Court leaned close to Yasmin. “I hope you know the alarm code.”
“Of course. They changed it when Bianca disappeared.” She told it to Court. He recognized that disarming the system would, no doubt, alert anyone in the house near a keypad, but there was no other way out.
He reached up to deactivate the alarm, but then he stopped and turned to the bathroom.
He had an idea.
First he gave Yasmin the backpack, and she struggled to put it on and handle the baby at the same time. Jamal lifted his head and looked around a little, and he gave off a soft cry. Court left the two of them at the glass door and went into the bathroom, where he scooped the dead man in the Desert Hawks uniform out of the bathtub and hefted him into a fireman’s carry.
When he returned to the bedroom Yasmin gasped audibly, and Court shushed her. She looked in shock at the man slumped on the stranger’s shoulder.
Court had decided that if he could get out of here with the body undetected it might look, for a short time, anyhow, like this guard had been involved in the kidnapping of Jamal. Anything that would buy him some time as he left the city would increase his chances of success in getting to the Jordanian border.
Court went back to the keypad, struggling to carry the man, but he did stop to whisper at Yasmin. “It’s okay. He’s just asleep.”
It was a lie, but she was stressed, and now the baby was almost fully awake in her hands. He’d do anything he could to keep his two new cohorts from freaking out.
He looked out onto the back patio of the home and searched for the patrolling guard’s flashlight. He didn’t see it, which meant the guard carrying it would be in the front of the property now, or else making his way on one of the walkways on either side, out of Court’s vision. This was good as far as getting out of the building, but since he needed to get the girl, the baby, and the body in the car in the front drive, he hoped like hell the guard would be strolling around back to the west just as they moved around the house to the east.
But he didn’t think for a second he’d get that lucky.
He took a step back from the door and drew his SIG pistol from its holster on his hip. He gave Yasmin the car keys and told her to deactivate the home alarm, and then to be ready to move fast on his heels. When they got to the Range Rover she was to use the keyless entry so Court could dump the body . . . he corrected himself, the sleeping guard, in the back. Then Yasmin was to get in the backseat with the baby, crawl down to the floorboard, and cover herself and the child with the backpack.
He made her repeat everything, and then the baby started to cry.
“What the hell is wrong with it?” Court asked in an angry whisper.
“It? He’s hungry.”
“For God’s sake, not now. We’ve got to go.”
She turned and deactivated the alarm, then opened the sliding glass door, and Court shot out, moving as fast as he possibly could while holding a 170-pound dead man on his back.
Past the patio furniture, a right turn into a small arched passage that led to the northern side of the property, then another right turn towards the front and the driveway there. Court swept his pistol left and right, looking for any threats ahead as they walked along a lighted footpath.
He had no idea where the guard with the flashlight was, but he knew he needed to be certain he saw the man’s light before the man’s light saw him.
They turned around the northeastern corner, and the silver SUV was right there in the drive, just ten yards away. The baby began to squeal just as Yasmin popped the tailgate on the vehicle, and as Court moved around the back to dump the body inside, he saw the flashlight’s beam across the front driveway sweeping towards the noise there.
Court heaved the body off his shoulder and down into the back of the Range Rover, spun towards the light to his left, and fired off four rounds.
The flashlight spun in the air and fell onto a narrow strip of grass between the walkway to the front door and the driveway. Behind it a body lay still on the path.
Court swung his pistol towards the roof now, aimed at the area where the man had been sitting, and saw he did not have a line of sight from this angle. Just as he was about to head for the driver’s-side door of the silver Range Rover, a man stood up with a rifle, almost directly in the sights of Court’s pistol. Court fired a single round, hitting the man high on the top of his head above his left eye and knocking him back and out of view.
Court climbed behind the wheel, fired up the engine, and slammed the SUV in reverse. He spun around to make sure Yasmin was in the back, and she was, but with the shooting and her panic she’d neglected to close the door behind her.
He smashed through the gate at the end of the drive and reversed into the street.
Men began pouring out through the front door of Bianca’s villa now, running towards the Range Rover and shouting, but Court ignored them, hoping like hell these guys knew better than to start slinging lead at a car carrying the son of their president.
The crack of a pistol told him he’d neglected to consider that these guys just might be unaware the kid had been kidnapped at all. All they were sure of at the moment was that someone was trying to steal Bianca’s car.
Shit.
More pistols snapped off and glass shattered behind Court; he threw the transmission into drive and floored the accelerator.
“Stay down!”
CHAPTER 48
The gun battle inside the farmhouse southwest of Paris turned against the Syrian expat rebels and in favor of the Syrian government commandos the moment Malik and his remaining men linked up with the squad that had assaulted from the front of the building. Malik had left one of his team in the kitchen to cover the stairs to the wine cellar for the purpose of trapping Bianca Medina down in a hole, while he and his unified team fought their way through the ground floor and then up the stairs, where three of the six remaining Syrian guard force members had set up a hasty block. After being bogged down there for a couple of minutes, one of Malik’s commandos threw a pair of grenades over the blockage, killing the surviving Syrians, and then the team raced up the stairs on their hunt to find and kill all the remaining FSEU gunmen, one by one.
And as the commandos working for Ahmed Azzam cleared the big farmhouse, Sebastian Drexler waited in the kitchen with Voland’s pistol in his hand, just feet away from the lone paramilitary left guarding the stairwell. Drexler listened to the broadcasts over the radio announcing the positions of Malik and the rest of the team, and he fantasized about shooting this one GIS man in the back of the head, strolling down the stairs, and dispatching Medina, but he saw no way to do this without running the risk of Malik finding out about it. Further, he didn’t know what he would encounter once he got downstairs, and he assumed Medina would be protected. He needed Malik’s men just to get to the girl, and there was no way he could do it without them.
No . . . Medina was safe from Drexler, at least for now.
After five minutes, Malik announced a cease-fire over the radio, proclaiming the two main levels of the property clear. He’d lost three of the ten commandos who had raided the home, and three more were walking wounded, but these men he positioned in upstairs windows to keep an eye out for police.
Then all his attention turned to his preparations to assault the wine cellar. As Drexler watched, Malik stacked his team up by the door in the kitchen that led down to the lower level. The breach man opened the door, then peered around the corner, shining the light on his P90 submachine gun down the darkened stairs.
Drexler called softly over to Malik. “Have you encountered a middle-aged woman with red hair?”
Malik shook his head but kept his eyes on the stairwell as the first man prepared to descend.