by Alison Ryan
Qadim rose to his feet, towering over his brother, anger flashing in his eyes.
“He was my brother!” Qadim bellowed. “The same as you. He could have been made to see reason, to understand.” Qadim’s fists balled, and the mercenaries by the French doors suddenly perked up. Three of them had accompanied Qadim, and were presumably loyal to him. They’d intentionally intermingled with the rest of the men, in case they needed to come to the aid of their boss.
Arava walked over to the brotherly standoff and pulled a weapon from the back of QB’s chair. It was a Mac-10, fully automatic sub-machine gun, and she took up a position next to Nolan Weston, with the entire line of prisoners past him, in the background if she pulled the trigger.
“I can solve this entire debate with my index finger, Qadim,” she warned. “I can kill them all right now.”
The guards drew their weapons, some pointing at each other, some drawing beads on Qadim, QB, and Arava.
Qadim slowly drew the gun from behind his back, making a show of the fact that he wasn’t aiming it at QB or Arava. He held it aloft for all to see, then took a step away from the wheelchair and back to the prisoners.
With tension choking the room, he stepped to Canaan and levelled his piece at the youngest Titan.
“Don’t question my thirst for blood. My willingness to dirty my hands,” Qadim pointed the gun at Carlton Fox next. “I’ll execute three of these men right now. And feel no more remorse than swatting a fly. But Weston deserves clemency. And Rubidoux is worth more, much more, to me alive than dead.”
Every eye and ear in the room was on Qadim. Arava’s finger caressed the trigger of her weapon. Her mouth twisted into a perverse sneer, almost as if she craved bloodshed.
QB broke the silence. “No one doubts your resolve, nor your commitment to the cause. We can discuss Weston. He’s not going anywhere.”
Qadim mulled QB’s words for a moment, then turned to Matthias Schneider. Without a word, he fired a single shot into the German intelligence operative’s forehead, causing him to crumble in a heap to the floor, dead.
Canaan’s eyes widened in horror, and he braced for his own death. Arava looked to QB for direction, and at that moment, Nolan Weston sprang into action.
Nolan had managed, at the expense of shredding his left wrists, to wriggle a hand free of his cuffs. With the room focused on Matthias Schneider’s murder, he leapt toward Arava, swinging the loose handcuff against the side of her head and relieving her of her weapon, all in one graceful move. A burst from the Mac-10 sent live rounds spraying into the carpet and into Matthias Schneider’s still-warm body.
Nolan put an arm around Arava’s neck and used her as a shield, pointing the machine gun at QB as he pulled along, shuffling toward the door.
Blood trickled from above Arava’s right eye as she grasped Nolan’s arm with both her hands, keeping the pressure from her throat.
The henchmen across the room forgot their own beef and trained their weapons on Nolan and Arava.
“Canaan, Annalise, and Fox. On your feet,” commanded Nolan. “We’re walking out of here. She’s coming with us,” Noland added, tightening the arm he had wrapped around Arava to emphasize how serious he was. “Anything happens besides that, and QB and Qadim are dead. And as many of you bastards as I can take with me before I run out of ammo. And it should be obvious to you that if you try any bullshit, I’ll break your fucking neck,” he said to Arava.
“You should thank me for not breaking your balls, bitch,” Arava answered, her voice dripping with malice.
“Oh, Nolan,” QB said, shaking his head. He appeared to be not the least bit worried, nor surprised by the sudden turn of events. “We are not savages. Your death could have been easy. Quick, and painless, like your friend Matthias’s. But now, not only will you have to suffer first, and suffer pain beyond your wildest reckoning, but Camilla will also have to be violated.” QB laughed when he finally finished dragging out each syllable of the word “violated.”
“Not by you, you miserable wretch,” Nolan replied, backing himself and Arava toward the door as the security team positioned themselves to flank him.
Nolan swiftly turned his attention to the nearest mercenary, squeezing off a burst of gunfire into the man’s chest, dropping him where he stood, before setting his sights once more on QB. Discipline and experience kept any of the rest of them from firing a shot, and they stopped as one.
“That’s a warning to the rest of you. Weapons down.”
QB lifted his good hand to signal compliance to his troops. Qadim did the same, and the Arab tucked his own weapon behind his back. “I want the rest of these cuffs off. Now!”
As one of the guards approached the rest of the hostages, Annalise Rubidoux casually tossed her cuffs to him when he was just beyond striking distance.
“Set the keys on the floor. And I’ll have your spare piece. The one in your ankle holster. Left leg. Set it by the keys,” she bossed the man, while rubbing her wrists.
Carlton Fox chuckled.
“Color me impressed. Once this is over, you Yanks will have to show me how you extricated yourselves from the cuffs so easily. SAS doesn’t teach that,” he said, referencing the British Army elite division, the Special Air Services.
“Leave those weapons and step back to the wall,” Annalise Rubidoux commanded the mercenaries. “Turn and face the wall, hands over your heads, flat.” The men complied, and she unlocked the cuffs on Carlton Fox and Canaan Titan. Fox walked over and cuffed Arava’s wrists behind her back and held onto her, guarding her with the gun he’d been handed with the cuffs.
Satisfied that matters were more or less secure, Annalise walked over and collected the guns on the floor, carrying them back and handing one to Canaan. “I know swords are more your speed, but you’re a Titan, you must know how to use one of these, no?”
“I’ve been to the range a time or two,” Canaan admitted, stuffing one gun down the back of his pants and pulling the slide back to chamber a round in a second he’d picked up off the floor from Annalise’s collection.
“What’s your next move, Weston?” Qadim asked. “Four of you against an army. On a battlefield with which you’re unfamiliar. You don’t even know what country you’re in. How far do you think you’ll get?”
The rest of the group looked to Nolan for direction.
“Annalise, you have the door. Carlton, keep that bitch under wraps. Canaan, if QB or Qadim even clear their throats in a way you don’t like, put ‘em down.” Nolan instructed his impromptu team. “The rest of you, away from that door. All in a group. Over there.” Nolan moved them to a corner as far from the door as they could get, and he stepped over the body of the man he’d killed en route to the French doors.
Nolan stepped out onto the balcony, where he saw only endless water past a rocky shoreline. To either side, he could see nothing but cliffs. No hint as to where they were.
A dock sat far below, with several speedboats hitched to it. Nolan looked up and around at the house; part castle and part mansion. On a turret towering overhead, he could see at least two armed men with binoculars. Directly overhead was a smaller balcony, probably part of a bedroom, Nolan surmised.
“Not much in the way of escape routes, I’m afraid,” QB mocked as Nolan reentered the room.
Nolan walked up to Qadim with his gun drawn and relieved the Arab of the gun behind his back. “Matthias was a good man, you son of a bitch,” he snarled, and smashed the gun into the side of Qadim’s head, turning instantly with his weapon to dissuade any of the thugs from intervening.
Nolan backed cautiously toward Annalise, wanting to confer with the nearest thing he had to a peer in the room. He hadn’t worked with her as closely as Atlas Titan had, but he’d only ever heard her referred to as a reliable and capable operative. He’d have to trust her. Canaan had the bloodline, but lacked the experience. Fox was the wildcard. He’d been brought in for a reason, but Nolan didn’t know what he’d done to wind up on QB’s radar or what ro
le he had to play in the unfolding drama.
“What’s the play, Annalise?” Nolan asked quietly, sidling up to the woman guarding the door, his eyes never leaving the guards he’d herded into the opposite corner.
“What’s outside?” she asked.
“We’re on a cliff,” Nolan answered. “It’s rocky, no beach that I could see, just water. Large house, probably a helipad on the roof. Dock down below, but no easy way to access it from here.”
Annalise considered their options. “If we go out this door,” she pointed her weapon to indicate the door through which they were all brought. “It’s forty-four stairs to the ground floor; spiral staircase. No way to know how many corridors off the steps. Came through a large room off the garage to get to the foot of the stairs. I was transported here from a small airstrip, twelve-minute drive. I was in Brussels when I was taken, not sure how long I was out.”
Nolan was immediately impressed. He hadn’t had his wits about him in time to recall anything of the trip to the house they were now in, nor of much of the stairway. He was groggy until they arrived outside the door to the room, in which they now found themselves, completely confused until his hood was removed.
He recalled an ambush leaving a café in Paris; he turned a corner, carrying food and coffee back to Camilla in their hotel room. They’d been enjoying a brief getaway while their baby girl, Larkin, stayed with Camilla’s father, Richard, his wife, Emma, and their daughter, Hadley, in Salzburg, Austria.
Larkin was the most precious thing in the world to Nolan and Camilla, but sleep was a foreign concept to her. They kept expecting her to figure it out and settle down eventually, but after ten months, her record was two hours and forty-three consecutive minutes. Camilla was at her wit’s end, and when Emma offered to have Larkin spend a week in Salzburg, the Westons jumped at it.
After a romantic dinner in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and a moonlit walk along the Seine, Nolan and Camilla retired to their five-star hotel for a night of ravenous love-making. Exhaustion claimed them in the wee hours, and hunger woke Nolan before his bride.
He’d strolled to a nearby café to allow Camilla some more blissful uninterrupted rest, but when he took a turn down an alley to cut back to his hotel, he was accosted by three young Africans.
What seemed like a typical Parisian mugging, however, was anything but. Nolan expected his martial arts mastery to send his attackers scattering, but they turned out to be much more than common street thugs.
He threw hot coffee into the face of the first man to approach, and the second he hit with a spinning back kick, but when he went to grab the third and send him crashing into the first to clear an escape route, he found that his attempted judo throw was countered and his legs were swept out from under him by the second man, who recovered far more quickly than Nolan had expected him to.
The men pounced when Nolan hit the ground, two of them pummeling him with punches while the third set to work securing his legs.
Nolan managed to deflect and dodge most of the barrage, but just when he thought he had an opening, two more men appeared; the two men who brought him into the room he was now in.
He was overwhelmed by their numbers and injected with what he guessed must be a sedative. A car pulled up, black to his recollection, then everything was blank until he was put on his knees next to Matthias Schneider.
If anything had happened to Camilla, he’d dismember the men in this room, slowly. If they’d somehow gotten to Larkin or Hadley, then however they defined pain would prove sorely inadequate.
“I was with my wife, in Paris,” Nolan replied. “We need time. We need to regroup and figure this out. My first instinct is to clean this room; stack bodies in that corner and be done with it. Between the two of us, armed, I have no doubt we could escape, but I need intelligence. I have to know if my wife was taken as well. How did you come to be here?”
“Something in my water. I was working out at my hotel gym in Brussels; I was there doing some recon for your father-in-law. Stupid, I let my guard down.
“I was put on a plane, something small, and during the flight I came to. They knocked me back out.” Annalise pointed to the swelling on her face. “And put a bag over my head. Did you know QB had a son?”
“No. But QB was a phantom. Our entire dossier on him would have fit on a business card. I’ve never known anybody with a such a gift for disguise, disinformation, and evasion.
“Canaan, come here,” Nolan summoned the youngest Titan.
Canaan stepped back toward Nolan Weston and Annalise took up his post, not wanting the three known quantities in the room to be clustered too closely together.
“You were in Vienna, right? Tell me everything you remember.”
“Yes…?” Canaan answered, warily.
“Business or pleasure?” Nolan asked. “Alone?”
“Business. Buying books at an auction for Odin. Raven Conway and one of Odin’s guys were with me.”
“Gilchrist?” Nolan asked.
“Yeah,” Canaan replied, “that’s right. How did you…?”
“Never mind that,” Nolan countered. “Where were you taken?”
“A hotel.”
“You were at The Sacher, right?” Nolan asked.
“Yeah, that’s correct. What the fuck, Nolan?” Canaan replied, annoyed that Nolan Weston seemed to have his entire itinerary committed to memory.
“I try to make sure I know where all the pieces are on the board at all times,” Nolan explained. “But this shit came out of left field.”
“There was a woman, we met at the auction,” Canaan admitted. “We wound up back at her hotel room. Fell asleep next to her, woke up here, in these clothes. Wherever ‘here’ is.”
“Shit, then we have to assume they have Conway,” Nolan said, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “And the woman you were with. Unless she’s working with them. Describe her.”
“Red hair, lots of it,” Canaan explained. “Pretty enough to stop a train. Voluptuous, I guess you’d say. Her name was Madeline Carmichael. Ring a bell?”
“Nah, not at all,” Nolan replied.
“What’s our next move?” Canaan asked, trying to swallow his mounting panic.
“First of all, we—”
Nolan’s words were cut short by the door next to him being blown off its hinges.
The room filled with splintered wood and smoke, and a cacophony of voices shouting instructions.
Nolan grabbed Canaan’s wrist as they scrambled away from the door, winding up practically in Annalise Rubidoux’s lap.
“The French doors!” Nolan barked before bolting toward the exit with Annalise and Canaan in tow. Carlton Fox discarded Arava, pushing her to the floor and springing away and toward his fleeing colleagues.
Nolan Weston knelt in the open doorway, firing his weapon back into the room. Dangerous-looking, heavily-armed men poured into the room through the remnants of the heavy oak door.
The three escapees hit the balcony and stopped in their tracks. A perilous fall, past and over jagged rocks, to the waves far below awaited anyone foolish enough to jump.
Annalise Rubidoux raised her weapon and unleashed a barrage of rounds back into the hazy, chaotic room before she dropped the gun and took a running start before executing a flawless swan dive off the balcony.
“Bloody Hell!” Carlton exclaimed, and Canaan gasped as she disappeared over the railing.
“Go! Follow her! Go now!” Nolan barked. “There’s too many of them, they’ll be on us any second!”
Bullets whizzing past Canaan’s head convinced him, and he climbed up on the railing and leapt as far out into nothing as he could manage.
Carlton discarded his sport coat and dodged bullets as he took his own running dive off the cliff.
Nolan was last, aiming center of mass at the largest target in the room, a giant of a man who’d burst into the room when the door exploded. He didn’t bother to watch the man fall, rather he said a
silent prayer that Camilla and Larkin were safe, and he abandoned the balcony at terminal velocity.
11
“What do you mean, he’s gone?” Odin Titan barked into the phone. It was just after 11:00 PM in Las Vegas, and after he’d been unable to reach his brother, Canaan, on the phone, he called Duncan Gilchrist.
The auction was set to reconvene in just under an hour, and Odin needed to touch base with his proxy in Austria to go over the game plan.
“Odin, I was supposed to meet Canaan for breakfast this morning, but he didn’t show,” Duncan explained. “He was with a woman last night, so I figured he was sleeping in this morning and he wanted to skip breakfast, you know?”
“A woman? What the fuck. Come on, Canaan!” Odin was furious. “Okay, so he missed breakfast, what about after that?”
“I called him again, then I went to his room. I had hotel security open it. He hadn’t been there since turndown was performed by housekeeping. His bed wasn’t slept in or, well, nobody used the bed. He’s gone. Just gone. It gets worse, Odin.”
“How?”
“I can’t contact Raven, either. I wanted her to go over the hotel’s security feed, but she’s gone dark. Nothing.”
Odin staggered back and fell onto his sofa. “Shit. I don’t know. The woman, who was the woman?” Odin opened his laptop and fired off a message to Atlas and one to Nolan Weston.
He needed help, fast.
“She was at the auction,” Duncan said. “Redhead. Didn’t catch her name, she was a knockout. They left together.”
“Of course they did,” Odin said. “This whole fucking thing was a setup. It didn’t smell right from the minute I heard about it.”
“Should I notify local police?” Duncan asked.
“Sit tight. I have to think…” A balloon popped up on Odin’s screen; Atlas indicating he’d be right over. “No, no police, they wouldn’t have a clue anyway. Richard Hunt is in Salzburg. Matthias lives near Munich, if he’s not on assignment he may be our best bet. Just get to the auction and follow the plan. We’ll work Canaan and Raven from this end. You focus on the Gutenberg. Updates every thirty minutes, even if there’s nothing to update. Understood?”