She’d pulled some poison trick. A kamikaze move. Ah, God.
All the times in his life that he had numbed himself to endure some atrocious thing had not prepared him for this. He was a helpless child again. Staring at the end of the world, lying on the bathroom floor.
Then, to his astonishment, her eyes fluttered open. They focused somewhere beyond him, and widened. She sucked in a bubbling breath.
“Watch out!” she cried.
He jerked to the side, and the bullet grazed his hip, plowing a deep furrow to join his other wounds. Novak grinned from his pool of blood on the floor, thin neck straining, and lifted his Walther PPK to try again.
Val emptied Henry’s Taurus into the old man and kept pulling the trigger compulsively even after the gun was empty.
He glanced wildly around the room. “Anyone else? Anyone?”
No one moved. No one spoke.
Val stumbled over to the dead man, the young one, who lay on his back with Val’s knife sticking out of his throat. He yanked it out and lunged toward Tamar.
He put his arm around her slender body as he reached up to saw at the rope. Just a few passes of the blade severed it, and her slight weight dropped into his arms. She was covered with tiny rivulets of blood. Small wounds, from the shards of flying glass.
He gathered her up, looking around for a place to lay her down that was not strewn with glass. There was none.
He dropped to his knees and cradled her.
Her eyes opened. Her gaze was still sharp. “Don’t…k-kiss me,” she croaked in a halting whisper. “I’m poisonous.”
Despair slammed through him. “Oh, fuck,” he said, his voice high and shaking. “You are killing me, Tamar.”
Her lips twitched. “Melodramatic,” she whispered. “Idiot.”
Their eyes met, full of pain and longing. She hitched in a shallow breath and said her daughter’s name with a whispering sigh. “Rachel,” she said. “András has her.”
Her eyes commanded him back into action.
“Yes,” he said thickly, smoothing back her sweat-stiffened hair. “I understand.” He pressed a kiss to her damp, icy forehead. “There’s glass everywhere,” he said, helpless. “I don’t know where to put you.”
“Fuck the glass,” she croaked. “Get…Rachel. Move your ass.”
He cleared a spot on the rug as best he could with his boot and laid her down gently. Then he forced his shaking legs to bear him over to the bloody carnage on the ground to scrounge for loaded weapons.
Rachel. The last thing that he could do for her.
Chapter
29
Connor stared out the windshield. His eyes burned like coals.
The atmosphere in the taxi had the tension of a bomb countdown.
There was nothing to say. It had already been said, repeated, hashed out, torn apart, attacked, picked to pieces. They were so on edge that anything anyone said annoyed the shit out of all the others, so they had collectively subsided into a gloomy, self-protective silence.
Connor sat in the front, clutching the monitor with the satellite map. Their driver sensed the weirdness, despite the language barrier, and kept casting nervous looks at him and the others, in the rearview mirror. Seth, Sean and Davy were crowded into the backseat, everyone red-eyed, grim, and tense from the strain of suppressing the thoughts of what might already have happened to Rachel, considering her ten-hour head start.
All they could do now was throw themselves at the location of the beacon in Rachel’s red coat and see what happened. Connor had called the FBI liaison in Budapest when they got to Hungary, and told him what was going on, just so that someone would be sure to follow up should the worst happen. They had been strictly forbidden to go anywhere near Novak.
What the fuck. To a man, not one of them had ever learned to do what they were told. And they were the only ones whose prime agenda was Rachel’s safety. They needed to be the first ones on the scene.
They were almost there, bumping over a narrow, ancient stone bridge over a narrow river and then down a long avenue next to a tall stone wall. All of them noted the cameras mounted at regular intervals along the top of it. The cab driver came to a stop at a big wrought iron gate. It was yawning wide open. Weird.
“We are arrive,” the driver ventured timidly.
As they watched, two men came sprinting out of the gate. They didn’t even look at the car, just ran, hell for leather, toward the bridge.
OK. Weirder.
The meter read 155 euros. Connor handed the guy two hundred-euro bills. They piled out and the cab peeled away, tires squealing. Connor didn’t blame him. It was very clearly a bad scene.
Then another guy came pounding out the gate. Davy grabbed him, slamming one of his thick forearms across the guy’s throat.
“What’s happening in there?” he demanded.
The guy gibbered in Hungarian. Davy gave him a shake and tried the same question in French, then in German. The guy just struggled and squawked, voice high. Finally, Davy flung him away in disgust.
“Get out of here,” he muttered.
The man stumbled, flailing, caught himself and ran.
“Rats leaving the ship,” Sean said. “Got a fix on Rachel?”
Connor peered at the handheld. “Got her. Let’s just go for it. They’re not manning the cameras now. The shit’s hit the fan. It’s every man for himself.”
They took off running, swift and silent, down the long, curving avenue of trees. No one challenged them; no one shot at them. A huge, decaying eighteenth-century palace came into view.
They veered around it to follow the signal, and found a long, low building that must once have been a stable. Getting closer. Forty meters. Thirty. The icon blipped on the screen, tantalizing them.
They burst into the building, peering around, guns at the ready.
No one was there, just a long row of covered parking slots. Fifteen meters, ten, eight. Dead silence.
The beacon was inside one of the cars. Connor’s heart pounded with dread. Five meters, four, three…there it was. A Mercedes coupe.
No one was inside it. They flashed their penlights in every direction. No one. The doors were locked.
They crowded around to the back of the vehicle, and stared at the trunk. The beacon was there. Connor tried it. Of course, it was locked.
He swallowed hard and pounded on it. “Rachel? Honey?”
No
