months earlier
He had to get out of there.
The elevator doors parted and Fred Gruber burst from the confined space. He found himself surrounded by the sounds of meat sizzling, knives striking cutting boards and people shouting at one another in French. He looked around and saw men and women dressed in white chef hats and stained aprons standing at cooking stations, cutting vegetables or cooking meat on large griddles. On any other day, the amateur chef would’ve considered this a gift from heaven, a chance to watch skilled cooks make five-star French cuisine.
This night he couldn’t have cared less.
He just wanted to stay alive.
At first he tried walking fast through the kitchen, hoping to pass through with a minimum of fuss. He had covered maybe ten paces when one of the chefs, a heavyset man with a handlebar mustache, spotted him. Without setting down his utensils, the guy turned toward Gruber.
“What are you doing?” the chef demanded in French. “You can’t come in here.”
Without breaking his pace, Gruber forced a smile on his face and closed the distance between them.
“Sorry,” Gruber, an American, replied in the same language. “I am lost.”
Gruber brushed past the man, who was offering to help him find his way, but Gruber tried to ignore the man. On the other side of the kitchen, he saw an exit door. He wanted to get through it, step into the warm Monaco evening and run like hell to his car.
He wore blue suit pants, black wingtips and a white broadcloth dress shirt. The tails of the shirt were pulled out of his waistband. His tie was where he’d left it, looped over the back of a mahogany chair. His Glock was stuffed into his waistband.
Before he could take another step, he felt a hand clamp heavily on his left shoulder. His stomach plummeted and he whirled. His right hand slipped up under his shirt, fingers curling around the pistol’s grip, while his other one slapped the man’s hand away. In a heartbeat the chef’s expression went from mildly irritated to surprise. Gruber took a step back from the guy, ready to order him to back off, when he heard the elevator ding followed by the whoosh of the opening doors.
Gruber yanked the Glock from his waistband and displayed it so the chef could see it. The guy’s face paled and he stepped back. Gruber wheeled and resumed his sprint for the door, shoving other members of the kitchen staff from his path. Judging by the screams, the slap of footsteps against the floor and the clatter of dishes breaking, pandemonium had broken out behind him. Though his pursuers likely were armed, he doubted they’d try shooting at him in this crowd or, for that matter, in this building. The hotel catered to the rich and powerful, which included police chiefs and military generals. The last thing the people chasing him wanted was official attention. They had been operating in the shadows for years. Gruber had no doubt they wanted to keep it that way.
That’s why they wanted to stop him. He’d spent a couple of weeks in Berlin, rooting around for information. What he’d found had knocked him on his ass. Enough so that he’d considered contacting his old cronies in Washington. He’d dismissed the idea outright. What he knew just seemed too fantastic. If he called his friends at the Bureau, they might not believe him. They might even assume he was bored in retirement and trying to drum up excitement and relive his glory days.
He wouldn’t have blamed them.
Then he’d come to Monaco, to put some final pieces together. Gruber knew their plans; he knew the players. He finally had some proof. Now all he needed was to share what he knew.
When Gruber reached the exit, he pushed down on the release bar, shoved the door open and ran outside, barely slowing at all. The night was warm, with a light breeze. But the stench of rotting food rising up from the garbage bins hung in the air. He’d put several yards between himself and the kitchen by the time he heard the door slam closed behind him. Arms and legs pumping hard, he tried to gather speed as he put some distance between himself and the building.
He hadn’t expected to end up in this situation, running for his life. A former FBI agent, he figured he’d left all the dangerous stuff behind when he had retired from the Bureau, got his PI license and started chasing wayward spouses for a daily fee plus expenses. Then he’d gotten a call from an old man offering incredible money. What did he have to do to earn it? The old man sat on a corporate board with another guy who as of late had been disappearing for days on end. Money had been disappearing from the company’s coffers, too. Could Gruber look into it? The old man was willing to pay a retainer, put him up in sweet hotels and make sure he ate like a damn king.
Hell, yeah, Gruber could look into it.
Idiot.
He’d be lucky if he lived to spend his retainer.
When he reached the sprawling parking lot at the back of the hotel, he heard footsteps pounding against the pavement behind him. Pumping his arms and legs harder, he darted between a pair of parked cars.
His first inclination was to turn and fire on his pursuers. A warning shot over their heads might make them back off. He dismissed the idea. If he was still a U.S. federal agent, he’d do it and hope he could avoid any legal problems. As a private detective he had no authority, including the authority to carry or discharge a pistol in a foreign city. He’d bought the gun from a contact here in Monaco. When he asked the guy whether the gun was hot, the man had just smiled, knocked fifty dollars off the price and told Gruber to stow the questions.
Gruber heard something slap against one of the cars. He glanced down and saw a spiderweb had formed on the rear window of the vehicle, followed a heartbeat later by second bullet sparking off the car’s roof and zipping into the darkness.
They had sound suppressors.
Gruber dropped to one knee an instant before a storm of bullets pounded into the cars on either side of him, drilling holes in the bodywork. Slugs pierced tires, flattening them, as other rounds lanced through the windows.
Jesus, if he didn’t fight back, they were going to kill him right here. He hadn’t expected this. But either he was dealing with true believers willing to go to jail for their cause or they had enough money to buy their way out of trouble.
From what Gruber knew, it was a little of both. He was dealing with fanatics and they had money.
Moving in a crouch, he backed away from the shooters, sticking as close as possible to the silver Mercedes to his right. The cars were parked nose-in, so the bullets were piercing the trunk lids, the rear quarter panels and the roofs.
When Gruber reached the Mercedes’ front bumper, he saw it was parked a couple of feet from the front bumper of another luxury sedan. Rounding the car’s front end, he sandwiched himself between the two vehicles and popped his head up in time to see one of his pursuers—a guy built like a pro wrestler with the long, bleached hair to match—closing in on the car. He had his pistol extended forward in a two-handed grip, and Gruber could see a wisp of smoke coming out of the sound suppressor.
The guy was so intent on looking at where he’d last seen Gruber that he failed to see the former federal agent from his new position. Resting both arms on the car’s hood, Gruber drew down on the man, exhaled and squeezed off a shot.
The Glock roared and the shooter jerked back, as though hit by an invisible baseball bat. Releasing the pistol from his hands, he grabbed at his throat and collapsed to the ground.
To
