“Where is she?” I demanded.
The guard said something in Spanish and pointed toward an immense curving marble staircase. I didn’t need Benito to translate for me. She was upstairs.
But I was surprised at his deferential tone. I heard the word “doctor,” which sounds the same in Spanish and English. Apparently the white coat and tie and the stethoscope dangling from my neck really did lend me an air of authority. It works for real doctors, after all. It didn’t seem to bother him that a doctor was lugging EMT equipment around himself. Maybe he’d never seen an ambulance team in operation. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to spot the anomalies.
We trotted up the stairs as quickly as we could, the guard following right behind. At the top of the stairs he pointed to the left and moved ahead to guide us there. When we’d gone a few feet down the hall, I suddenly said, “The defibrillator.”
“Excuse me, Doctor?” Benito said.
“We’re going to need the defibrillator. Go on ahead without me. I’ll be right back.”
I set down my equipment bags, and Benito quickly translated for the guard. I could see him warily sizing up the situation, trying to figure out what to do. He didn’t want me walking through the house unescorted, but he also didn’t want to leave Benito up here unaccompanied. And he wasn’t going to make us lug the equipment back downstairs.
It didn’t occur to him to question why we didn’t have a cardiac defibrillator with us, nor why I’d suddenly decided we needed one.
Nor why we were willing, in a medical emergency, to keep the patient waiting while I fetched a piece of equipment we might not need. He was a guard, not an MD.
He nodded, and I raced down the staircase.
I returned in a little over two minutes. The hallway was wide and went on forever. A long antique runner, bare in places and probably priceless, slipped underfoot against the highly polished hardwood floor. He stopped at a closed door on the left, knocked once, turned the knob, and opened it. The door wasn’t locked, I was surprised to see. Maybe, with the guards and the electric fence and all, Soler wasn’t worried about Svetlana Kuzma trying to escape.
A muffled female voice from within: “Hey!”
The guard switched on an overhead light, illuminating a spacious bedroom suite. An elaborately carved four-poster bed with barley twist posts and a canopy made out of some kind of antique tapestry. A chaise longue. A mirrored vanity dressing table.
I was half expecting a dank concrete torture chamber out of the movie Hostel. Not a royal suite at Sandringham, which was what this looked like.
“La ambulancia llega,” the guard said. He was being too helpful. I’d expected him to point us upstairs and remain at his post. This was a problem I didn’t anticipate. We’d have to deal with him.
A young girl bolted upright in bed, her hand outstretched as if to shield her eyes from the light.
Svetlana.
She was wearing a white A-shirt, which in politically incorrect circles is sometimes called a “wife beater.” Her eyes were wide with fear. There was panic in her face.
We set down our equipment.
In the photos her father had e-mailed me, she was an exotic, raven-haired beauty. She could have been a supermodel. Up close and personal, she looked much younger and smaller and more fragile, though no less stunning. She didn’t appear to have been beaten or abused. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, I knew. The kind of abuse she’d probably endured wouldn’t be visible.
“Khto vi?” she gasped. “Shcho vi khochetye?”
I don’t speak Ukrainian, if that was what she was speaking. But she sounded desperate.
The guard looked from her to us, suspicion furrowing his brow. He’d just figured out that the girl didn’t seem to be in any medical distress. Benito, quick-thinking, said something to the guard in Spanish. I didn’t understand much of it, but his tone was indignant. The gist seemed to be So what the hell did you call us here for? Or How dare you waste our time! Or something along those lines.
Now the guard was arguing with Benito, and I didn’t need to know Spanish to see that he’d finally tumbled to the realization that no one had called for a doctor. As we say in Boston, light dawns over Marblehead.
He reached for his two-way radio and held it up with his thumb near the transmission button, about to call for backup.
I’d expected this, of course. Actually, I was surprised we’d gotten this far without the other guard, or guards, showing up.
While Benito was diverting the guard with his display of pique, I’d slowly come up behind him, as we’d rehearsed, and pincered his neck in the crook of my elbow, squeezing it hard between my bicep on one side and the bone of my forearm on the other. He gave a sharp yelp. I tightened the vise by grabbing my left hand with my right, compressing both carotid arteries. The good old naked rear choke, beloved of action heroes and teenage boys—but the best thing in a situation like this, and the quickest. He thrashed and shuffled his feet and took a feeble swing at my torso, but he didn’t have much strength left.
Then I stomp-kicked him at the back of his left knee. He lost his balance, fell backward toward me. In less than ten seconds, I felt him go limp, and I eased him to the floor.
The girl, meanwhile, had scrambled out of the bed and leaped to the floor. She screamed, “Dopomozhit’ meni!”
But then she tried to sprint past me. And I understood why she was so terrified.
She didn’t know who we were nor why we were here. She’d seen me subdue a guard; for all she knew, we were stealing her away and taking her someplace even worse. Her mind was probably clouded by the trauma of her captivity. I’d seen it before.
I grabbed her. “Svetlana, it’s okay. You’re safe now.”
“No!” she screamed, trying to wriggle free. “No!”
“Svetlana, listen to me.” I spoke calmly and quietly. “My name is Nick Heller. Your father asked me to come get you out of here.”
“No!” she screamed, even louder and shriller. “Get away from me!” she said in accented English. “Leave me alone!”
She twisted one way, then another, and then raked her nails across my face. It felt like she’d drawn blood. It hurt. I grabbed her by the wrist to prevent a repeat performance. She screamed even louder and went for me with her other hand, this time aiming for my eyes. A tough girl.
“Svetlana,” I said, grabbing that wrist, too. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
She struggled mightily to free her hands. Her face had gone red, her mouth contorted in an ugly, animal-like snarl. Spittle flew from her mouth. Svetlana Kuzma, poor thing, had obviously lost it. Maybe Soler had drugged her. Maybe her confinement had disoriented her, made her paranoid, afraid of all intruders. Or maybe she’d come to think of Soler’s security guards as her protectors, and anyone else as a threat. Some version of the Stockholm Syndrome. I didn’t know what she thought. I only knew that she was deeply confused.
“Svetlana, please listen to me. We have to move quickly.”
Her eyes searched my face, scanning back and forth. She seemed to have calmed down a bit, so I let go of her wrists.
A mistake. Suddenly she kneed me hard in the crotch. That I wasn’t prepared for. I felt a starburst of pain and expelled a lungful of air. She was tough, wiry, and strong. The girl must have taken self-defense classes.
She was also complicating things considerably. We had expected any number of contingencies except having to fight the girl we’d come to rescue. I gestured to Benito, who grabbed her by the shoulders.
Then I produced a syringe from my pocket, grabbed her right hand, and jabbed the needle into the large vein at the front of her arm. I depressed the plunger, releasing a small quantity of a rapid-onset opioid sedative called remifentanil.
Benito’s mouth gaped. “Why you do this?” he said furiously.
“We didn’t exactly have a choice.”
“This is not our plan! Now we have to carry her out!”
“A lot easier to carry an
unconscious body than someone who’s fighting you all the way.”
In a matter of seconds she slumped in Benito’s arms. Together we set her down gently on the carpet.
I grabbed the guard’s pistol, a 9 mm Astra, from the floor. As the two of us dragged his inert body into the suite’s bathroom to get him out of sight, his two-way radio crackled.
“What are they saying?”
“They’re—they’re responding to a panic call,” Benito said, his eyes widening.
“Panic call?”
“It comes from inside this room.”
“But how? He didn’t even have a chance to call for help.” I glanced around, then saw the wireless panic button fob on Svetlana’s bedside table, which I hadn’t noticed before. She must have hit it when she jumped out of bed, calling for help.
Why had Soler provided her with a panic button?
But there wasn’t time to ponder this or anything else: A loud electronic Klaxon had begun to sound in the hall outside the bedroom, and probably throughout the mansion. “They’re on their way,” Benito said, his voice shaking.
“From where?”
“I think they said the east wing.”
I glanced at my watch. “We can make it. I figure we have about a hundred and twenty seconds before they get here.”
He shook his head, his face grim. “Less. It won’t take them that long.”
“It will if they stop to get weapons. Which they will.”
“What do you mean? They all carry guns.”
“No. The heavy-duty stuff. Standard protocol when there’s a major intrusion, I bet.”
“Heavy duty…?”
“Assault rifles. Submachine guns. AR-15s and M-16s.” They were listed on the firearms registration Soler had filed with the Barcelona police. And they were kept in a secure storage cabinet off the butler’s pantry downstairs. Obviously the guards wouldn’t carry submachine guns around, not in a private home. In the event of a major intrusion, they’d grab their weapons from the tactical rack.
“Madre de Dios.” Droplets of sweat had begun to appear on his face. “We have to run. Leave her here! We don’t have time to take her with us.”
“Wrong,” I said. “She’s why we’re here. Come on. We have plenty of time. Grab the equipment. I’ll take her.”
I turned her over on her stomach, then kneeled in front of her head. Her shallow breathing told me she was unconscious but okay. No respiratory distress. I hooked my elbows under her shoulders and hoisted her in a sort of fireman’s carry. She was small and slight and couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. She smelled good: Her hair gave off a sweet, faintly floral, scent. She still had the delicate skin of an innocent young girl. In repose she seemed fragile and vulnerable, which brought out my protective instincts.
Out in the hall the alarm was earsplittingly loud.
We made it downstairs and out the door, got her into the back of the ambulance—we left the gurney on the porch, to save a few precious seconds—and jumped into the front.
Benito, his face now streaming sweat, pulled the ambulance away from the house. We seemed safely on our way out when he yelled something and slammed on the brakes.
Three guards had us surrounded. Two in front and one on the driver’s side. Pointing assault rifles at us. Ready to fire.
Maybe Benito had stopped because he didn’t want to run anyone over. Maybe he stopped because he didn’t want them to fire at us. Whatever his reasoning, he’d just made a serious miscalculation. I would have kept going, force them to get out of my way and thereby hope to mess up their aim.
But there was nothing to be done about that now. I saw that he was panicking, on the verge of giving up.
Each of the guards held a black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a civilian version of a military infantry rifle. This was a reliable and accurate weapon, high velocity, fast handling, with not much recoil. Probably thirty rounds in the magazine. It had a range of almost two thousand feet.
Four very ugly barrels were pointed at us, swaying back and forth. One of the guards was shouting something.
“They want us to get out,” Benito said. “What we do?”
“We get out.”
“You have the gun.”
“Ever hear the expression ‘bringing a knife to a gunfight’?”
“Madre de Dios. They going to kill us. Now what we do?”
“Just watch me,” I said. “And stay calm.”
We got out, hands in the air. The alarm Klaxon was still going, amplified by loudspeakers out here. The front of the house blazed with emergency lights. Another guard yelled something at me, and Benito translated: “He wants our hands on our heads. He wants us to, er, interlock?—interlace—our fingers.”
We obeyed his orders. We had no choice.
The same guard, obviously in charge, shouted something else.
“He sees the pistol tucked into your belt. He says if you lower your hands even a millimeter they will pump you full of lead.”
“Understood,” I said.
Benito translated, but he didn’t have to. They knew I wasn’t stupid enough to reach for my weapon in a situation like this. Not with four semiautomatic rifles pointed at me. The guy in charge barked an order, and another one of the guards strode up to me, the matte black muzzle right in my face. I could see the selector lever, on the left side of the receiver, pointed up to Fire.
I kept the fingers of my hands interlaced on top of my head. Benito was looking at me, eyes wild, trying to communicate without words. A warning, perhaps. Maybe he was afraid I’d do something foolish.
He didn’t know me well enough.
The guard circled around and stopped behind me. The lead guard shouted something, and Benito translated: “Keep your hands on your head. Keep your fingers interlaced.”
The three other guards slowly raised the barrels of their rifles to take aim at my head and chest. I could hear the slight scrape of the guard’s boots on the pavement behind me. Then I felt his hand brush against my side as he reached for the pistol.
But I reached for it first.
* * *
What happened next probably took only four seconds, but it seemed to go in slow motion.
I dropped my hands and yanked the Astra from my waistband. I pulled the slide and spun around and pointed the pistol at the guy. He obviously hadn’t expected that—a handgun versus an assault rifle? sheer lunacy—so it took him a beat to raise his rifle into position. I heard the guard in charge shout, “Fuego!” and they all squeezed their triggers almost in unison.
And nothing happened.
They kept trying to squeeze the triggers, but their weapons wouldn’t fire. There were loud, confused shouts, curses. But no gunfire.
Then I shouted, “Hands up! Hold your rifles up over your heads, all of you! Now!”
Benito, stunned, didn’t translate, but he didn’t need to. The guard nearest me squeezed the trigger again, tried to pull back on the charging handle, but that was frozen, too.
Meanwhile, I yanked the second pistol from my belt and tossed it to Benito, who caught it in midair, looking stunned.
“I said, hold your rifles in the air!”
Two of them, understanding their predicament though not exactly how it had happened, raised their rifles in both hands over their heads. Benito racked the slide on the pistol I’d just thrown him, pointed it at each guard in succession. The man I’d identified as the lead guard, quicker-thinking than the others, reached for his sidearm with his right hand. I shouted, “Freeze!”
He kept going for the pistol.
I took aim and fired.
The round hit the target neatly, creasing the outside of the leather holster, sending chunks of leather everywhere. He screamed, jerking his right hand away reflexively. Startled, he dropped his rifle.
The remaining holdout gave up any thought of reaching for his pistol. Instead, he held his rifle up in the air like the others. Benito wagged his gun like some desperado in an old west
ern and shouted at the lead guy, “Arriba las manos!”
“Get the cuffs,” I told Benito. “I’ll cover these guys.”
Swiftly he opened the ambulance driver’s side door with his left hand, reached inside, and grabbed a fistful of flexi-cuffs.
“On your knees!” I yelled to the guards.
They promptly obeyed.
“Cross your feet,” I said. “Keep your rifles above your heads.”
We worked quickly. I kept the Astra trained on the guards, moving it from one to another, while Benito quickly and efficiently cuffed them. He was good at it. He’d done this plenty of times before, in his previous career. He had them slowly place their rifles on the ground and put their hands back up. Both of us had our pistols pointed. When you’re on your knees with your feet crossed, your balance is extremely unsteady. It’s hard to make any sudden moves. He took each guy’s pistol from its holster, making sure their hands remained on top of their heads, fingers interlaced. Then he handcuffed them.
We returned to the ambulance and drove in silence to the front entrance. We could still hear the alarm sounding from the house, but this far away the sound was more muted. As we approached the closed gates, Benito groaned. We were both thinking the same thing: The guards had put Soler’s estate into lockdown, and now here was one more obstacle to getting out of the place alive.
But to our surprise, the gates swung open as we drove up to them. The ground-loop sensor embedded in the pavement, which automatically triggered the gates’ activation, hadn’t been shut off. Maybe the guards were expecting others to arrive and didn’t want to impede access. Or maybe they’d gotten cocky and didn’t think we’d get this far.
Whatever the explanation, we reached the street ten seconds later, the sirens bleating and the flashers going. Benito didn’t speak until we reached the Avinguda Diagonal.
Plan B Page 2