Gone Tomorrow

vibrated in my pocket.
    I ignored it.
    Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: Attack from the high ground. Couldn’t do it. Not an available option. Around the time the Israeli list was being written the SAS in Britain had been developing a tactic of rappelling off roofs into upper-story windows, or smashing through the roof tile itself, or blowing through directly from one adjacent attic to another. Fast, dramatic, and usually very successful. Nice work if you could get it. I couldn’t. I was stuck with the pedestrian approach.
    For the time being, at least.
    I opened the stairwell door. It swept an arc through a tiny thirty-inch by thirty-inch ground floor hallway. Directly across from me, close enough to touch, was the door that led out to the residential entrance. To the street door with the single bell push and the crime-scene tape.
    Directly out of the tiny hallway rose a single narrow staircase. It turned back on itself halfway up and rose the rest of the way to the second floor out of sight.
    The phone vibrated in my pocket.
    I pulled it out and checked it. Restricted Call . I put it back in my pocket. It stopped vibrating.
    I started up the stairs.

Chapter 79
    The safest way up the first half of a dog-legged staircase is to walk backward, looking upward, with your feet spread wide. Backward and looking upward, because if overhead resistance comes your way, you need to be facing it. Feet spread wide, because if stairs are going to creak, they’re going to creak most in the middle and least at the edges.
    I shuffled up like that to the halfway break and then sidled sideways and went up the second half going forward. I came out in a second floor hallway that was twice the size of the first floor version but still tiny. Thirty inches by sixty. One room to the left, one to the right, and two dead ahead. Doors all closed.
    I stood still. If I was Lila I would have one guy in each of the two rooms dead ahead. I would have them listening hard with weapons drawn. I would have them ready to fling open their doors and start up two parallel fields of fire. They could get me going up or coming down. But I wasn’t Lila and she wasn’t me. I had no idea of her likely deployment. Except that as her numbers diminished I felt she would want to keep her remaining guys reasonably close. Which would put them on the third floor, not the second. Because the flutter I had seen had been at a fourth floor window.
    At the fourth floor window on the left, to be precise, looking at the building from the outside. Which meant her room was the room on the right, looking at it from the inside. I doubted that there would be any significant difference in the floor plans as I went up. It was a cheap, utilitarian structure. No call for custom features. Therefore a walk through the second floor room on the right would be the same thing as a walk through Lila’s room two floors above. It would give me the lie of the land.
    I squeezed the slack out of the MP5’s trigger and put my gloved fingers on the door handle. Pushed down. Felt the latch let go.
    I opened the door.
    An empty room.
    In fact, an empty and part-demolished studio apartment. It was as deep as but half the width of the restaurant dining room below. A long, narrow space. A closet in back, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a living area. I could see the layout at a single glance because all the dividing walls had been torn back to the studs. The bathroom fitments were all still there, odd and naked behind a vertical array of old two-by-twos, like ribs, like the spaced bars of a cage. The kitchen equipment was intact. The floors were pine boards, except for ragged-edged old-fashioned mosaic in the bathroom and linoleum tile in the kitchen. The whole place smelled of vermin and rotten plaster. The window over the street was black with soot. It was bisected diagonally by the bottom of the fire escape.
    I walked quietly to the window. The fire escape was a standard design. A narrow iron ladder came down from the floor above and gave onto a narrow iron walkway under the windows themselves. Beyond the walkway a counterbalanced section lay ready to fold down toward the sidewalk under the weight of a fleeing person.
    The window was a sash design. The lower pane was designed to slide upward inside the upper pane. Where the panes met they were locked together with a simple brass tongue in a slot. The lower pane had brass handles, like the ones you see on old file cabinets. The