Maks stuck to my side like glue and my heart hammered hard in my chest. How much time did I have to get him the antidote? A minute or two? Maybe less? I couldn’t remember.
Maks stumbled suddenly as we were making our way up the steps. “I’m dizzy,” he said to me.
I tightened my grip on his hand. “Keep moving!”
Behind us I heard a woman cry out. “What’s wrong with him?”
I thought she was talking about us, so I chanced a look back and it was then that I noticed that the sheikh was being held up by two of his men, looking pale and sweating profusely. I remembered him swatting at a mysterious bug about two minutes before Grinkov. The sheikh was now beyond my help, not that I really would have helped a misogynist pig like that even if I could.
“Come on!” I urged as Maks and I got inside and were moving to the inside stairwell. Sweat had broken out all across his forehead and his breathing was labored. “Listen to me!” I snapped when he paused to grab the railing and wouldn’t move. “If you don’t make it up those stairs, you’ll die! Do you understand me?”
Maks nodded dully. I lifted his arm over my shoulders and pulled him along with me up the stairs. By the time we reached the top, we were both breathing hard.
Our door was only a little down from the landing, thank God, as I was now supporting most of Maks’s weight. “Please!” I coaxed. “Just a little farther!”
Somehow Maks was able to get his feet to cooperate and we made it to the door . . . which was locked.
“Where’s the key?” I said frantically. Maks mumbled something and his now trembling hand came up to rub against his jacket pocket. I set him on the ground because I couldn’t maneuver with him draped over me, and fished through his pocket, removing all the contents, including a folded piece of paper and the key. I inserted the key into the lock and got the door open, then pulled him limply into the room, because he was no longer able to stand.
His eyes were quickly rolling up into the back of his head, and foam began to form at the corners of his mouth. “Jesus!” I cried, dropping the key and the rest of the contents of his pockets next to him as I dashed into the bedroom, over to my luggage, and began rummaging through the contents.
I found the small manicure set right away and unzipped it with trembling fingers. Pulling out the toenail clippers, I extracted two of the syringes and ran back to Maks’s side.
He was curled onto his side now, convulsing and frothing at the mouth. “Ohmigod!” I cried, shoving him onto his back and yanking so hard on the front of his shirt that buttons flew off in every direction. Straddling his torso, I lifted the syringe just like I’d been taught in my training and plunged it straight into the right side of Maks’s chest.
He convulsed so hard he actually sat up and threw me off-balance. I fell sideways but managed to recover, then raised the other syringe and plunged it into the other side of his chest.
Maks gave one loud heaving breath and lay still.
I was panting so hard I was seeing stars, but I backed up off him and waited to see if he’d sit up and tell me that he was perfectly fine now, thank you very much.
He didn’t.
My radar pulled my attention back to the syringes still in the cuticle case. I had an overwhelming urge to give him a second round of the antidote, but I hesitated for several seconds debating about whether that was a good idea. No one at the CIA had told me what giving an extra dose of the antidote would do, and I wondered if I’d kill Maks by injecting him with another round.
My intuition insisted that I needed to act quickly, and I needed to give him an extra dose. Steeling myself, I removed two more syringes and administered another dose, hoping they would do the trick.
But as I watched, Maks’s color didn’t return and his breathing remained very, very shallow and it seemed to me that he might be getting worse. I started to tremble and knew I needed to find Dutch. He’d know what to do. As I was getting to my feet, I reached for the key, and that’s when I noticed the folded piece of paper lying next to Maks on the floor.
With a small gasp I realized it was the note and the map I’d written to Dutch and given to Mandy. “Oh, no!”
I grabbed the map, my purse, and the key and ran out of the room, barely managing to still my hands long enough to lock the door behind me. I then made a mad dash up the stairs to the third floor, and was only vaguely aware of the shouting and angry voices coming from outside.
Reaching the landing, I ran headlong down the hallway, panic fueling my every step, and to this day I don’t quite know how I made it so far, so fast, in four-inch heels.
When I reached Dutch’s door, I twisted the knob, not even bothering to knock, and thrust it open. Dutch was standing in the middle of the room looking at something hanging from the door to the bathroom. It took me a minute to realize that the blue-faced figure hanging grotesquely on the door by a black leather belt looped around her neck was Mandy.
I opened my mouth to scream—it was all a little too much for me—when I felt a hand clamp firmly over my mouth. I stared up at Dutch, my eyes watering, while he shook his head vigorously. “Shhhh,” he said softly; then he let go of my mouth and curled me into his arms.
I sagged against him, suddenly so exhausted I could barely move. He set me down on the floor because my legs refused to hold me up, and I leaned next to Mandy’s suitcase, which was parked next to the bed. “Jesus!” I cried. “Oh, poor Mandy!”
“It took me a while to get into the room,” Dutch said, bending low to talk to me. “Whoever killed her locked the door after they left.”
Numbly I lifted the key I’d taken from Maks, and pushed it into his hand. “Try that in the door, will you?”
Dutch took the key and moved away, and my eyes went back to her prone figure for a moment. She was so blue and still, and I felt like I was going to throw up.
I turned my head in the other direction, and the tags from Mandy’s suitcase tickled my face. I pushed them away, but something about them caught my attention.
“The key works in the lock,” Dutch said from across the room.
“Dutch!” I whispered, motioning him back over to me.
He came right over and I showed him the tags. “Las Vegas,” he said, eyeing them, then Mandy.
“She flew in from the same airport where Oksana was killed!” I said.
Dutch looked back to me again. “Someone was using her and Oksana,” Dutch said.
I nodded. “And when they were done using them, they killed them.”
“Grinkov?” Dutch asked, holding his palm open to show me the key.
I shook my head. “I thought so,” I said, “but now I’m not so sure. I think there’s someone else responsible.”
“How do you know there’s someone else?”
“Because Maks has been shot by a dart!”
Dutch stood up quickly and pulled me up too. “Is he dead?”
“No,” I said. “At least, maybe not yet. I gave him a double dose of the antidote, but I don’t think I gave it to him in time.”
“Where is he now?”
I was dizzy with all the recent events happening around me, and closed my eyes trying to get the world to stop spinning. I opened my eyes again and saw the urgency on Dutch’s face. The window to the room was open and a strong wind gusted in, billowing the curtains and allowing me to see directly out into the garden, where it appeared the sheikh either had just died or was in the final throes before death, because the commotion around him seemed to be escalating. “He’s in our room,” I said. “It didn’t look like he was going to recover, so I came to get you.”
Dutch moved over to the window and peered outside. More thunder rippled across the atmosphere and the shouting below grew volatile. “Something’s happened to the sheikh,” he said.
I nodded dully. “He was also shot with a dart.”
“You saw it?”
“I think so.”
Gunfire erupted from down below, followed by screams and angry shouts.
Dutch moved swiftly to my side and swept up my hand. “Time to go,” he said, pointing out the obvious.
We paused long enough for him to grab Mandy’s homing device, which she’d left on the nightstand, and as we dashed out of the room, he gave it to me with a stern, “Keep this with you.”
I tucked the pen down my dress, clipping it to the inside of my bra, while we rushed down the hall and over to the stairs. We made it to the second floor, and just as we reached the landing, I saw Grinkov’s butler knocking on Maks’s door. “Sir!” he called urgently.
Eddington’s face lifted and our eyes locked. “Go!” I told Dutch as the butler’s mouth fell open, and we hurried as fast as we could down the rest of the stairs.
Gunfire continued to sound all around the premises along with screams and the shattering of china and glass. Dutch and I ducked low as we moved down the stairs to the ground floor, where chaos reigned. “Do you have your gun?” he asked, reaching into his blazer to pull out Des Vries’s weapon.
I held up my purse. “Yes!”
“Good,” Dutch said, and we ran out from the stairwell. Dutch began moving us toward the front, where everyone who was fleeing was naturally gravitating, but I stopped him and said, “No! We need to get to the back! There’s a gate in the wall of the garden and I think we can get through it if we hurry!”
Dutch’s lips pressed together like he didn’t like the idea, but he trusted me enough to turn direction and pull me down a side hallway that ran along the back of the house. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, and my radar was telling me we were headed in the right direction, so I kept close to him and tried to keep my heels from clicking too loudly on the floor.
Of course, I shouldn’t have worried; the chaos all over the grounds was enough to mask even Mandy’s horse clomp.
At one point in our stealthy course through the house, Dutch paused outside a closed door where I could hear several voices yelling inside. There was also a loud static noise in the background, but I couldn’t make out a single thing anyone was saying. Dutch pulled his scrambler pen from his dinner jacket, twisted the cap, and placed it on the ledge above the door.
The effect was immediate. From inside the panicked yelling increased dramatically. Dutch and I hurried away as fast as possible and barely managed to round a corner down a smaller hallway before we heard the door burst open and someone shout angrily in alarm.
“Keep moving!” Dutch said when I stopped to try to remove my shoes.
“I can’t run in these!” I told him, mentally berating myself for not changing into different shoes before I’d left Maks to find Dutch.
“Keep them on!” he warned, and reached back for my hand again. “You’ll cut your feet to shreds if you don’t.”
We made it to the end of the hall and Dutch stopped in front of another closed door. He tried the handle, found it locked, and stepped back from it, pulling me with him. “Stand clear,” he said, right before he brought his foot up and karate kicked the door just above the handle.
It burst open and we darted inside, coming into a small library of sorts. Dutch moved to a single glass-paned door with a sheer curtain, the very one I’d attempted to open earlier that morning, in fact. As we moved to it, the glass suddenly shattered and a hail of bullets rained into the room.
Dutch threw himself over me and we went crashing to the floor. I heard him grunt in pain as he tried to shield me from the gunfire, and for one awful moment I was convinced he’d been hit.
The gunfire aimed at us diminished the moment another round of bullets sounded from across the lawn. I concluded that whoever was shooting at us had just gotten shot. “Dutch!” I said when the rain of bullets stopped threatening our lives. “Dutch!”
“I’m okay,” he said with a groan, rolling off me but holding on to his left side where his bruised ribs were still healing. “Come on,” he said, after taking a breath and getting to his knees. “We’ve gotta move.”
Squatting down low, I followed him over to the ruined door, immensely grateful that he’d insisted I keep my shoes on when my feet crunched on the broken glass. Dutch kept me behind him as he chanced a look out onto the lawn. “Why is everyone shooting at each other?” I whispered.
“It’s the death of Sheikh Omar,” Dutch said softly. “I’m sure his bodyguards thought he’d been poisoned by Boklovich or one of the others who wanted to take him out of the bidding, and they started the gunfight. Since everyone here is armed to the hilt, it’s likely everyone’s shooting at everyone.”
“Great,” I said, wondering if our situation could possibly get any worse.
“Get your gun out,” Dutch told me.
I dug into my purse and pulled out the small pistol, which brought me little comfort when I thought about the assault weapons being carried by every single one of Boklovich’s guards.
I clicked the safety and held it in the manner that I’d been taught, waiting anxiously behind Dutch. My radar pinged and I nudged him. “Honey! We’ve got to go now!”
He looked over his shoulder to stare meaningfully at me, mouthed, “Love you,” then took me firmly by the left hand and we dashed out to the terrace.
Chapter Fifteen
The first thing Dutch and I had to navigate when we came out onto the lawn was a dead body. To this day, I’m not sure if it was a man or a woman; I just knew the person was dead by the blood . . . lots and lots of blood.
My stomach clenched and I felt myself gag and double over. Dutch pulled me close and swept me up in his arms, not even pausing while he hurried over to the wall and began to run with me down the side.
Overhead small droplets of rain hit my face and a cool wind came with it. I swallowed hard and pushed on his shoulder. “I’m okay!” I told him, just as the sky really opened up and the rain came pelting down.
Dutch paused by a tree, where he set me down and we hid for a moment to catch our breath and assess the lawn. I peeked out through the rain and saw it littered with bodies. I tried not to look too close, but even that random observation told me that Boklovich appeared to be one of the casualties.
“Oh my God!” I gasped when I saw just how many people were down. Dutch was right—everyone was shooting at one another!
“Come on,” Dutch said, reaching for my hand again. “We can’t stay here.”
“The gate is at the far end of the wall,” I told him when we began to move again. I kept praying that we wouldn’t encounter a guard, and judging by the stream of gunfire still echoing above the thunder, lightning, and rain, most of the fighting had moved to the front of the house. I was immensely grateful to my crew that they’d pushed us to the back, because as we continued to dart along the wall, I thought we might yet have a chance.
And with a small flutter of my heart I saw the ivy covering the gate just ahead. “There!” I said, pointing it out to Dutch.
In ten more strides we got to the gate and both of us began to tear the ivy away. It was slick and wet and clung to me, tangling around my ankles, but I was hardly worried about that. I just wanted out of that stupid yard and I didn’t yet know how we were going to get beyond the padlocked gate.
I paused to look up. The top of the wall didn’t seem to be ten feet tall anymore—it seemed to be twenty. “We can climb the ivy,” I told Dutch as he stood back to survey the gate and the lock too.
He looked from the gate to me, and I swear he almost smiled. “In that dress, Edgar, that’s something I’d like to see, but not today.”
He then aimed his gun right at the padlock and fired three times in rapid succession.
The lock took all three bullets and held together. “Son of a bitch!” he swore, stepping forward, about to yank on it.
All of a sudden the brick next to me exploded and I screamed, dropping to my knees as bullets pummeled the wall right above my head. Dutch had also dropped down and he crawled over to me, half-pulling, half-dragging me to a nearby stone bench. The gunfire continued right over our heads, and with great effort Dutch push
ed the bench over to give us some cover. A second later I heard the bench take several bullets, and small chunks of concrete flew up only to pepper my hair with debris.
Instinctively I covered my head and tried to make myself as small as possible while Dutch held me close. When the gunfire stopped, he whispered, “Stay here.” Before I could even react, he’d moved to a crouch and darted away.
Gunfire followed after him and I wanted to cry—I was so scared for him. After a time the bullets chasing Dutch stopped, and I worried about what that meant. And then I got angry. Very, very angry. Footsteps through the foliage alerted me that someone was approaching the bench, slowly and cautiously, and the way they moved closer so carefully told me that it definitely wasn’t Dutch. I looked down at my shaking hands and realized somewhere between the gate and the stone bench I’d dropped my pistol, but my clutch was still parked firmly under my arm.
A plan formed in my head, and after rummaging through my purse, I moved carefully onto my stomach, listening to the footsteps draw closer and closer. My heart was pounding in my chest like a jackhammer, but my brain was focused on one thing, and when I felt someone tug hard on my shoulder, I came up with all the rage of a tigress, using the edge of my palm to inflict an uppercut to the guard with one hand before zinging him good in the groin with the stun gun. He slammed to the earth with a hard thud, knocked out cold.
I sat next to him panting for a few beats, thinking my CIA trainer would’ve been so proud.
Quickly, however, I snapped my attention back to getting the heck out of there. I returned to the gate and looked around for something to hit the padlock with. My eyes lit on the gardeners’ shack and the tools spilling out from inside. Moving quickly, I grabbed the heaviest shovel I could find among the clutter and hefted it above the lock, bringing it down hard onto the casing.
My aim was slightly off, and the shovel only half hit the metal, but to my surprise the whole lock fell apart as if it had only just been holding itself together. I threw down the shovel and tugged at the latch, then heaved the rusted metal gate open, but I didn’t go through. Instead, I turned away and began moving off in the direction I’d seen Dutch go. I wasn’t leaving without him.