She shouted again, the same desperate call as before. An automatic rifle blasted a burst of gunfire into the house through the open doorway. It was almost deafening. Whoever it had come from was close, very close, firing blindly into the smoke hoping to catch her. At least she knew once and for all that these men weren’t going to be helping her.
Doing her best to ignore the ringing in her ears and the disorientation from the point-blank gunshots, she dashed out of the open front doorway. Three yards into her sprint, she saw the outline of a black-clad figure through the wispy smoke. She feinted left. He opened fire. As she swept past, she slashed at his arm with the knife. The man screamed and began to turn to follow her move. But it was already too late for him.
The Red Cobra spun in an arc and slashed the knife viciously across his torso, leaving a gaping wound over a foot long in his chest and down his belly. The man collapsed to the ground.
Panting heavy breaths, her mind now focused and alert, The Red Cobra stopped and looked around. The smoke dissipated. At the corner of the house, another man appeared. He lifted his rifle and pointed it at her. She was about to dive desperately for cover when...
A gunshot rang out.
A spray of blood, bone, and brain erupted from the side of the man’s head. His lifeless body fell down.
Logan stepped out from around the corner. He was now carrying a rifle. A handgun was sticking out from his jeans’ waistband.
‘How many?’ he asked, still a picture of calm. He walked up to her.
‘Two. You?’
‘Three. And Butcher radioed to say two more at their end.’
‘Leaves one,’ the Red Cobra said.
And as the words passed her lips, she saw him, hiding behind a tree directly behind Logan, just ten yards away. His finger was already pulling on his rifle’s trigger.
‘Down!’ she screamed as she bundled into Logan. She’d expected her momentum to send him flying but his heavy frame seemed to absorb her movement and the two of them fell to the ground clumsily in what felt like slow motion. Or maybe it was that the adrenaline coursing through her was giving her enhanced focus.
Either way, with bullets whizzing by them, the Red Cobra grabbed the handgun from Logan’s waist as they fell. She turned the barrel and fired two shots before she landed on top of Logan.
She heard the man cry out. She’d hit him. She didn’t know where, but she could hear him wailing. Before she had a chance to do anything, Logan brushed her off and got to his feet, then strode over to the man. Logan pulled up the rifle and put a bullet in the man’s head.
The Red Cobra was on her feet and brushing herself down as Logan marched back over.
‘Thank you,’ he said, without any feeling in his words.
‘You too,’ she said. ‘We did good.’
‘Yeah. Eventually. But we need to figure out how they tracked you.’
‘I think I know.’
‘What the hell were you thinking, pulling the gun on Butcher like that?’
‘I had to.’
‘For someone with your skills, you really are quite dumb.’
‘Fuck you, macho man.’
‘If you insist,’ Logan said with a mischievous smile.
CHAPTER 46
It was three a.m. when the Red Cobra awoke with a start. She wasn’t sure what had roused her so aggressively. She hadn’t been having a bad dream and the room was silent. Except for her own heavy breaths and the much slower breaths of the man laying next to her in the bed; Carl Logan.
She looked over at him, stared for a good while as she calmed her breathing. Then she got to her feet. She picked up the white hotel-branded robe from the floor and wrapped it around her naked body which was cold but damp with sweat. She moved over and sat in an armchair, facing the bed where Logan was still sleeping soundly.
Before leaving the house in the forests, they’d taken apart all the electronic items she had on her. They’d found bugging devices in both the camera and her phone. That worried her. Because she’d purchased both items when she was already in Berlin. Potanin had somehow managed to plant the bugs on her probably while she slept. He’d never trusted her from the start, had probably always planned to kill her, like Logan said.
After destroying all her electrical items, she and Logan had performed a thorough search of her clothing and her body for evidence of any other tracking equipment. There was none. Regardless, on leaving the house in the woods the two of them had headed straight to the nearest town where they’d purchased new clothes for her. She’d had to give up her leather jacket, but had spent a couple of hours once back in a hotel in central Berlin stitching a sheath for her hunting blade into a newly acquired one.
Following that, the Red Cobra and Logan had eaten room service, drank two bottles of wine and ended up in bed together. Again. This time he hadn’t tried to sneak out.
Instead, at three a.m., it was she who was awake with thoughts cascading through her brain.
She couldn’t take the suspense. She had to know. And with her laptop and phone gone, there was only one way she was going to find out.
She moved over to the bed and picked up Logan’s mobile phone. She opened the web browser. The connection was far slower on his phone than it would have been on her laptop but after five minutes of mostly staring at blank screens, she finally managed to open up her inbox on the chat portal she used to communicate with Potanin.
Sure enough, there was a message waiting for her.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. It wasn’t like Potanin would have ranted and raged within the coded message he sent. Nonetheless, she could feel his animosity as she read the threatening words on the screen.
The Red Cobra closed her eyes and gritted her teeth.
What the hell had she done? This wasn’t over. Not by a long stretch.
She deleted the message, closed the browser, then went into the phone’s settings and cleared the internet cache too. Then she placed the phone back down.
She’d been given a simple choice by Potanin, much like the choice Mackie had given her: live or die. Potanin was giving her another chance to take out the targets. And while there wasn’t a part of her that wanted to take the lifeline that Potanin was offering, she knew she had to.
Because it wasn’t just her life on the line anymore. Potanin had made that very clear.
The Red Cobra bent down and rummaged through Logan’s clothes, looking for the handgun she knew he had. She found it and lifted it up, turning it over in her hands. Then she pointed the barrel to Logan’s head. He didn’t stir, didn’t move at all, not even a twitch. She pushed the gun closer to him, until the end of the barrel was an inch from his closed eyelid.
‘I already took the bullets out,’ Logan said, eyes still closed, his body unmoving.
The Red Cobra felt a flood of anger – embarrassment too – rush through her. She dropped the gun and it clattered to the floor.
Logan opened his eyes and stared at her. ‘You can stay, or you can go. It’s up to you.’