The Equalizer Read Online Free PDF Page A

saw the two ex-FTB agents running back to the front of the gallery.
    What she didn’t see was the black Gaz-3102 Volga that pulled out after her.
    Elena accelerated into the traffic on the Ul. Kymskiy Val. She reached into her bag and closed her fingers over the silver flash drive. She had no idea what was on it. She didn’t need to know. All she had to do was deliver it to Control.
    She thought back over her evening at the art gallery.
    Robert McCall would have been proud of her.

 
    CHAPTER 3
    The blast hit the car like a huge fist, smashing out the driver’s side window. The Lada swerved across the narrow, cobbled street just off Tverskoy Boulevard. Little daggers of glass spit into the left side of Elena’s face. She felt the wave of heat like someone had opened an oven door. She saw everything happen in exquisite slow-motion: she avoided hitting a spar of metal on the edge of the street with a glassed ad on it for Guerlain Shalimar and a pink perfume bottle hiding the curves of a naked young woman. There was a big black-and-white cow on the sidewalk. She hit that, sending the back of the sculpture through the window of a store with KOOEHH, SOUVENIRS, VODKA AND CAVIAR FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE painted over the doorway. Rows of Russian nesting dolls with painted caricatures on them scattered: Mick Jagger, Putin, Obama, Princess Diana, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stalin pointing an accusing finger at her. All of them splintered and shattered along with the glass in the window.
    Two couples had been walking out of a grocery store on the corner. The explosion hurled them to the ground. The woman rolled into a fetal position. The man had lost an arm. A busker in a long black coat had most of his face peeled off, strips of blood erupting up his torso. An orange tabby cat sitting on the top of his amplifier was fried. The sound of the explosion roared in her ears like a long, distorted echo, playing at the wrong speed.
    Elena bounced up onto the sidewalk. A low wall was covered in Russian graffiti, the words WWW.ROSTSPLONT.RU scrawled above some angry swirls of color. She swerved away from it.
    The Company safe house had been on the second floor of a pink apartment building. It was the only apartment that had a terrace. The wrought-iron railing that had been around it was now mangled in the center of the street. A Vaz 2107 had swerved to avoid it, but had struck it. An old Mercedes-Benz hit the back of the Vaz and sent it flying into tables along the side of the Starbucks on the opposite corner. Couples threw themselves to the ground or scrambled away, none of them badly hurt except one young woman cut by flying glass.
    Elena looked ahead. Beyond the wrecked souvenir store was the huge wooden figure of a man riding on a unicycle, glasses on the painted face, wearing a deerstalker cap, white shirt and red tie, riding britches, raising a huge white cup to his lips. He’d balanced there for years—but tonight he came toppling down, right across the hood of Elena’s Lada. The white cup smashed through the windshield, as if the unicyclist were demanding she take a sip. Shaking, Elena leaned forward, thrusting the white cup out of the windshield. The wooden figure fell off the car as she swerved again, jumping back up onto the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding the second couple outside the grocery store picking themselves up from the ground. The man appeared unhurt. Blood streamed down his girlfriend’s face.
    It all happened in six seconds of absolute clarity.
    Elena jumped back down into the street just as a second explosion ripped through what had been her destination. More glass exploded out into the narrow street. Two more vehicles skidded to a halt. A heavy Volvo smashed into the old Mercedes, sending it into the window of a hat shop. A florid Russian climbed out of the Volvo, ran over to the Mercedes, and dragged out a screaming woman, stumbling away with her before the Mercedes went up in a ball of