by L. T. Ryan
Where the hell was she?
Bear closed his eyes and let the noise become background. He tuned in to two distinct voices. Sasha’s never materialized. But Mandy called out.
“Let me go! Bear! Help!”
He filled his lungs with sterile air, noting the distinct smell of fear emitted from those streaming past him. That sweet-sweat sensation lingered on the back of his tongue like jalapeño.
A choice had to be made. Control and balance? Or immediate firepower?
What good would he be fallen over on his side?
Perhaps the sight of him would be enough to persuade the other man to let Mandy go.
Bear released his grip on the MP7 and let it dangle from the strap wrapped around his thick neck. He started forward. The firearm bounced off his chest. There was something reassuring about its weight thudding against his sternum.
Mandy hadn’t been taken far. And Bear saw why. The guy had stopped and bound her wrists together with long zip ties. They looked like the soft-flex type, made from nylon. Less painful for her over time, he supposed. And if he had his way, she wouldn’t find out. Mandy and the man had their backs to Bear, but they weren’t moving. What was the guy doing? The man turned about ninety degrees, sort of facing Mandy. He had long, dark hair, and it hung in sweaty clumps, covering his face. His head bobbed up and down. The hair moved. The guy’s eyes darted from a device in his hand to her face.
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s her.”
American. Probably former military. Definitely a mercenary.
Mandy stiffened. She was about four inches shorter than her captor. She’d grown quite a bit the past year, standing five-foot-six now. In a lot of ways, she was still that little girl Jack Noble had rescued off a street corner in New York City. But she was also on her way to becoming a woman. Stuck in that awkward place between girl and grown. Bear had to make sure she’d get through it.
Mandy had taken to the training Bear had provided her. In more recent months she’d had a healthy interest in martial arts, studying Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (Bear’s favorite), Muay Thai (Sasha’s favorite), and Krav Maga (Jack’s favorite). Bear figured if she could master all three, there wouldn’t be a situation she couldn’t fight her way out of, as a last resort, of course.
This is one of those situations, girl.
Her chin lowered to her chest, but her gaze didn’t settle on the floor. As the man holding her makeshift shackles turned away, she looked back. Toward Bear.
Her eyes widened. A smile formed. He put a finger to his lips and shook his head slightly. She gave a single nod, turned her head, and lowered her chin back to her chest and then she did something unexpected.
“What are we waiting here for?”
Finally, she put that attitude to good use.
The guy looked up from the cell phone. His eyes narrowed. His lips were drawn so tight they might as well not have existed. The look caused her to pull back as though she’d been physically assaulted. He lifted his right arm up and threatened to backhand her.
For months Bear’s anger had been directed inward. Guilt, pain, ire over the life he’d lived, things he’d done, all of which he blamed his current condition on. There’s no such thing as coincidences, he’d told himself on more than one occasion. His choices led to the tumor. He accepted one-hundred percent of the blame, no matter how much the people he loved told him otherwise.
Shit happens.
But not today.
That anger built up and something snapped inside him—he heard it the moment it happened—and all the pain, frustration, rage, hate, self-pity and loathing, it all exploded into white-hot fire burning in his gut, through his chest, exploding from his head.
He barreled forward, only half-using the left crutch for support. A renewed strength filled his ankles, knees, and hips. They didn’t move fluidly, but they worked well enough to get him across the hallway faster than he’d traveled by foot since the surgery.
The new group of people streaming down the hallway posed no threat, and no obstacle to Bear. They moved around him. Why wouldn’t they? No one was going to stop and ask the six-six mountain of a man if he needed help getting out. For damn sure not when he was carrying a submachine gun.
The guy uncocked his arm and grabbed Mandy by her bound wrists. He spun, started walking away from the crowd, dragging her along. No one other than Bear noticed.
Bear picked up the pace. A mistake. His right knee buckled. He let go of the MP7. It dropped and slapped him in the diaphragm. He caught the wall with his large mitt, digging into the slight grooves with his fingertips. A pair of hands gripped him above his hips.
“You OK?”
He half-glanced back at the orderly. The guy stood almost as tall as Bear. About half his width. He had long fingers that wrapped around Bear’s side onto his abdomen. Was this how a ballerina or figure skater felt before liftoff?
“I’m good,” he said, noting that the orderly had taken note of the weapon strapped around Bear’s neck. “Best you get these folks out of here now.”
“You one of them?”
Bear held the guy’s gaze for a moment. “I’m the one taking them out.”
“Bear!”
The call came from beyond the corner. He brushed the good Samaritan aside and tried to ease around. He ended up stumbling into the open hallway in time to see Mandy’s fingers pried free from a doorway.
Crutch and right foot hit the tile. He propelled his left foot further than his regular stride. It planted hard, sending a shockwave up his leg. He felt it in his kidney. Ignoring the sensation, he vaulted forward, repeated the process.
Mandy’s screams continued. Was she in danger? Scared of Bear losing her whereabouts?
“Damn you, girl,” the guy shouted.
Bear was caught between thinking that’s my girl, and holy hell wait for me before you get yourself killed.
The plaque for the room came into view. The morgue. Fitting. It would be someone’s resting place today, and Bear had no intention of dying just yet.
He dropped the crutch. His left hand supported the small barrel, while his right wrapped around the grip and threaded the trigger guard.
Mandy grunted at the same time Bear heard a pop. He stepped into the doorway, his frame filling it. The guy stood over Mandy, who now lay on the floor. His right hand crossed his chest, and he held it up around neck level, ready to strike again.
“I told you—”
That was all Bear let the guy say. He flipped the MP7 to single shot and fired a round into the man’s upper back. The guy bowed forward at the waist, then his knees buckled and he fell like a towel left to hang in the air after a strong wind gust faded.
The shot proved not immediately fatal. The man worked his mouth open and closed as his face turned deep red, then blue. The bullet had exited through the right side of his chest. Probably severed the spinal cord on top of destroying the right lung. His eyes pleaded with Bear to help him.
“I could end this for you now. But it’s best you use these last few moments to think about how messed up your life choices have been that you ended up like this.”
He nodded at Mandy, who got to her knees and searched the guy’s pockets. She came up empty handed.
“Get the phone,” Bear said.
She spun on her knees and located the device underneath a steel table with wide swirls of leftover disinfectant glimmering under the overhead lights. She hopped up and handed it over to Bear.
“Thanks,” he said. “Now, we gotta find a way out of here.”
“This is the morgue, right?” she said.
Bear nodded as he swiped his thumb across the phone’s screen.
Mandy pointed to the back of the room, next to a bank of lockers three high and five wide. Fifteen bodies, max. What would they do if there was a disaster, natural or manmade? Maybe something like today’s assault.
Bear followed her outstretched digit past the row of human coolers.
To the door with light seeping in
from around the bottom.
Mandy said, “Then there’s gotta be a way to transport dead people on the other side of that door.”
Chapter 10
Luxembourg offered Jack passage to Germany, Belgium, and France. After the meeting, he had planned on traveling to the Netherlands via Belgium. The itinerary was compromised. They knew he’d been in Luxembourg City. They’d know his next destination.
He had motorways sprawling out like a spiderweb memorized. The 12 and the A6 to Belgium. The A1 and the E29, north and south, to Germany. And the A3 and A4 south to France. He knew where each went, the best places to stop, the intricacies.
And they were all worthless now.
By this point the woman with the baby realized that her car and friend had been stolen from behind the hotel. Amid the chaos of the scenario, it would take time to get a police officer or detective to listen to her. But they eventually would. If the local authorities placed no stock in what she said, surely someone sitting at a desk in front of a large monitor scanning for news from the shooting would pick up on the stolen car report. They’d take the license plate number and feed it into the EU’s network of license plate readers on every major motorway.
Noble fumbled his phone out of his pocket and entered a series of thirty-six numbers he knew by heart. The call would bounce around Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines before making the trek across the Pacific where it would route through several public and private switches until it hit a bank of computers Langley had long forgotten about before finally ringing through to Brandon Cunningham.
Jack didn’t want to involve the man. He’d gone through enough, according to reports Clarissa gave him before leaving her little hideaway in Italy for good.
Everything that had happened to the guy was Jack’s fault.
“Pick up, buddy,” he muttered. “This is the last thing I’ll ask of you.”
But the line rang several times. After a minute, Noble hung up.
“What’s wrong?” the woman said. He glanced at her in the mirror. She had one knee drawn up and wrapped her arm around it.
“It’s nothing.” He eased to a stop at the light, craned his head forward to catch a glimpse of the camera perched atop the pole.
“You’re worried about the videos,” she said. “I saw a report on this recently, how they scan every car that drives now. You won’t be able to get far, will you?”
Jack shook his head, said nothing.
“What happened at the hotel?”
“Someone tried to kill me.”
“Why?”
“Why does anyone?”
She eased her cheek onto her knee and shrugged. “Did you do something to them?”
“I know something about someone very powerful, and if that information was revealed, it would cause problems for many people in several countries.”
She arched her eyebrows. Her eyes grew wide. She set her foot on the floor and leaned forward. The lemongrass smell washed past Jack.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He turned his head. They were eye to eye. Her lips parted slightly.
“I’m nobody anymore. Dead man walking.” She pointed at the light, which had turned green. He kept his foot on the brake. “You should get out. This isn’t going to end well. I don’t need any more collateral damage weighing on my soul.”
She didn’t move to either side. Instead, she pressed even closer to him. “Can you be trusted?”
Jack lingered on her question for a few moments before fielding a reply. But he didn’t manage to get it out.
A loud bang followed by the crunching of folding metal and shattering glass sent the small car lurching forward.
Jack’s head and torso snapped back then forward. He caught the steering wheel on the side of his head, an inch above his ear. The pain wrapped around his face as though someone had taken a buzzsaw and tried to lobotomize him.
The woman didn’t fare much better. She’d been resting against the front seats, her arms draped over them. The impact propelled her forward to the windshield.
Instinct took over, as it often did for Noble. He stretched his arm out. Her chest smacked into it. His elbow held for a moment, then gave a few inches. She veered off course, her trajectory sloping down a few inches. He couldn’t prevent her from impact, but he spared her the pain of having her face shredded by glass.
Her head hit the dash with a smack. Her body went limp for a moment as she slid down like a bird flying into a window.
In the mirror, Jack saw smoke rise from the black sedan’s tires as the driver peeled back in reverse. They weren’t trying to get away though. Another attempt was incoming.
Jack jostled the woman off the shifter and put the transmission in gear. The light had turned red again. A line of cars crawled through the intersection. Behind him the sedan lurched as the driver shifted to drive before braking.
There was no time to wait. They’d be hit again, and the impact would drive them into traffic, pinning them in.
Noble lurched forward, peeling the tires of the small car and laying on the horn. Startled drivers slammed on their brakes, even though their vehicles were larger and likely to not sustain any damage at their slow rate of speed. He wove through two lanes of traffic and sped off.
Their pursuer had less luck getting through the muck of autos. The passenger door popped open and a man in black wearing black gloves emerged. He rushed forward, brandishing a pistol at oncoming traffic. Enough of a hole formed for them to get through. Before they did, Jack made a right turn.
Into a dead-end alley.
He slammed his foot down on the clutch and brake and slipped the transmission into reverse. Both feet came up. The right went back down on the gas pedal. Pivoted at the waist, he looked back through the rearview and saw a woman and child had stepped into the alley entrance. The kid grasped strings attached to half a dozen balloons colored yellow, red, and blue. The little boy glanced over. His mouth dropped open. His hand released the strings. The balloons went sailing. The car screeched to a stop a few feet from them. The woman scooped up the kid who had diverted his attention from the near collision to his balloons which soared over the tops of buildings. Sailing to the clouds.
Which was where Noble would be heading if he didn’t get out of the narrow roadway with no escape at the other end.
He took the corner blind, reversing onto the main street. He went wide hoping to clear the oncoming vehicles he couldn’t see. It didn’t work. Another car roughly the same size clipped the rear passenger fender. Sent Noble into a swirl. He corrected halfway through a turn, faced the sedan barreling toward him.
The other car had power.
Jack’s had some nimbleness.
He charged ahead, veering toward the sedan.
A game of chicken he had no chance of winning.
“What are you doing?” Her fingernails dug through his shirt. Probably left marks.
He shrugged her off, jerked the wheel hard enough to snap his head to the side. The car popped up on the sidewalk. He laid on the horn to warn pedestrians. In his peripheral, he saw his passenger slide along the seat until she was bunched up in the corner. He half-wished the door would pop open and dump her into the street.
The other driver attempted to mirror Jack’s hard turn, but the bigger vehicle could only cover a lane in the same distance. They came close enough that Jack made eye contact with the driver. The image of the guy burned in his brain.
Did he know him?
From the past?
Movement ahead drew his attention forward. People frozen on the sidewalk, unsure what to do. The smart ones butted up against the buildings, taking cover in open doorways and alcoves. Some might consider the ones still standing there deserving of the Darwin Awards. Survival of the fittest, and all that.
Noble jerked the wheel again. This time he braced himself. His companion did not, though, and she tumbled toward the middle of the rear seat, reaching out and catching his arm to stop herself.
&nb
sp; A couple yanks on the wheel corrected course. A look in the rearview saw the sedan starting a wide U-turn. Jack saw a road ahead and took it, even though it led back toward the shooting.
“Turn left,” she said, pointing at the next intersection.
Noble didn’t ask for further instructions. He guided the small car left.
“Now right.”
Again, he turned.
“Right again.”
He hesitated. In the rush to get away from the hotel, he hadn’t considered the car’s perfect placement. The woman concealed in the backseat. The story of the friend and baby left behind. What better cover to use? Jack wouldn’t get rid of her under such circumstances. Too much risk.
The turn approached and they risked blowing past and entering a busy intersection.
“Do it.” She slapped his arm on the bicep. Her fingers gripped his muscle.
Noble hit the brakes after he turned into the dead-end alley. “What the hell’s going on?”
She lifted her hand off his arm and pointed at a narrow opening at the base of a six-story building. “Parking garage.”
He eased the car through the opening and stopped in front of a white lift gate with yellow and black stripes painted on it. She shifted in his peripheral but did nothing to cause him to react. He stared at the sign attached to the middle of the gate. Didn’t understand what was written on it, but figured it contained a universal message.
The woman threaded one leg between the two seats, then the other and slid into the front passenger seat. She leaned over Noble and rolled down the window and pushed further forward. Her hair brushed against his face. Amid the stale garage air and the smell of sweat, he picked up the scent of lemongrass again. His eyes closed, and for a second, he imagined himself and the woman on a beach somewhere. Then the possibility that she was an assassin crept back into his mind. He had one hand on the middle of her back. The other freed his pistol.
The keypad emitted a small chime with every button press. She punched in an eight-digit code. The gate lifted as she returned to the passenger seat. Strands of her hair caught in his beard. Felt like bugs crawling on his face as they snaked their way free.