53
MILA RAN. She’d fired four rounds into the machinists’ shop, with calculation. She wanted to confuse, to unsettle. She’d winged the blond in the arm and had forced Howell and his men to concentrate on her for a full minute, which hopefully had given Sam time to flee.
Then she’d retreated, running across the parking lane and around a corner. A CLOSED sign—Gesloten— hung in an office and she’d worked the lock with a kit in her pocket, ducking inside before she could be spotted. She slammed the door closed and hurried to the curtained office window to watch.
Five minutes later Howell and his two men emerged. No sign of the Chinese hacker. The big blond clutched his arm, his jacket sodden with blood. The other man stumbled, hit in the leg. Both men looked more pissed than hurt. Howell’s face wore blind rage.
The van pulled away. So. Howell was not treating a crime scene like a crime scene. Maybe he would call the Dutch police; but then there would have to be explanations as to how Company personnel had arrived at the warehouse and engaged in a gun battle. And although the industrial park looked neglected and empty, someone nearby might have heard the shots and summoned the police.
Ten seconds after the van roared off, she made her decision. Howell wasn’t waiting for the police, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t calling them, and they might arrive within minutes. She had very little time to scope out the building.
Mila slipped back inside the old machinists’ shop. The smell was of close-in gunfire, acrid; the sweet smell of tobacco.
She saw a spill of blood drops, heavy, near one of the lathes. The Chinese student had taken a bullet in the head. She glanced down at him, didn’t see breathing. The ID on him was still in place and she took that; anything that could delay the police investigation was to her advantage. She checked an abandoned office. Empty. She hurried through the entire office space, tense, her breath tight, expecting to see Sam’s dead body. But there was no sign of him.
Then she headed down a short hallway and found a shuttered steel door. Here. They had to be here.
Mila picked the lock with care, as quietly as she could. The mechanism eased and her hand went back to her gun. She took a deep, calming breath, leveled the weapon and kicked in the door. Screams greeted her. Eight women, half-naked, bruised, chained to the wall.
For a moment she faltered. A pain as sharp as a steel blade went through her chest, made her spine ache. She stared at the women and they stared back at her. Then a surge of indignant strength rose in her bones. Revenge was its marrow. Had Howell not realized these women were here? Or did he not care? Or was he calling the police anonymously to report their presence? It didn’t matter. She could not, would not, leave them.
Most of them kept their gaze low to the ground, but one, a redheaded teenager, glanced up at her.
Mila tried English. “It’s okay. It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
The red-haired girl spoke to her in Moldovan. “Who are you?”
Mila switched to Moldovan. The words tasted like a sweet she’d loved as a child. “You’ll be safe. I’m getting you out of here. The bad men have gone.”
“Who are you?” the redhead asked again.
“A friend. I want you to do exactly what I say, because we may not have much time. I’m going to get you to safety. And then home.”
“We have no money to get home,” one of the other women said. Her lips were purple with bruising.
“I know,” Mila said. “I will take care of you all.” She stepped back out in the hallway, knelt by Nic’s body. In his pocket she found a set of manacle keys. In his palm she saw Sam’s transmitter, stripped apart. She scooped it up from the dead man and tucked it in her pocket.
Her hands shook as she unlocked the women from their restraints. Her head flooded with forgotten sensations: the low rumble of the traffic on the boulevard, the odor of cheap pizza, the warmth of a gun in her hand, the breeze through the open windows of the warm Israeli night as she walked through the rooms of the damned, the man that she’d left alive roaring that she’d be killed a thousand times one day for what she’d done. She shoved the memories down.
A couple of the women started to moan and cry, in Moldovan, hardly believing that their horrific ordeal might be over.
She was thinking: they need shelter, doctors, documents. She was not thinking about Sam Capra. For the moment, he was on his own.