around faster than a house cat on meth, and brought his weapon’s muzzle with him.

The weapon was trained on me, and even from that distance the muzzle was like a black hole, sucking in all my pasts, presents, and futures. A vortex, a piercing of the veil between worlds, where I’d either soon meet Charon and cross the river Styx–or perhaps Peter as I darted through the Pearly Gates–or be free to keep going. That muzzle was, in short, the kind of gaping void that made you think of the line by Nietzsche about that ol’ staring abyss.

The chair hit the far wall, to the left of his head, and gunshots rang out.

I ran forward, despite the sucking nothingness that was his gunbarrel. Unarmed, barefoot, and absolutely stupidly, I ran forward.

Two more shots.

And I kept going. One more step.

He tried to exit stage left, through the open bedroom door.

I slammed into him before he could. I outweighed him by forty pounds, at least, but that still wasn’t saying much as we both impacted with the wooden wall. I grabbed his gun hand before he could direct his weapon my away, slammed it back against the paneling we’d just hit.

One, two, three–thud, thud, thud!–and then his weapon was clattering to the hardwood.

I went for the 9mm, but he punched me twice in the face before I could make a grab, once in the jaw and another in the nose.

Pain didn’t register from either strike as I stepped back to get more purchase and leverage. Weightlessness suddenly gripped me as my heel missed the top step, and I grabbed his maroon sweater in an improvised BJJ grip as my weight shifted. I fell back.

Gripping the handrail and sinking his center of gravity, he counterbalanced me, and I was almost horizontal out over the stairs as I held myself to him by cotton and wool gripped tightly in my hands.

“Fuck you if you think you’re going to have her!”