Another hotel. She had resigned herself to another closet-sized room at the northeastern edge of the city, along the coast and underneath the flaming smokestacks of a busy oil refinery. The air around the refinery smelled like burnt rubber, making her eyes sting. It wasn’t pretty, but it was cheap and within walking distance to the Port of Luanda. In the morning she would try making some contacts there, see about fares for a cross-Atlantic voyage. It could be an official ticket and seat, or an under-the-table arrangement for human smuggling. She preferred the first option, as long as it didn’t attract too much attention. But at the end of the day, she was a beggar and without the luxury of choice.

She could barely wait for the luxury of a hot shower, her first in three days. Macy stayed under the water for almost an hour, eyes closed, mind drifting off to home. She could be drifting there herself in less than a week, cutting across the Atlantic toward Brazil. The Port of Paranaguá. There she would feel closer to home, and safer—until she’d have to somehow make it North through Central America, and the border . . .

Fuck it. What about Cuba? Maybe she could be granted asylum there. Fresh Cuban sandwiches and fine cigars. She could forget about the United States. Sure. Fuck America for what it had done to her.

While Macy rinsed away the last suds of shampoo, a future with unlimited beach-side pineapple mojitos ran through her mind. She turned the water off with a rusty squeal, the water dripping away and leaving her cold. She stood there feeling more naked and alone than ever.

Shoving the thoughts away, she toweled off and tried to get her mind back to Luanda. Life or death in Luanda. It was the same deal as last night, only this time the decoy room was next door. Not only that, but the two rooms were attached. A side entrance between them with a separate door on each side. Earlier, she’d gone inside the decoy to scope it out, studying the doors on her way back to her actual room. That was when the plan popped in her head.

Before taking her shower, and before an unauthorized renovation project, she’d broken into a storage closet in the basement of the hotel in search of tools. The power drill she found inside made it easier to poke a hole through the door on the decoy side, and the spray can of lubricant made her door open without even the slightest squeak.

The trap was set.

If she heard someone in the decoy room, Macy would turn off her lights, open the connecting door, and then spy through her custom peephole. And if she didn’t like what she saw—and she assumed she wouldn’t—then she’d simply open the door and give the intruder a little surprise. A 124-grain greeting. It was simple. She’d drop him, collect her things, and then climb out her back window and back into the Luandan night.

It seemed so simple in her mind, but in bed an hour later, when she eventually heard the sound of a chair leg scraping across the decoy room’s linoleum floor, her mind went to mush. She’d never seized up like that before, and she cursed herself in her mind as she finally found her way to the light switch. She flicked it off and stood in the darkness, collecting her wits for a moment before moving by memory to the side entrance. She slid off the safety on her Beretta and then slowly and silently opened the door.

The peephole beyond it was still dark, as was the room beyond that. Macy crept up against the door, her hand moving up and feeling its way to her little custom window. She positioned her eye there and then waited for the first sign of light.

Another sound, furniture bumping or something skidding across the floor. She could at least be certain that the person in the room didn’t have the advantage of night-vision goggles.

Then came a loud thud, and someone taking a breath.

Macy frowned. Did they stub their toe? Whoever was inside was even clumsier than she’d been. They certainly didn’t have the layout memorized. It was almost funny—for a half-second—until she remembered the comedian had arrived not to entertain, but to splatter her brains against the linoleum.

She pressed the gun up against the wood of the door. If she had to be quick about it, a few surprise shots might save her life. Her rounds would travel through the thin, particleboard door with hardly any change in velocity. The scumbag who broke into her room wouldn’t know the difference. And if she hit him right, he probably wouldn’t even know what happened.

Macy waited, trying not to keep holding her breath. She needed to go back to inhaling and exhaling slowly and steadily. But the room was still dark, and it was becoming harder to stand still and silent behind the peephole. Energy pinged inside her, her adrenaline building up and needing to explode out.

For a long while—which was probably only one minute—she heard nothing.

Was it all in her head again? Another ghost behind the shower curtain?

The lights flicked on, a set of dim ceiling bulbs illuminating a slender African man with a black bandana over his face. He wore soccer shorts and a black t-shirt, just your typical Luandan kid out for a night of sport. Only it was blood sport and the kid was carrying a gun. It looked like an old revolver, a cop gun almost, not something a trained assassin would mess with. Macy breathed easier when he carried it away from her position, the kid walking with a strange limp toward the bathroom hallway. She watched him disappear around the corner.

She waited.

There would be no sense charging in and shooting this guy. It didn’t feel right. He may have been just another two-bit thief, like those kids on the scooter. Luanda was full of opportunists.

She’d wait and collect a little more evidence before she’d make her move. She’d watch what he did in there, how he’d go about searching what was supposed to be the room of the American—according to the books downstairs.

She watched, but still held the gun tight, the barrel inches away from the wood of the door. The situation was fluid and her response could change at any moment. Her brain was clean and clear now, up for the challenge. She’d figured it out, why she was so flustered earlier. It was that warm shower that had lulled her into a complacent sleepiness. Now, the sight of her latest intruder was like a bucket of cold water against her face.

He was still out of sight, doing something in the bathroom. But she could hear his progress. The door, and then bathroom fan turning on with the light switch. She waited for the curtain.

And waited.

Still nothing.

And then, a cop’s voice: “Freeze! Drop the gun!”

No, not a cop. A man’s voice, but not a local. An American. The sound of a quick-sliding shower curtain.

“Drop it!”

Multiple shots rang out, some over each other. A gun fight. More noise with the shower curtain and the tub, and then the door, scuffling feet with someone groaning in the background.

Before Macy could decide on her next move, the intruder was back in her line of sight. Her hand shook with anticipation. She tried pointing the gun at him, but he ran off toward the open rear window. She couldn’t let him slip away so easily.

Somehow, and definitely without thinking, Macy had launched herself into the room. It was stupid and not very tactical, exposing herself like that. But after what had happened in the bathroom, she felt compelled to stop him.

“Freeze!” she said in a similar voice to the one she’d just heard. Her gun fixed on the unarmed African. Another shape rushed into her peripheral view, a white male coming out of the bathroom, his arm wet with blood and dripping as he held it up to aim at the intruder. But all that was left to aim at were the kid’s legs, and then just his feet, him squirming out of the window like a rat through a sewer grate.

Macy rushed to the window in time to see him land, five stories later, headfirst. The sound of meat and bone slapping, almost liquefying, against the pavement. She felt the thud from her room and her stomach curdled. What was the scene like on the ground?

“Oh, Jesus,” she cried, slapping her hand over her mouth when she remembered the room’s other occupant. She spun around. His eyes were wide, chest heaving, arm bleeding. When he started rushing toward her and the window, Macy drew her gun on him, backpedaling toward her door, steadying herself. She tried desperately to make her brain interpret what the hell she was actually seeing. Who the fuck was this? Was he the real killer?

He was aiming his gun at her now, his body positioned in a familiar tactical stance. The Weaver stance. He looked like a trained professional. A killer. “Freeze,” he said, grunting it loud and guttural.

“You freeze,” she said, aiming in Weaver, too.

“You first,” he said.

“I’m fucking frozen.”

“Drop the gun, then.”

“You,” she said.

“Me what?”

“Who are you?”

When he lowered the gun halfway down, she wasn’t so fixated at the light reflecting from the barrel. She could finally see beyond the glint of death, to his face. But it still didn’t make sense. It was just as shiny and obscure and bright and confusing. She couldn’t make out the details aside from that it was a white man’s face. American as apple pie.

CIA?

“It’s okay,” he said, his gun lowering even further, his chest moving in long deep breaths as if to persuade her to do the same. “It’s okay, you can lower your gun.”

She kept her gun trained on Mr. Apple Pie. She didn’t trust him for anything.

“Can you?” he said. “Can you please lower it?”

The face had gone a little wary now, his arm muscles straining.

Her gun was shaking, too.

“Macy, please—”

“What?” The sound of her name ricocheted in her head like a hollow-point bullet.

“Please lower the gun,” he said. “Please?”

Something about that jaw line, the dimple, the way his nose sat on his face. His soft eyes pleading with her. Puppy-dog brown. He raised his eyebrows. Was he about to laugh?

“Come on, Mace. It’s me.”

It was St. Louis. It was seven years ago coming back hard, hitting her like a ton of bricks in the face. In her heart, the recollection piercing her.

“What?” she said, the word coming out limp and mumbled. Defeated.

“It’s me,” he said. “You know me. Macy . . .”

“You.”

“Tucker.”

“Tucker?” She wanted to run back to the door, crawl back through the little hole she peeked out of, crawl back into her room, alone, in the shower, melting away and hiding.

“There you go,” he said, soothing, smiling, his eyes still following her gun lower and lower. “Thanks,” he said. “Damn, I was worried you were about to blow me away.”

She didn’t feel herself lowering the gun. It was an automatic response, the gun already at her side and hanging off a few fingers. The piece of metal felt like a hundred pounds. There was weight now on her shoulders, too. On her neck, everything crushing her down. Everything about the situation, about who was standing in front of her in a hotel in Luanda making her knees wobbly and useless.

“It’s okay,” he said again, his voice fading. “You’re okay.”

The dim bulbs on the ceiling got dimmer, from orange to brown. The light in her head faded, too. Macy wanted to lie down on the ground for some reason.

When she mumbled something about how or what, her voice sounded far away. It was like she was back at the police academy, the firing range with Tucker, her ears covered with shooting muffs. It was so vivid that Macy could even smell the burnt chemical odor of gun smoke. And then she remembered that she was in Luanda, remembered what had happened in the bathroom, and what had just fallen five stories from the hotel window.

“Tucker,” she said, feeling her mind come back into focus.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”