One Shot

thing?”
    “Litton,” Cash said.
    “Expensive, right?”
    “Thirty-seven hundred dollars.”
    “Got to be better than a lousy thermal camera.”
    Cash didn’t reply.
    Reacher said: “Well, I’m hoping so, anyway.”

    He walked on. Probably the most unnatural thing a human can force himself to do, to walk slowly and surely toward a building that likely has a rifle in it pointing directly at his center mass. If Chenko had any sense at all he would wait, and wait, and wait, until his target was pretty close. And Chenko seemed to have plenty of sense. Fifty yards would be good. Or thirty-five, like Chenko’s range out of the parking garage. Chenko was pretty good at thirty-five yards. That had been made very clear.
    He walked on. Transferred the phone to his left and held it near his ear. Took the knife out of his pocket and unsheathed it and held it right-handed, low and easy. Heard Cash say: “You’re totally visible now, soldier. You’re shining like the north star. It’s like you’re on fire.”
    Forty yards to go.
    Thirty-nine.
    Thirty-eight.
    “Helen?” he said. “Do it again.”
    He heard her voice: “OK.”
    He walked on. Held his breath.
    Thirty-five yards.
    Thirty-four.
    Thirty-three.
    He breathed out. He walked on doggedly. Twenty-nine yards to go. He heard panting in his ear. Helen, running. He heard Yanni ask, off-mike: “How close is he?” Heard Cash answer: “Not close enough.”

    Vladimir leaned forward and said, “There it is again.” He put his fingertip on the screen, as if touch might tell him something. Sokolov glanced across. Sokolov had spent many more hours with the screens than Vladimir. Primarily surveillance had been his job. His, and Raskin’s.
    “That’s no fox,” he said. “It’s way too big.”
    He watched for five more seconds. The image was weaving left and right at the very limit of the camera’s range. Recognizable size, recognizable shape, inexplicable motion. He stood up and walked to the door. Braced his hands on the frame and leaned out into the hallway.
    “Chenko!” he called. “North!”
    Behind his back on the West screen a shape as big as his thumb grew larger. It looked like a painting-by-numbers figure done in fluorescent colors. Lime green on the outside, then a band of chrome yellow, with a core of hot red.

    Chenko walked through an empty bedroom and opened the window as high as it would go. Then he backed away into the darkness. That way he was invisible from below and invulnerable except to a shot taken from the third story of an adjacent building, and there were no adjacent buildings. He switched on his night scope and raised his rifle. Quartered the open ground two hundred yards out, up and down, left and right.
    He saw a woman.
    She was running crazily, barefoot, darting left and right, out and back, like she was dancing or playing a phantom game of soccer. Chenko thought:
What?
He squeezed the slack out of his trigger and tried to anticipate her next pirouette. Tried to guess where her chest would be a third of a second after he fired. He waited. Then she stopped moving. She stood completely still, facing the house, arms out wide like a target.
    Chenko pulled the trigger.
    Then he understood. He stepped back to the hallway.
    “Decoy!” he screamed.
“Decoy!”

    ______

    Cash saw the muzzle flash and called, “Shot fired,” and jumped his scope to the north window. The lower pane was raised, the upper pane was fixed. No point in putting a round through the opening. The upward trajectory would guarantee a miss. So he fired at the glass. He figured if he could get a hail of jagged shards going, then that might ruin somebody’s night.

    Sokolov was watching the crazy heat image on Vladimir’s screen when he heard Chenko’s shot and his shouted warning. He glanced back at the door and turned to the South monitor. Nothing there. Then he heard return fire and shattering glass upstairs. He pushed back from the table and stepped to the door.
    “Are you OK?” he called.
    “Decoy,” Chenko called back. “Has to be.”
    Sokolov turned and checked all four screens, very carefully.
    “No,” he called. “Negative. Definitely nothing incoming.”

    Reacher touched the front wall of the house. Old plank siding, painted many times. He was ten feet south of the driveway, ten feet south of the front door, near a window that looked into a dark empty room. The window was a tall rectangle with a lower pane that slid upward behind the