Suddenly, six men were down, and the only person standing was the woman. She gave me a look of mingled terror and lethal hate and dove over the back of the couch, coming up with a neat little handgun I hadn’t seen on her. She rose up firing, but I was moving, changing angle and distance, and the range was bad for her but good for me. I chopped down on her wrist hard enough to break things, then kicked her in the stomach. She folded into a knot that was tight as a fist.

Then I shot the two men Ghost had injured. One was going to bleed out and die. Fuck it. The other was going to need a lot of surgery. Too bad.

The whole fight took about four seconds.

I looked down at the woman, shrugged, and shot her with Sandman. Then I left them all there and found a housekeeping closet, tricked open the lock, and grabbed a big canvas laundry cart on wheels. I took it back to the room and loaded my three sleeping beauties into it and then hid them with towels and sheets I pulled from the bed.

“In,” I said, and Ghost jumped into the cart, and I covered him with a duvet.

The briefcase Woodpecker had been carrying was on the coffee table next to an identical one. Both were locked, both went in with the laundry, along with everyone’s wallets and cell phones. Then I was out the door, wheeling the cart to the elevator. There was nothing in the room where Ghost and I had spent the night. My borrowed gear was downstairs in the first room where I’d awakened from my fugue. And, besides, I didn’t want to be anywhere near this room. So we took the service elevator.

I got into that elevator just as the main elevator doors pinged open and two security guards and an assistant manager hurried out to investigate reports of a disturbance. I pushed up my sleeve to allow access to the thin, flexible tactical computer strapped to my forearm and disabled the video loop. They never saw me.

I rode the car down to the fifth floor, fed the empty-hall loop to those cameras, exited, and—after making sure the hall was clear—wheeled the cart to the other room I’d booked. Got inside, reactivated the security cameras, and sent a signal for MindReader to erase all traces of my hack, closed and locked the door, leaned against it, and exhaled, blowing out my cheeks.

Ghost raised his head and peered at me, grinning to show his bloody metal teeth.

CHAPTER 129

HOTEL TIMIȘOARA

TIMIȘOARA, ROMANIA