The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3

by Karen Robards

  There’s no such thing as coincidence. That was something else Mason had said so often that she’d wanted to stick her fingers in her ears.

  Now she considered it gospel.

  There was no way a known criminal and affiliate of French mobsters was in this particular place at this particular time by chance.

  Adrenaline surged through her veins. Tightening her arms around Colin’s neck, she went up on tiptoe to whisper, “I take it back. I do know him. He’s a career criminal, a member of Le Milieu—” the French equivalent of the mafia “—and I don’t think him being here is a coincidence. From what I recall of him, he doesn’t have the brains to pull anything on his own, but I think he could be acting as a spotter.”

  Spotters sometimes worked a hit, keeping up surveillance on the target until the moment was right for the killer to do the deed. The upside was convenience—the hitter only had to show up and carry out the hit, which meant less exposure time, fewer potential witnesses and less chance of being made by the target prior to the hit. The downside was, spotters were potential witnesses, too. Untrustworthy ones quickly wound up sleeping with the coquilles.

  Colin didn’t so much as miss a dance step. His mouth found her ear again, but this time there was nothing sexual about it.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  “We need to take him out first so he can’t let anybody know we’re leaving.”

  Because the notification that they were leaving was probably what the hit man/woman/squad was waiting for. As she had feared, she thought it probable that whoever wanted to kill her was set up so that they could hit her as she exited the restaurant.

  “We could try just sneaking out the back door.”

  “It opens into a courtyard that exits onto the same street. I saw it when I came in,” she said. Checking for alternate ways out was something she did automatically whenever she entered a building. This one was less than ideal. Any competent hit man would be covering both exits.

  “The other back door.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Kitchen. Exits into an alley.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve eaten here before. And gone out that way.”

  That brought a number of questions to the tip of her tongue, but she filed them away for (maybe) later. She was in the grip of a driving conviction that time was of the essence here.

  She said, “Even if we go out that way, we still need to take him out before we leave. Otherwise he’ll be coming after us himself or sending someone after us.”

  “Want me to shoot him?”

  Men. Genus: Subtle-R-Not-Us.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll handle it, thanks.”

  Before Colin could respond, she broke free of him and headed directly toward Four-fingered Franz—and the server, an attractive young woman who was bringing him another beer. When the server reached his table, Bianca meant to reach it, too. Because Franz could not possibly know that she was the little girl who’d been in on the bank robbery he’d participated in sixteen years previously, he would not expect her to recognize him, and thus her heading in his direction should not make him overly suspicious. Her cover for approaching his table would be asking the other woman the way to the ladies’ room. When the server turned to point it out, she would unobtrusively chop Franz in the G-spot and render him unconscious. It would happen so fast he wouldn’t even have time to make a sound.

  When the server looked back, all she would see was a man slumped on the table or the floor (depending on how he fell) in what would likely be deemed a medical emergency.

  Chaos would ensue. Meanwhile, she and Colin would be hightailing it out through the kitchen.

  She was steps away from Franz’s table, where the server was handing over his requested beer.

  “Pardon, mademoiselle,” she began. The server looked at her inquiringly.

  A commotion at the entrance brought both their heads swinging around toward it. Bianca’s heart leaped as four masked gunmen burst through the restaurant door, pistol-whipping the screaming hostess to the floor and—Pfft! Pfft!—shooting a male sommelier who got in their way.

  The sommelier crumpled bleeding to the ground. With a jolt of escalating alarm, Bianca automatically registered the weapons as Ceska automatic rifles with suppressor cans. Verdict: not your garden-variety street thugs.

  The gunmen stormed into the main part of the restaurant.

  “Sur le plancher!” they screamed, ordering everyone onto the floor.

  17

  Bianca’s already quick-stepping heart slammed into overdrive. The server gasped and dropped her tray with a tooth-rattling clatter. Fear exploded through the restaurant. Cries of alarm arose on all sides. Plates, glasses, silverware crashed down on hard surfaces as chaos descended. Chairs screeched as they were shoved away from tables. People sprang to their feet, dived under tables or simply sat, terrified into immobility. On the dance floor, screaming couples ducked down or tried to run away. She saw Colin crouch—

  “On the floor!” the gunmen shouted in French again. One sprayed gunfire high, over the heads of the scrambling diners. Even muffled by a suppressor, the rapid-fire chatter of the automatic rifle was terrifying. Chunks of plaster and other debris rained down. People threw themselves to the floor, covered their heads, screamed. A few tried to bolt, caught bullets for their pains. They shrieked and fell, eliciting more shrieks from those who weren’t hit. Blood sprayed from convulsing bodies. The burned-toast smell of cordite from the gunfire filled the air.

  Not for the first time in her life, Bianca regretted her lack of a firearm. But the covert nature of the job, coupled with the strict French gun laws, made packing heat a nonstarter. She was armed with weapons of her own, though, and there was Colin …

  Wooden chair legs scraped noisily across the floor mere inches away as Franz jumped up from the table. He was looking at the gunmen, his expression not terrified but—expectant. Was he with them? Was he not? Didn’t matter: he was a threat.

  She took him out exactly as she had intended, with a silent chop to his meaty neck that had him dropping like a felled tree. Her purpose was to get a known enemy out of the way and clear the decks for engagement with the main enemy even if this wasn’t (as she suspected it was) ultimately directed at her. The result was to get one of those automatic rifles swinging around in her direction as a gunman appeared to catch Franz’s fall out of the corner of his eye and turned to investigate. Before his gaze could definitively fix on her she shoved the screaming-like-a-banshee server to the floor and went with her.

  “Shut up. Stay down,” she hissed in French at the server, and closed a hand around her throwing star.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  More gunfire—no suppressor there—erupted from the vicinity of the dance floor, snapping her gaze in that direction. Bullets slammed into the gunmen, who shrieked and dropped or shouted and took cover amid more ground-shaking screams all around.

  Colin. She knew it was him even before she saw him, hunkered down behind an overturned table, Glock in hand. Glancing at her, he came up firing and yelled, “Let’s go.”

  Oh, yeah. While he had them pinned down. Staying low, she darted toward him, past him, taking care to stay behind him so as not to get in his line of fire. Sprinting toward the kitchen, she leapfrogged it through the seething mass of people rolling and commando crawling and regular crawling and attempting every other means of low-level locomotion known to man as they tried to escape the main dining room. Everywhere cell phones glowed as mass calls were placed to the 112 emergency number. She would have felt guilty about abandoning so many innocents except she was almost 100 percent sure they would be safer with her gone, that the attack had been staged with the sole purpose of capturing her or taking her out and once she was no longer present the danger would vanish, along with any surviving attackers, like cockroaches in the light.

  “Go, go.” Colin fell in behind her, both of them bolting past the bar and the dozen people sheltering behi
nd it toward the swinging door to the kitchen.

  Bianca was maybe ten feet away from that heavy wood panel when it bounced open. Her heart stuttered in horror as a trio of masked gunmen rushed through it.

  “Ah,” she squeaked, jumping back and cannoning into the solid mass that was Colin, who, she saw in a lightning glance, had been covering their exit by looking behind them and had to get up to speed on this new development fast. Equally surprised, the lead gunman hesitated a vital second before leveling his weapon at her—and that was all she needed.

  “Eat this.” A punch of her thumb, a flick of her wrist, and her throwing star spun through the air to lodge in his neck. His eyes went wide with surprise. He made a strangled sound. His gun clattered to the floor. Clutching at the sharp metal plate in his neck, he fell back against his compatriots. Blood sprayed from his neck like soda from a shaken can as the three of them stumbled back into the kitchen and the door swung shut behind them.

  So, kitchen exit out.

  Bounding forward, she snatched up the fallen weapon—a Desert Eagle 50. Not her favorite semiautomatic pistol. It was heavy at around four pounds and light on capacity with a seven-bullet max. Still, it could do some damage—and what was that thing they said about beggars?

  She turned to find a shrieking horde of panicked diners stampeding toward them from the dining room.

  “Go out through the courtyard,” she screamed at them in French, pointing the way. They turned en masse. Possibly the fact that she was waving a pistol the size of a super soaker had something to do with it.

  “This way.” Colin grabbed her wrist and yanked her through another door.

  This one opened onto a switchback staircase. She could see straight up to the stained-glass skylight awash in rain some seven floors above. Since down wasn’t an option, up was the only way to go, so up she went. Fast.

  “You want to tell me again how this is better than a CIA kill team?” Bianca threw that over her shoulder at him as they pounded up the windowless stairs.

  “They’re not as good.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “We’re not dead.”

  “What’s this we thing? It’s me everybody’s trying to kill.”

  He stayed close behind her, on purpose to cover her back again, she had no doubt. The stair silo was well kept. The lighting, dim but adequate, came from brass sconces. Christmas garlands festooned the railings, paintings graced the white plaster walls and waist-high green ceramic planters complete with seasonal poinsettias occupied pride of place on each postage stamp–sized landing beside dark oak doors that provided access to the various floors. The halls all contained apartments, she was sure, as the typical arrangement in Paris was for living accommodations to be located in the floors above ground-level restaurants and shops.

  “You’ve got to get over thinking everything is about you. Although, to be fair, this probably is.” His voice was faintly breathless.

  “Ya think?”

  “So who are they?”

  “How should I know? You’re the one with all the spook friends.”

  “These guys aren’t spooks. They’re criminals.”

  “Oh, and I know all the criminals?”

  “You knew that one downstairs. Not a stretch to think they might be together.”

  “I have no idea who they are. Well, most of them. Except for that one guy.”

  From below came the unmistakable sound of a door opening, complete with a sharp blast of chaotic sound from the restaurant that was almost immediately shut off as the door closed again. Bianca stopped dead on the sixth-floor landing. Grabbing Colin’s arm as he stopped beside her, she made a silencing gesture. His lip curled as in, yeah, I figured that out.

  “They in here? Do you see them?” The questions, whispered in French, floated up the stairwell, leaving her in no doubt about who had just entered it.

  “No. Listen.”

  Okay, so the bad guys were six floors below. Bianca deliberately slowed her too-rapid breathing, her pounding pulse, and centered herself for what she suspected was the coming battle. It was all she could do to resist the urge to look over the rail.

  Colin stepped away from her—she was once again impressed with how silently he could move—and tried the door to the hallway.

  “Locked,” he mouthed.

  It was her turn to curl her lip at him. No duh.

  Cre-e-eak. Cre-e-eak. Cre-e-eak.

  If their pursuers were going for quiet as a mouse, they’d reckoned without the venerable wood of the steps. What felt like an icy finger ran down her spine as Bianca realized what she was hearing: the gunmen creeping up the stairs.

  The choice was stark. They could shoot it out, thus making sure the bad guys knew where they were as well as attracting every surviving gunman in the building plus a whole host of others, including gendarmes and God knew who else with, perhaps, an unhealthy interest in Bianca St. Ives, Lynette Holbrook or any or all of her alter egos, or they could run.

  Running got her vote. She and Colin needed to get out of the stairwell. Now. Using her purse as a makeshift holster, she shoved the Desert Eagle into it so that the weapon would be easy to draw if necessary and went for her lock pick.

  Before she could get it free the sound of a door opening on the landing directly below brought her head up. It was immediately followed by an exuberant scrabbling and a burst of rapid footsteps.

  Bianca sucked in her breath as she realized what she was hearing: innocent bystanders heading unknowingly down the stairs. They were talking—a man and a woman, maybe two kids—

  She risked a look over the rail, to find a young couple, two early elementary–age girls and a pug on a leash going down the stairs, and one of the gunmen, apparently attracted by the same sounds that had drawn her attention, craning his neck to look up. He was just a few steps short of the second-floor landing. Another gunman was right behind him.

  The young family was toast. No way would the gunmen let them get that up-close-and-personal a look at them and live.

  The first gunman saw Bianca at approximately the same time she saw him. His eyes widened. She jumped back, but too late.

  “There they are!” the gunman yelled, and fired. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Bullets smacked into plaster and wood. Debris went everywhere. The couple screamed. The children wailed. The pug barked hysterically. From the ensuing sounds they all fled back up the stairs. The echo chamber that was the stairwell amplified everything.

  Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.

  More shots zinged past as the gunmen stormed upward, firing as they came. Abandoning the landing to race on up the stairs ahead of them was a bad idea: on the stairs, she and Colin made too easy a target. Colin’s weapon was in his hand and hers was available with a split-second grab, but of course now they couldn’t shoot back: the shrieking family was in the way.

  Bianca went with the next best thing. She snatched up the heavy porcelain planter, poinsettias and all, got eyes on her target and hurled the planter over the rail at them.

  It slammed into the first gunman. He fell back against the man behind him. The pair of them tumbled down the stairs as the planter rolled after them, scattering deep red Christmas blooms in its wake.

  Say it with flowers, Bianca thought with savage satisfaction. She yelled in French, “You! With the dog! Get back in your apartment and stay there!” and turned to find Colin kicking the door open.

  It must have been a mighty kick, because the door flew back on its hinges with a crash. Did he run through it? No, he looked around for her.

  Her brows snapped together.

  “Go.” Colin gestured urgently at her to precede him.

  “Get them,” one of the bad guys yelled in French.

  Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.

  The gunmen had obviously recovered. Bullets flew. One smacked into the doorjamb inches from Bianca’s head. She bolted past Colin into the hall.

  Which was about a hundred feet long and ended in a plain white wall
with a tiny window. A red sign with the word Sortie (Exit) hung above the last door on the left.

  She sprinted toward it, throwing this over her shoulder: “Good to know that chivalry’s not dead. But if you keep on hanging back behind me you soon might be.”

  He was half a step back. Keeping his body between her and danger, she knew. She wavered between finding it cute and maddening.

  “Think we could talk about this later?”

  Doors lining either side of the hallway were closed. They led to apartments, she knew, and offered no chance of escape. The twin smells of cooking and mustiness because of the rain she could see sluicing past the window assaulted her nostrils. She could hear the gunmen pounding up the stairs behind them.

  Standing their ground occurred to her—shades of Gunfight at the OK Corral!—but their pursuers were armed with automatic rifles, which meant that she and Colin were seriously outgunned. If fight or flight were the choices, flight once again seemed like the better plan.

  “Down,” Colin said as they burst through the unlocked door into what was clearly a fire exit. The tight quarters and plain narrow steps were totally unlike the ornate staircase they’d just run up. Since the only up option consisted of a single flight to the top floor that offered no more access to safety than the hall they’d just left, Bianca didn’t need the instruction: weapon in hand now, she flew down the stairs.

  “Up there! Up there!” Shouted in French, that was her first clue that more bad news, as in more gunmen—couldn’t be the ones who had been behind them—was heading their way. The second clue—Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!—was bullets flying past. Footsteps pounded up the fire stairs toward them. From the ensuing sounds Bianca concluded that there were at least three men.