Backfire

by Catherine Coulter

  “Oh, yes, it’s splendid today, after the rain,” she said, and turned her back to him to open the room across the hall.

  Something was definitely off, but what was it? They couldn’t have found him, simply couldn’t have. But he hadn’t stayed alive for the past twelve years by taking chances. He carefully eased a small canister out of his jacket pocket, slipped his finger through the ring and pressed it against his thigh. When he slid his key card down the slot, the green light flashed and the door opened, quiet and smooth, as it always did. He let the door open a crack.

  He stepped into the very modern living room of his suite, with its view of the city spreading out before him.

  A man’s voice yelled, “FBI! Hands in the air! Now!”

  “Don’t shoot me!” he yelled. He flung his hands into the air, and let the safety ring remain on his finger as the canister crashed to the floor. There was a deafening blast, and thick smoke billowed like a black curtain in front of him. A sheet of flames burst out hot and high, and Xu was down, rolling. He’d closed his eyes as he’d hurled the canister and turned his head away, but he still saw lights, felt his eardrums throb from the deafening noise.

  He heard shouts, heard bullets flying around him through the flames and smoke. He knew they couldn’t see him any more than he could see them, even less if they were still blinded by the light with their ears ringing. But they’d know if they didn’t do something fast they’d burn to death. He felt a bullet sting his arm, ignored the shot of pain, crawled to the front door, and rolled out into the hall. His last view of his suite was through a wall of flames, the FBI agents yelling to one another from the other side.

  He jumped to his feet to face the maid, who was raising her SIG. “Freeze!”

  A shout and three more bullets came through the smoke, striking the wall behind her close to her head, and she flinched. He kicked the SIG out of her hand, backhanded her face, knocking her to the floor, and took off down the nearest stairs. His left arm hurt like the devil, but he took two, three steps at a time, hoping he wouldn’t go flying on his face. With his useless arm, he’d break his neck if he did. He forced himself to slow and straighten his clothes before he reached the lobby, and took a second to regain his breath. He saw blood had soaked through his jacket sleeve. It was a dark material, thankfully, it wouldn’t be all that apparent at a glance, but it hurt, really hurt. He knew he should be applying pressure, but there wasn’t time.

  He forced himself to walk, not run, across the lobby and toward one of the smaller front doors. The fire alarm went off, the people in the lobby started looking around uncertainly, wondering what to do while the staff took their places to usher them to the doors. Very soon there would be pandemonium, he would see to that, enough craziness that even the FBI agents would be too busy trying to save their own butts and protect all the innocent bystanders to care about catching him. He heard a shout from behind him over the alarm bells. “It’s Xu! Stop, FBI!”

  He kept walking as he reached into his pocket and pushed a preset number on his cell phone. There was a loud explosion, and soon there were screams and the sounds of people running—the chaos was beginning, and the FBI agents waiting for him in the hotel lobby would be drowned in the stampede.

  He held his arm as he walked quickly to the valet station. He saw his car, but the girl wasn’t there, no one was, none of the bellmen, none of the valets. He saw her then, but she was dashing back into the lobby, yelling something to the doorman. Where were the keys to his Audi? He didn’t see them, and he couldn’t wait. He had to get out and grab a taxi, and where was a taxi stand?

  He didn’t register the dark van parked across the street until the van door slid open and a redheaded woman jumped out. He saw a gun pressed against her side. Another fricking FBI agent, he thought, and she was running right at him.

  Xu took off, weaving through the growing crowd of panicked people clogging the sidewalk. He heard sirens in the distance. How had the FBI found him? How? Cindy, he thought, she’d been able to talk.

  He could hear her, knew she was gaining on him. She was a woman, and if she made the mistake of getting too close, he could kill her in an instant. He could nearly smell her now. He heard angry, panicked voices as she shoved people out of her way.

  —

  Sherlock heard an explosion. Her heart stopped as she looked up to the top floor and saw a window flying outward, sending shattered glass raining down, smoke and flames gushing out after it.

  It was Xu’s room. What had he done? Eve, Harry, and Griffin Hammersmith had been in that room waiting for Xu, and Agent Willa Gaines outside in the hallway, dressed as a maid. Were they still there?

  Sherlock couldn’t believe it was Xu she saw coming out through the luggage door of the hotel. She saw people running out of the hotel behind him, heard yells, felt the rising panic.

  She jerked open the van door and jumped down. Two agents monitoring the hotel exits shouted after her, but she paid no attention. She ran full speed after Xu. He was fast, but there were so many people around, all of them excited and looking up, wondering what had happened.

  He disappeared for a moment. She stepped around a couple of tourists, saw a blood trail on the sidewalk. Good, he was hurt. Who else was hurt? Stop it. Focus. Sherlock saw him again, holding his arm as he ran. She took a flying leap past two civilians who stood in the middle of the sidewalk gaping up at the flames and landed on his back, her arms around his neck. The force drove him to his knees. He was larger than she was, and stronger, even wounded, but she was well trained, her adrenaline level off the charts. She had to flatten him, get his face against the sidewalk.

  She struck her fist as hard as she could against his wounded arm, and he howled. He fell to his belly, yelling in fury and pain, cursing, trying to flip her off him. With his good arm, he tried to grab her to pull her beneath him, but she didn’t let that happen.

  People were standing around them now, looking to see what was happening, but not understanding. “Keep back!” she yelled. “FBI! This man set the bomb in the hotel!”

  Sherlock raised her SIG, shoved it against the back of his head. Xu froze. Sherlock leaned down beside his ear. “Give me an excuse, Xu, come on, twitch or move your finger, anything. Let me blow your brains out.”

  “How did you know?”

  “We’re FBI. You’re not.” She leaned back and clipped a handcuff around his right wrist. “And it turns out you’re not as good as you thought you were. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to—” She grabbed his wounded arm and was pulling it back, Xu yelling in pain and fury, to fasten them together, when her brain registered the sound of a shot and a spear of sharp bright light before everything went black.

  Something was wrong. Savich double-parked the Taurus and ran toward the FBI van across from the Fairmont, where he knew Sherlock and two other agents were positioned. He heard the explosion, saw the glass bursting outward from the sixth floor, followed by gushing smoke and flames.

  And then he saw Sherlock through the throng of panicked people, barreling through the crowds, shoving people aside. She was after Xu, and Sherlock was catching him. Savich watched her leap forward and tackle him. They disappeared from sight.

  He shoved people out of his way, yelling Sherlock’s name. Then he saw her astride Xu’s back, cuffing him. Suddenly there was a loud cracking sound from somewhere behind him, a rifle shot, he registered it in an instant, and he saw her head bloom red. His heart froze in his chest. Xu threw her off and scrambled to his feet, one handcuff dangling off his right wrist, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Savich couldn’t believe what he’d seen, simply couldn’t accept it. He had to get to her, had to see her smile at him and tell him it had all been a dream, nothing more. Above the mayhem he heard a ferocious growling sound he realized was coming from his own throat. He saw frightened faces staring at him, but he ignore
d them. People dove out of his way. His vision narrowed to an arrow of misting red, like blood—no, not blood. He’d get to her, he’d find it was all a mistake, that what he’d seen was a lie his own brain had spun together, nothing more than that. When he burst out of the last scattering knot of people, he saw three teenage boys huddled over Sherlock, protecting her from the stampede.

  He grabbed one of the boys’ arms, pulled him back. “I’m FBI. Keep the people away—you, call nine-one-one.”

  Savich stared down at all the blood streaming down her face, matting her hair to her head. She was lying on her side, utterly still, and he was afraid in the deepest part of him that she was dead. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. He was afraid to touch her, afraid that when he pressed his fingers against her throat there would be no pulse, there would be nothing, and it would mean she was gone. His fingers hovered, then finally touched the pulse point in her neck, pressed in. He felt her pulse. Yes, she was alive. He ripped a sleeve off his white shirt and pressed down on the blood streaming from her head. His hands were steady and strong, but his brain was a wasteland of chaos. But she was alive. Nothing else mattered.

  One of the boys asked, his voice shaking with a mixture of fear and excitement, “Is she dead?”

  Savich barely registered the question. It was outside of him, not important, only she was important. He could see he was pressing on a deep gouge the bullet had made along the side of her head. But how deep? There was so much blood with a head wound, too much. He pressed down harder on the wound and put the fingers of his other hand against her bloody neck to find her pulse, to reassure himself again it was there. He touched her vivid hair curling over his hands, wet with blood.

  He said, more to himself than to anyone else, “She’s alive.” Saying the words helped to make them real.

  One of the boys said, “The nine-one-one operator said everyone in the city is rushing to the Fairmont.”

  “Billy, what are you doing? What is going on here?”

  “Mom, we’re okay. We’re helping the FBI. One of the agents got shot.”

  Savich blocked out the parents’ voices, leaned close to Sherlock’s bloody face. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you’re going to be fine. You’ve been shot—well, let me say it’s more than a graze, but still, the bullet didn’t hit your brain.” He pressed his cheek against her bloody hair, and thanked God the shooter’s aim wasn’t true. He wondered for only an instant who the shooter was.

  “Savich! Where’s Sherlock?”

  It was Eve. Billy’s parents pulled him and the other two boys out of the way. Eve fell to her knees beside her.

  Savich raised his face, now nearly as bloody as his wife’s. “I saw the explosion blow out that window in Xu’s suite. Are you all right?”

  Eve waved that away. “Your face—”

  “It’s Sherlock’s blood,” he said.

  Eve said, “Is—is she okay?”

  He made himself nod. “The bullet didn’t kill her. She’s alive, but she’s out—” There weren’t any more words. He pressed his shirtsleeve hard against the wound, his eyes not leaving her face.

  He didn’t care about Xu, didn’t care if the Fairmont burned to the ground, only about Sherlock. No, get yourself together, Sherlock’s alive. You have to take charge, there’s no one else. She’d captured Xu and then someone else had shot her. Who? It didn’t make sense; Xu was alone, always alone. Wasn’t he?

  He looked over at the three boys, Billy’s parents standing protectively behind them, and Savich registered that Billy was as redheaded as Sherlock, tall, gangly, and skinny as a plank. He nodded at them, and manufactured a calm, steady voice. He said to Eve, “These boys protected Sherlock from the crowd. Get their names.” He managed a smile at Billy’s mom.

  “Ma’am, your son is a hero, all three of them are heroes. Thanks, all of you.”

  He looked back down at Sherlock. “Eve, where’s Harry?”

  “He went after Xu.”

  No more words; he never looked away from Sherlock’s face until Eve touched his arm. “The EMTs are here, Dillon. Let them take care of her.”

  EMT Nathan Everett lightly touched Savich’s shoulder. “You all right, sir? Yes, okay, I see now it’s her blood. You need to let us take care of her now.”

  Savich raised his face to a man he’d never seen before in his life. “She’s going to be all right.”

  “Yes, sir, yes, she will,” Nathan said, and turned to direct two other EMTs to bring a gurney.

  Eve pulled Savich to his feet. He watched them lift Sherlock onto the gurney. She looked nearly lifeless. No, she would live, she had to. “I got the boys’ names and addresses.”

  Savich forced himself to focus on Eve’s face. “Are you okay, Eve? And Harry and Griffin?”

  “Yes, we were just rattled.”

  “Have Harry and Griffin gone after Xu?” He looked at her face, really registered it for the first time. “You look like you’ve been in a war.”

  She nodded. “All three of us do. The fire and smoke was from an incendiary device, but we made it through. Xu even had a bomb rigged in the room. Luckily, we’d gotten out before he blew it.”

  The crowd melted away from Sherlock’s gurney as they rolled her to the ambulance. Savich walked quickly after her. He said over his shoulder, “Who shot her? It sure wasn’t Xu, since I saw her cuffing him. So who was it?”

  “We’ll find him,” Eve called after him, as he climbed into the ambulance with Sherlock and they shut the door.

  It was slow going getting through the snarled traffic, the gawkers milling around, but finally the ambulance pulled onto Market Street on the way to San Francisco General.

  Savich held her hand between his, never looking away from her face.

  “I know it’s a lot of blood, sir,” Nathan said, “but head wounds are nasty like that.”

  “Yes, I know,” Savich said. “I’ve seen them before.”

  He watched the EMT check her pupils again and look at her head wound. He prepped her arm and slid a needle into a vein at her elbow. “My name is Nathan. The bleeding from her scalp has stopped. She needs this IV in case we have to give her medication. She’s getting saline now, nothing more.”

  Savich nodded. “My name’s Savich. Give me an alcohol pad and I’ll wipe the blood away.”

  Nathan Everett wanted to say No, you shouldn’t touch her, but he saw the big man with only one shirt sleeve, his black leather jacket on the floor beside him, was desperately trying to keep control. “Sure, here you go. But stay away from the wound; we don’t want it to start bleeding again.”

  He watched Savich lift up her hair and wash it with sterile dressings Nathan had soaked in saline from a plastic bottle. He was gentle, his touch light. After a half-dozen dressings, he got most of the blood cleared from her hair.

  Nathan handed him another dressing. “You need to wash your face as well, sir.”

  Savich did as he said. So much blood, he thought, as he wiped his face.

  Thank goodness, Nathan thought; the wound wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It was a deep gouge along the side of her head. But was her skull fractured? Her brain injured? Was she still bleeding inside her skull from a lacerated artery? Nathan didn’t know, but he did know the bullet had passed only a few millimeters away from exploding her head open. Nathan swallowed. The important thing now was that she wake up soon. The sooner she woke up, the better the chance she was still the person she was. He said aloud what he was hoping for. “It isn’t fatal, but she needs to wake up. Are you an FBI agent?”

  “Yes, I’m Agent Savich, Dillon Savich.”

  “You work with her? Is she an agent, too?”

  “Yes, she’s an agent. I live with her as well. She’s my wife.”

  Nathan nearly fell over backward when he said that.

  “Yo
u’re kidding.”

  Savich only shook his head. He listened to the ambulance siren blare loud and insistent as traffic pulled over in front of them. Odd, but he hadn’t heard the sirens before now. He wiped a streak of blood off her face. She was pale, nearly as white as Sean’s two percent milk. It looked obscene. It nearly broke him.

  Her eyes opened. She looked dazed, like a prizefighter who’d gone too many rounds.

  Savich leaned in close, his hand squeezing hers. “Sherlock?”

  She blinked, licked her lips. “Why are you up there, Dillon? Or why am I down here? What happened?”

  “You don’t remember? It doesn’t matter. You were shot, but you’ll be fine.”

  She looked confused, as if she hadn’t understood what he’d said. “Dillon, my head really hurts.”

  “I know, but we’re nearly to the hospital now. You had a small accident—nothing, really—only a small hit.”

  “A small hit?”

  Nathan said, “That’s right. Try to stay awake. That’s right, can you focus on my face?”

  “Her name’s Sherlock.”

  “Sherlock, what color are my eyes?”

  She didn’t say anything, simply closed her eyes again.

  Nathan saw Savich’s face go blank and said quickly, “She woke up, she was herself, and that’s an excellent sign. Six more minutes and we’ll be there. She’s not going to die, Agent Savich.”

  For the first time, Savich looked and actually registered the face of the man beside Sherlock. He was in his early forties, on the heavy side, with pockmarked skin, deep brown eyes, and a reassuring smile, but most important, as he’d spoken, Savich hadn’t seen any lurking doubt in his eyes.

  Nathan cleared his throat. “Who shot her?”

  “I don’t know,” Savich said. “I don’t know much of anything except there was a bomb in the Fairmont and she caught the man who blew it up and someone else shot her.”