Ian glanced up, calculating the distance. There were false balconies over the windows on the second floor, curved, decorative ironwork that were as much of a barrier as ornamentation. “Give me five,” he said abruptly.
As he stood up to sprint toward the end of the house where Joshua had spotted Anna, though, he threw a last glance inside the room where he stood. Cavendish was pushing at what looked like a section of the bookcases that lined the wall at that end of the room. He had something in his hand, but Ian didn’t wait to see what it was. The guards had taken roughly two minutes to reappear once they rounded the corner. Unless they were moving faster ….
He took a running jump toward the ornamental railing around the last window on the east side of the house, hoping to hell it was well anchored into the wall. It would’ve been a much easier leap if he could’ve run straight on. Running parallel to the wall of the house, he counted himself lucky to have caught a hold at all. Gritting his teeth, he pulled himself up by one arm and caught the top edge to hoist himself upward just as the guards rounded the building again.
It was too much to hope they wouldn’t see him, he supposed. Hearing a half uttered expletive below him, he hauled himself upward, ducked his head and used his back to take out the window.
Gunfire accompanied the sound of breaking glass. Anna, he discovered, was halfway between the bed and the window, her eyes rounded, her mouth forming an ‘O’ of surprise.
“Ian!” Anna gasped, rushing toward him.
Ian scrambled toward her at a half crouch, catching her around the waist and carrying her to the floor. Caleb burst into the room through the door just as they hit the floor. Within seconds the sound of gunfire escalated to a deafening roar around them.
Bullets shattered the glass of the other windows and plowed into the walls, the molding and the ceiling.
Caleb flicked a quick look at the two of them as he slammed the door and then glanced around the room. “This lock isn’t going to hold them long!” he bellowed at Ian.
“Stay down!” Ian growled at Anna as he lurched up to a half crouch and headed toward the piece of furniture closest to the door. The Armoire shattered as he shoved it over, but neither man waited to see if the pile of broken pieces would be enough of a barricade.
“Coming in!” Simon bellowed, slamming against the door, flying through the narrow opening he’d made in a diver’s arch, and rolling to a stop at the foot of the bed.
Ian kicked the door shut behind him and shoved a heavy dresser in front of it.
Anna, after looking around a little frantically for a safe place to hide, scurried under the bed just about the time Simon snatched the mattress off, pitched it toward the door and reached back for the support panel beneath it.
He froze for a split second when he lifted it and saw Anna staring back at him from beneath the bed. “Get in the bathroom and into the tub!” he bellowed when he’d glanced around for a place for her.
Rolling onto her stomach, Anna crawled out from under the now empty bed frame and raced for the bathroom.
“Get down!” Caleb bellowed at her just about the time she stubbed her toe on the threshold between the bath and the bedroom and sprawled out on the tile. Fortunately, the tub stopped her. When she’d recovered enough to figure out she was lying against the tub, she crawled over the side and flattened herself the best she could against the bottom. Bullets seemed to be flying in every direction, however. She’d barely settled when a bullet ricocheted through the room and shattered the edge of the tub near her feet.
Screaming instinctively, she jerked her feet up closer to her body and then rolled to her side when she saw that position put her knees higher than the rim of the tub. It didn’t seem to be working all that well as a shield, but it was certainly better than nothing!
For a while the barrage of gunfire seemed to escalate and then, so subtly she didn’t notice at first, it began to subside.
“You alright in there, Anna?” Caleb called out.
“Yes,” she said weakly. “What are we going to do now?”
Simon appeared in the doorway, staring down at her. “Stay put. Our men will have everything under control shortly.”
She was reassured, briefly. Even as she lay listening to the sporadic gunfire as men died or fled the scene, listening to Simon and the others as they discussed the possibility of finding evidence against Cavendish, an unknown uneasiness began to churn in her stomach.
“He’s a got a vault, or maybe just a secret room off his office on the first floor. I didn’t see enough to tell which, but that might be the best place to start,” Ian said.
Anna rolled out of the tub as the uneasiness congealed into a terrifying conclusion. “Simon, wait!” she gasped, crawling frantically toward the door.
She discovered when she reached the bedroom that he and the other men were shoving their makeshift barricade away from the door. “Wait! Wait!” she gasped, pushing herself to her feet and rushing the door when she saw Simon ease the door open and take a quick look outside. “He blew up my house, Simon! He had a bomb in it!”
Simon sent her an impatient look. “I know. We were there.”
“But …he blew it up to make sure there was no evidence, Simon!”
All three men stared at her blankly for a moment as that settled in their minds.
“Get her out of here! Now! ” Simon barked at the others. “I’m going to see if I can grab anything useful!”
The relief that had flickered through her vanished. She lunged at Simon and grabbed him. “Come with us! Please! You can come back!” she begged him.
He studied her for a long moment, his expression stony, and then abruptly jerked her upward and covered her mouth with his. As long as she’d hoped desperately that he would kiss her, she was too anguished and in too much shock to really register anything until he’d let her go. The heat and pleasure of his touch swept over her then in a backlash that rocked her to her core and abandoned her just as swiftly. “I’m sorry, Anna,” he whispered harshly when he put her away from him.
Someone grabbed her arm, hauling her toward the window Ian had come in through. “Simon! Please!” she called after him.
“I’ll go after him,” Caleb growled, surging toward the door.
“Don’t!” Anna covered her mouth with her hand as Ian swept her up into his arms, but she saw it was too late. Caleb had darted down the hall behind Simon.
“Hold on, baby,” Ian said grimly, “this is going to be a jolt.”
Anna twined her arms around his neck instinctively as she felt him leap. Having braced herself to fall, the sensation of rising up instead sent a disorienting jolt through her. She discovered Ian had leapt up onto the ornamental railing just as he leapt off of it.
It was amazing enough that he landed solidly on two feet, but he almost instantly launched himself forward at a run. “Joshua!”
“Here!”
“Take her and get her over the wall! Anna thinks there might be explosives in the house!”
He had to pry her loose. She knew the moment he spoke that he was heading back inside.
“Any sign of Cavendish?”
“Not yet!”
Anna made a grab for Ian again the minute he peeled her loose.
“Go with Joshua!” he said harshly.
Before she could think of anything to say, Joshua hauled her across one shoulder and took off at a run. The jolting of his shoulder against her belly knocked the breath from her, but that was nothing beside the jolt she got when he sprang upward, paused briefly on the top of the wall surrounding the compound and then leapt down. Pain seared through her. She didn’t have time to recover either. He hit the dirt running.
She thought she was going to pass out, but she never quite achieved blackout.
They hadn’t reached the end of the wall before a horrendous explosion erupted so close it deafened Anna. She wasn’t certain if Joshua threw
her to the ground or if the concussion of the blast knocked him off his feet, but he rolled on top of her, shielding her face with his hands and his own head.
Debris rained down around them. Between the pain and her deafness from the explosion, Anna wasn’t even aware of it until a burning board landed across Joshua’s back. He rolled with her. When he stopped, she was beneath him again, still deaf, but she could smell burned hair and fabric even above the other smells of burning things.
Despair filled her. She felt it all the way to her soul just before she lost consciousness.
* * * *
Simon didn’t have to search for the hidden door. It was standing ajar when he reached the office. Rushing toward it, he discovered the ‘room’ was no more than a couple of feet deep, no more than a small closet. Shelves lined the walls, though, and at the back was a steel door.
Scanning the shelves swiftly, he grabbed up a case of the sort used to store data chips and shoved it into his pocket. When he saw nothing else beyond stacks of money in a dozen different denominations, he tried the door. Without surprise, he found that it was locked. Stepping back, he flicked a glance over it, saw that the hinges weren’t visible, which meant it opened in to whatever was on the other side, and began kicking at the edge of the door near the handle.
Caleb arrived just as he fell back to catch his breath and try again. Spying the door, he pushed Simon aside and began battering at it with his shoulder. Simon was having another go at it when Ian arrived.
“Is there enough room for three?”
“We can give it a try,” Simon responded after glancing at the door speculatively.
Lining up belly to back, the three of them launched themselves from the door of the office in a concerted lunge. The door, already weakened from the battering Simon and Caleb had done, flew open the moment the three of them slammed into it.
There wasn’t a hall or a room on the other side. All three of them flew into a well of pitch. The explosion disintegrated the house above them a split second before they hit the bottom, illuminating the walls of the cave and the tunnel that led away from it.
As stunned as he was when he hit the dirt, Simon knew everything that had gone up would be coming down any second. He scrambled to his feet dazedly. “Move!”
Either the explosion had cracked the rock the tunnel was carved from or the debris slamming into the ground above them shook loose rocks from the wall and ceiling.
The three of them launched themselves in a staggering run along the tunnel, covering their heads with their hands in an effort to ward off the rocks raining down on them.
They found the underground channel by falling into it in the darkness.
Splitting up, the three of them searched the walls of the channel until Caleb found the opening they were looking for. Simon knew after five minutes that, without the right gear, no human could’ve swum the distance, and there hadn’t been gear in the tunnel or a boat in the water.
The realization galvanized him and he pushed himself to swim faster. Even so, he heard the distant sound of a boat motor before they emerged from the channel. Two men, he saw, were drifting toward the sea in a boat. One of them working feverishly to get the motor started.
Simon reached the boat just as the man finally succeeded and the motor roared to life. Shooting out of the water, he caught the man as he began to straighten and turn away, using his weight to pull him with him as he dropped toward the water again. A bullet plowed through the man he was holding and dug into his arm. By the time Simon had managed to resurface with the dead weight of the man he’d jerked overboard, Caleb and Ian had wrestled Miles Cavendish into submission.
* * * *
Anna swam upwards through a painful fog toward awareness as a voice penetrated her subconscious.
“What happened?”
“I think I cracked one of her ribs when I jumped from the wall with her.”
She recognized Joshua’s voice, though it sounded strangely rough and shaky.
Someone lifted one of her eyelids. When she managed to focus, she discovered it was Simon staring down at her. “Simon!” she murmured in pleased surprise, swamped with relief to discover he’d made it out alive. As soon as he let go of her eyelid, she drifted down into the dark abyss again.
The next time she roused it was to discover she was being strapped to something.
Before she could open her eyes, she felt herself tilted upward. She managed to lift her eyelids just enough to get a dizzying glimpse of her surroundings and closed them again, struggling with dizziness and nausea as she listened to the voices around her.
To her vast relief, she picked out Simon’s voice, and then Caleb’s and Ian’s.
She’d been more than half convinced she’d dreamed that they were with her. “Wer ‘m?”
she murmured drunkenly.
“She’s come around.”
She didn’t recognize that voice and peered from beneath her eyelids. The bright lights above her said ‘hospital’. She closed her eyes to shield them from the stabbing light, and found herself drifting, swirling.
“Anna! Open your eyes!”
She opened them, but discovered she was still dizzy.
“How many fingers do you see?”
It seemed like a stupid question, but she struggled to focus. “Two.”
“What day is it?”
She frowned, trying to think. “Donno.”
“Did you give her anything?”
“Something for pain. She cracked a rib.”
“Cracked her head, too,” the stranger said. “We need to do a scan. You’ll have to wait outside. You might as well go get someone to look at that burn and those cuts.”
“Where?” she managed to ask after a few minutes.
“New Atlanta. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of you.”
“Simon?”
“He’s in a treatment room.”
“Caleb?”
“Him, too—and Ian and about a dozen others.”
“Ok?”
“Ok what?” the stranger asked absently.
“Be alright?”
He understood that time. “I’ll check their status and let you know something if you’ll be good for me and stop talking while we do a scan.”
She subsided, but it was more because of the wave of nausea that rushed over her when she felt the gurney she was on turn suddenly. She managed to pitch herself toward the side to throw up.
She felt like crying when she lay down again because she’d thrown up right in front of strangers! And she thought she might throw up again.
“Don’t worry about it,” the man said, commiserating as if he’d read her mind.
“You have a mild concussion. The nausea will pass.”
It didn’t seem to be passing very quickly. She couldn’t decide what hurt worse, her head or her ribs, but it was hard to breathe and throwing up hadn’t helped that at all!
She had to focus just to catch little snatches of breath. Each time she tried to gulp just a little more, pain engulfed her.
After a while, she decided that she must be passing in and out of consciousness although she didn’t seem to be completely awake or completely unconscious at any time.
Her awareness of her surroundings was fractured, though, so it was either that or memory lapses. One moment she was aware of a scanner being moved above her, the next she felt the gurney she was lying on moving and opened her eyes to see lights flashing by overhead.
She was so grateful when the movement finally stopped she felt like crying, and then did because they moved her from the gurney to a bed and she threw up again. And then she couldn’t breathe at all for several moments because she’d stopped her head up and her lungs felt like they were in a vice. Panic at not being able to really catch her breath threatened to engulf her. She clutched at the bedding a little frantically, trying to focus on getting enough ai
r.
“I’m going to give you something for the pain and to calm you. Try not to cry, sweety. Alright? I know you’re upset, but it’ll only make it harder to breathe. I don’t want you worrying about your men anymore either, doctor’s orders. They’re all alright.
I give you my word. We’re going to keep them here a couple of nights to make sure their wounds are healing like they should, but they’re in damned good shape all things considered.”
Her men? “Simon?”
“Yes, he’s going to be alright. And, before you ask, Ian and Caleb, too. Joshua’s in better shape than the others. Cuts and burns from having pieces of burning debris landing on him while he was trying to shield you, but nothing too serious. Like I said, they’re all just fine. Now you can concentrate on getting better so they can take you home.”
Anna was still trying to make sense of all that when the drug kicked in. She didn’t think it had kept her out long, though. She felt just as bad or maybe worse when someone woke her up. “You doing ok?”
She frowned. She’d been doing a hell of a lot better before she was woken up.
She informed the stranger of that and he chuckled. She fell asleep again as soon as he quit annoying her, but he was back again, it seemed, before she’d slept any time at all.
And so it went, on and on, until she felt like she was in hell where the demons stood over her, just waiting for her to doze off so they could wake her up again. She’d lost all track of time. Finally, though, she woke up at the sound of yet another intrusion and realized she didn’t feel nauseated. She even felt vaguely rested, or at least not exhausted to the point that she felt drugged and disoriented.
Her ribs still hurt. The moment she tried to drag in a deep breath to yawn it felt like she’d been stabbed.
“How are you feeling?”
Annoyance flickered through her a split second before recognition of his voice dawned. She opened her eyes to see if she was right and smiled faintly at Joshua’s worried face. “My hero,” she murmured, discovering her voice sounded rusty with disuse.
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