He was ready to go, boots and all, and handed her a coffee in a paper cup before slinging the strap of his bag over his shoulder. “I would have found Rory without you, but this, us together—you with your mad computer skills—is much, much faster.”
She grinned. It was a hell of thing because, outside of his daydreams, he hadn’t seen her smile in twenty months. He’d forgotten how hungry he used to be to see that smile, to watch her face lighten, especially when it was directed at him.
“I told you so,” she said in a singsong voice that made his heart ache. He’d forgotten about that, too. How he used to crave hearing the flirty lilt her voice took on when she teased.
He looked away and ran a quick pat down of his pants and shirt, doing an inventory of the weapons on his person.
He opened the door. “We have to hurry. Logan’s crew is going to pick up Rory’s trail soon, if they’re not here already.”
Alicia set the coffee cup on the table by the door, then pulled a stun gun from her computer bag. Poetic justice, John assumed, since Rory had used one to neutralize Diego before shooting Alicia.
She gave the air a test zap with it, then smiled again. “Let’s end this thing with Rory once and for all.”
Speed took precedence over personal ethics this morning. Rather than try to hail a cab or jump-start a stolen car, John sprinted to the closest idling car at the nearest intersection, flung the door open and ordered the middle-aged male driver out at gunpoint.
He hated pulling stunts like that, scaring innocent people and stealing their vehicles. The poor guy was probably on his way to work and John was leaving him stranded in the road with a hurricane bearing down on the island. It was a jerky move, for sure, but a worse move would be allowing a murderer to stay free for one second longer than necessary. For all he or Alicia knew, Rory had already committed more murders or was planning to.
He shoved a stack of cash at the terrified man, then dropped into the driver’s seat as Alicia slid in on the passenger’s side. Rather than wait for the light to change, he flipped a U-turn and sped off along the waterway.
When they were close enough that they could make out the cherubs adorning the church spires rising above the surrounding buildings, the rain turned into a downpour with wind gusts that pushed against the car and threatened to dislodge awnings on the buildings and the palm trees.
They saw more than one person with bags of groceries, braving the storm for last-minute supplies as merchants, drenched to the bone, hustled to cover windows with wooden boards. People were scrambling to batten down their belongings and get off the street, covering themselves against the worst of the rain and wind with colorful tarps, made even more vibrant by the churning gray sea licking up against the concrete wall separating the sea from the pedestrian byway lining the harbor.
John drove by the church at a crawl, looking for anything that resembled an ATM. Alicia spotted it first, across a side street from the church and tucked inside a glass enclosure attached to the outside of a bank.
They didn’t see Rory on any of the surrounding sidewalks or streets, but shielding his identity wouldn’t be hard in the storm. All he’d need was one of those tarps like the locals used as umbrellas.
John parked a block away on another side street up a hill from the frontage road and took the keys with him. They hurried along on foot in the direction of the church.
“We need height,” Alicia called through the noise of the storm, pointing to a set of stairs leading to a second-floor restaurant’s patio that overlooked the harbor. The restaurant was closed and boarded up, with not a single chair or table on the patio and the awning rolled up tight and strapped down.
The patio sat at an intersection, with great views in all directions along the flat road skirting the harbor. John debated whether or not binoculars would be effective, given the rain, and decided against it. First he needed to figure out which direction to look.
Where would Rory go after getting money? To get a fake passport, to pay for a hotel room? He scanned the businesses, most of which were closed and locked. For all they knew, he’d stolen a car and was long gone, but John’s instincts told him Rory was still close by. Then he saw a market a block past the church that was still open, one of those general stores that looked as if it had a little of everything. It looked crowded inside with citizens and tourists making last-minute purchases. A man turned the corner toward the market, hunched under a blue tarp and resembling Rory’s build and height.
“I think I got him. The blue tarp at nine o’clock.”
She ran to the edge of the patio and squinted in that direction. “I think you’re right, but I can’t tell for sure.”
There was no one on the sidewalk in front or behind the suspect, so if John could get his sniper rifle set up in time, he’d have a viable shot—if the man turned so John and Alicia could see his face and confirm it was Rory.
John dropped his bag and pulled out his Remington and a 7mm magnum cartridge. He set it against the patio rail and loaded the ammo, but it was all for naught. The man kept the tarp pulled tightly over his downturned head until he was in the store, out of sight.
“We’ve got to go on foot. This is it, John. I can feel it.”
John could, too. He cleared the unspent ammo, shoved both into his bag, then followed Alicia back down the stairs.
“I’ll cover the back door. You cover the front,” she said.
It was a good idea in theory, but John had the feeling that if Rory ran out the back door, Alicia would kill him on the spot rather than honor their agreement. It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take.
“Let’s stick together.”
At the base of the stairs, she turned and stopped him with a hand to his chest. “The only way that makes sense is if you don’t trust me.”
They didn’t have time for this. “Okay. I don’t trust you.”
She looked as if she wanted to either argue about it or slap him, John couldn’t decide, but she stopped herself. “Fine. Let’s see what we can see through the store’s window, then go from there.”
John blinked water out of his eyes as he noticed a man leaning against a wall a few stores down from the store Rory had entered. It was the man on Logan’s crew who’d sat in the passenger seat of the shuttle van, looking casual and unaffected by the fact that it was raining cats and dogs, with one hand on a closed long red umbrella and the other in his pocket, probably gripping a gun.
John and Alicia crouched on the stairs, scanning the nearby buildings for the rest of the ICE unit. They couldn’t be far away. After all, Logan’s rule was to always have backup.
“How did they find us so fast?” Alicia whispered.
The woman who’d been driving the van was the next John noticed. She stood under an eave of the church, her eyes glued to the alley behind the row of buildings that housed the market.
Knowing what he did about Logan’s crew’s objectives, they were staking out the store with one sole purpose: to trap Alicia by using Rory as bait. Which meant there was at least one operative at each possible exit point for the store—the woman on this end of the alley, someone on the other side and probably a stationary sniper. At least, that’s how John would’ve played it if he’d been a crew leader.
“If the man under the tarp is Rory, then there’s no easy way for us to get to him before Logan’s crew does,” Alicia said.
“They’re not here for Rory.”
Her eyes brightened with understanding. “We can’t just leave. We can’t let Rory slip away.”
John pulled his handgun. “Then let’s see how we can add a little confusion into their plan.”
They sneaked up behind the female operative, with John electing himself as the bait. He walked right up to her, gun ready, waving. As soon as she set her hand on her own gun, Alicia stepped from the shadows with her stun
gun and zapped the woman good.
She crumpled to the ground. John grabbed her firearm and stuffed it in his pocket while Alicia bound her wrists and ankles, then he and Alicia jogged across the street and flattened against the wall around the side of the alley. Alicia kept a lookout on the street side, in case Rory or one of Logan’s operatives appeared. John peered around the corner of the alley, searching for the stationary sniper.
John and the man saw each other at the same time. He recognized the man as the operative who had been sitting in the very back of the shuttle van. Today he was standing in an open floor-to-ceiling window in the second story of a building across the alley.
He moved his aim from the rear door of the market to John’s head, just as John aimed at his. “One hostile. I’ve got him, Phoenix. You keep your eye on that front market door for Rory or Logan.”
He was perfectly happy with the sniper in the alley not realizing Alicia was present for as long as they could pull that off.
“Set your gun on the floor, then get your hands up where I can see them,” John bellowed. He had zero expectation that the man would comply, but it was worth a try.
“You’re in no position to be making demands against Damian.” It was Logan, walking out of a door into the alley below his sniper—named Damian, apparently—a handgun aimed at John. “Where’s Alicia?”
What did he expect John to say to that asinine question? “Behind you, moron.”
Logan smiled indulgently. “You’re outmanned two to one, here, John. It’s time to set your gun down. If you cooperate with us about finding Alicia, I can promise you lenience when I take you into custody.”
“What a tempting offer, but I think I’ll pass.” He smiled at Damian. “I’m going to shoot you first, just so you know.”
Logan laughed. “Even if you got that shot off at Damian before he fired on you, do you really think you can make a shot that tough? You’ve been working on your tan at the beach for too long. The sun’s warped your judgment.”
Boom. There it was. The sweet spot—John’s comfort zone of being underestimated by his opponent. He stepped into full view and shrugged. “You have a point there. Damian and I are a hundred meters apart at a seventy-degree angle with high wind conditions and rain. That’d be a tough shot for any man.”
Alicia cleared her throat.
“Or woman,” he added. “But I must say, I’m glad you noticed my tan. I think it complements the blue in my eyes, don’t you?” He winked at Damian for emphasis.
At the exact second the man’s focus shifted to John’s eyes, John squeezed the trigger, aiming at Damian’s knee. He hit his mark. Damian hit the deck, shooting. Shots rang out from Logan’s gun, too, but John was already ducking back around the corner, out of range.
Logan fired again, the bullet ricocheting off the cinderblock near the corner where John stood. Bits of cinderblock and white paint crumbled onto the rain-soaked cobblestones. John pulled his rifle around from his back and started spraying bullets in Logan’s direction. After several shots, he chanced a look. Neither Logan nor Damian were visible.
“What’s happening on your side, Phoenix?
“Everyone’s fleeing the market. They must have heard the shots, but I haven’t seen Rory.”
John looked in the alley. Still no Logan. Movement on the roof caught his eye. Bingo.
“He’s on the roof. Rory. Running scared.”
Alicia got close to him and followed his line of sight to the roof. Rory was running in the opposite direction along the flat roof of the building. Bad plan, Rory. But then again, between John and Alicia and Logan’s crew, they’d pretty much had all the street level exits blocked, so it was hard to blame him for getting creative.
Once, when John and Alicia’s black ops crew was in Athens, Greece, they’d engaged in a rooftop chase, except that they were the team of five and the scumbag art thieves they were chasing down were the party of two. The thieves had stolen a critical artifact from a museum that had been on loan from Egypt and would’ve caused an international incident if it couldn’t have been recovered on the down low, but there they were chasing them over rooftops and jumping buildings to keep up.
“You know what this has me thinking about?” he asked.
She smiled. “Athens.”
“Exactly.”
They tapped the sides of their guns together. “Let’s roll.”
* * *
After a boost from John, Alicia scaled the fire escape ladder first. Wet and caked with dirt, it was tough going, but she managed fine.
John waited for her to start on the second ladder before starting the first in case it couldn’t hold their combined weight.
In minutes flat, they were two stories aboveground on the building’s flat roof deck. The rain was hitting the deck so hard that it gave the illusion it was raining upside down. Alicia wasn’t entirely convinced that a particularly strong gust of wind wouldn’t blow them clean off the roof. Judging by the angry sea to their right and the swirl of black clouds above them, Hurricane Hannah’s arrival was imminent.
Rory was four buildings in front of them, but in another seven or eight buildings, he’d reach a dead end where the block stopped at the cross street.
With Alicia in the lead, they took off in a sprint as fast as the uneven roof and rain-slicked patches of tar or tile allowed. From the looks of it, Logan and his team had flanked the buildings, with Logan running along the street and the man from the passenger’s seat of the van running through the alley, keeping pace with John and Alicia and chancing an occasional shot. Whether they were aiming at her, John or Rory was unclear, but if Logan’s history held true, he was after her, and her alone. To be on the safe side, she kept one eye on Rory and the roof and the other on Logan.
Sure enough, while she watched, Logan ground to a stop and turned his gun in her direction.
She was in the process of hitting the deck when John’s arm pushed her down and she hit the roof hard. Gritty water splashed in her eyes and mouth. John dropped on top of her as though shielding her with his body as he unloaded his firearm over the edge of the roof, returning Logan’s shots.
As soon as the gunfire stopped, she shoved him off, spit out the grit and wiped her eyes with the hem of the T-shirt. “Thanks for that, but I know how to duck and cover all by myself.”
“It was a gut reaction. Sorry.”
Logan must have ducked out of range of John’s shots because she didn’t see him and so took off running toward Rory again. John ran by her side, holding her pace though he could probably go much faster if he wanted to. She wasn’t sure why it irked her that he didn’t.
“You didn’t have those kinds of gut reactions when we were teammates,” she said.
“True, but in all fairness, this is the first time I’ve been on a mission where you’re the asset. It’s throwing me off.”
She smacked his arm as hard as she could. “I am not the asset. I’m your business partner.”
“Whatever you say.”
As a woman who’d worked in a world of men since a week after her high school graduation, Alicia knew that no man ever said “whatever you say” and meant it. The throwaway line was passive-aggressive man code for “You’re delusional and can’t be reasoned with so I’m not going to try.”
They scaled a short chain-link fence separating a roof maintenance area from the tiled facade on the other side. Alicia made sure she hit the ground on the other side at the same time John did.
“You’re not in this to protect me,” she said. “We’re in this together to catch Rory. I can take care of myself. And I’m just as good an operative as you are.”
He looked taken aback. “I know that. Like I said, I’ve never had an asset before who was—”
“For the last time, I’m not the asset.”
“Okay.”
Ahead of them, Rory struggled to maintain his balance, slipping and grabbing at ledges. Alicia slowed as he did in approach to what looked like a pretty substantial gap to the last building in the line. She was so intent on watching him back up and take a running leap across the gap that she didn’t see the change in the slope they were traversing. Her feet flew out from under her and she dropped her gun, intent on breaking her fall with her hands.
John caught her midfall, wrapping his arms around her middle until her momentum stopped. Then he set her back on her feet and handed over her gun.
“Don’t say it,” she said.
A light shone in his eyes. Tender and knowing, taking the fight right out of her. He nodded.
They both turned their attention to Rory, who had reached the dead end and had ducked behind an air-conditioning unit in the center of the building that looked to be a boutique hotel. The only wild card Alicia could see in the equation was what Logan’s crew would do now.
She got low and peered over the edge into the alley. No Logan. John was performing the same check on the street side.
“Anything?” she called.
“Nobody here.”
“Interesting.”
They both took stock of the nearest roof access points. There were three, which wasn’t unmanageable. This was the scenario they’d ended up using in Athens against those artifact thieves, because every rooftop chase ended in a dead end, which forced the criminal into a pressure situation that caused them to make stupid mistakes.
But Rory was no ordinary criminal. Neither were the thieves in Athens, though, and Rory and John had surrounded them at gunpoint while Diego and Alicia had extracted full confessions, then took them into custody and recovered the artifacts without a single shot fired. She loved days like that.
John knelt near the edge of the building facing Rory and took his sniper rifle from his bag. Alicia got close to him, but instead of watching Rory, she had her eyes on the roof access points.
“You’re hurt,” John called to Rory. “There’s a hurricane coming and ICE has a new black ops team on your tail. You need to surrender to me and Alicia before this gets any more out of hand.”
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