Charlie drew his Sig Sauer and fired into the lock. The noise of the gun, reflecting off the steel door, was terrible. Even with the clamor of the crowd in Babur Square and the din of the storm, there was no doubt that Byko’s people would hear it. He grabbed the handle and tried to turn it, but it still wouldn’t move. He fired a second time, aiming the 9-millimeter slug at the exact junction of the door and the frame. The second shot did the trick, cracking the bolt in half. He braced one foot on the frame and pulled on the handle. With a scream of metal on metal, the door slowly ripped open.
As he descended the stairs, he heard another door banging open somewhere down below. He knew it couldn’t be an accident. Somebody was coming for him.
He gripped the Sig Sauer in two hands as he crept down the stairwell. One step. Another. A third. There were no lights and with each step the space grew darker. Charlie paused. Listened. Below him he heard a soft scrape, a pause, then a creak.
He took another couple of steps. Standing on the wall two minutes ago, he had been terrified. But now, much to his surprise, there was no fear. Instead he felt an almost eager anticipation, as though he were engaged in an extremely high-stakes chess match. He took a few more steps, maintaining a sight picture on his weapon, planning how he would confront whoever was down there hunting him. As soon as his stalker appeared, Charlie would frame him in his front sight and squeeze the trigger.
Three quick shots, then duck back into cover.
Now he could hear breathing. Rapid breathing. Charlie smiled. Whoever was down there was more scared than he was. Or maybe he was just out of breath. Either way, the advantage went to Charlie.
Charlie forced himself to stay completely still, breathing silently through his nose. The man wasn’t more than ten or fifteen feet away.
Front sight. Wait for the target.
Scrape. Scrape. Creak.
A sudden burst of thunder rumbled through the stairwell and a shaft of lightning illuminated the space through a grimy window.
The light projected a shadow against the wall.
Gotcha.
Charlie knew exactly where he was now.
This was the moment.
He leaped around the steel banister, prepared to confront his target. A large man carrying a submachine gun stood poised, barely visible on the edge of the landing, eyes wide, jaw tight with tension.
Charlie fired—three quick bangs—then took cover.
Another flash of lightning illuminated the stairs. But he heard no thunder, only the deafening kickback of the Sig Sauer.
He strained, waiting for the ringing in his ears to subside, but he could tell it might take several minutes. And that was time he didn’t have.
He took a chance and peered around the banister, whipping his gun into firing position.
The man was gone.
Charlie took a few stealthy steps down the stairs. It was even darker here than at the landing above. Another step. His ears still ringing. Unable to hear even his own footsteps.
He jumped onto the landing, sweeping the area with his gun. It took his eyes a moment to adjust, but then he saw him.
The man lay on the ground, his hand reaching feebly for his MP5. Charlie ran down the last few feet and kicked the submachine gun away.
“Where is she?” Charlie hissed.
The man made a wheezing noise, air bubbling from a wound in his chest.
“Where is she?”
The man rolled over and spit blood at Charlie’s shoe.
Charlie was in no mood to mess around. He fired into his leg. The man screamed in agony. Charlie pressed the heel of his boot into the wound and ground it with all his weight.
“Where is she?”
“Room 404,” the man wheezed. “The presidential suite.”
“Where exactly?”
“In the main living room.”
“How many guards?”
“One inside, two outside.”
“And Quinn?”
“He is the one inside.”
Charlie noticed a radio attached to the man’s belt. He grabbed it and commanded, “Tell them I’m on the third floor. Heading down the hallway from the stairwell. Tell them to cut me off by taking the elevator.”
The man stared defiantly into Charlie’s eyes. Charlie pushed the barrel of his gun into his crotch. “Do it or I shoot!”
“Okay, okay!”
Charlie put the radio to the man’s mouth.
“It’s Markov,” the man said. “I’m hit. The bastard’s on the third floor.”
Chapter Fifty-eight
As soon as Markov finished, Charlie grabbed the walkie-talkie and sprinted down the flight of stairs to a large metal door with the number 3 spray-painted on it. He pushed the door open and found himself in a long hallway. At the far end was a small elevator lobby. He shoved a fresh magazine into his pistol, then ran toward it.
There were two elevator doors with small brass dials mounted on the wall. The arrow on the dial of the closest elevator was halfway between the 3 and the 4—moving slowly down. The ringing in Charlie’s ears had died down and he could hear the elevator coming. He ducked behind a column just as the elevator dinged. The column was made of glass brick, allowing him a view—albeit a distorted one—of the elevators.
The doors shuddered, then slowly opened.
Charlie jumped out and settled his front sight on the figure emerging from the elevator.
To his horror, it wasn’t a big man in a leather coat, but a slim old lady wearing a maid’s uniform and pushing a cart full of laundry. Was there anybody behind her? He didn’t want to catch her in the cross fire.
The housekeeper spotted him, quickly dropped her eyes to the floor and scurried away. Charlie moved slowly toward the elevator only to find it was empty.
Suddenly, he heard children’s voices.
He wheeled and saw a family coming toward him. Father, mother, three children. The father was showing his oldest son a banner. They were headed for the rally in the Square and so caught up in their excitement that they didn’t even notice the Sig Sauer in Charlie’s hand. The youngest boy ran toward the open door of the now-empty elevator, but reached it just too late. The doors closed.
Ding.
Charlie jumped, startled. The second elevator was coming and this one was surely carrying at least one of Byko’s bodyguards.
The family crowded toward the door. As it opened, they suddenly halted, the wife grabbing the arm of her three-year-old son and pulling him backward. From the look on her face, Charlie knew she must have been reacting to something frightening—most likely, a man or men with guns.
Charlie ducked back behind the pillar of glass bricks. All he could see was a mass of shifting colors, people moving in all directions.
He waited a beat, then stepped out from behind the column. The doors were closing on the family. A balding heavyset man in a leather coat was hustling down the hallway, pistol at his side.
Charlie carefully lined up his shot. Just as he was about to squeeze the trigger, a door opened. A door almost precisely halfway between Charlie and his target.
It was a young woman, emerging from her room.
Charlie held his fire, but she saw his gun and let out a bloodcurdling scream.
The bald man wheeled and fired rapidly at Charlie, heedless of the innocent woman in his line of fire. Charlie ducked behind the column as she continued to scream. The bullets were smacking into the glass brick, throwing chunks onto the floor with each impact. Charlie considered shooting back but discarded the idea, afraid he would hit the innocent woman.
The bald man advanced, firing steadily. His barrage quickly smashed a hole in the far side of the brick. Charlie knew that if he didn’t do something soon, one of those bullets would crack all the way through and put a hole in his head.
The young woman was huddled against t
he wall in an almost fetal crouch, hands covering her ears as she whimpered and prayed, trying to take up as little space as possible. Then the housekeeper appeared, poking her head nervously out of another room.
“Get back!” Charlie screamed.
Three more rounds smacked into the column, sending a spray of glass chips in his face.
Charlie stuck the gun out and fired several shots, intentionally aiming for the ceiling so as not to hit the young woman. It was enough to send the bald man lunging for cover.
For a moment, there was something like silence. A brief stalemate.
But Charlie knew reinforcements were bound to be on the way. As soon as they got here, they’d surround him, cut him off, and he’d be dead meat.
He eyed the abandoned laundry cart left by the housekeeper. It was only eight or ten feet away. Charlie poked his gun out again and fired, hoping to draw a fusillade of bullets in return.
The plan worked. Maybe a little too well. Shards of glass flew off the column, cutting Charlie’s arms and face. He closed his eyes, thinking it might be better if he didn’t go blind.
And then there was something like silence. Silence and gasping sobs. Underneath those sobs, Charlie heard a clink—the sound of a magazine dropping to the floor. The bald man was reloading.
This was Charlie’s only chance.
He dove across the hallway, grabbed the cart’s cracked plastic handle and charged toward his foe, using the cart for cover.
The bald man got off two shots and dodged to his left—to avoid being run down.
Charlie redirected the cart, giving himself a clear shot.
For a frozen moment he saw the gleaming bald head just behind his sights. He fired once and the man staggered against the wall, a round hole in his cheek. As his adversary lifted his gun to retaliate, Charlie squeezed the trigger again.
The lumpy figure slid down the wall and hit the floor with a heavy thud.
“Why is this happening?” the traumatized woman stammered.
Charlie scrambled over to her and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Go back to your room. Lock the door and don’t come out.”
As she scurried away, averting her eyes from the dead man on the floor, Charlie ducked into the room where the housekeeper had disappeared. He found her speaking rapidly into the phone.
“Hang up!” he said. When she hesitated, he raised his gun to her. “Hang up.”
She dropped the phone.
“I need you to take me to the fifth floor,” he said, “to the room just above the presidential suite.”
Chapter Fifty-nine
Two minutes later, Charlie was walking onto the balcony of room 504 on the top floor of the hotel. The small patio was flanked by two pillars that rose from the larger balcony of the presidential suite below. The scalloped design of the pillars created a ladderlike projection that made it suitable for climbing. If he managed to scale down it, he could come straight into the suite and catch Julie’s guards by surprise.
That was the plan anyway.
Charlie holstered his gun and began descending the pillar. The concrete was slippery in the driving rain and sharp gusts of wind clawed at him. Hearing a cry below, he couldn’t help glancing down to see if he had been spotted. As it turned out, it was just the call of someone in the Square hailing a friend. But looking down, he felt his head spin and for a moment he froze.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and tried to think of Julie’s face. After a few seconds, he opened his eyes and began shimmying slowly down the pillar, putting his foot on top of the railing. A few more feet and he would be there. But as he lowered himself, he felt his holster snag on one of the scalloped protrusions from the pillar, tugging and twisting him.
He felt something dislodge from his hip and looked over the edge just in time to see his pistol wheeling toward the ground below and smashing on the flagstones.
He’d lost his gun.
Julie sat on the couch by the piano, her breath rapid and her hands trembling as she listened for a radio update about the gunfire. The rain was pounding hard outside and a bank of televisions on the other side of the suite played international news and finance shows, making it hard to hear the chaotic reports coming over Quinn’s radio. She could tell that Byko’s guards were still off balance, still searching for the men who’d attacked them from the roof.
It must be MI6. Or the CIA. Or American Special Forces. They’d located Byko somehow and they were coming for him. Finally. She only hoped that if they came in here guns blazing, they’d take some care not to kill her in the cross fire. She looked around the room, searching for a place to dive for cover if and when they came crashing through the door.
Quinn signed off on the radio and sat down about ten feet away, pistol in his lap, arrogantly paring an apple with a small curved knife. The knife looked wickedly sharp and he seemed to delight in the thinness of the slices he was making.
“So they’re coming,” she said.
He looked at her with amusement.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
Suddenly, there was a crackle on Quinn’s radio and a Russian voice.
“Eto tuzh,” the voice said. “On odnoy.”
Her heart skipped a beat. Had she heard that correctly?
“It’s the husband. And he’s alone.” That was how she translated it.
The husband? Charlie?
Her heart was racing. But Byko had said . . . had he lied to her? Just to torment her? Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Why had she assumed he was telling her the truth?
Another crackle from the radio. “Markov’s shot. Nanzer’s dead.”
And Charlie had killed them? She knew that Charlie had grown up around guns, that his father was a hunter, his uncle a cop, that he had an aggressive, competitive side. But this? Gunning down trained mercenaries? For a moment, she dismissed the idea, certain that she had misheard them. But if she had heard correctly, who else could they have meant when they said, “the husband”?
She watched Quinn closely, trying to read him. “No,” he said in Russian. “Byko doesn’t need to know about any of this.”
He put down his walkie-talkie and looked at her. “He really does have a soft spot. For both of you.”
She looked at him impassively, seeing him perhaps for the first time as a fellow human being. “How can you do this? How can you be a part of this?”
He smiled thinly. “I wonder if Charlie really thinks he’s going to be able to get past all of my guards. I have to confess, it would offer me a certain amount of closure if he did find his way here. I regretted not finishing him off in Los Angeles and now here he is causing all kinds of trouble.”
Quinn pared off a slice of apple and crunched it in his mouth.
Suddenly, Julie saw motion behind Quinn. Something outside, something moving on the other side of the French doors. Not something. Someone.
A rain-drenched man in a baseball cap.
Standing there in the downpour, Charlie could scarcely believe it. There was Julie. No more than twenty yards away, the only thing standing between them . . . John Quinn.
His eyes found their way to hers and in that brief instant something electric passed between them. Something primitive and essential. An agreement that they would survive this. An agreement that somehow, some way, they would find a way out of this.
A radio crackled and Quinn picked it up.
“There’s someone on the balcony,” the voice said.
Charlie flattened himself against the wall just to the right of the French doors. It was a blind spot where Quinn couldn’t see him.
“What are you talking about?” Quinn barked into the radio. He was holding the knife and the apple and the radio, looking like he needed a third hand.
“We’re at the front door. We saw a gun fall from up near the—I think there’s
somebody up there.”
“Up where?” Quinn shouted as he moved toward the balcony.
Julie had to do something to distract him.
But Quinn was a quick man. And the instant he saw Julie bolting away, he grabbed her ponytail and yanked her ferociously to the floor.
As Charlie smashed through the door, the world seemed to slow down. He was a good five strides from Quinn and he threw himself across the room as hard as he’d ever run, aiming his right shoulder at a spot in the middle of the man’s back.
Quinn, hearing the sound of the door shattering, whirled to meet him, a gun appearing—seemingly from out of nowhere—in his hand.
SLAM!
They smashed into the piano with a thunder of jangling bass notes then slammed to the floor, Quinn’s gun slipping from his grasp and disappearing under a cabinet.
Finding himself on top of Quinn, Charlie pounded him in the side of the head.
Not bothering to deflect the blows, Quinn wrapped his arms around Charlie, bucked his hips and threw Charlie onto his back. Pressing Charlie to the floor, Quinn methodically hammered away at him, grunting in satisfaction as Charlie tried to cover his face with his arms. When he tired of punching Charlie’s face and arms, he hammered on his ribs. Then, as Charlie dropped his elbows to protect his ribs, Quinn pounded away at Charlie’s head again. Charlie tried to grab Quinn or throw him off, but he simply couldn’t break through the barrage of expert punches.
As yet another blow sneaked past his guard and clipped him on the temple, Charlie’s vision dimmed. He was still conscious, but this couldn’t go on much longer.
Julie lay stunned on the floor. In the back of her mind she recalled someone drawing a gun. There had been a loud noise and now there was a lot of grunting and cursing coming from the other side of the room. But her mind felt blank and empty and cold, as though she were a spectator inside an empty, echoing ice rink.
What was happening here? The noise on the other side of the room seemed disconnected from the cottony emptiness of her mind. She lay on the hard floor and stared at the water stain on the ceiling above her. It was a brown stain, darker at the margins than in the center, and vaguely resembled a cartoon character whose name she couldn’t quite bring to mind.
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