Page 109 of Night of Shadows
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The contractor enters at 11:53 AM.
He’s in a courier uniform. Real uniform. Real clipboard. The receptionist has already buzzed him through because the courier has been on this building's approved list for nine months, which means the contractor has, somewhere downstairs three blocks away, intercepted the actual courier in the last forty minutes and traded clothes with him.
He gets to my floor.
He gets to the corridor outside the conference room.
He’s been on this floor for forty-three seconds when Lex stands up.
I do not see what Lex sees. The conference room glass is frosted at sitting height; only people who are standing can see through to the corridor. Lex was reading the brief at sitting height. Lex stood up. Lex's body went from the man who had been waiting to the man who was moving, and the change happened with no sound and no warning, and Sarah Klein, in the middle of her sentence, registered the change and stopped speaking before her brain had caught up to why.
Lex says one word.
"Down."
Sarah Klein is on the floor inside two seconds. Her aides follow. The paralegals are slower, but they are also down. I am down because Lex has crossed the conference room and put me on the floor with one hand at the back of my neck, the way a man puts his wife on the floor when the floor is the only surface she’s allowed to be on.
The conference room door opens. The contractor is in the doorway.
The clipboard is in his left hand. The knife is in his right. The knife is a four-inch blade, fixed handle, the kind a man brings into a building when he’s been told the target is a federal prosecutor in a private firm with metal detectors at the lobby entrance, and he’s been told to use a thing the metal detectors will read as a clipboard's bracket. The contractor has had the knife taped to the back of the clipboard.
He sees Lex.
He’s eight-tenths of a second to register that the man between him and the woman he came here to put a knife into is not a Konstantinos soldier. The man is the Greek heir. The man is the husband. The man is the architect between the contractor and his work, and the contractor's brief didn’t warn him that the husband would be in the room at this hour.
Lex disarms him in three seconds.
I do not see most of it. I am face-down on the conference room carpet with Lex's hand at the back of my neck, and what I hear is the sound of a wrist breaking and a body hitting the floor and the sharp clatter of a four-inch fixed-blade knife sliding across the conference room carpet.
Cormac comes through the door.
He’s been moving since the lobby. The lobby buzzed him about the courier ninety-one seconds ago. Cormac came up the stairs. Cormac has the lobby alert in one ear and his ownassessment in the other ear, and he arrives in the corridor outside the conference room exactly forty-six seconds after the contractor entered the floor, which is, as Cormac will tell me later in a kitchen with a bandage on his forearm, ‘the slowest he’s moved in fifteen years and not slow enough.’
Cormac steps over the contractor. Cormac kicks the knife further down the corridor.
Cormac says, "Hi, Lex."
Lex says, "Hi, Cormac."
Marshals are in the corridor inside another forty seconds. The contractor is unconscious on the floor. The conference room is mostly under the conference table. Lex's hand is still at the back of my neck. Sarah Klein, federally appointed prosecutor, is shaking against the leg of her own chair and is going to be fine because she’s Sarah Klein and she’s worked Bratva cases for nine years, and she’s not going to come undone in her own conference room with an unconscious contractor four feet from the door.
Lex says, low, into my ear, "You are okay."
"I am okay."
"I am going to lift you up."
"Okay."
He does.
The aftermath takes three hours.
Marshals secure the floor. The contractor is taken into custody alive but not awake. Cormac takes a knife wound to the inside of his forearm during the disarming phase that I do not see; the wound is three inches long, requires three stitches at the firm's nurse station, and is the kind of cut that needed a bandage and didn’t slow him down for any minute of his life.
Cormac calls it the scratch.
