by Karen Guyler
And then the outside exploded.
27
Eva threw herself onto the floor, covering her head with her hands. The roar of the initial explosion faded beneath gunfire and shouting. What the hell happened?
Hand on her Glock but she knew she wasn’t accurate enough to hit anything from there. Maybe the Scorpion would do it, Rubin had boasted enough about it. Time to see what it did.
Its trigger was locked. She flipped a switch, knocked a lever, pressed a button. Nothing. Maybe it had been programmed to the user. It remained inert, a lump of metal that would only be useful if she threw it at someone or hit them over the head with it.
More bullets outside, the rat-a-tat of death knocking.
Eva studied the stand the gun was on. Finch had held it in his arms. Maybe that was the thing. She squeezed the mount and dipped the barrel down and the Scorpion was in her hands. It barely weighed more than her Glock.
Flicking the lever on its left up with her thumb, she pressed the trigger at the same time and felt it give. Her heart thumped, she’d activated it.
She peered out of the doorway. Where were they, the men attacking them?
The lynx pen would shield anyone on the other side of it from her so she’d use it in the same way. The intermittent cover of the tree branches let her crouch-run to the top corner, where she trusted the angle might help confuse things, even though it was glass. It had to be toughened, didn’t it? But bullet-proof? She hoped she wouldn’t have to find out. The uppermost tree gave her a sliver of cover.
She couldn’t see who was screaming from there, but the sound reached her from near the house. Hopefully not one of her team.
Fisher lay on the snow ahead of her on the rise, using its tiny lip as cover. Another in white ahead of him. The house gave the attack team a huge advantage. They fired the second anyone moved, toying with them.
A volley of shots on the other side of the lynx pen, pinning Bennett where he was.
The men in black didn’t appear to have noticed her.
Eva swallowed. She could do this, at least scare the hostiles into moving backwards to give her team a chance to get to shelter too. The rest they’d figure out. She ran the scenario in her mind. She was thinking too much. Just do it, before she started second guessing herself. Let her instinct guide her.
She laid down on the ground beside the pen, too low. On her knees, Eva braced herself against the glass. Slow movements, let the white jacket keep her hidden. She flicked the lever and pulled the trigger of the Scorpion, aiming high.
The gun barely kicked. Its high-pitched whine was almost obliterated by the sound of chunks of building being demolished. It tore through the corner of Rubin’s house across to the outbuildings near where the hostiles sheltered.
Like a blowtorch through ice cream.
She stopped firing. Listening, an urgent cry in a foreign language. Not one of her team. A shout in reply. Another. A moan, a wail.
Fisher still lay on the snow, but whoever had been ahead of him had taken cover somewhere else. Placing the Scorpion on the ground, definitely too big to run with, she drew her Glock and bent low, running from the shadow of the tree in the lynx pen, pressing herself into the snow beside Fisher. Red-soaked.
Oh God, oh, God. Eva rolled away from him, eyes closed. Forced herself to look, to make sure. No, no one could survive that. His gun was still in his hand, his finger on the trigger in front of him but his face—he must have been caught by the explosion. Eva tightened her grip on her gun to stop her hand shaking.
‘You’ll never be in an optimal firing position,’ her trainer’s understatement was so on the money she could feel hysteria filling her. Her safer position beside the lynx pen, in the outbuilding called to her. But it was her fault Fisher was there. She wouldn’t dishonour him in that way. Another of their team might need her help.
One hostile was down, lying in a halo of red snow. Another, the leader, had taken refuge beside the first outbuilding. But it hadn’t given him much shelter. He slumped against the side of it, his hand pressed to his abdomen, barking orders.
Something blitzed past Eva, again, and again. They’d noticed her.
Pretend she was in the firing range, that this didn’t matter. That all she was shooting at were paper cut-outs.
She fired back, waited. A handful of bullets shot in her direction, she fired back. Come on, show yourself. She definitely couldn’t hit a target she couldn’t see. Where was the rest of her team?
In the silence, Eva heard a familiar grumble, felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising. She knew why it was there, marking out breakfast.
“Hey,” she called. “Call your men off, there’s a lynx behind us, it’s hungry and the smell of all this blood will make it want to feed.”
The man pulled his attention off his abdomen, turned it on her, his arm snapped up and he fired. Eva ducked behind Fisher, pulling his dead weight as hard as she could over her, pressing herself beneath him as far as possible. Sorry, Fisher, so sorry. Thwack, thwack, the jerks of two bullets hitting him.
The menacing growl sounded closer. Eva didn’t move.
The man bleeding outside the building shouted. His orders were clear when a barrage of bullets was unleashed at her. She tried to burrow further under Fisher, but his dead weight and the frozen ground held her too much out in the open.
She watched, she tensed, she waited. Threats from the front, silence from behind her. Ahead she caught a streak of movement, someone making their way towards the leader, stopping behind a black vehicle, pulled up close to the house.
Eva held her breath. He’d come out to the right and he’d spot Taz trying to shelter in amongst the sparsest of hedges. She aimed. This was almost that impossible shot, but she had to get it. She took a breath and fired, altering her aim slightly, bringing her hand across to her left with each shot. The curving Luke had talked about with Sadie. The hostile went down.
The lynx growled, right behind her. Lying here, she was game for the big cat. Standing up so he’d choose someone else, she’d be offering herself up to the gunmen. What a choice.
The air beside Eva moved, the snow gathered up, dropping off the lynx’s back legs as it bounded over her towards the man sheltering beside the building.
He screamed, his gun clicked empty. Click, click, click but the lynx was on him, its target decided. Screeching, a blood-curdling screaming, then the man fell silent. Eva wanted to clap her hands over her ears to stop the chilling sounds of the cat tearing his flesh apart. But she waited, as still as she could while the coldness of the wet snow beneath her crept through her, or maybe shock made her shake.
She shuddered as the lynx prowled past her. They were nothing like the wild lynxes she’d encountered in Sweden, these had been trained to be killers.
The roaring of an engine and the rattle of snow chains on the other side of the house, someone taking off in a hurry.
She waited, cold, wet, stiff, but uninjured, remarkably.
“Roll call.” A shout on her right, Bennett, leader of the second team.
A low whistle answered her, one alive, another, another, she whistled too.
Apologising again to Fisher, she rolled out from beneath his body and got her feet, stopping when the other lynx slunk in and fell on what his or her stablemate had left of the guy.
“It’s all clear out front, hostiles gone. Two dead.” Taz walked backwards from the house towards her. “Holy shit.”
He pulled out the handgun holstered on his hip and shot at the feeding lynx. The animal whipped around from its frenzy and snarled at him. He gathered his energy, ready to pounce.
“Look out, he’s going to—”
The lynx dropped, unconscious.
“Tranquilliser dart. Should give us enough time for us to sort stuff out, get out of here. These new tranqs work fast, but not sure how long they’re good for. As I was saying, three dead hostiles, we’ve lost two.” Taz walked towards her. “You okay? Thanks for the save. They’ve all g
one, bailed, the ones walking anyway. Looks like you found the good stuff. We’ll get loaded up and get out of here.”
Eva called Luke. “Just checking to see if there’s anything specifically I should do here?”
“How’d it go?”
“Sideways. We’re two men down, a group surprised us.”
“Show me.”
Eva video called him and walked past each of the bodies.
“That one.” Luke said when she got to the one she’d shot. “You need to make him look like a The Society kill, so, once we figure out who he is, it’ll be a new image for our portfolio. Then the other guy’s a bit mangled. You remember the sign?”
Her breath caught. She wasn’t likely to forget the training where she’d had to engrave a T and S on a joint of pork, over and over, until it looked less like a mangled attempt at carving the meat and more like the message they had to send.
But that was about a million miles away from doing it to a person.
“That guy’s a shell, like the pork you practiced on.” Luke reminded her.
Eva knelt beside the body.
“I’m sorry.” she whispered, turning Luke’s knife around in her hand.
The man was still warm. She closed his sightless eyes. Took a breath. Practiced with the knife in the air. The rest of her team were loading up the weapons into their SUVs.
Eva turned the guy’s head to one side. “Does it matter which ear?”
“No, take your pick.”
She swallowed hard, reached out and, sending the man another apology, carved the downstroke. She turned away from him as her stomach rebelled.
“Don’t let that come up unless you don’t mind picking it all up.” Taz said. “We’re disinfecting the scene. You throw up, you sort it out.”
Eva swallowed hard, fought her body. “I’m okay.”
Taz said nothing about the knife in her hand. The things they must have seen.
“Where’s the body inside?” he asked.
“In the doorway into the lounge,” she wiped at her streaming eyes, “last on the left.”
“Got it.” He marched past her and round the side of the house.
Eva took a breath, letting the frigid air ground her. Focusing on its slow release, she carved the top stroke of the T and the awkward curves of the S. The man’s skin was less resistant than the pork had been.
“There.” She held the phone up to show Luke.
“Not bad, recognisable enough. Send me a close-up of that and another of him in situ from more of a distance. You’ll need to open his eyes again for that one.Then get shots of the hostiles’ bodies and anything else that might help us identify them. The teams know how to disinfect our presence, just do what they tell you.”
Eva found Taz kneeling beside Ralph when she’d done what Luke instructed.
“Can I help?” She asked before she realised Taz’s thumb and index finger were digging around in Ralph’s chest.
“Sure, there you go,” he threw something at her. “that’s your bullet.” He snapped a knife blade about three times the length of Luke’s back into its handle, replaced it in his ankle holster.
“Doesn’t it need to be—”
“No chain of custody needed, this’ll never go to trial.” He held a plastic bag open for her to drop the bullet in. “All potentially compromising evidence goes in here and we take it back in the diplomatic bag to dispose of it safely.” He looked around the room. “Anything else?”
Eva couldn’t think.
“Get the door.” He grabbed Ralph’s feet and pulled him out of the lounge.
“Shall I. . .?” Eva gestured at his arms.
“This is better for evidence. You wipe down anything you both touched.” Taz dragged Ralph down the hallway while Eva wiped everything she knew she and Luke had touched without gloves on.
Taz was propping Ralph up close to the man on whom the lynxes had fed when she got outside. He gestured at the still comatose big cat. “Might get lucky and he’ll have lunch on this guy when he wakes up, help destroy traces of us. You done?”
Eva nodded.
“We have to get Fisher and Jacob, you helping?”
“Of course.”
She followed Taz over to where the remaining four of their teams surrounded Fisher.
Bennett took off his bobble hat, bowed his head. “Fisher, fallen but never forgotten.”
“Never forgotten,” everyone responded.
They repeated their ritual for Jacob.
Bennett lent over Fisher and took off the black armband he’d worn, put it on his own arm. “I carry the mantle.”
Eva felt like she was watching something she shouldn’t be seeing.
“Onwards, brother.” He touched Fisher’s shoulder.
“Onwards.” They all responded.
With surprising care, they lifted him, Taz stepping closer to Oscar to leave space for Eva to take hold of his leg. Carried to the back of one of the SUVs, the men lifted him into the boot onto one of the canvas sheets that had hidden the weapons Eva had found. They did the same for Jacob in the other SUV.
“First time losing someone?” Taz asked.
Eva shook her head. “But first time on the job.”
Taz nodded. “Never gets easier, as it shouldn’t.”
28
Wedged in the back seat beside most of their kit and the black grip bags containing half the weaponry they’d seized, Eva stared out of the window as Taz drove them back to Bergen. Had it been worth it?
With their haul they could reverse engineer the weapons and they’d kept them from the other arms dealers, though that was probably only a temporary thing. But for Fisher and Jacob to pay for that with their lives? It was too heavy a price.
And the man she’d killed, would his family even find out why he hadn’t come home?
She’d done it before, last year in Charles’ lab. Under attack, she’d thrown chemicals at the man throwing them at her but hers were pyloric, igniting the moment they came into contact with the air, incinerating him.
She hadn’t meant to kill him, she just wanted to stop him from hurting her. This was a whole other level.
Eva sat on her hands so no one would notice them shaking, studying the back of Taz’s head in front of her. The hostile would have killed him if she hadn’t stopped him. She’d assumed if she was going to get him at all, it would be a wounding shot, not a kill shot.
She blew out a breath, shut her eyes, let the warm silence in the car lull her. But the man’s sightless eyes, her fingers carving his skin, played on a loop in her mind’s eye.
This was what she’d signed up for. The glamorous image of chasing villains across rooftops in sunny locations was nothing like this. Wet, bloody, using the man who’d come at her request as a shield, taking the life of another, using him as propaganda. This was the reality.
How many had Luke seen that way, sprawled at his feet while he carved their necks? How did he rest easy with that?
Could she?
Could she hold Lily and pretend nothing had changed in her? Pretend that she’d been at a meeting when the man’s face was there behind her eyes?
The team dropped her at the hotel with nothing more than a ’nice shooting’, ‘be seeing you.’
“Hey,” Taz called her back to the driver’s side. “Thanks again for the save.”
Eva tried for a smile. “Any time.”
“Here.” He held out a white something that turned out to be a wipe. “You’ve got,” he gestured at her face and chest. “Don’t want to go scaring the hotel staff.”
She looked down at herself as the SUVs peeled away and drove off. She was a mess, her white jacket swirled with a red camouflage pattern of Fisher’s blood. Pulling it off, turning it inside out on itself, the baby wipe got enough blood off her that Eva got her keycard with only a sidelong look from the receptionist.
After a very long, very hot shower, she ordered a double whisky in the hotel bar, remembering how the one Nora had given her las
t year when she thought she’d lost Lily helped unknot her enough to function. She still hated it, but the harsh warmth that spread through her was growing on her.
“Celebrating?” Luke joined her, sounding less drugged up and moving normally, apart from his arm in its blue sling.
“Hardly. You want?”
“Probably not with my pain meds. They’ve called us back to London. Jet leaves in an hour.” She nodded. “First time out is the hardest.” he said softly. “And you did the hardest thing.”
She shook her head, short, sharp. She didn’t want praise, she couldn’t say anything about their case because she could feel tears too close. Crying on a mission would never happen, no matter how much it hurt. She swallowed the rest of the drink, placed the glass carefully down, and addressed the bar. “I’m going to get Rubin.”
“We will.”
“I mean now. What’s the procedure on diverting the jet for a stop on the way home?”
“Depends, where do you want to go?”
“Copenhagen.”
Persuading Luke to stay on the jet had been the hard part, Eva told herself. She scrambled out of the taxi that brought her to Balancia just as the trickle of staff leaving for the night swelled to a flood. The shouted goodbyes and slamming car doors were the normal but the silent moving off of the electric cars was weird, unsettling, just as it would be at Futura Energy.
As long as Rubin wasn’t there, there was no reason for this not to go as she hoped.
No smile from the receptionist at Eva’s late appearance, as she’d expected. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow, we’re closed.”
Eva flashed her Interpol badge and gestured at the photo and huge display of flowers in the middle of the counter.
“You’re here about Patricia?” the receptionist’s perfunctory manner disappeared.
Eva nodded.
“It’s been such a shock, I mean, to be shot, you don’t expect that. Patricia was so nice, why would anyone want to kill her?”
