The Pandora Key (16 page)

“Go upstairs. Get that .45 out of the sink, and bring it down here.”

“It doesn’t have any bullets,” she hissed. “You have them.”

I thought about it. If something happened to me, it wouldn’t be fair to leave her with an empty revolver. I dug the cartridges out of my pocket and put them into her hand. “Load it upstairs, and bring it down. Go toward the front. I’ll go to the back. Shoot anyone you see. If you get in trouble, go to…”

“The office,” she said. “It has a door that locks and windows.” She was scared but still thinking. That was good. “Who are they?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Go
now
, Rachel.”

Good question. Who were these people? They had to be Russians. What had Bo said about Drazen? He had former KGB…Soviet Army…Russian police. Had Drazen lost patience this quickly? Maybe he had found out about Rachel. Maybe he had found out she killed Vladi. Maybe he had just decided to wipe us all out, and maybe I should stop thinking so much, because I was getting shaky.

I had to talk myself through it, to slow everything down. I had a flashlight. This was why I carried it. I held it to the side, away from my body, but didn’t turn it on. With my shoulder to the wall, I felt my way toward the kitchen. I didn’t know the layout of the house, but I knew the back better than the front. I moved the way I had been trained—both arms up, one shoulder back, my gun hand resting in the other, both thumbs pointed down the barrel. Like holding a golf club with a trigger, one of my instructors had said. What my instructor could not have explained, and what I could never have experienced in a thousand simulations, was the roar of adrenaline that practically had me levitating.

My whole body was like one big sensory receptor. I felt the darkness against my skin. When the latch on the back door began to rattle, the sound came into my body through every pore. I started to back up, but it was too late. The door opened, someone stepped through it, and my entire world telescoped down to the assault rifle in his hands. He saw me and raised the rifle to shoot. I held the light out, pointed it at the intruder, and flashed it on. The high-intensity beam hit his face. He flinched but still fired…and missed. I didn’t. I put two rounds into his chest. He yelled and fell back. The second man came in firing right behind him. I ducked, killed the flashlight, and hauled ass the other way. Red beams from their weapons wheeled around the dark hallway, and I knew I was in someone’s line of fire, and I knew I had to get out, so I fell through the next doorway I found. I landed on the floor inside. The door slammed shut right behind me. I used my flashlight and found Rachel, which meant I had found my way to the office. She threw her arm over her eyes. “Get that out of my face.” The .45 was in her other hand.

“How many did you see?” I asked her.

“I just heard shooting and came in here.”

There were boots on the floor outside the door, more than one pair. If the first guy hadn’t gone down, it was because they had on body armor. I had definitely hit him twice in the chest. A scarier possibility was that there were more than the two I’d seen.

Then came the unmistakable
cha-chink
of someone chambering a round in a pump-action shotgun. I grabbed Rachel, pulled her behind the desk, and covered my ears against the mighty roar of the blast. Another
cha-chink.
They were blowing the hinges and would follow that by blowing out the dead bolt, and then there would be nothing standing between them and us.

Somewhere it had registered that they were wearing night-vision goggles, which explained why the first guy had reacted as he had to the high-intensity beam. I reached for Rachel’s hand and put the flashlight in it.

“When they come through the door, flash this at them, but move it around, like this.” I showed her. Keep it away from your head, because they’ll shoot at it.” Her hand was shaking. “It’ll be all right. We’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

I left her there and scrambled across the floor. There wasn’t any better cover than the furniture, so I crouched behind the couch. When the third shot went off, I felt the reverb in my chest. The door crashed in. The red beams came first. I got flat on my belly, aimed for knees and feet, just in case they did have armor on, and fired. One of them went down. I fired at his head until he stopped moving. I popped the clip—I knew I was out—and reached into my pocket for the second one. The shotgun roared again, and a substantial chunk of the back of the couch blew out over my head. Rachel screamed. When I looked up for her, a loud crack sounded. My head snapped back. A stingingly bright light erupted behind my eyes, and I fell backward. The light ruptured, and the pain came with the darkness. I covered my face with my hands and rolled over onto my stomach, wondering in some detached part of myself if I’d been shot through the head.

When I opened my eyes, a figure dressed all in black hovered over me. He wore a black mask and all the gear. He flashed a light in my face, then at a picture in his hand. I was apparently not the one he was looking for, because he took a step back and started to raise his assault rifle. Before he could get his shot off, his body began to convulse. He tried to turn around, but the convulsions began again. When he started to go down, I rolled out of the way. He fell next to me like a redwood.

I felt around for the Glock and found it behind me, but I didn’t need it. Rachel jumped down from the desk and leaned over her prey. I heard a buzz, like a mosquito zapper, and he seized again. She was holding a Taser against his neck. She’d Tasered him.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on. Get up.”

I was wobbly, but I wanted to live. We stepped over the body in the doorway, the one I had shot. On the way by, I reached down for his shotgun. It was a pistol-grip Mossberg. There were a bunch of shells in a pouch Velcroed to his belt. I grabbed it, too.

Out in the hall, I lurched instinctively toward the basement, but Rachel dragged me in the opposite direction to another doorway that led to the garage. When she pulled the door open, I was staring at a monster, a huge black Humvee. Either she had planned for a quick exit, or someone didn’t like backing the thing out of the garage, because it was facing out. She circled around to the driver’s side. The passenger-side door was so close to the wall on my side I could have practically climbed in from inside the house. She started the engine and then must have stepped down on the accelerator by accident. The engine roared in that dark, close space.

“I’m putting up the door. Ready?”

“Wait until I get this thing loaded,” I said, struggling with the Mossberg. “There might be more of them.” My fingers were shaking so badly I kept dropping the big cartridges on the floor in front of me.

“Hurry up!”

It was a nine-shot. I got six in and pumped one into the chamber. Then I powered down the window and braced the barrel on the door ledge, facing forward.

“Go.”

She punched the opener. The door started to lift immediately, and an overhead light snapped on. She put both hands on the wheel and leaned forward. She could barely see over the dashboard, but she had the focus of a pointer ready to go get her bird.

We both watched as the door came up. My forehead was bleeding. I kept wiping the blood out of my eyes. We both had our necks bowed, looking for feet or legs to appear beneath that slowly rising curtain. The Humvee made a lot of noise in that cramped space, and the door was not quiet, either, which was probably why we didn’t hear the man coming through the side door from the house until he was right there.

I tried to swivel the shotgun around, but he was too close. He grabbed the barrel and pushed it straight up with one hand. With the other, he stuck a semiautomatic into the car. I let go of my weapon and went for his. He got a couple of rounds off just as I slammed his arm against the dashboard. The cabin filled with the smoke and the smell and the sound. Rachel was screaming something, and he was trying to pull his arm back. I was kicking at his arm with both feet and feeling around with one hand for the Taser. Out of the blue, his fingers slipped from the grip of the gun, and he started screaming. Rachel had powered up the window and pinned his arm to the ceiling.

“Drive!”
I yelled.
“Drive! Go!”

She hit the gas, and his masked head whipped around, because he could see what I had seen—that there was about three inches of clearance on his side between the Humvee and the side of the garage doorway. The machine roared out of the gate, and the jamb instantly peeled off our attacker. When he stopped and we kept going, his arm whipped past my head and then disappeared completely. Rachel skidded out into the street. She must have hit the remote again, because as we were pulling away, the garage door was coming down.

17

WHEN WE GOT BACK TO HARVEY’S, RACHEL NEARLY RAN me over going through the front door. I found her in the kitchen with Harvey, standing next to him with his face in her hands, staring soulfully into his eyes.

“Baby,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you. Are you all right?” Then she kissed his forehead and smiled as she wiped a tear from her eye. If it was a performance, it was a good one. It might also have been a posttrauma realignment of priorities. It was hard to tell with Rachel.

As for Harvey, the way he blushed in her presence made him look more alive than I had seen in ages. He reached up, took her hands in his, and kissed each one. Then he looked at me.

“Oh, my God. What happened?” The alarm on his face told me I must have been a mess.

“I’m all right.” I had a skull-pounding headache, but everything else seemed to be working. “Where’s Bo?”

“After he got your call, he brought more men over. He is showing them the back.”

“Rachel can tell you what happened. I’m going to get cleaned up, and then the three of us have to sit down and talk.” I left the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes.

Bo came upstairs almost immediately. I had washed the blood out of my eyes, found a clean shirt, and just retrieved the first-aid kit from under the sink in the bathroom loosely designated as mine.

“What happened?” he asked, focusing immediately on my most obvious injury, the contusion on my forehead.

“I think I got whacked in the head with the butt of an assault rifle.”

“Let me see.” When he looked behind the damp, bloody washcloth, he seemed concerned but not alarmed. It was the sort of thing that qualified as routine in Bo’s line of work. But his jaw tightened. Violence against women was another of his deeply entrenched rage buttons, and no matter how hard I tried to change his view, he considered me a woman first and a professional colleague second. He put down the toilet seat cover.

“Sit.”

I did, happy to let someone else be in charge. He worked quickly and expertly, cleaning and dressing the wound.

“Drazen’s got some technical operators,” I said. “These guys were pros.”

“How many?”

“Two for sure. Maybe three.” I didn’t know if the one we had scraped off the Humvee in the garage had been a third man or the Taser man. “They had all the gear. Masks and night-vision goggles and armor. All kinds of firepower. Bat belts. They were definitely Velcro guys.
Owwww.”

“Hold still.” He dabbed at the gash on my head, which had become the primary focus of all my nerve endings. “Voices?”

“I didn’t hear any. They weren’t talking, and there was too much other noise.”

He put the lid on the bottle of peroxide and found the trash can for the pile of bloody cotton balls that had accumulated from his ministering. “They were not Drazen’s men,” he said. “He knew nothing of what happened.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I spoke to him. He told me.”

“But they were looking for Rachel. I mean, I think they were. They were looking for someone, and they were ready to take me out, so it must have been her.” I started to stand up, but a wave of nausea put me right back down. “He must be lying to you, Bo.”

“He wants Roger Fratello. He wants you to find him. Why would he kill you?”

I looked into his face, trying to detect whether he believed what he was saying or whether he believed it because Drazen had told him to. All I saw was a lot of stress in his eyes and deep creases in his thick forehead.

“If they weren’t Drazen’s men, then who were those guys?”

“I don’t know. When my men got to the address you gave me, there were no bodies.”

“No bodies? It’s been, like, an hour. Are you sure they were at the right place?”

“As you said, technical operators. There were no shells or weapons or bodies. They cleaned up.”

I leaned back against the tank and thought about it. If it wasn’t Russians, there was only one other possibility. “Blackthorne.”

Bo had found a large adhesive bandage. He peeled off the back and centered it over the cut. “Who is Blackthorne?”

“It’s a what, not a who. A private military firm. Army for hire.”

“Yes, yes. We had many such groups in my country. That is how the Croats beat the Serbs.” He perked up at the memory. “Their militia was trained by one of your American companies.”

“Blackthorne had a car parked outside Rachel’s house. They’re all ex-military and intelligence. These guys must have been from Blackthorne.”

“What did they want?”

“Rachel.” This time when I got up, I managed to stay on my feet. “And she’s about to tell me why.”

Harvey and Rachel were still in the kitchen when we went downstairs. I settled in at the table with them with a big glass of cold water and a bunch of ibuprofen. Bo went off to make calls. He was still working his way off the Boston PD’s “person of interest” list. Looking across the table at the newly constituted couple, I was almost afraid to begin.

“Rachel, why is Blackthorne after you?”

“Who’s Blackthorne?”

“A private military firm.”

“Mercenaries?” She looked at Harvey. “French Foreign Legion? That kind of thing?”

“No,” Harvey said. “These are private firms that provide military services for profit.”

“They can do that?”