The Assassin by Stephen Coonts

the empty magazine and reached in his pocket for another as a high-pitched, keening wail came from the other side of the wall. Someone was thumping the wall, kicking it, it sounded like.
    He got the second magazine in and was thumbing off the slide release when a shot came through the wall, tugging at his sleeve. Before he could get the gun leveled, Ricky Stroud’s weapon began hammering. Stroud fired four times, spacing his shots along the wall. A cry and a thud followed when he stopped shooting.
    Stroud struggled to rise on one knee, his belly and crotch covered in blood.
    “Get out,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’m finished. Won’t be long. Get!”
    Nate Allen didn’t hesitate. He stepped over Ricky, glanced right and left. There were four men lying in the hallway. He stepped around them. One of them was struggling to rise. Nate shot him in the head.
    As he exited the building he heard a shot behind him. Ricky Stroud had shot himself.
    There were people in the street, all facing the building from which the shots had come. Ignoring them, Nate Allen walked through the crowd and kept going.
    “Abdul-Zahra Mohammed is dead. The killer used a knife and got blood on his sleeves and chest. He was seen. There were two of them. The brothers killed one, and the other escaped after killing all four of the brothers.”
    Abu Qasim’s face was impassive as he heard the news.
    The man who delivered the bad tidings shifted uncomfortably. He started in on Allah and his mercy, but Qasim lifted a hand, stopping the sermon.
    “How did they find Mohammed?”
    “He was dead in the street—“
    “No, fool. How did the infidels find him?”
    “He rarely left the Old Quarter. Everyone knows that.” The truth was that with no education, limited life experience and a xenophobic outlook, Abdul-Zahra Mohammed hadn’t felt comfortable outside the tiny circle in which he had been raised. This mind-set was so common in the Arab world that it was unremarkable.
    “More to the point, how did the infidels learn he was in the movement?”
    The messenger had no answer and, wisely, said nothing. So, this man who escaped—where is he now?” Rome. We have him under surveillance.”
    Rome was Nate Allen’s favorite city, the one place on earth he loved above all others. It was modern, stylish, very Italian and literally built on top of ancient Rome, which cropped up in ruins and walls and columns when one least expected it. In Rome one got a sense that one’s life was merely an eye-blink in the cosmic experience, and yet one sensed the Italian urgency to enjoy, to savor, each and every moment. There was a woman, too, a dark-eyed slender woman who loved life and Nate Allen.
    So Rome was … special.
    On pleasant afternoons Nate liked to sit on a patch of grass with other men, most of whom were older, most of whom wore laborers’ clothes, and listen to the Italian language being spoken around him. Some of the men brought wine, and as they smoked they passed the bottle around. Behind them, in the center of this little urban paradise, young men kicked soccer balls around, shouted and laughed and strutted for the girls who paused to eat lunch and watch. It was very pleasant, a world away from North Africa.
    Ricky Stroud had screwed up that hit… and paid for it with his life. Damn, that was hard.
    Of course, Ricky knew the odds and the risks and signed on anyway, as Nate had. Sitting in the grass in Rome listening to the laughter and watching the girls and boys, the smells and heat and palpable religious frenzy of the Arabs seemed like something from a nightmare, some horrifying thing that had grown in the corner of your mind yet wasn’t real.
    But it had been real. Ricky Stroud was really dead. Real damn dead. Of course, so was that murderous asshole Abdul-Zahra Mohammed. Blowing up airliners was his chosen quest. He had never actually been on an airliner—had never been more than four miles from the Old Quarter in which he was born—but the