Breaking Point

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Jules dropped his cell phone, holding his right hand out and open. Think, think. Crap, his vision was starting to fade out around the edges—not a good sign.

  But he wasn’t dead yet. His weapon was heavy on his chest, hidden from Emilio by the voluminous sleeve of that leather flight jacket. All he had to do was grab it and . . .

  Except, how was he going to walk out of here, with tunnel vision? Forget the tunnel vision, how was he going to walk on a leg that was useless and heavy? Broken in God knows how many places. Okay, whoa. Getting ahead of himself—

  “Hands!” Emilio repeated. “Both of them out, right now!”

  “My left arm’s broken,” he told Emilio with a stroke of genius. Part of him was aware that it was a miracle the man hadn’t already shot him. But maybe the E-man had hit his head, too, so Jules’s time delay seemed normal to him. “I can’t move it. At all. Unless you want me to move it, you know, with my right hand . . .”

  At which point he could grab his weapon and . . .

  “Just don’t move,” Emilio ordered.

  And Jules realized he must look to be in even worse shape than he truly was. He glanced down to see that blood stained his shirt and jeans, and even pooled beneath him and . . . Shit, he was in bad shape.

  As far as Emilio . . . As the man got closer, Jules could see that he had blood on his face and neck. He must’ve broken his nose, because his shirt had been sprayed. His right arm was wrapped around his torso, like he was holding himself together. He’d probably injured his shoulder or collarbone. Or maybe he’d broken some ribs.

  Either way, he was moving as if he were really hurt.

  Good.

  Because unless a team of Navy SEALs dropped from the sky to save his ass, it seemed likely Jules was going to die by Emilio’s hand.

  Okay, God. Send that helicopter. Any time now would be good . . .

  But the only sound he heard was distant gunfire.

  It was not a happy sound. The implication was that Max wouldn’t be coming to his rescue in the very near future either.

  Which meant that whether Jules lived or died was down to sheer luck. There was nothing left for him to do but grab for his sidearm—which would result in Emilio’s shooting him immediately in the head.

  Most likely before Jules could get his own weapon up and aimed.

  The odds of his winning that kind of a quick draw, so to speak, were not in his favor.

  It didn’t help that his vision was blurring and he was so freaking cold. Shock from loss of blood.

  Talking this guy into surrendering was definitely a long shot, but he couldn’t just lie there and wait to die.

  “Don’t do this,” Jules tried, working to keep from slurring. It was hard—his teeth were chattering. “Whatever you’ve gotten into, I can help you get out.”

  “You can help me?” Emilio laughed, limping slowly, painfully closer.

  What was wrong with this picture?

  There was something here Jules knew he should be paying attention to. This was more than just a situation to which he had never given much thought—a scenario that could and probably would result in his own death.

  There were beads of sweat on E’s upper lip, and his gun hand shook, but only very slightly as he continued to advance.

  “I doubt you can help me,” the man continued. “But I’m going to help you. Your associates aren’t so lucky, I’m afraid. Once they fall into Colonel Subandrio’s hands, they’ll beg for the mercy of a bullet to the brain.”

  Colonel Who?

  And okay. Jules so couldn’t die now. He absolutely refused. That was way too melodramatic—like this guy had studied Evil Overlord technique, sitting at the feet of famous James Bond movies villains. It would be just too pathetic if this conversation with this idiot was the last thing Jules did on earth.

  God couldn’t be that unfair.

  But then he thought of his ex-partner, Adam, who’d hooked up with Robin—Robin being the first person in years that Jules had been seriously interested in . . .

  Yeah, actually God could be that unfair.

  So okay. If Jules was going to go down, he was going to go fighting.

  Still, he had to wait until Mr. Drama cleared the car before he went for his own gun. It wouldn’t do to lose his one chance at a Hail-Mary shot because the son of a bitch ducked behind the fender.

  “You don’t know my associates very well,” Jules told him, trying to keep Emilio talking, trying to keep himself alert. Jesus, he was cold. “I don’t think Max has ever begged for anything in his entire life.”

  “So who is he?” Emilio asked, dragging himself even closer. “He’s obviously more than a diplomat, as he told me he was.”

  Yeah, like Jules was going to say anything about their connection to the FBI to this prick.

  And, it was obvious that Emilio didn’t give a damn who or what Max was. He was just making noise, killing time. Which was fine with Jules. Every step Emilio took shifted the odds in Jules’s favor. It shifted them infinitesimally, sure. But he’d take whatever he could get.

  “Max is actually unemployed right now,” Jules told him, keeping the conversation going. “Although he has a history of his boss refusing to accept his resignation letters. I think, though, after he kills you and Colonel Whosis and everyone else that you’re working with . . . ? He’s going to take some time off. Spend a month on the beach somewhere, with Gina.”

  “Ah,” Emilio said. “The lovely Gina. Perhaps the Colonel will use Gina to help Max learn how to beg.”

  Fuck you. Jules clenched his teeth over the words. “Don’t you feel really bad,” he said instead, “when you have to kill someone? I mean, to waste a life like that?”

  “That’s the problem with you Americans,” Emilio said. Blah, blah, blah. Jules stopped listening.

  Because Emilio was close enough to pop Jules with a head shot—he had been for quite some time. He was plenty close, plus he had the car to use as cover.

  Unless . . .

  It was entirely possible that, unlike Jules, Emilio hadn’t spent time learning to shoot with his nondominant hand.

  The winner buzzer sounded in Jules’s spinning head.

  What was wrong with this picture?

  Even with a freaking concussion, Jules had figured it out. Emilio, who’d done everything right-handed up to this point—talk on the phone, brandish a handgun—was now holding his weapon in his left.

  It was likely dude was low on ammo, too. So he had to get very close to make sure he didn’t miss as he used his less-practiced hand to fire that so-called mercy bullet into Jules’s waiting brain.

  A brain that was finally done waiting, as, still talking, Emilio stepped around the front of the car to finish him off.

  But Jules was ready. He rolled, reaching for his weapon, pulling it up as he squeezed the trigger once, twice.

  And Emilio fell like a stone, two small round holes in the center of his very dead forehead.

  Jules shot him again, just in case he was still seeing double.

  Sometimes, when he shot and killed someone, he felt bad, like he felt right now. Except the thing that he felt bad about now was that someone else hadn’t rid the world of this scumbag years earlier.

  Okay. Breathe. Oxygen was good.

  There wasn’t enough time to celebrate his victory by falling unconscious. Keep it together, Cassidy.

  Step one. Don’t bleed to death. He maneuvered himself out of that jacket. His T-shirt was even harder to get off, but he succeeded. He tore it into pieces, using it as a bandage.

  By the time he was finished, jacket back on and zipped up, he was exhausted. His head was swimming worse than ever, and blackness was descending.

  Still, he knew what he had to do. Appropriate Emilio’s weapon. Pocket his own, along with his cell, which he had to search for by feel on the spongy jungle floor, because the vision thing was more and more cloudy with every second that ticked by. He had to find it. Because maybe someone would get those towers up
and working . . .

  His fingers bumped against it and he grabbed it, still sticky with his own blood.

  Shivering in what he knew to be eighty-degree heat, Jules began crawling down the hillside one painful inch at a time, looking for the road.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  So much for easy outs.

  As Jones followed Molly up the dank, spider web–filled staircase and back into the house, he could just imagine the conversation between the overzealous soldiers and their superior officer.

  “What part of ambush do you idiots not understand?”

  “Sir, the door opened, sir! So we discharged our weapons, as ordered!”

  “At which time the door was swiftly closed. And locked. No injuries, no dead, no prisoners.”

  “Sir, yes sir! No dead on our side, as well, sir! Perhaps crisp new uniforms and ten minutes of training don’t make us real soldiers after all! Sir!”

  Jones’s heart was still pounding. That could have been ugly. The troops must’ve moved into place while they were in the tunnel, which was quite a flaw in the design of Emilio’s security setup.

  Of course, in a perfect world, surrounded by minions, a video screen at the door of the escape tunnel probably wasn’t necessary. Because in a perfect world, cell phones still worked. A quick call to Igor in the kitchen and they’d know whether or not they were good to go.

  With neither phones nor Igor, Jones had opened the door ver-r-ry carefully.

  Max had anticipated trouble. He’d carried a mop with him that he’d taken from the kitchen.

  As they’d traveled down the tunnel, Jones had thought Max had brought it to lean on—that he was hurt worse than he’d let on. But then he used it to clear the tunnel of the spider webs, so Jones had figured it was possible the brilliant and powerful Max Bhagat was a baby when it came to creepy-crawlies.

  Of course when they’d opened that door—hatch really—Jones had discovered Max’s real reason for bringing the mop.

  He’d slowly stuck it out of the opening, like a head peering out from behind the hatch . . .

  And it had been shot out of his hands.

  The hatch was resealed.

  They were safe.

  Or trapped.

  Depending on how you looked at it.

  Of course, another no-win, no-way-out situation seemed almost no big deal to Jones. He was already smack in the middle of one with the pregnancy and cancer thing.

  He hadn’t known what to say when Molly had told him she’d felt the baby move. She was always telling him to be honest, but he knew damn well that in this case she wouldn’t want to hear what he was thinking.

  As in “Gee, and I was hoping all the trauma would trigger a miscarriage.”

  But okay. Molly was also always selling positive thinking, and since Jones couldn’t manage honesty right now, he was trying hard to be optimistic to make up for it. Yes, they were safe here in Emilio’s cozy little fortress. True, they were down to Plan C, but—yay rah rah, go team—in their version of the alphabet, C stood for siege. As in, go ahead and shoot at us, mo-fo’s. Short of withstanding a direct attack with some serious artillery, they were assault-proof.

  Their absent host had even done most of their prep work for them, bless his black heart.

  Which meant, after they’d double-checked all the doors and windows making sure they were still secure, after they’d shut down the AC and sealed all the air vents—just say no to poison gas—and filled the bathtubs, sinks, and every available container with water, as long as they kept an eye on those security monitors and made sure they weren’t under attack . . .

  They had a little extra time on their hands.

  And that meant, after they’d both had a turn in that shower—thank you, Jesus—Max was finally ready to let Jones take a look at his so-called “it’s just a scratch” of a bullet wound.

  As Jones scrubbed up in the kitchen—how long had it been since he’d done that?—Molly and Gina helped by washing down the banquet-sized table. They also had water boiling, to sterilize the collection of knives and other kitchen utensils that he was going to need to de-bullet Max.

  Eventually the generator—which they’d found housed down in the tunnel—would run out of gas. Until it did, they’d conserve.

  They’d found a first-aid kit, but it was barely the size of a school lunch box, and the supplies inside had been mostly depleted. There were still several adhesive bandages, designed to take the place of stitches. Which was good because instead of surgical silk, someone had tossed in one of those mini sewing kits that were given out at fancy hotels.

  The lack of real surgical thread worried him less than the absence of antibiotics. In this climate, with a bullet in his butt that had passed through his grimy jeans, there was a serious danger that Max would suffer from infection.

  Emilio had spent a million dollars on security cameras, but apparently he couldn’t throw a few extra bucks toward a more realistic supply of medi-cal basics.

  Go figure.

  Clad in a white bathrobe that he’d already bled through, but looking more like his old self, thanks to a disposable razor he’d found in the bathroom, Max now searched the kitchen for Emilio’s liquor cabinet.

  “If you can’t find anything,” Jones told him, “sugar’s a decent substitute. I’m assuming your intention is antibiotic rather than anesthetic.”

  Max didn’t bother to answer. Stupid question. “After we’re done here,” he said instead, “we should do an inventory—go through every cabinet, every closet. See if we can’t find a shortwave radio.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Molly said.

  “I can’t believe that all that time we were in Kenya, you never once helped out in the hospital tent.” Gina’s words were such a non sequitor, that it took Jones a second to realize she was talking to him. Not just talking to him—bitching at him.

  He closed his mouth over the “What the hell is your problem?” that had almost escaped.

  Because he knew what her problem was. She was scared to death that Max was hurt worse than he was letting on. Plus she and Max had had an exchange of words, as Molly so politely called it, just a short time ago.

  Jones didn’t take Gina’s less-than-sunny attitude personally. He knew she was also scared for Jules Cassidy—whom Max had described as being “in trouble.”

  Enough with the euphemisms. Max had been shot, he and Gina had had a rip-roaring fight, and Jules was surely dead.

  Jules’s “troubles” had reached an end. Help still might be on its way, but it wouldn’t be coming from him.

  No, if they wanted to be rescued, they were going to have to wait however long it took for someone in the Jakarta CIA office to realize that Jules and Max had fallen off the edge of the earth.

  Which would probably be a while. The U.S. Government had a few other things on their plate this week.

  And, it was entirely possible that no one would ever come.

  Withstanding a siege was only possible with limitless food and water. Eventually their supply would run out.

  And when it did, they would be forced to go to Plan D. D for death. As in his.

  Okay, now he was working the honesty angle, but it was pretty bleak. He couldn’t seem to do both honesty and positive thinking at the same time.

  “He couldn’t work in our camp clinic.” Molly was defending Jones to Gina. “He didn’t want anyone to know that he had medical experience. He couldn’t risk someone connecting Leslie Pollard to either Dave Jones or Grady Morant.”

  Gina turned to him. “So are you a real doctor, or . . . ?” She made a face that was part shrug, part disgusted curiosity, and pure New Yorker. Scared to death and trying to hide it by being pissed off. New Yorkers were taught from infancy never to show any fear.

  “I was a medic in the Army.” Among other things. “I was trained to treat battle-related injuries—gunshot wounds are right up my alley.”

  “But don’t medics just patch people up until they
can get to a real hospital?” Gina’s worry was showing.

  “He spent two years running a hospital for Chai.” Molly put her arm around the younger woman. “Which was the equivalent of working the ER in a city like New York or Chicago. He saved a lot of lives.” She made sure Max was paying attention, too. “And before you say, ‘Yeah, of drug runners, killers, and thieves,’ you should also know that his patients were just regular people who worked for Chai because he was the only steady employer in the area. Or because they knew they’d end up in some mass grave if they refused his offer of employment. Before Grady came in, if they were injured in some battle with a rival gang, they were just left for dead.”

  Jones looked up to find Max watching him as he sterilized a particularly sharp knife. “Me and Jesus,” he said. “So much alike, people often get us confused.”

  “Mock me all you want—I’m just saying.” Molly had on her Hurt Feelings face. It may have fooled Max, but Jones knew it was only there to mask her Relentless Crusader. She was lobbying hard for Max to be on Jones’s side if they made it out of here alive. And she wasn’t done. “Yes, Grady Morant worked for Chai for a few years—after the U.S. left him to die in some torture chamber. He’s so evil, except what was he doing during those two years? Oh, he was saving lives . . . ?”

  “I was practicing medicine without a license,” Jones pointed out. “You just gave Max something else to charge me with when we get home.”

  When, not if. Even though he wasn’t convinced that they weren’t in if territory, he’d used the word on purpose. The look Molly shot him was filled with gratitude.

  He gave her a smoldering blast of his best “Yeah, you can thank me later in private, baby” look, and, as he’d hoped she would, she laughed.

  Max, meanwhile, had uncovered a bottle of rum. 151 proof. Yee-hah.

  “Let’s do this,” he said, then turned to Gina.

  “I’m not leaving,” Gina told him before he could ask her to do just that. “In case you were thinking of cheering me on.”

  Gina was obviously referencing their earlier argument, and sure enough, Max closed his eyes as he sighed. “I’m sorry for losing my temper before.”