The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3

by Karen Robards

  “Shit! Up!” was Colin’s take on the situation. They both snapped off shots meant to slow the pursuit. Having already reversed course, eschewing the door they’d just come through because she was as sure as it was possible to be that the other gunmen were at that moment in the hall racing toward it, Bianca swarmed up the single flight of stairs that ended in a door at the top. There was no other choice than to go through it: the staircase ended there.

  She prayed it wasn’t locked.

  It wasn’t. She burst through it into a deluge of cold, pouring rain.

  18

  Dashing out onto what proved to be a flat roof, Bianca was instantly soaked to the skin. A shocked glance around as night swallowed her up and the storm raged around her confirmed the only possible explanation—the seventh floor was smaller than the rest, sitting atop the building like the uppermost layer on a tiered wedding cake. Barreling through the door behind her, Colin checked and said “Jesus” as the pouring rain surprised him, too.

  Then they both ran full tilt through it, heads ducked against the onslaught, splashing through puddles, sheltering their weapons as best they could. The roar of the rain muffled the sound of multiple sirens that she imagined must belong to police cars converging on Le Chien Rouge: one more reason to run like hell.

  Lightning flashed. Its bright blaze cracking across the sky was terrifyingly close—how many possible ways could she die tonight, anyway?—but it was enough to show Bianca where the roof ended. The seven-story-deep chasm of darkness between the roof they were on and the next, and the approximately four-foot-wide gap between the buildings, was only a short distance away. She hesitated, slowed—

  Behind them, shouts prompted her to cast a hunted glance back. An indistinguishable knot of people burst out onto the roof, backlit by the light from the stairwell so that all she could see was a featureless mass. They separated, cursing as the rain beat into them. She saw that the two groups that had been chasing them had clearly met up and combined, so that now five—count ’em—yes, five thugs armed with automatic weapons were after them.

  She and Colin had a choice: turn and fight, or leap.

  Colin grabbed her hand: yay for wordless communication. They sprinted for the edge of the roof, jumped across the chasm as one, then raced away from the edge.

  Given the darkness and the rain, it was, Bianca thought, always possible that their pursuers hadn’t seen—

  Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.

  Bullets whined past, pinging into a metal ventilation pipe, causing a satellite dish to keel over with a crash, smacking into the concrete rooftop and sending chips flying. They dodged antennae and leaped wires, then as lightning flashed again dived behind a tall brick chimney for cover. The chimney thankfully had a metal cap with an overhang that provided a small slice of shelter from the rain.

  They turned as one to snap off return fire around their respective edges of the chimney.

  The answering volley slammed into the chimney, the rooftop and everything else nearby. Pieces of concrete flew like shrapnel. Making herself as small a target as possible, Bianca took advantage of another lightning flash to do a hasty recon of their surroundings.

  Ahead of them, the edge of the roof was maybe thirty feet away. The problem was, the yawning black chasm between the roof they were on and the next was the width of an alley—about twenty feet.

  Bianca’s stomach sank. Sopping wet, teeth clenched to keep them from chattering, back pressed flat against the cold brick, she looked at Colin, who was in similar shape beside her.

  “Looks like no more roof hopping.” He swiped a hand across his face to clear the streaming water from it. She’d done the same thing moments earlier.

  “No,” she agreed. Not even for her.

  “How many rounds?” His words were nearly drowned out by a clap of thunder.

  “Three.” Her tone was grim because what he’d asked was, how many bullets did she have left? She knew the answer, because she’d kept careful count. Being caught out with nothing in the chamber at a crucial moment was a good way to wind up dead. “You?”

  “Five.”

  They had eight bullets remaining between them. Given their five pursuers, they could afford to miss or fail to kill or incapacitate with three of their shots. Ordinarily, she would judge that to be doable, but given the rain and the darkness and the fact that their pursuers were loaded for bear with automatic weapons—

  Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.

  —and apparently plenty of ammunition, their chances of coming out on top of this particular firefight weren’t great. Granted, the ferocity of the downpour was throwing off their pursuers’ accuracy to a certain degree, but then, that worked both ways.

  “So we’ve got a problem,” he said as bullets raked the chimney and everything else around. The trajectory of the bullets told the tale: the bad guys were slowly advancing on their position. By mutual if unspoken agreement, she and Colin held their fire. At this point, their remaining bullets were too precious to waste. “Short of pulling a Butch Cassidy and the Ninja Kid–style suicide stand, it’s looking like our options are try to pick them off one by one or do our best to hold out until the police get here.”

  The situation was too dire for her to object to him casting her as the Ninja Kid (ha ha, and it went without saying that he considered himself Butch Cassidy) or to find any humor in his lame attempt at it.

  “No,” she said. “To both.”

  “You got a better plan, I’d love to hear it.”

  “Do you trust me?” she asked.

  His head turned. He gave her a considering look.

  “Oh my God,” she burst out when he didn’t immediately answer. “I don’t mean in some kind of cosmic sense, or as in let me hold your priceless treasure for you because I’m the most honest person you ever met in your life. I mean right here, right now. Enough to jump off this building with me.”

  “You mean, do I trust you with my life?” There was a pause of maybe half a beat before he finished up on a softer note with, “Yeah, I do.”

  Did her heart give a girlish flutter? Maybe. File it under reactions to be sorted out later.

  She was already reaching up under her skirt for the escape cord dispenser that was part of her garter belt. His eyes followed her every move. She freed it, held it up. “I’m going to wrap the cord in this thing around the chimney, we’re both going to grab hold of the handle, and we’re going to run to the edge of the building and jump.”

  He’d seen her use it to escape—from him—before. The cord’s existence was not a surprise.

  “How much weight will it hold?”

  Bianca smiled. “At a minimum, Doc,” she said. “Field tested and guaranteed.”

  “Good enough.”

  Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.

  Without the deterrence of answering gunfire, the gunmen advanced with impunity now. She and Colin exchanged looks. He leaned out, slamming them with a spray of cover fire while she wrapped the cord around the chimney and secured it. The last step, detaching the satin garter strap that was the handle and clipping it to the cord, was the work of a second.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Taking her weapon, he snapped off the last of her bullets at their pursuers to slow them down, then jammed her now-empty weapon in his waistband alongside his. They were out of ammo. There was no turning back. With a single look at each other, they grabbed the satin loop, ran for the edge of the roof and leaped into space.

  They hurtled down the first three stories in a whoosh and then the immediate burst of their descent slowed, became erratic. The dispenser seemed to sputter, releasing only a few yards of cord at a time.

  Then it—they—stopped altogether.

  “Defective equipment?” Colin asked, faultlessly polite. With both of them holding on by their right hands, they were practically nose to nose.

  “This never happens.”

  Swinging some four stories above the cobblestoned alley, hand cramping, arm aching,
barraged by rain, bumping into Colin and the smooth, featureless stone of the building behind them with every gust of wind, Bianca tried to troubleshoot.

  The problem with troubleshooting this particular problem was, trouble was right behind them, ready to shoot back.

  Shouts from the lip of the roof jerked her gaze up. The gunmen peered over the edge—

  Her heart leaped. Out of bullets, bereft of her throwing star, in a ridiculously exposed position, they were defenseless if their pursuers started firing, which, as soon as they worked out the logistics—the width of the eave made it impossible to simply point and shoot straight down from where they stood—they would do.

  Then—talk about your dangling ducks.

  “I’d suggest trying to kick our way through a window, but there aren’t any,” Colin said.

  A police car, sirens wailing, lights flashing, sped past the entrance to the alley. Another followed. And a third.

  The gunmen popped back out of sight.

  It was a reprieve of seconds, she knew.

  “It has to be the uneven distribution of weight!” The solution hit Bianca’s fear-galvanized mind in a brilliant flash of insight. “Whatever you do, don’t let go!”

  Wrapping an arm around his neck, she turned loose of the handle—and down they went. She hung from his broad shoulders like a dress on a hanger. He clamped his free arm around her to hold her in place.

  They landed on the cobblestones right in front of a group of women huddled together in a doorway in an obvious attempt to escape the storm. Eyes huge, the women gaped at the seemingly out-of-nowhere arrivals.

  Letting go of Colin’s neck, Bianca slid down his body to hit the cobblestones and punched the button that released her escape cord and brought it snaking back into its dispenser, all in a single smooth movement.

  The women stared, goggle-eyed.

  “It’s raining men,” she told them in French, and put a finger to her lips as Colin grabbed her hand and pulled her after him.

  They ran together toward the intersection that wasn’t swarming with police cars. The good news was, the gunmen weren’t going to be following them over the side of the building. The bad news was, the gunmen would be following them.

  But right now she and Colin had a small head start.

  “They’ll be looking for us. We need to get off the street,” he said as they reached one of the wide thoroughfares that were so integral to Paris’s charm. Even in the teeth of the deluge, a few people still moved along the sidewalk, sheltering under umbrellas and overhangs. Traffic filled the street. She could hear the shriek of sirens, but the sounds were blunted by distance and the drum of the rain. The horror at Le Chien Rouge, just a couple of blocks over, hadn’t touched the people here.

  “We can’t go back to the apartment,” she said.

  “I know.”

  A crowded bar a few doors along had a jumble of customers’ coats hanging on pegs just inside the entrance: Bianca could see them through the window.

  She tugged at Colin’s hand. “In there. We need coats.”

  They’d left theirs behind in the restaurant. Leave nothing behind was one of the rules, but there’d been no time to grab their coats and thus no choice. She wasn’t worried about the garment giving anything away or being traced back to her. Siu Siu Tseng, designer to the criminal stars, had fashioned it to look like a perfectly ordinary reversible coat. And treated it with a substance that kept any fingerprints or stray bits of DNA from adhering. But now the missing coats needed to be replaced. Because not wearing one in these weather conditions made them conspicuous, and because the unexpected addition of outerwear could serve to disguise them from those who were almost certainly already coming after them in hot pursuit. Also, because they were wet and cold.

  He looked in the direction she indicated, nodded and followed her inside. When they emerged, she was wearing a scarlet rain slicker with a hood and he was wearing a man’s long gray overcoat and a fedora. Plus he was carrying an umbrella, which he opened. She joined him beneath it. As she gripped the umbrella’s handle, he put an arm around her: nothing to see here, folks; just two slightly damp lovers splish-sploshing through the rain.

  They were now all but unrecognizable as they hurried away from the scene. Bianca was still nervous. She’d thought she was unrecognizable before. Obviously she’d thought wrong.

  That nearly unprecedented failure unnerved her.

  Who were those guys?

  “There. Come on.” Pulling her along with him, Colin took off running toward the nearest cross street and a—Bianca had to shield her eyes against the rain to make sure—red double-decker on-and-off tourist bus.

  “Really?”

  “Sorry to say I’m fresh out of Aston Martins, so, yeah.”

  It took her a minute: James Bond’s signature car was an Aston Martin.

  “Oh, ha ha.”

  They caught up to it at the corner as it stopped to let a couple off, clambered on board, paid the fare and kept their heads down as they made their way to the back. The bus was nearly full, which wasn’t so surprising when she thought of the storm: not many people were getting off to tour the attractions and no one wanted to sit up top.

  Escaping by tourist bus had several advantages, she had to admit: it made an unlikely getaway vehicle; its onboard computer system—did it even have one?—probably couldn’t be Boston braked; it was dry, and it was warm, which was a godsend considering how cold and wet she was beneath the coat: she had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering and water ran down her body to form a puddle at her feet.

  The downside was, the lumbering, exhaust-spewing, stinky-cheese-smelling bus was slow.

  The Arc de Triomphe, where they disembarked, was approximately three miles and a ride across the Seine from where they’d hopped on board. The journey took forty-five minutes.

  By the time they were back out on the street, the storm had largely abated. The lightning was no more than an occasional fork-tongued flicker on the western horizon, the thunder was a distant growl, and the rain had slowed to an intermittent sprinkle.

  Bianca was so cold she was beyond shivering. The only warm spot on her was her right hand, and that was because Colin was holding it. His hand felt large and strong and right wrapped around hers.

  She was so cold she was even beyond worrying about the implications of that.

  “I’m assuming you have a plan.” Bianca was pretty sure he did, because he’d bundled them off the bus. They hadn’t talked on the ride—too easy for others to overhear everything that was said. And she, personally, was too cold to chitchat.

  “There’s a hotel near here. Takes cash, doesn’t ask questions.”

  “You seem to know a lot of places like that.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Okay, he had her there: she did. At least a dozen in Paris alone. Problem was, the staff at any of them might recognize her. After her experience earlier, she was wary of trusting in her disguises to keep her safe. Something had clearly gone wrong with that, and until she’d had time to figure out precisely what, the only prudent thing to do was count them out as safeguards. At this point, she and Colin were dangerously close to being unarmed. And in any contest pitting hand-to-hand combat against a bullet—well, she knew what side of that fight she’d rather be on.

  “A hotel sounds good,” she said. “Lead on.”

  19

  Hand in hand—Hello, young lovers!—and umbrella up to protect them as much from any stray surveillance cameras as from the rain, they walked quickly away from the Arc, which, like the Eiffel Tower, was beautifully lit up for Christmas. The iconic monument to Napoleon’s victories was the centerpiece of a traffic-packed roundabout on the west end of the Champs-Elysees, one of the busiest boulevards in Paris. Even in the rain, hundreds of tourists strolled the twelve avenues that formed a star around the Arc. It was a given that she and Colin were by now being hunted like vermin through the streets of Paris, but finding them amid such a throng would—Bia
nca hoped—be difficult.

  She said, “I can’t—we can’t—go back to the hotel where I left Lynette’s stuff. We have to assume they’ll be watching it, waiting for me to show up again. But we can’t just leave her stuff there, either.”

  “Got it covered.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll have somebody call the hotel tomorrow pretending to be Lynette, tell them she had to leave town unexpectedly, have them pack up her belongings and ship them back to her apartment in DC.”

  “Where she won’t show up.”

  “No. But after what she’s done she wouldn’t show back up there anyway, if she’s smart.”

  Bianca nodded: solid plan.

  “Who were those guys?” She voiced the thought that kept chasing itself through her mind.

  He shook his head. “All outward signs point to them being part of some kind of a criminal syndicate, possibly Le Milieu like your friend, possibly something else, but for them to be looking for Lynette the word on her would’ve had to leak out of the spook community pretty damned fast. Plus right now you look totally different from Lynette. Maybe they had the hotel staked out, saw Lynette go in and you come out, and put two and two together and actually got four. Or maybe somehow they knew to look for you dressed like that.”

  She frowned. “First of all, that guy was never my friend. I just happened to recognize him. Second, wouldn’t it make sense that they’d want to get hold of the information Lynette stole? Before they killed her? Because once they kill her, she’s not going to be able to tell them anything.”

  “You think they were trying to kidnap you? Her?” By that time the hotel, which Colin pointed out to her with a gesture, was within view.

  “I don’t know. The feeling I got was that they were trying to kill me. But I could be wrong.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded thoughtful. “Your friend—or, I’m sorry, the guy who isn’t your friend—from Le Chien Rouge. Who is he?”

  She’d known he was going to ask that question. The problem was, she hadn’t yet decided what to tell him. Or, rather, how big a lie to tell him. Because of course she couldn’t open up with the whole, unvarnished truth. It revealed way more about her than he needed to know—and it brought Mason into it, which led down a path she never wanted Colin to so much as suspect existed.