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Evan dropped his eyes to the guy’s feet. He was wearing flip-flops, unsuitable footwear for a stakeout or pursuit.
Frank B. bent down, angrily wiping at a smudge on his cargo shorts. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”
But Evan wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. He’d already narrowed his focus to the man with the IV pole and the umbra thrown by one of the building’s concrete outcroppings. Another man was emerging from the darkness there, his gait familiar.
The homeless guy from the street, moving swiftly on his sneakers.
Evan let his vision blur so he could take in the full sweep of the plaza impressionistically. Through the tumult he discerned figures moving in concert as if connected by invisible strings.
He heard his own breath now, a rush in the ears, sensed hisheartbeat ticking in the side of his neck, felt the brightness of the midday sun, a shard in his eye. The pedestrians around him were talking and bustling along, lost in the daily grind, cell phones pressed to cheeks, mouths moving. They were soundless, their words lost beneath more pressing objectives.
The homeless guy cutting one way, the gowned man with the IV pole another, the swiveling heads of three others at tables around the healing gardens. Coordinating trajectories, lines of sight.
The Third Commandment barked at Evan—Master your surroundings—and in a split second he shuffled through the schematics and blueprints he’d stored in his head. Service elevator behind South Tower reception. Utility closet on the top floor with an access hatch to the roof. Cafeteria kitchen rear door that let into a warren of restricted-access corridors. If he could make it to the Medical Offices Tower, there were outlets onto Third Street and Sherbourne Drive. But he didn’t know how much manpower they’d brought or how wide a net they’d thrown.
Best bet would be to disappear into the parking structure beneath his feet—dumpsters, stairs, elevators, countless vehicles, a sewer line to get him underground.
Evan stepped back again beneath the shade umbrella, pushing past Frank B. to shoulder against the wooden post.
“Hey, chief, now you’re really getting on my last—”
Across the plaza the guy in the hospital gown halted, his eyes sweeping the crowd. They locked on Evan’s. The man pushed the IV pole away. It slid a foot or two, tilted.
He skinned the gown off himself. It undulated in the breeze and fell away behind him. He was wearing form-fitting running clothes beneath. Slung around his neck, now in his hands, was a fat-barreled grenade launcher.
Evan felt it then, the conversion of potential threat into kinetic danger, a thrumming of his bones, a firing of the nerves, an imprinting of lesser phenomena like the shard-sharp glint of sunlight, breeze cooling the sweat at his hairline, the man talking at Evan’s side, Adam’s apple bouncing lethargically.
Without knowing it, Evan had moved to a calming breathpattern—two-second inhalations, four-second exhalations. His muscle memory had set the tempo, slowing him down, steadying him. This was what his tactical training had taught him: to decelerate real life until it moved in slow motion.
That’s what being present was. People think of a superpower as going fast when everyone else moves slow. But that’s not as useful as going slow when everyone else is moving fast.
Three-fourths of a second had passed. None of the bystanders in the plaza had keyed to the disruption. The man’s IV pole hadn’t yet struck the ground. The fat-barreled grenade launcher was still rising to aim at Evan.
The bright orange stripe around the muzzle broadcast it to be a less-lethal weapon. From this distance Evan couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a 40-millimeter designed to accommodate less-lethal projectiles. With crushable foam noses packed with irritant powders and hard plastic shells, the projectiles were good up to 130 feet. Despite their reassuring name, they could cause serious damage at close range.
Way to Evan’s right, the homeless guy came up with a 40-millimeter launcher of his own. The three men near the healing gardens now rose, bringing matching weapons out from beneath the tables. About a dozen more men spread throughout the plaza announced themselves similarly.
Like a flash mob, but less entertaining.
The only note of comfort was that the bright orange stripes made the operatives highly visible.
There was a moment of perfect stillness.
Then someone screamed.
Evan hoisted the umbrella up out of the weighted base.
And charged toward the stairwell to the parking structure.
Leaping through the healing garden, umbrella held before him like a shield, agave plants whipping at his calves. Shouts and stampeding. A projectile whined in, thumping the awning with nearly enough force to rip the umbrella from his hands. Another flew overhead. A third kicked up a chunk of soil by his boot, spraying his front side with dirt.
Hurdling a bench, tripping over a stainless-steel footlight, he crashed through the crowd. The tough canvas batted people aside but also obscured his line of sight, the peaceful cloud design discordantly soothing. A full-blown panic had erupted, people shouting and bulling for the exits. Evan pinballed between a few folks, nearly lost his footing, and caught a spray of lukewarm coffee from the side. As he sprinted across an open stretch of concrete, he sensed a few men behind him bucking the throngs of bystanders, circling to close ranks.
Questions flurried: Who was behind this? Why less-lethal? Did they want him alive to torture him? To get intel?
His breathing held, a metronome running of its own accord.
A volley of projectiles hammered the awning, and then one ripped straight through and sliced past Evan’s cheek so close that his eyes burned from the chemicals. The next tore away a section of fabric, stopping him in his tracks. He stared through the wreckage of the canvas at the fake homeless guy, standing right in front of him.
