Commander-In-Chief (23 page)

He looked up at Ryan with resigned, fatalistic eyes.

Ryan climbed to his feet now, stuck his foot in the elevator to keep the doors from closing, switched his gun to his left hand, and aimed it at the door to his apartment, just ten feet away. Looking at the wounded man on the floor of the elevator car, he asked, “
Combien?
How many?”

The man replied in English with a heavy accent. “Eat shit and die, Ryan.”

Jack reached a foot out and dragged the pistol back out of the car, through the blood. He kicked it behind him in the hallway. He reached down and pulled the man’s earpiece and radio set out of his coveralls. Then he pressed the button for the ground floor.

The car closed and descended.

Ryan looked back at the other man on the floor. He was coming to, but slowly.

Jack stepped forward, sent a massive front kick into the man’s face, and dropped him back down and out. On top of this, Jack knew he’d broken the man’s nose and given him whiplash that would render him immobile for days, if not weeks.

Jack turned for the door to his apartment, and he fought every urge to forget his tradecraft and barrel through at top speed. He knew Ysabel was in there, and he seriously doubted she was alone.

He felt the latch and realized the door was unlocked, so he went flat on the floor, lying on his left shoulder. He switched his pistol to his left hand, used his right to unlatch the door above him, then quickly switched the gun back again to his dominant hand.
With a quick breath to ready himself, he shoved the door open with his left hand, holding it in place so it didn’t bounce back on him.

His living room was in front of him. He saw no one there, but a floor lamp lay across the ground and the glass coffee table was shattered as if someone had fallen through it.

Jack rolled up to his knees but stayed as low as possible. He crept into the room, keeping his gun arm pivoting back and forth between the two exits in front of him. The kitchen was on the right, and the hall to the bedroom and bathroom was on his left.

He cleared the kitchen first, and what he saw here made him recoil in horror. Blood on the floor, smeared on the wall at knee height. Ysabel’s luggage lay open and strewn about the room. The room was empty, so he turned back out and headed for his bedroom.

His ears were tuned to hear any sound in the apartment, but it was deathly quiet. In the distance he detected some movement in the hallway, but quickly he heard the sounds of neighbors talking to one another, screaming at the sight of the unconscious man and the guns lying about. He knew he’d have civilians on him in moments, and police here shortly after that, but his only focus now was on getting Ysabel away from any danger.

Jack cleared the bathroom with his pistol, then lowered his body and pivoted into the bedroom.

He saw her hair first, down on the floor and matted on the far side of the king-sized bed. Behind it, a bloody handprint streaked the wall next to an open window.

“Oh,
God
, no,” he whispered.

Y
sabel?” He retained the presence of mind to keep his gun on the blind corner, and he moved carefully over toward the large walk-in closet, training his weapon inside to make sure it was empty.

He passed over Ysabel’s body without allowing himself to focus on it yet as he moved to the window. He looked outside at a fire escape, trained the CZ pistol up toward the roof and then down to the street.

Three men ran across the little cobblestoned square in front of his apartment building and jumped into the back of the panel truck he saw earlier, just as a pair of police cars rolled onto Place de Clairefontaine.

Ryan tossed the gun under the bed and then ran to Ysabel’s lifeless body, sliding across the polished hardwood floor on his knees for the last several feet. Cradling her limp head in his hands, he felt wetness in her hair. He knew it was blood; he didn’t have to look.

“Ysabel?”

He started to lean down to listen for a heartbeat, fearing the worst, but just as his ear rested on her chest she coughed, weakly.

Her eyes remained shut and her breathing remained shallow.

Jack shouted loud enough to be heard all over the floor of the building in both French and German.
“Aidez-moi! Hilf mir! Ambulance! Krankenwagen!”

Ryan shoved his hand into the side pocket of his blazer and breathed a prayer of thanks that he found what he was looking for.

John Clark had demanded of his team that they never went anywhere without their personal trauma kit, a tiny package of items designed by Clark and Chavez. Jack and Dom hated the things; while Clark touted them as being tiny, as far as the two rather fashionable men in their early thirties were concerned, they weren’t nearly small enough. Dom derisively referred to the PTK as his “diaper bag,” and Jack called it “Clark’s booboo pouch.”

After listening to the two younger members of his team bitch long enough, Chavez came up with the idea to have the kit items taken out of their pouch and put in plastic bags, which could then be vacuum-sealed, and this made them just larger than two decks of cards stacked on top of each other. They would just fit in the front pocket of a pair of pants now, and Jack and Dom stopped their complaining. It was still a hassle to carry a med kit twenty-four hours a day, even when they weren’t in the middle of a mission, but both men knew when to pick their battles, so they kept the packets on them at all times.

Now Ryan thanked God that he’d been forced into carrying the damn thing, and he tore the PTK open with his teeth and dumped the contents onto the floor next to Ysabel. He tossed the tourniquet to the side; she wasn’t hemorrhaging from an appendage, although she was bleeding badly from several head and neck wounds.

He used one of the pressure bandages on her forehead and another on a gash on her neck that looked like a deep puncture wound. While covering the bloody cut, he realized she’d come a half-inch from having her carotid artery severed by a knife’s blade.

He used gauze and electrical tape from the kit to stanch the bleeding on her upper-left arm and the bridge of her nose.

He knew the paramedics would likely just remove the majority of his bandaging and apply their own dressings, because they would want to evaluate the wounds. But Jack didn’t care. He had no idea how much blood Ysabel could lose between now and when they’d get here, so stopping the bleeding and keeping her stable were paramount.

With cuts and bruises as bad as he could see, he feared she might have many broken bones and even damage to her organs. He had no idea if she was bleeding internally. He’d done good work on the injuries he could see, but he had no idea if he’d done enough to save her life.

Her face was pale under the smeared blood and the gray and purple contusions.

After stabilizing her head, he moved her arms onto her lap. While doing so he noticed all the defensive wounds on her hands. There were cuts on her palms and fingers. In addition to this, her knuckles looked like she’d punched one of her attackers, and hard.

“Good girl,” he whispered, his voice cracking with emotion as he did so.

From behind he heard a man’s voice, speaking English. “Who are you?”

Jack spun around quickly, his right hand moving closer to the gun hidden under the bed.

A heavyset man in his early twenties stood in the doorway to the hall, shock on his face. His hands were empty.

Jack slipped his hand away from the pistol. “I live here. Who are
you
?”

“I am a neighbor.”

“Call an ambulance.”

“Four C has already called. The ambulance is coming.”

Jack had no idea who this guy was, but he needed the help right now. “Did you see who did this?”

“No. I only just arrived.”

Jack felt the man staring at him.

“You are husband? Her husband?”

“No.” He thought while he worked on her arm. “I am her friend. I just got here myself.”

The young man relaxed a little; he’d been scared by the possibility he’d stumbled onto some sort of a domestic fight, and the man who now treated the woman had just minutes ago beaten the woman. This made Jack confident the man had not been involved in the attack himself, although this guy was too portly to fit in with the three other members of the crew Jack had already encountered.

The neighbor asked, “Who did this?”

Jack shook his head while he frantically treated her. He had the presence of mind to answer the man carefully. He knew the police would be here soon, and they would take statements. What he said to this neighbor could mean the difference between the cops letting him leave Luxembourg or throwing him behind bars. “I don’t know. She comes from a political family back home. There had been some threats.”

The young man nodded again, and he asked no more questions.

Other neighbors entered soon after, and the police made it up to the fourth floor not long after that. They assured Jack the ambulance was on its way.

Ryan knew he needed to call Clark or Gerry and let them know
what had happened, but he had no idea if Ysabel was going to survive the next few minutes. There was no way he was going to make a phone call until she was stabilized. Instead, he just huddled over her, rubbed her hand and her forehead with a wet compress one of the neighbors brought, and kept talking to her, telling her she would be fine.

The police let him stay with her, only because they didn’t have a clue he’d just shot a man and severely injured two others in the building. As they tried to figure out what was going on, Jack hoped they didn’t look under the bed and find the pistol he’d slid there. To reduce the chance of this even more, as he knelt behind the police, he pushed his left foot back, slid it under the bed, and shoved the gun further out of sight of anyone who wasn’t specifically checking for something hidden there. They might find it eventually, but Jack was hoping he’d be long gone by then.

Ysabel’s eyes opened a little, and they focused on his face. He soothed her with his words, again told her she would be okay, although he had no idea what sort of internal injuries she might have suffered.

She said, “I’m sorry, Jack. There were too many.”

“Don’t be sorry. You did great. You’re going to be fine, just rest.”

But she wanted to talk. “The men . . .”

“The men? Yes? Do you know who they were? I couldn’t identify the accents.”

She just shook her head. “The one . . . the one in charge. The one who did this to me.”

“Yes?”

Ysabel’s voice cracked, and tears drained down the side of her face.

“Russian.”

Jack felt the life drain out of him.
Russian.
He felt certain this had happened to her because of him. Because of his safe little operation in Western Europe, the one with the opportunity to roam art galleries during the day and enjoy nice restaurants at night.

“God damn,”
Ryan muttered under his breath. Looking at Ysabel’s impossibly swollen face, the blood seeping through her bandages, her lip split and her eyes blackened, he knew this was all his fault.

Two paramedics pushed through the growing crowd in the apartment, then they all but knocked Ryan out of the way. He stood back against the wall by the bedside table.

They concentrated on stabilizing her neck, then they rolled her onto a backboard for transport.

Within three minutes of arriving in the apartment, the paramedics were yelling for the police to make a pathway through the dozen or so people standing around so they could get by and back down to their unit.

Jack stood to the side for most of this, but he helped clear out some space in the living room for Ysabel’s stretcher to pass.

Jack started to walk out the door behind the paramedics and the stretcher, but one of the policemen stopped him. He said, “We’ll take you to the hospital, but we have questions.”

“Ask me on the way.” Jack wanted to rush to be by Ysabel’s side, but he also wanted a few minutes to think about his story.

“One moment first. Do you have identification?”

Ryan handed over his actual passport, because he was not traveling undercover here. The police officer looked it over quickly, showing no recognition of the name. “What is the woman’s name?”

“Ysabel. Ysabel Kashani.”

“American, as well?”

“No, Iranian.”

The cop looked up at Ryan. After a moment he said, “This is your apartment?”

“I am renting it, just for a week or two. Did you find the men outside of the apartment?”

“The
men
? There was just one man. In the elevator.”

Shit,
thought Jack. The two less wounded goons managed to get out of the building before the police arrived. Still, at least they had picked up one of the men.

“How is he?”

“He’s dead. Did you shoot him?”

“
Me?
No, of course not. I was on the phone with Ysabel when she was attacked. I raced over here and found the men outside. Then I found her.” Jack could not have admitted shooting someone without getting detained for a long time. Even if he could convince them he’d taken a weapon from one of the attackers, he knew it would take longer to sort out than he wanted to spend as a guest of the Luxembourg police.

The police officer didn’t seem to buy his story. “There are cameras down in the lobby and in the elevators. One on each floor. We’ll see what happened.”

Jack nodded, then said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Two cops stood outside the bathroom while Jack stumbled in. They were obviously suspicious of him still, though not enough to search him.

In the bathroom he turned the water on, faked a few hacks, then he pulled out his phone and dialed a mobile number in Alexandria, Virginia. Jack held his breath, hoping the man who owned the phone would answer quickly.

To his relief, he heard a voice. “Gavin Biery.”

Ryan hacked loudly again, then whispered, “It’s Ryan. Listen
carefully. Five Place de Clairefontaine, I need the security cam footage of the last hour removed from the drive. You have five minutes, tops.”

“How many things can I do for you at one time, Ryan? Hack this art gallery, hack this lawyer, tail this aircraft, erase these cameras. You don’t think I have anything else going on?”

“I just killed a man. The police have me and they are about to watch the footage.”

The pause was short. “Holy shit! I’m on it, Ryan.” He hung up the phone.

Jack hung up as well, flushed the toilet, and left the bathroom.

There was a moment of confusion in the apartment while the police worked out who was going where and with whom, and men started to lock down the crime scene. Violent crime in Luxembourg was rare, rare enough that Jack saw the police weren’t defaulting to any real standard procedure. There was a lot of talking and even a little arguing, all of it in German. Jack took advantage of the moment to go into the kitchen and get a glass of water, and while he did so he saw Ysabel’s purse lying on the counter, its contents strewn all around it.

He ignored the contents and concentrated on the bag itself, began feeling around in the material quickly.

In ten seconds he found it, feeling a small, hard shape in the leather in a place where he could find no button or zipper. He pinched at the material for a moment more, then pulled out a one-inch-long pin with a small black head.

He knew what this was, and he knew how it got there.