by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees
You lose, she thought at him. Although…not quite yet. Not until she had the hostages. Not until she could at least warn the Berzhaani what he’d really been up to here at the capitol.
She took one last look at the doorway between the ballroom and the hostages, discovering their guard staggered against the doorjamb, bleeding from a rapidly swelling lump just below his eye. Cold flying marble, oh yeah. In another moment he wouldn’t be able to see out of that eye at all.
In the moment it would take her to reach the function room.
She followed the wall to the next peephole, and confirmed what her ears had told her—the hostages were poised on their feet, exclamations loud between them and fear running high—especially as the guard waved his gun at them, shouting at them to shut up and sit down. He must have been more rattled than he realized, for he used Berzhaani words, totally incomprehensible to most of those scared people. So they froze, waiting for the situation to become clear…waiting, to judge by the pale, strained expressions, to die.
They’re just kids.
But Selena saw more than the kids. She saw broken, ruined families; she saw a country plunged into irreparable turmoil. Berzhaan’s prime minister about to die in the rubble of his own capitol.
And the door wouldn’t open.
The table. The Kemenis had shoved a table in front of the passage, and she’d forgotten it. Adrenaline kicked in, hammering at her; with no room to step back for a kick, Selena threw her good shoulder into the door, feeling the wallboard give way and bulge out. Someone shrieked, startled and too panicked to hide it even if it meant her life, and when Selena looked again the guard was striding forward, blinking wildly from his watering, swollen eye but full of purpose and totally focused on the table-trapped entrance door.
“Stupid ass,” she muttered. “You should have just shot me through the wall.” And she shoved the Luger knockoff up against the wallboard, waited for him to block her view of everyone else and pulled a trigger so stiff it might as well be nonfunctional. There’d have been no maintaining her aim if she hadn’t had the gun jammed up against the wall for support.
The gunfire rang painfully loud in her little enclosed space in spite of the mild silencing effect of the wall, and she couldn’t help but flinch. When she found the peephole again, the guard had fallen out of view, and the hostages were scrambling to the other end of the room.
Not Allori. Allori shouted something to Razidae and the two men rushed forward, flinging the table away from the door in a synchronized effort. Selena all but tumbled out. She tripped over the downed guard and barely had her balance back when the ground rocked profoundly beneath her; her ears recoiled from a sharp basso reverberation of sound. She stared toward the ballroom, aghast—surely they hadn’t triggered their bombs, not when they weren’t anywhere near the exits!—and then realized the explosion had come from outside the building, back near the always-crowded little parking lot, the old carriage barn and the amazing grounds and gardens.
Not the building bombs at all—but whatever diversion the Kemenis had planned. But the timing…
The timing couldn’t be right.
She held up a quick hand to Allori, a silent signal to wait, and it was he who turned on the hostages, his arms held wide to stop the rush they’d been about to make at her. A few steps put her in position to look through the doorway, and still, all she saw was chaos—fervently renewed packing, men festooned with field bandages…one man clearly down for good, a thick puddle by his upper leg. They’re not ready. Whatever was going down out there, the Kemenis weren’t ready at all.
Before Ashurbeyli could spot her, she drew back. They had to have heard her pistol shot, as enclosed as it had been. They’d chosen to ignore her. They’d chosen escape over revenge.
That would certainly explain the dark, furious flush she’d seen on Ashurbeyli’s hawkish features. He knows I’m here somewhere. He’d chosen to complete his mission rather than to hunt her down…but then, he had probably never guessed that she was just beyond the door.
She turned on her heel, facing the hostages as she pulled her increasingly heavy briefcase off her shoulders—now they were in skirmish, and the thing would be more of a liability than potentially useful.
Two days of threats had trained the hostages well; after their initial noisy reactions, they’d silenced, staring mutely from a wide variety of complexions all turned pale and pasty. She stabbed a finger at the bedraggled events coordinator. “You know the way out,” she said in Berzhaani, not even bothering to make it a question. “You lead them. Take them out through the kitchen and go right around to the front. There are soldiers there, and they’ll protect you.”
More noise stuttered through the shouting in the next room—noise that froze them all, and hushed even the Kemenis in their hasty evacuation.
Gunfire. Automatic weapons fire. The three-burst stutter of a well-trained soldier, not the double-burst of the Abakans.
Rescue.
SEALs or Berzhaani Elite, Selena didn’t know. And she didn’t want to chance it either way, regardless of the extensive training each group underwent in how to not shoot the wrong people. She didn’t want the hostages in the middle of it. She grabbed the nearest student by the arm and sent her at the corridor, pinning the events coordinator with her most commanding gaze. “Go!” she said. “They won’t try to stop you now—just get out of the way!”
A glance at Allori told her he saw her lie—that he, too, knew the Kemenis might well try to stop the hostages, to use them as shields. But she didn’t want them timid, she wanted them running like hell.
Another explosion from the grounds rocked the building and the hostages suddenly moved as one, their silence broken. They rushed the door with their fears released into action—only to get bottled up at the exit, sobs and anxiety and “Hurry up, dammit!” filling the air.
Razidae wasn’t one of them. He stood in the middle of the room—prudently near the wall adjoining the ballroom so as not to be visible to the Kemenis, but he stood there nonetheless—his white dress shirt rumpled, his dignified thagiya cap askew and his dignity entirely intact. Selena turned to him in annoyance, suddenly quite certain that he didn’t intend to go anywhere at all. When a Kemeni popped through the door with mayhem on his mind, she reacted almost absently. She scooped up the briefcase, whirled it around once like a sling, and let fly; it hit him with the force of a medicine ball and bounced off to spew decorative planter marbles across the floor. Selena leaped over them to slam into the Kemeni with the same brute force, too tired for finesse when she could slam the fake Luger across the side of his head and fling his weapon away. She couldn’t help but give the gun an appreciative glance. “At last,” she told it. “Something you’re good at.”
“You should give it to Allori,” Razidae said, speaking loudly over the growing pop of gunfire now centered in the lobby area. The Kemenis who weren’t packing or bleeding—and even some of those who were bleeding—had gone out to hold off the rescue. To Selena’s startlement, he held out his hand. “Or to me.”
“You don’t want this,” she assured him. “It’s a piece of crap. And please, don’t tell me you’re going to stay here to greet the cleanup crew. You need to get to safety along with everyone else. More than anyone else.”
“I do want it,” Razidae said, and jerked his head at the diminishing number of hostages, all of whom were completely focused on escape. “And you should be the one to go with them.”
She found herself speechless and glanced at Allori to confirm what she suddenly thought she understood. Razidae didn’t want her there when the Berzhaani Elite crashed the scene. He didn’t want a woman holding the only captured weapon, and he didn’t want her there at all.
Allori gave her the slightest of nods.
Selena stabbed a finger at the Abakan she’d tossed across the room, and at the pathetic Luger knockoff not far from it, by the side of the first man she’d taken down. Acquiring either meant entering the potential line of fire f
rom the doorway. “You want one? You’ve got your choice. I hope you know how to use them.”
Razidae stiffened. “Now is not the time—”
“No,” she snapped. “It’s not. You can’t help pull this country back together if you’re not alive.”
“Nor can I do so if I cannot command the respect of my people.”
She couldn’t believe this argument, this moment. She didn’t want to believe this argument. She gave Razidae a cold look and said, “It’s a good thing I was really risking my neck for those kids, or I might be seriously peeved that you’re throwing away all my work. As it is, I don’t have any problem with the notion of working with—let’s see, who’s next in line now that bin Kuwaji is dead?” She didn’t expect an answer. She said it only to buy thinking time, hovering over the decision to end this argument with a good stout blow to Razidae’s head. With Allori’s help, she could drag Razidae out of this place before it came down on them all. “Weren’t you paying any attention to the conversation in there?” she asked, indicating the ballroom. “They’re going to take this whole building down. If you wait here, you’re going to go down with it.”
“The Elite are here,” he said, as calmly as though gunfire didn’t blot out half his words. “They’ll deal with the situation.”
Selena took a chance, glanced through to the ballroom, and hesitated at the surprise of seeing the last limping Kemeni heading out the exit opposite her, hauling one of the equipment cases and leaving in his wake the detritus of apparent defeat—furniture overturned, several bodies on the floor, the scent of blood in the air.
There was no sign of the remote detonator triggers. The table where they’d been was conspicuously bare. A forlorn chunk of dry ice steamed on the floor beside it, showing no signs of the havoc it had wreaked. In the background, the firefight surged in ferocity; Selena could well imagine the first line of fleeing Kemenis laying down cover for those who escaped with the computer drives and data.
Another Kemeni ran up to the room, stopping just short of entering to stare at Selena as though stunned. She raised her gun in a knee-jerk reaction, but froze in midmotion, taken back. That looks like—
But it didn’t. Black mustache, piercing brown eyes, olive skin…he wore the most modest of green turbans and Kemeni colors, but he stood there on the balls of his feet, every bit as frozen as she, compact and graceful and so familiar—
“Cole?” She hadn’t intended to speak at all, and yet there somehow it was. Cole was in D.C. She’d left him behind, never intending to put herself in a situation where she wouldn’t see him again—or where her last message to him was a voice mail message in which she never even told him they might have managed to start a family after all. And yet there was her one-word question, hanging between them with a longing she hadn’t known she could feel, never mind express.
I must be going crazy. Cole was blue-eyed and fair-haired and his nose not quite so—
“Cole?” she asked again, this time barely a whisper. Nothing loud enough to carry over the noise of the firefight raging in the lobby and beyond, but somehow he gave the slightest of nods anyway. He pulled off the turban to reveal bright, sun-streaked hair; he yanked at his shirt. Underneath the apparent buttons of the military-like blouse, Velcro quickly gave way, leaving him in a tight black T-shirt with U.S.A. printed in bright yellow. Selena’s instinct gave way to sudden, overwhelming recognition—she knew those shoulders, had watched those muscles flex with weight work, had seen that chest sheen with sweat as he pulled her close.
The mustache and brown eyes and olive skin tone remained, at wild odds with his hair. He took a step toward her, apparently and suddenly oblivious of the turmoil around them, and Selena held up a sudden hand. One more step and she’d lose perspective and control; she’d run to him and she might even do it with the slow-motion effects of a love story in full play. So instead she stiffened, and she restricted all her longing to her eyes. “The Kemenis have Razidae’s hard drives. And they have remote detonators—this building’s rigged.”
He understood. He reversed that step, a precise movement so typical of a man who always knew exactly how to put his body where he wanted it. His gaze stayed locked on hers as he gave the smallest of nods, and as he turned to go—chasing after the Kemenis, leaving her to play her own part—he lifted a fist to his chest with thumb, forefinger, and pinky extended, their own simple addition to the covert ops signals they both knew.
Selena returned it. I love you, too.
Now live through this, dammit, so I can prove it.
Total heart-body disconnect. Selena felt it happen. The better part of her turned away from the ballroom with Cole, following in his footsteps as he moved toward the fighting with such apparent ease that it almost looked as if he drifted. What remained looked back into the function room, finding herself under scrutiny by both Allori and Razidae. Allori, at least, seemed to understand what he’d seen, accepting that somehow the Cole Jones of whom he’d only read had made his way to Berzhaan—and that for the sake of Berzhaan, Selena had denied herself that full reunion.
Razidae only had the physical perspective to see Selena herself, and he watched her with impatience. Selena returned it, opening her mouth to suggest, again and rather more acerbically, that he take the exit the other hostages had left open for him—except Razidae’s eyes widened with alarm she couldn’t ignore. Selena whirled to find the second room entrance—the one through which Ashurbeyli had escorted her with such intent not so long ago—filled with the graceless form of Jonas White, his arm extended in a way that could only mean one thing. Gun!
And not one of the fake Lugers with which he’d supplied the Kemeni, either—something stocky and clean-cut and reliable. Selena doubled back on herself in a catlike leap that took Razidae down. He fell unprepared, hitting the floor hard; a chair tumbled out of his way as it took a glancing blow. Selena rolled to her stomach, coming up with arms extended to take aim at White, her injured arm automatically trying for a support position it couldn’t sustain. But it didn’t matter that she wavered. She hadn’t even finished the movement when the ear-numbing blast of White’s .45 battered her.
Allori staggered back, astonishment on his face and instant blood on his faintly pinstriped dress shirt. Backward and down, smearing blood along the wall as Selena hesitated, lost in surprise and fatigue and that sudden sinking feeling that things already gone wrong had just gone worse. Hesitated just long enough for White to close in on the wounded ambassador and smile wolfishly at Selena. The retreating gunfire in the background gave her the sudden bizarre regret that they were alone—no unpredictable hostages to get in White’s way, no fervently dedicated Kemenis making sure things evolved in their own best interest. Not even any of the rescuers, who’d obviously made rounding up the terrorists their understandable first priority.
White didn’t have to say anything. He merely raised an eyebrow, his gun pointed directly at Allori’s head. And even though Allori, stunned and speechless, had the wherewithal to shake his head at Selena, she quietly put her own gun on the floor and nudged it away from herself. “It pretty much sucks anyway,” she told White. She didn’t mention that she’d already taken a quick glance to calculate the distance to the Kemeni’s gun so recently tossed aside; a lunge from this sprawling position, a few rolls, and she could put her hand on it. Or that her fingers had closed around several of the decorative marbles scattered in the wake of that encounter.
White laughed. “As a weapon, it’s sorely lacking,” he agreed. “But it was much better when you were holding it, wasn’t it? Now the only question is whether when I shoot you, I aim to kill or just to take you down.”
“I don’t suppose you’re taking votes.”
He laughed again. Not because she’d been particularly funny, but because of the victory dancing in his eyes. In moments he’d escape, heading for his Plan C, and he’d once again leave death and destruction in his wake. “No,” he said. “I don’t suppose I am.” And he shifted the gun until
she was looking right down the barrel.
Selena gave White a look of purest annoyance, just as though her heart weren’t pounding so hard as to reverberate through the floor beneath her. “Be that way,” she said, and whipped a side-hand marble at him from her awkward spot on the floor. It smacked into his kneecap—dammit, I was aiming higher—and so startled him that he leaped away from the pain. She gathered herself, lunging for Allori; she rolled sideways across the carpet, snagging the dead Kemeni’s discarded pistol along the way. Gunfire echoed in the room—but White had expected her to go for her own gun, and filled the carpet with deadly holes. By the time he corrected himself, Selena crouched by Allori’s side, her weapon pointing steadily at White.
And it was all perfect, until Razidae stepped in. White was poised to run, until Razidae stepped in. But step in he did, hurling himself at White as though to save the day. Thinking, perhaps, of the headlines, of the influence—however temporary—that such an action would give him in the wake of this terrorist disaster. But Razidae had more heart than training or experience, and White almost gladly stepped into his rush, evading Razidae’s blow to jam the .45 in his chest with such profound impact that the prime minister stopped short. Stopped short and instantly realized his error.
The return of White’s grin probably had something to do with his sudden wisdom.
White looked at Selena, an eyebrow raised in question—your move? Selena scowled back. “I should have tied you at that window.”
“Your mistake,” White acknowledged. He looked between Razidae and Allori, a recognition of the stalemate between them. “But since you didn’t, I’ll just take my prize and leave.”
