The Equalizer Read Online Free PDF

flame.
    And then Elena was out of the chaos. She turned right onto the main boulevard. She passed the BECTTA building with its large art designs in the bright windows. To her left she noted the Vitek sign high on a building across the square, white against a blue background. Beside it was a tall building lit up in multicolors, some kind of a design. She couldn’t make out what it was. Her mind was focusing on small, meaningless details, trying to cope with the outrage and violence she had narrowly escaped.
    They’d known she would go to The Company safe house. They had timed it almost perfectly. Obviously something had happened to put the timing off by a few seconds. She remembered why. She’d had to brake and stop while a small parade of students had crossed in the middle of Bolshaya Bronnaya Street. It looked as if they’d come from some sort of protest. It had delayed her.
    And saved her life.
    Elena drove down a dark side street, pulled over to the curb, and parked. She sat still for a few moments, shaking the glass slivers out of her hair. She brushed them off her dress. She knocked out the rest of the glass shards in the driver’s side window with the butt of her gun. There was nothing she could do about the windshield. Now there was a round, neat hole where the wooden figure’s white cup had smashed through. The rest of the glass had not starred. Thank God.
    Her left side burned. She saw that her left arm was red, seared in the heat. She ached as if someone had taken a hammer to her ribs. Her eyes were puffy and there was a trickle of blood from just under her right eye. She adjusted the rearview mirror and inspected the damage. Her face was imbedded with tiny glowing jewels of glass. Gingerly she picked each one of them out of her skin, wincing at the pinpricks of pain.
    She had been very lucky.
    She could hear the ambulance and police sirens in the distance, coming closer, sonorous sounds, not like the familiar wails or whoop whoops of fire engines and police cars back home. She couldn’t stay still. There would be a contingent plan in place to kill her. It would already be activated. She needed to get some medical supplies and bandages. She needed the firepower and ammo that had been waiting for her at the safe house, along with a new passport and ID papers.
    But she knew where to go. Thanks to something Robert McCall had once told her. Pillow talk on a soft, violet night when they couldn’t sleep after they’d made love. He’d told her things. Unusual for him. But he’d wanted to talk. As if there had been no one to listen to him for a very long time.
    Elena readjusted the rearview mirror, expecting to see headlights behind her. There were none. But she could hear the ambulance and the cop cars arrive at the scene of the explosion two streets away. She pulled out of the parking spot, grateful that the back window was still intact. She wouldn’t be able to travel far like this without attracting attention, but she couldn’t just abandon the Lada. She could try to hot-wire a car in the street, but that was risky: car alarms, a call to the police reporting a stolen vehicle. She didn’t have too far to travel. No, she would risk driving the Lada a few miles outside of Moscow. There was no other choice.
    She got onto the artery heading into the Moscow suburbs. She kept looking in the rearview mirror, but it was tough to see if she was being followed. Just headlights in a shifting pattern. No one car appeared to stay behind her. She gripped the wheel tightly, trying to ignore the burning in her left arm and leg. She saw the explosion in the safe house in her mind, erupting across the narrow street, how the harshness of the light had lingered on her retina. It triggered a memory within her.
    Robert McCall was standing at a window in a Serbian hotel room, six years before, seeing explosions light up the night sky, the entire building shaking slightly with each one. He