by Susan Mann
“Quinn! Go! Wait for us in the car out front!”
“No! There’re shooters in both hallways. You can’t hold them both off and get you and Ben out the door. You go. I’ll cover you.”
“No way.” James jerked his head back when a bullet zinged past. He fired again at the same time as Quinn shot at Fitzhugh who’d popped his head out from the doorway. “You go! Now! Be safe!”
“I’m not having this argument with you again,” she growled.
James expelled a frustrated snarl and grumbled a few choice words. “Fine. Don’t move. I’ll be right back to get you.”
“Copy.” She instinctively ducked her head when part of the railing nearest her exploded and sent splintered wood flying in all directions.
James sent two more bullets down the far hall just before he and Ben headed for the door. At the same time, Quinn pinned Fitzhugh down by squeezing off four rapid shots. Ben staggered as they moved, but did so mostly under his own power. It was only a couple of seconds before James threw open the door and they ran outside.
The man who had been following James and Ben burst from behind the staircase and bolted for the front door. He was halfway across the entryway when Quinn took aim and fired. She missed, but the shot sent him swan diving to the floor.
While she was busy with the new threat, Fitzhugh came out from his hiding place and advanced down the hallway toward her. Quinn swung her pistol back toward Fitzhugh and squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught him in the shoulder. He jerked and dropped to the floor.
Quinn thought that hallway was now clear, but Fitzhugh’s shouts had roused Lucy. The woman stumbled out from the library and lurched down the hall. Blood covered her hands and a murderous rage darkened her face.
Quinn couldn’t wait around for James to come back for her. With one guy crawling across the floor like a commando for the safety of the staircase, Fitzhugh down, and a bloodthirsty Lucy soon to be but not yet armed, it was her only chance to make a break for the open door. By her count, she had seven rounds left in the Glock. No problem.
She stood and fired twice down the left hallway, forcing Lucy to plaster herself flat against the wall.
As Quinn moved toward the front door, she fired at the commando guy and sent him skittering for cover. Her firearm was trained on him when movement to her left caught her eye. She glanced over to see Lucy raise her gun.
Quinn ran for the door. She tore out of the house right before a bullet embedded itself in the door frame. She didn’t look back and ran as fast as she could.
She ran to James. He stood next to the open door of a silver sports coupe parked twenty yards away. When she yelled his name, he spun around and his eyes widened. He looked at her and then his focus shifted to something behind her. “Duck!”
She hunched, but kept her feet moving. He stepped away from the open car door as he repeatedly fired his Sig at the front of the house.
Lungs burning, she sucked down the cold evening air and sprinted for the car. She dove into the front seat, scrambled over the center console, swung her legs around, and hunkered down in the passenger seat.
James climbed in behind the steering wheel and handed her his Sig.
He hit the ignition and the engine growled to life. He popped the clutch and smashed his foot on the accelerator. Bits of gravel sprayed up in rooster tails from the spinning rear tires. When they gained traction, the car launched forward. At the end of the driveway, Quinn braced for the upcoming high-speed turn. Pain erupted in her shoulder when her elbow pressed against the door. She hissed when she sucked in air through clenched teeth.
“Quinn? What is it? Did you get shot? Oh my God! You’re shot!” James sounded absolutely panicked. The back of the car slid when he cranked on the steering wheel and turned onto the lane, casting a glance at her at the same time.
“I’m not shot.” Despite the adrenaline coursing through her, she tried to keep her voice calm. “My shoulder got jammed when Ms. Badass tackled me. I’m fine.” After safely stowing the Sig under her thigh and returning her Glock to its holster, she grabbed the seat belt. She yanked it across her chest and clipped herself in.
James peered over at her, his face tight with concern. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Positive. You okay?”
“Yeah.” He glanced into the rearview mirror. “Check around for a remote control or something to open the gate. This car can’t smash through it.”
She’d have to find it fast since they were almost to it and James had to slow the car. The center console was empty as were the storage bins in the doors.
From behind, a rasping voice said, “Try the sun visors.”
The car was almost to a complete stop when Quinn spotted the small box attached to the visor above James’s head. Quinn reached over and pressed the button. The gates jerked and began to swing toward them at a frustratingly unhurried pace.
“Come on, come on,” James urged under his breath. In the rearview mirror, they could see the headlights from a car racing up behind them. He stomped on the gas the second the gap in the gate grew wide enough. The car flew through the opening and careened onto the main road.
Quinn craned around to look over her shoulder at the man wedged into the tiny backseat. She smiled. “Hi, Ben.”
Even in the dark, she noticed his once-white dress shirt was filthy, torn, and splattered with blood. One eyelid was puffy and partly closed, the skin around it purple and mottled with red. Dried blood was caked at the corner of his mouth and clinging to several days’ growth of scruff. She winced at the way two of the fingers on the hand resting limply on his lap were swollen and bent in unnatural positions. Bruiser’s handiwork, she assumed. The thought of the pain he must have endured turned her stomach. Despite it all, he smiled at her a smile that reached his eyes. “It’s great to finally meet you in person, Quinn.”
“You too.” Her heart soared to have him safely with them.
James cut in. “It’s great you two have finally met and all, but we still have Fitzhugh, or at least one of his flunkies, on our tail.”
Quinn turned forward again. “Probably not Fitzhugh. I put a bullet in his shoulder.”
James’s head snapped back.
“Ms. Badass might be riding along, but I doubt she’s able to drive. I’m pretty sure I broke her nose when I smashed the heel of my boot into her face.”
“Marry her,” Ben said to James.
She chuckled and hoped the darkness hid her blush. “Actually, we are married. Well, sort of.”
“What?”
“It’s a long story,” James said. “We’ll bring you up to speed later.” He lifted the phone from his back pocket and handed it to Quinn. “Bring up a map and figure out where we are exactly, would you?”
She did and said, “We’re headed northwest and about five miles east of the M1. If we stay on this road, it’ll take us right to it.”
James shook his head. “We don’t want to do that. Too exposed, too dangerous to other drivers.” He glanced up in the rearview mirror again. “If they’re in the Lamborghini, we can’t outrun them.”
She did a double take. “You passed up a chance to drive a Lamborghini?” One glance at the small logo that looked like a set of pilot’s wings in the center of the steering wheel told her they were in an Aston Martin.
“The Lambo only has two seats. The DB9 at least has a tiny backseat.”
“Oh.”
James downshifted when they raced up on the glowing red taillights of a much slower car ahead. The Aston Martin’s tires squealed in protest when they made a hard right turn onto a narrower road.
Once she was upright in her seat again after being pressed to the door during the violent turn, Quinn asked, “Do we keep driving until one of us runs out of gas?” She peered out the back window. The headlights reappeared behind them and seemed to be edging closer. Not good.
“What if it’s us?” James answered and shook his head. “We can’t chance it. We’ve got to disable them
somehow.”
“I take it this thing doesn’t have the James Bond premium package, complete with machine guns installed in the bumpers and exhaust pipes that squirt oil slicks,” she said.
“Seriously, James. Marry her.”
James smiled and glanced at his partner in the rearview mirror. “Sorry. No grenade launchers that I know of. We need to use the darkness to our advantage. Doing something unexpected that will stop them long enough to give us time to get away.”
British operative Edward Walker’s car chase in Target São Paulo sprang to mind. “Like have them end up in a sheep pasture?” she asked.
“Yeah, like that.”
Quinn studied the map and spotted something that looked promising. She switched to the satellite view and nodded in approval. “How do you feel about a road that comes to a T at a pond?”
“I like it. Get us there.”
“Okay. At the next road, make a left. We’ll go about a quarter mile and make a right.”
Fortunately, they were on country lanes with no traffic. At the impressive clip they were traveling, it didn’t take long to execute her directions.
Focused on the blue dot moving across the tiny screen, she said, “After the second roundabout, take the first right.” When they’d done so, she checked behind them again. The headlights were so close they practically filled the back window. She spun around again. “This is the road. It’s a straight shot. The end is in a mile.”
“Roger that,” James said. The tension in the car ramped up as they hurtled down the lane. “Tell me when we’re two hundred feet from the pond.”
“Will do.”
“Ben, you strapped in back there?” James asked.
“Yep. Let ’er rip.”
Quinn’s gaze was glued to the map. “Three hundred feet. Two-fifty,” she said, her voice growing louder with each announcement. “Two hundred!”
The engine whined in protest when James downshifted. “Hang on!”
Quinn braced her feet against the floorboard, pressed her back into the seat, and white-knuckle gripped the door handle.
James flicked the steering wheel a touch to the left, stomped on the brake, and then snapped the wheel to the right. The tires skidded and squealed when the back of the car kicked out and spun around one hundred eighty degrees. It came to rest only a few feet from a clump of reedy trees.
Their pursuer’s car flashed past them in a yellow blur. By the time the driver hit the brakes it was too late. The two beams of light from the headlamps wobbled up and down in the darkness as the Lamborghini bounced over the uneven ground. Then they disappeared completely.
Not wasting any time, James slammed the car into first gear and sped off.
Quinn’s every extremity buzzed. She slapped a trembling hand to her chest to keep her heart from hammering its way out of her rib cage.
“You okay?” James asked.
She took in a deep breath, held it, and then blew it out slowly. “Yeah, I’m good. You’ll be happy to know you’re a much better driver than Madison. He did a turn like that once with me in the car. Only, when he did it, it wasn’t on purpose.” Quinn looked over her shoulder at Ben. “Do we need to get you to a hospital?”
“No, I’m okay. We need to clear out, right, James?”
“Yeah. With a bullet in Fitzhugh, he’ll probably have to go to the hospital and the police will get involved. It won’t be long before the three of us are wanted for all kinds of bad stuff, including stealing this car. We need to ditch it and take a train back to London.”
“You don’t want to hook up with our backup?” she asked and opened the map application on James’s phone again.
“No. Fitzhugh doesn’t know we’re CIA. We want to keep it that way. Right, Ben?”
“Right. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“I have a question about that,” Quinn said. She paused and examined the map. To James, she said, “The closest train station is Long Buckby about five, six miles due south. The next left will take us straight there and keep us off the main roads.”
“Perfect,” James said. A half minute later he made the turn and checked the mirror. “No one’s behind us. I think we’re good.”
All three relaxed and the tension inside the car disappeared. James slowed and drove at a less conspicuous pace.
“If you’re not up to talking right now, or you can’t say in front of me, that’s fine,” Quinn said.
“I’m okay talking,” Ben said. “It’s moving that I’m having some trouble with.”
“Well, stop me if you get too tired,” she said. “Here’s my question. Was Fitzhugh bluffing when he told me you and James were part of a weapons organization trying to find Dobrynin’s stash?”
“No, he really believes it. The whole thing went pear-shaped when I was at this party he threw at his place in Notting Hill Saturday night. I didn’t want to go, but I knew Ben Baker the insurance guy would go schmooze the rich and powerful to drum up business. So I’m working the room, pressing the flesh, and I recognize one of Fitzhugh’s guests. The minute he sees me, I know he’s pinned me as part of a weapons ring—I’d been undercover in one during an op in Chechnya.”
Ben stopped for a moment to catch his breath before continuing. “He goes straight for Fitzhugh to tell him I’m not an insurance agent but a weapons guy working for a rival syndicate and I take off, knowing Fitzhugh will immediately connect what I’m doing with the Dobrynin rumor.”
“What did you do?” Quinn asked.
“I grabbed a cab and headed for Victoria Station. I sent the e-mail with the coded ISBNs to James’s account on the way. Two of Fitzhugh’s goons caught up with me before I could catch a train to Destination Anywhere.”
“It must have really hit the fan when Fitzhugh realized the manuscript was missing,” she said. “How’d it end up at the library?”
“So you found and deciphered my research notes. Good. I figured you would if I ever got in a jam. I left the manuscript there in case it turned out to be important. I’d done it before with other items. I didn’t want to take the chance of Fitzhugh taking something that might be important before I’d cleared it. The big guy, Joseph, was with me Saturday. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer and never bothered to check to make sure the manuscript was in the briefcase before we left.”
“Weren’t you afraid someone in the library would find it before you came back for it?”
“I always made sure to be the last person there when they closed and the first one there the next time they opened.”
“So you stashed the manuscript Saturday afternoon before the party and planned to be there when the library opened Monday morning.”
“Yeah.”
“But you were exposed and captured on Saturday night and couldn’t be there.”
“Exactly. I wish I could’ve seen Fitzhugh’s face when he opened the briefcase and found an old Bible instead of the medieval manuscript. He must have gone ballistic since he had Joseph and Hamish beat the crap out of me to get me to tell them where it was.”
“Hamish was the one chasing us after I found you tied up in the cellar?” James asked.
“Yeah. He’s a real charmer.”
“I’m sure,” Quinn said. “We’re familiar with his nephew.” Her nose wrinkled at the memory of the delightful Ethan. She pushed aside thoughts of that little weasel and asked, “Why didn’t they search your flat for the manuscript?”
“I thought they did.”
“Nothing was out of order when our guys got there to look for you,” James said. “Your phone was there, too.”
“They must have done that to make it look like nothing was wrong, to keep my people from looking for me.”
“It worked, sort of,” James said. “We knew you’d gone off grid because of the e-mail, but we didn’t know what had happened to you until Fitzhugh called us today.”
“We thought maybe you were sipping mai tais on a beach somewhere,” Quinn added.
Ben chuckled
and then groaned. “I wish.”
James slowed the car as they drove through a tiny village. “They must have looked at the calls on your phone and figured out who Professor Gemma Dudley was. That’s how Fitzhugh knew to have her followed. He assumed we’d find the manuscript and take it to her like you were going to.”
“He guessed right,” Quinn said. “Ben, how did you know the manuscript was connected to Dobrynin?”
Ben shifted in his cramped seat. “It was? I didn’t know for sure. If I had, I would have taken it straight to our station in London. Something was hinky about it. I just didn’t know what. I figured talking to Professor Dudley would be a good start. So it really had important stuff in it? You’re sure?”
“Mmm-hmm. Dobrynin tucked away some SS-24 Scalpels,” James said. “The agency is mobilizing to verify and intercept.”
Ben blew out a low whistle.
“The text in the manuscript gave us the locations. Quinn figured it out,” he said, turning the Aston Martin into the train station parking lot.
“No,” she said. “We figured it out.”
“Okay, we figured it out,” he said with a smile. “Ben, we’ll tell you more about our adventures later,” he said as he parked the car. “Right now, we need to get on the next train out of here.”
After shutting off the engine, James took the sleeve of his coat and wiped it over the steering wheel. Quinn did the same with the door handle she’d touched. James jumped out of the car and pushed a lever on the seat. The seatback folded forward and Ben slowly maneuvered himself out. James had already shrugged off his coat and was helping Ben’s arms into the sleeves when Quinn joined them. She handed James his Sig, which he promptly returned to its holster.
Ben tugged the coat closed and walked gingerly across the parking lot with Quinn and James flanking him on either side. A gust of cold wind cut through her sweater, sending an icy chill through her. She was bummed her beautiful CIA-issue wool coat was forever lost to Roderick Fitzhugh. She pictured Lucy using it for target practice. “You’re going to leave the key in the ignition?”
