70
YASMIN.
I didn’t have time to wait the three stooges out. The old pallets of beer were stacked in five long rectangles at one end of the dock space. Maybe forty feet between me and the external doors. I could hear at least two voices two pallets away. Like a run to make. Break it down into steps then commit each action as part of a more fluid movement.
My mind shifted to a gear it hadn’t been in since I tried to save Lucy in London. Overhead a bay of fluorescents loomed. I gunned the lights. The room plunged into semidarkness; the only light now came from the glow of the vat room.
Yasmin screamed again.
I studied the room with a traceur’s eye. Pallets to leap on, railing to jump, walls to bounce off. I could try to use parkour to outflank them. I wasn’t sure how steady the pallets were and usually I ran with hands free, not holding guns.
I saw movement to my left and I risked standing and firing a shot, then fell back to the floor. A babbling scream rose from the other side of the pallet.
I hurried down the passageway formed by the pallets. Suddenly glass crunched under my heels.
Gunfire exploded around me from three sides. In front, behind me, to my right.
Surrounded.
I retreated left, in the direction of the man I’d shot. I could hear feet scrabbling around, two closing behind me to cut off my retreat back to the vat room.
But I wasn’t retreating. They were only looking for me between the pallets. If I wasn’t where they expected, I could gain a momentary advantage.
I did a standing jump and yank onto the fifteen-foot-high pallets and ran along the edge. I saw movement to my right, another guy rounding a corner where I’d been crouching twenty seconds before, and I fired. Missed him. He fired at the same time I did and I felt the bullet tear up through my jacket and score along the flesh of my back. Then heat hit my shoulder, a sting that rose into agony.
Below my feet, bottles broke, the pallet coming apart at the top. The stack gave way. Beer flooded my shoes. I knew if I tumbled into the mess I’d be cut by the jagged glass and an easy mark.
I jumped to the roof of a forklift, looking down to see a surprised face hiding behind its bulk. I fired wildly and the surprised guy went down, bullets punching into his shoulders. I jumped to the next pallet, hit the wood and didn’t look back. The pain in my shoulder seared. A warm throb of blood coursed down my back. I was hurt.
I couldn’t be hurt. I couldn’t. I jumped off the stack and landed on concrete.
And one of the two had doubled back on his run. I landed three feet in front of him.
He raised an assault rifle but he didn’t fire. “Drop your weapons!” he screamed.
I dropped both the Glocks.
“On the floor!”
I went to my knees. My hand twisted behind me for the wakizashi.
“Hands where I can see them!”
My hand closed on the wakizashi’s handle. I turned the sword and it sliced through the thin leather belt I wore. Thank you, Piet, for being bored, for sharpening the sword while we waited in the rain outside the sweatshop for the Lings’ truck. If I’d pulled it free he would have seen it, but I made my right hand dangle. “I’m shot in the arm,” I said. “I can’t lift it.”
He took a single step toward me. “Who are you? Police?”
“Yeah, because the police come in one guy at a time,” I said. “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not police.”
I heard the crunch of glass behind me. My feet were in shadow; the only light coming from the vat room. Whoever was behind me would see the wakizashi any second.
“Who are you?” the first man yelled again.
Two more steps from behind me. The guy coming up behind me would see the blade. In three. Two. One…
I fell backward into the scattering of glass and rolled, my jacket protecting me from the floor full of sharp edges. The wakizashi swung through flesh down to bone on the leg of the guy behind me. He screamed, and the guy with the rifle froze in surprise. I yanked the sword free from its mooring of flesh and swung the wakizashi back, twisting to put the edge forward, and slashed through the thigh of the man before me. He bellowed and staggered back, bullets spraying into the floor as he fell. Seriously, are any of us prepared to be slashed with a sword? No. For an instant, the pain must have been so hot and fresh in the man’s mind that he forgot to shoot me.
That’s the key. You must ignore the pain.
I could hear someone else approaching. God, how many were there? I kicked both the men unconscious. I yanked the flash charge from my jacket, activated it, and tucked it under one man’s arm.
I hurried on the other side of the pallet, moving as quietly as I could, ignoring the pain.
C’mon, I thought. I heard footsteps. One set, closing fast, spraying a panicky round of fire down the passageway formed by the pallets. Bottles shattered and beer gushed.
I heard someone kneel on the glass-covered floor, murmur a name, and then the light and sound burst like a little bright warhead. A howl. I hurried around the corner, saw a man—but only one—writhing in the glass, blinded and deafened by the flash bomb. I picked up a beer bottle and smashed it on the back of his head and he went groggy. A second kick to the face left him cold; my shoulders hurt too much to try and punch.
A dozen. I’d taken out a dozen. I was barely on my feet. Still one. Still one more. Edward. I checked my Glocks. Empty. One of the men had a gun with a full clip and I took it.
I crept out of the space between the pallets. The glass from the beer bottles was like a signal; every movement producing an audible crunch under my feet, a terrible telegraphing of my position. I moved as carefully as I could. My ears rang from the concussive blast and I was bleeding freely. Everything hurt.
Lucy. The Bundle. Yasmin, the girl I’d been sent to save, the key to the man who had stolen my family and my life. Focus. Don’t give up now.
I heard nothing except the distant sobbing of the young woman.
She was valuable to Edward. Maybe the orders were to guard her at all costs.
Then I heard her voice rise into a scream. I could hear the echo coming from a hallway to the right.
Maybe Edward had gone after her, decided to make his stand close to his prize.