The Second Saladin by Stephen Hunter Read Free Book Online Page B

a bookstore, a barbershop, and a place that sold gems in it, across from the train station and behind the bus station.
    He walked into the dim brown lobby.
    A fat lady looked up when he came to the desk.
    “Yes?”
    “A room. How much?”
    “It’s ten-forty, dear. You get your TV and a bath.”
    “Sure, okay.”
    “Just sign here.”
    He signed quickly.
    “One night? Two? A week? I have to put it down.” Her face was powdery and mild.
    “Two, three maybe. I don’t know.”
    “Oh, and hon? You forgot to say where you were from. Here, on the form.”
    “Ah,” he said.
    He knew what to put. He thought of the only American he knew. Jardi. Where had Jardi grown up?
    “Chicago,” he wrote.
    “Chicago, now there’s a nice town.” She smiled. “Now I have to have that money, hon.”
    He gave her a twenty and got his change.
    “You go on up. Those stairs there. Down the hall. It’s in the back, away from all the traffic.”
    He climbed the stairs, went down the dark hall and found the room. He went in, locked the door. He pulled the Skorpion from his pack and set it before him on the bed and waited for the police.
    Nobody came.
    You did it
, he thought.
    Kurdistan ya naman
.

4
    T rewitt was nervous. First, so many big shots in the room at one time. The special men, the elect, some of them legends, who ran the place. Then, the equipment. He was not by nature mechanical. He was not good with
things
. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have brought in some technical wizard to handle this aspect of it? Well, yes, under normal circumstances. But these were extraordinary circumstances. Therefore he’d just have to run the equipment himself.
    “You’ll get the hang of it,” Yost Ver Steeg had said.
    And then the slides. They were the key; they had to fall in the right order and he’d just got the last one down from Photographic a few minutes ago—it had been touch and go the whole way—and he wasn’t sure he’d gotten it into the magazine right. He might have had it in backward, which would have had a humorous effect in less intense briefings, but this one was big and he didn’t want to screw up in front of so many important people. And see Miles Lanahan snickering in his corner, removing one point from Trewitt’s tally and awarding it to himself.
    “Trewitt, are we ready?” It was Yost.
    “Yessir, I
think
so,” he called back, his voice booming through the room—he was miked, he’d forgotten.
    He bent, switched on the projector, beaming a white, pure rectangle onto the wall. So far, so good. If he could just find … yes, there’s the bastard; it was a kind of toggle switch mounted in a cylinder, in turn linked by cord to the projector. Now, if this just works like the instructions
say
, we’ll be …
    He punched the button and there was a sound like a .45 cocking.
    A face came on the screen, young, tenderly young, say eighteen, eyes wild with joy, crewcut glinting with perspiration, two scrawny straps hooked over two scrawny shoulders.
    “Chardy at eighteen,” Trewitt said. “His high school had just won the Class B Chicago Catholic League championship. March twelfth, nineteen fifty-eight. The picture is from the next day’s
Tribune
. This is a close-up; you can’t see the trophy, a hideous thing. Anyway, Chardy scored … ah, I have it right here ….”
    “Twenty-one points,” Miles Lanahan called. “Including a free throw with time gone that gave St. Pete’s a one-point win.”
    “Thanks, Miles,” said Trewitt, thinking,
you bastard
.
    “Anyway,” Trewitt continued, “you can see he’s a hero from way back.”
    Trewitt’s problem was heroes. His vice, his consuming passion, heroism. His deepest secret was that when he walked through the streets and saw his own bland reflection thrown back at him in shopwindows he projected onto it certain extravagances of equipage and uniform: jungle camouflages, dappled and crinkly, bush hats, wicked knives; and the weapons, the implements by which