Gannon tilted the rifle right and eyed the embassy.
“Shit!” he suddenly said.
His plan was to shoot the drone as it came out of one of the windows and knock it down safely behind the embassy gates.
But as he lay there, he realized a problem he hadn’t anticipated.
There was a damn Chilean flag flapping on a pole at the top corner of the Wilton side of the embassy.
If the drone came out from one of the back windows on the other side of the flag down Wilton, he wouldn’t be able to see it until it was too late. At best, he’d only be able to knock the drone down into the middle of Wilton Street, where the bastards could still retrieve it.
“Shit!” he said again, taking his eye off the scope.
What the hell was he going to do?
He was thinking of maybe laying fire on the embassy itself, shattering some windows to raise the alarm, when out of the corner of his eye he caught movement, and he turned.
A piece of scaffolding sheet on the Upper Belgrave side of the work site where Reyland and his team were now hiding was wafting back and forth in the breeze.
“Screw it,” Gannon said to himself as he suddenly leaped up.
He left the sniper rifle where it was and started running with everything he had back across the rooftops the way he’d come in.
96
Up on the third floor of the construction site, Reyland squatted by a concrete mixing tray as a muscular female MI6 agent slit open another piece of the white plastic construction scaffold wrapping.
She turned and handed him the binoculars.
From where Reyland peeked out, it was a level clear lane straight across Wilton to the embassy’s rear stairwell window where Dr. Santos would make the drop.
Reyland checked his watch. It was 11:25 a.m. Any minute now.
He looked at the dark window of the embassy, thinking about the doctor. What he had to be going through. The despair of betraying his patient and possibly going to jail warring with the hope of getting his son back.
Yes, that one hope, that tiny beam of light, was guiding him toward Messerly’s room at this very moment.
Reyland’s phone vibrated. He looked down.
It was an empty text from the good doctor. The signal.
He was by the window now.
“Keep your eyes peeled. It’s on,” Reyland said to the agent beside him.
In the end, it was almost ridiculous how easy it was. There was a sound of a window opening across the street, and then out of the window came a quad drone the size of a radio-controlled plane.
Then Reyland heard the embassy window shut as the agent leaned out of the panel slit.
“Gotcha,” she said.
“Are they there? Are they there?” Reyland said, and then his eyes lit up as the female agent dropped the thumb drives into his palm.
He gazed on them, three little smooth white slabs of plastic each no bigger than a gum eraser, Toshiba written on their sides.
Over this? he thought, shaking his head.
A year’s work. Millions spent. Lives lost. Over a gram of plastic and silicone?
“Time to go,” he said.
The line of his British security commando men waved Reyland west over the construction site roof like coaches at an obstacle course. He passed some aluminum framing beams, a pile of steel rods, a rolled-up hose. There was a stepladder that went up over the roof wall to the scaffolding on the Upper Belgrave side of the building, and Reyland went over it and started down the nine-story scaffold’s steps.
They were coming down the seventh-story flight of stairs when Reyland heard it. There was the high scream of a car engine on Upper Belgrave, and all five of them stopped on the stairs and went over to the street-side railing.
At first Reyland couldn’t see because of the plastic sheeting, but then he pulled at the plastic until he got it to part like a curtain.
Then he turned to the right.
Down Upper Belgrave came a huge white work truck flying like a runaway train.
It was a phone truck, Reyland could see, as it jumped the curb onto their block and came roaring up the sidewalk directly at them.
“Back! Back! Back!” Reyland cried.
Then the truck smashed somewhere down below into the scaffolding they were standing on, and Reyland yelled as he felt the stairs jolt and heave beneath his backpedaling feet.
97
The fifteen-thousand-pound truck’s speedometer was hovering around the eighty mark when Gannon plowed it into the base of the scaffolding.
The rapid-fire bongs of the ripped-free galvanized steel pipes blasting off the speeding hood and grille sounded almost festive, like wedding bells.
He ducked down as one of the pipes jumped up sideways and shattered the windshield. Another pole came into the cab itself a split second later like a spear where his head had just been.
Gannon kept his foot pressed down on the accelerator in the fantastic gonging as support pipe after support pipe after support pipe popped free.
The runaway truck had just torn loose the last of the supports at the end of the block when one of its front tires exploded like a bomb blast. Gannon closed his eyes as he felt the truck wobble crazily toward the right. It was actually on two wheels when it came off the sidewalk into the street again. Gannon hugged the steering wheel to brace himself as it toppled over completely on its right side and went skidding through the intersection in an incredible screech of metal and clanging support pipes and spitting sparks.
Reyland and the rest of his team were still scrambling up the stairs between the sixth and seventh floors of the scaffold when the heavy ninth-story transom of the compromised structure suddenly ruptured.
They were still running as the ninth floor pancaked into the eighth floor and the eighth floor into the seventh, and then the heavy wooden seventh floor slammed down onto them like a giant textbook onto the heads of a half-dozen scurrying ants.
The entire superstructure of the scaffolding ripped completely free from the building a split second later and tipped over into the street.
The screams of the dying and the mangled among Reyland’s party were lost in the banging as pipe upon pipe rained down mercilessly onto the sidewalk and asphalt seventy feet below.
Along with the pipes, lethal arrows of rebar, pallets of bricks, and boards flew down by the dozens. A falling construction dumpster went through the roof of a street-parked Mercedes like a knife through warm butter as half a dozen fifty-pound bags of concrete shattered off Upper Belgrave street all around in reverberating, bursting clouds of gray dust.
The critically collapsed scaffolding was still clanging and splintering and exploding into the narrow street even as Gannon pulled himself up out of the knocked-over truck’s passenger-side window.
He hopped down into the street over the hood of the cab and looked around and saw that he had come to a stop in the street almost directly in front of the Chilean embassy’s wrought iron gate. As he leaped down off the toppled truck, he saw the embassy front door open and some confused-looking men emerge from it.
“What happened? Are you okay?” one of them yelled as Gannon headed into the cloud of silvery dust that now almost completely obscured Upper Belgrave on the other side of Wilton Street.
The first human he came across in the thick mist was one of Reyland’s commandos. He was on one knee, coughing. Gannon saw the machine gun on a strap at his back and lifted a broken two-by-four up off the asphalt as he came in behind him, brought it down with a bonk over the guy’s head and took his gun.
A moment later, there was the rev of an engine through the dust, and Gannon walked toward it.
“Hey, hey, hey! Over here, Reyland!” called out a man’s voice with a British accent. “Where are you? Where is everyone? What bloody happened?”
As Gannon got
closer, he could see the man, some stick figure–skinny English guy. He was standing beside the open door of an idling black Range Rover.
Gannon put the bead of the Heckler & Koch between the guy’s suddenly hugely wide eyes as he approached.
“Get away from the car!” Gannon yelled then let off a clacking burst at the guy’s feet to give him some incentive.
Gannon found Reyland thirty seconds later ten feet from the Range Rover.
He was under a sheet of plywood between a couple of parked cars, and as he stood over him, the FBI agent moaned sorrowfully.
Then Gannon saw why.
There was a pole sticking out of him. It was a piece of galvanized steel pipe about three feet long and it was jutting from his torso just below his chest. It had sliced cleanly through his windbreaker, which was now completely drenched in blood.
Ouch, Gannon thought when he saw the rest of the galvanized pipe sticking out of Reyland’s back. The pipe he was skewered with was actually leaning sideways against one of the parked cars, and it was kind of propping him up in a seated position as he sat there in the gutter.
“I’m hurt. What is this? What happened? I’m stuck. Why am I stuck?” Reyland suddenly said.
It was a miracle that Reyland was still alive, let alone conscious, Gannon thought as he shook his head.
Gannon knelt and patted and then reached into Reyland’s bloody windbreaker pocket and removed the three thumb drives there.
He pursed his lips as he thought of what to do with them.
“What are you doing?” Reyland said as Gannon pulled off one of Reyland’s boots.
“It’s okay. Everything’s okay, big man. You just sit tight,” Gannon said as he peeled off Reyland’s sock and put the thumb drives into it and tied the sock up into a ball.
He was going to throw it back over the Chilean embassy fence. But as he jogged back across Wilton, he actually encountered one of the burly guards he had seen by the door. He was now standing out on the sidewalk on the corner.
“Here,” Gannon said as he untied the sock and poured the thumb drives into the startled guard’s hand.
“These belong to your guest,” he said. “Dr. Santos dropped them out the window. You should probably talk to him about that. Also, you should probably check on Mr. Messerly.”
“And you are?” the guard said with a Spanish accent.
“No one at all,” Gannon said as he started running back toward the destruction.
“Help,” Reyland said as Gannon got back to the idling Range Rover.
Gannon stopped and looked down at the deputy assistant director as he began making loud huffing and puffing sounds.
“There’s something stuck in me. Pleeeeeease! I can feel it,” Reyland said. “It’s between my ribs! It’s stuck. Stuck.”
Gannon peered at the shaft of blood-slicked metal sticking out of Reyland’s guts and suddenly smiled as he thought of what he had told his buddy Callum about going whale fishing.
How do you like that, he thought.
It looked just like a harpoon.
“You must help me,” Reyland said. “I have a family. My wife. I’ll give you anything.”
In the distance, Gannon could hear the first sirens approaching. He thought they would have that weak weee aw, weee aw Euro sound from the movies, but they sounded just like American ones.
“Sounds like you need a doctor, Reyland,” Gannon said as he got behind the Rover’s wheel. “Maybe Dr. Santos over at the embassy could help you out.”
Gannon slammed the door and zipped down the British luxury car’s window.
“But on second thought, probably not,” Gannon said as he slammed the gas into the floor.
EPILOGUE
When Gannon finally appeared out of the sliders onto the upper terrace, he was wearing a new pair of cargo shorts and a black T-shirt with a neon blue barracuda on it that he had bought at the airport.
It was coming on seven in the evening, and he was back in the Dominican Republic now at a gated vacation villa in the La Costa Brava neighborhood of Santo Domingo up in the hills high above the bay.
He walked to the rail and looked out on the sea, then down at the lower terrace where Little Jorge and Stick were laughing and drinking beer. They were grilling steaks beside the infinity pool with some reggae music bopping out of a speaker beside the grill.
“There you are,” Ruby said, coming out onto the deck behind him.
“How do I look?” she said, showing him her new long-sleeved T-shirt and capri pants.
“Are these sneakers okay for a boat?” she said, showing off her pink Converse low tops. “I never went deep-sea fishing at night. Or actually during the day either, to be honest.”
“You look marvelous, Lieutenant,” Gannon said. “Especially the sneakers.”
“How’s your son? You called him, right?”
“He’s doing fine,” Gannon said. “The Brewers turned him down, but he got another tryout with the Mets in Port St. Lucie. Fingers crossed.”
“That’s awesome,” Ruby said, holding up her crossed fingers on both hands. “The Messerly information drop just happened, by the way.”
“He’s back on his feet?” Gannon said.
“Uh-huh. It happened half an hour ago. The internet is going insane. It’s all unredacted. Thousands and thousands of pages. Emails. Videos. Swiss bank account numbers. These intel people must be beside themselves.”
“Intel people?” Gannon said. “Global mafia, you mean. Enough of those fools. Time to head to the dock. You ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Ruby said.
“Good,” Gannon said, walking over to the steel bucket by the door he’d already filled with ice and beer. “Grab the other end of this, would you?”
“Come on, guys. Time to catch us some fish,” Gannon said excitedly as they came out on the lower deck by the pool.
“Actually, Mick, we’re calling a mutiny,” Stick said. “After a few more cervezas, me and little Jorge here are heading down to a club nearby. He’s going to introduce me to some las chicas bonitas he knows.”
“Las what?” Gannon cried. “The blues are biting, Stick. The blues! And Little Jorge. How could you? You’re going to let me and Ruby here go out on that fine vessel we rented without a first mate?”
They heard the honk of their taxi sound as Little Jorge sat there giggling.
“It’s okay, Mike,” Ruby said. “I think we’ll be okay by ourselves.”
“Just you and me?” Gannon said, squinting at her.
Ruby looked up at the stars that were just now starting to show themselves in the darkening sky.
“Just you and me,” Ruby finally said with a nod. “I think we’ll be just fine.”
* * *
ISBN: 9781488055751
Stop at Nothing
Copyright © 2020 by Michael Ledwidge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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