Silver (22 page)

He moved out along the metal gantry. Two more men came out to join the others at the packing crates. They were big guys. One had a Heckler & Koch MP5 slung casually over his shoulder. Frost watched the way the man moved. There was an easy confidence about his posture as he sank down beside the others. He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit up. Frost waited and watched. He tried to think through the numbers. If Annie had seen eight guards, the odds were they were running two shifts, four and four. He didn’t recognize any of them as the night watchman, which meant there was at least one more out there whose whereabouts was unaccounted for.

There was no way he could take them all at once. He was going to have to pick them off one at a time like the ten green bottles accidently falling.
Not so accidentally
, he amended silently. These would have bullet holes in the back of their heads. That made falling the only natural thing to do.

The MP5 guy stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette under his boot.

It would be easy to move along the gantry and squeeze off two quick shots, taking out a couple of the guards, then make his way down to the ground. They wouldn’t know what had hit them, and in the panic that followed he’d have time to clear up the loose ends. What he didn’t know was when they changed watches, when the relief would arrive, how many of them there actually were in the old warehouse, and if the sound of the gunshots would carry to the watchman outside. These were variables he couldn’t control. Adding more guns to the mix meant more room for things to go wrong. The situation became harder to control. All he needed was for one of the kidnappers to go through to the room they were using as a cell and start shooting.

His instinct was to dictate the scenario.

That meant striking hard, fast and, if possible, remaining unseen.

He crept along the gantry, conscious that the slightest movement could catch a kidnapper’s eye at any time. He kept as close to the wall as possible. It took him a full minute to get into position. Frost crouched down. He had a perfect view of the killing ground beneath him. The Browning felt heavy in his hand, hungry. He’d carried the gun for what felt like all of his adult life. He had a parasitical relationship with the thing. It had kept him alive more than once, but sometimes it felt as though it thirsted for blood. This was one of those times. He breathed deeply, forcing the rise and fall of his lungs to stay steady.

Frost raised the Browning, drawing a bead on the man with the MP5. The kidnapper turned away from him, as though challenging him to put the bullet in the back of his head. Frost didn’t care about cowardice or seeing the whites of his victim’s eyes. That was Hollywood bullshit. A dead goon was a dead goon. It didn’t matter how he got there. He wouldn’t score points in goon heaven for taking the bullet face first. Honor was for the Samurai. It had no place in saving the lives of these women and children.

He kept the gun steady, breathing in, breathing out. He wanted to time the shots with the exhale for accuracy.

Beneath him, the kidnapper threw up his arms and spun on his heel. The MP5 banged off his hip. He looked up, and seemed for a heartbeat to be looking straight at Frost. Frost squeezed down on the trigger, slowly increasing the pressure until it was a hair from firing.

And stopped himself.

At the last moment the gunman looked away, barking something at his compatriots. Frost expected an explosion of gunfire. It never came. Their voices carried, loud in the huge space of the empty warehouse. It took Frost a few seconds to realize what had them so agitated—they were waiting for instructions. They were arguing about whether they should go in there and kill the hostages. Their contact hadn’t called in and they were getting fractious. The joker with the MP5 seemed to be the one with the itchiest trigger finger.

Frost put him out of his misery.

The back of the man’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brains.

Frost squeezed off a second shot, taking one of the men sitting on the crates high in the forehead. His body jerked back, a crack opening above his right eyebrow as his eyes widened in shock. It was a comical expression caught between surprise and fear, not the kind of look you’d want to carry into the afterlife. The dead man slumped sideways, falling from his perch on the crate. His leg kicked out as he fell and twitched uncontrollably for a full thirty seconds before the last vestiges of life convulsed out of his body.

Frost didn’t wait for that to happen.

While the other two reacted, diving for cover from this unseen threat, he made a run for the stairw His boots clattered loudly off the metal gantry, his footsteps echoing through the confines of the warehouse. The report of a gunshot cracked. He neither knew nor cared how close the shot came. The bullet didn’t hit him. That was all that mattered. Another shot sounded. Frost threw himself forward, hitting the gantry hard and rolling on his right shoulder. This time he saw the puff of concrete dust as the bullet buried itself into the wall six inches from his head. He came up running.

The staccato cackle of machine-gun fire tore through the warehouse. Bullet wounds strafed the wall, ripping through the brickwork. Frost half-stumbled half-ran across the last few yards of the gantry to the stairwell. He felt the wind from the rush of bullets against his face and the sharp sting as one nicked his cheek.

He ignored the sudden flare of pain and dropped to his knees.

A second burst of gunfire ricocheted off the metal gantry, spitting sparks. Frost pulled away from them, slamming into the wall. He pushed away from it, throwing himself through the mouth of the stairwell. He was breathing hard. He was shaking as the adrenalin pounded through his system. Shouts chased where the bullets couldn’t follow. He realized the stupidity of what he’d just done as he charged around the first ninety-degree turn of the descent only to hear shouts from down below chasing up the stairs to meet him. He couldn’t exactly run back up the stairs, and there was only one place the stairs were going to emerge. He needed to mix things up.

They would be expecting him to come down shooting. In their place he would have placed shooters either side of the stairwell, covering left and right, with a good view all the way up to the first turn. There was no way he’d get down the last ten steps without being cut down in a hail of machine-gun fire, so there was no way he was going to go down those last ten steps.

As he reached the first-floor landing he stopped running. He leaned out, looking down through the mesh grill of the lowest gantry, then up at the glass ceiling. Each of the huge plate glass panels was more than twenty feet across by twice that long and slotted together with iron girders. He squeezed off three shots inside a second, each aimed at the weak point in the center of each sheet of glass. For a split second he didn’t think it was going to work, then the strain pulled the glass apart. The glass around each bullet hole spiderwebbed and splintered, each crack running deep. Then the first shard fell, and suddenly the hole it left undermined the fragile balance of the entire twenty-by-thirty sheet. And following a crack like brittle thunder a lethal shower of glass rained down. Amplified by the confines of the warehouse walls, the noise was incredible.

Frost didn’t wait to see what happened. Blowing out the glass would buy him a few seconds at best while the kidnappers took cover and shielded their faces. He charged down the final flight of stairs. One of the kidnappers lay sprawled out at the mouth of the stairwell, jagged splinters of glass buried in his chest and neck. A viscous black pool of blood spread on the concrete like some kind of mocking halo around his head. He appeared to be very dead. Frost didn’t take any chances. He put a slug in the middle of the man’s face and walked out onto the central floor of the warehouse, glass crunching under his feet.

He couldn’t see the final gunman.

He felt out the cut in his cheek. It wasn’t deep, but it was bleeding freely. He’d been lucky.

He scanned the warehouse quickly, looking for any sign of movement, any out of place shadow. Something that would give the last man away. A section of the warehouse floor was given over to forty- and smaller twenty-foot metal shipping containers. They offered plenty of places to hide. It wasn’t an exact science, but nothing in the spread of glass across the concrete floor suggested anyone had run across it so he turned his back on the containers. If he could take the last guy alive, great. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t shed any tears. Frost licked his lips. He could taste his own blood on his tongue.

He heard a woman’s scream and realized the last gunman had gone for the hostages. He didn’t stop, he didn’t think, he ran. He wasn’t about to lose anyone—not now, not when he was this close.

The gunman stood in the doorway. “You!” he yelled, waving the muzzle of his machine gun around threateningly. “Here!”

Over his shoulder Frost could see the terrified face of the woman he had spoken to through the window. She stumbled toward the man, eyes wide with fear.

The man grabbed her and pulled her close, then started to turn. He was trying to use Annie as a human shield.

“Let her go,” Frost said, keeping his voice calm and reasonable.

The kidnapper shook his head wildly. His eyes bulged, filled to bursting with the blood pumping too fast through his body, driven by his racing heart. His fear was palpable. He started to bring the snub-nose of the MP5 up toward the side of the woman’s head. Frost took a step toward him, and another, even as the man shook his head. He didn’t look like evil incarnate. He looked like an everyday Joe. Unremarkable. Unmemorable.

“It doesn’t have to end like this,” Frost said.

Less than ten feet separated them. He could smell the man’s sweat. It was rancid, like he hadn’t washed in days. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there were no replacement guards. Maybe he and his dead friends had been the only ones involved after all. He stank every bit as badly as the hostages he had kept penned up in that tiny room for a week.

“Back! Stay back!” His voice broke on the last syllable.

Frost ignored him, taking another step toward him. Nine feet.

“I’m serious! Get back!”

Frost took another step. He made no pretense of offering peace.

“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill them all!”

“Then I’ll kill you,” Frost said, quite matter-of-factly.

Seven steps.

“Truth is, it doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to kill you. You know that, don’t you?”

Six steps.

“I’m going to kill you for what you did to her son,” he nodded toward Annie. “I’m going to kill you for what you did to their fathers and their husbands. I’m going to kill you because you deserve to die. Make it easy for me, go on,” Frost urged. “Make a move. Pull the trigger.”

Frost raised the Browning. The muzzle rested less than five feet from the center of the man’s face. The madness of fanaticism blazed in his eyes.

“I’m not going to miss from here. And no matter how quick you are with that thing”—Frost’s eyes drifted toward the MP5—“I promise you, I am faster with this.”

He expected the man to beg for his life.

He was disappointed when he didn’t. The man stared at him belligerently.

“Tell me who’s giving the orders here,” Frost said.

“Go to hell!” the man snapped. He shook his head. He was wired. Every muscle trembled beneath his grimy skin.

“You’re not the man here,” Frost said. There were three steps between them now. He could taste the man’s halitosis and see every pore opening as the sweat came. “You’re the muscle. You’re a goon. You didn’t plan this. Who do you answer to? Who’s your boss?”

“Do you think I will tell you?” the man sneered. “Are you really so stupid?” He shook his head.

Without breaking eye contact Ronan Frost lashed out with his left hand, grabbing a fistful of the man’s greasy hair and pulling down hard. The move dragged him off balance. Frost pressed the gun into the center of his forehead. “Last chance. Talk.”

“I will
never
betray my people.”