The Good Thief

by Judith Leon

  The man fired two deafening shots. A bullet zinged off Sam’s shield and another hit Lindsey’s shield where it stuck. She fired the Taser. The man lurched and fell before he could fire a third round, and Sam leaped in and snatched his weapon. Rapid footfalls. Someone was running from a side room. Lindsey crouched and turned her shield just as the approaching man fired at her. Mr. Eyebrows. The bullet hit the shield at an angle and ricocheted. Her ears ached with the noise.

  She rearmed her Taser with another cartridge. Apparently seeing that the bullet didn’t penetrate the shield, Brows kept running and jumped her, only to land directly on the shield, shocking himself and knocking them both to the floor. His eyebrows froze in a look of astonished pain. Flushed with satisfaction, Lindsey wiggled out from under him and sprang to her feet.

  Sam fired capture nets over the two men as the rest of the team rushed inside, absent Ferris, who was holding down the secure site, and Monique, whose job was to make sure no vehicles left the garage.

  With Sam beside her, Lindsey sprinted to the back of the stairway, looking for stairs that led to the basement. Lindsey had asked Marko specifically about the basement. All of Teal’s images to Stefan had seemed to scream “basement” or “cellar.”

  “The kitchen,” Lindsey said to Sam. They dashed back past the foot of the stairs. Tito and Tia were leaping two steps at a time upward, their task to search the second floor where the demonstration had been held in case Jeremy had kept Teal captive nearby. Marko’s job was to comb the first floor.

  Lindsey found a narrow wooden spiral staircase leading downward from the back of the kitchen. Their footfalls sounding way too loud in her ears, Lindsey moved swiftly down with Sam at her back. She expected to find one big room. Instead, a hallway lit by a single bulb extended straight in front of her and then divided.

  “Split,” Sam said. She took off to Lindsey’s left and disappeared into the first room off the hallway. Lindsey turned right and checked the first small room there. Nothing but dust-covered storage boxes.

  She moved back into the hallway and heard footsteps from behind. She quickly backtracked to the stairway. Halfway down the central hallway leading to the other side of the basement, Jeremy pushed a bound Teal in front of him as Pietro followed them both.

  Lindsey charged down the hallway toward the three figures. “T-7 to T-6—girl spotted,” she said, her pitch elevated and her speech rushed. “Back me up.”

  Jeremy and Slick Hair whirled toward her, and Slick, who was holding a gun on Teal, fired a shot that tore through Lindsey’s parka’s right arm. She didn’t feel anything. Maybe he’d missed.

  She tackled him around the waist and they spun in a half circle, her back crashing into the wall. Another shot from Slick went wild.

  “Kill her, kill her,” Jeremy shouted.

  Lindsey pushed Slick, and the two of them crashed into Teal, who fell to the floor. Jeremy grabbed Lindsey around the neck from behind and pulled her away from Slick. A barrage of gunfire from the other end of the hallway deafened her. She rammed her elbow into Jeremy’s gut, he released her, and she threw herself on top of Teal as the firing continued.

  She heard Jeremy and Slick’s footsteps scrambling away from her down the hall, fleeing from Sam’s gunfire. They couldn’t know that Sam had strict orders not to kill anyone.

  “T-7 to T-1,” Lindsey said into her earwig mic. “We have Teal!”

  The whole team responded through their mics with a quick cheer.

  “Are you wounded?” Sam asked Lindsey as she sank to one knee.

  “I’m okay.” Tape across her mouth, Teal moaned, but her eyes shone with relief.

  Sam rose and turned to chase the two men when they heard Ferris say, “This is T-3. Stealth movement outside between SE-1 and G. At least two figures.”

  Tito said, “T-2, begin pursuit. There must have been another exit we couldn’t see on the recon photo. T-5 and T-7, meet me at the front of the house.”

  Marko was in the kitchen, a room on the chateau’s east side, when Ferris reported movement of at least two men outside and Tito gave the order for Marko to pursue. At the kitchen window, Marko looked outside. Jeremy and another man—most likely the one Lindsey called Slick Hair—were hunkered beside an enormous bush next to the garage.

  A small door appeared to lead from the kitchen to the garage. He headed for the door.

  Sam hesitated for a moment as if unsure whether to chase the men or follow Tito’s directions.

  Lindsey scrambled to her feet. “Go,” she said to Sam. “I’m right behind.”

  Sam turned and raced toward the front of the house. Lindsey pulled Teal into a sitting position. She turned off her communicator. “Athenas are here for you, sweetie.” She pulled a knife strapped to her ankle and cut the duct tape binding Teal’s wrists. More tape covered Teal’s mouth. No time to do the painful job of removing that. “You’re safe. I want you to sit here, okay. Don’t you move until I come back for you. Okay?”

  “Mmmm mmmm,” Teal muttered, nodding.

  Flicking her communicator on, Lindsey raced back up the stairs. Again, she heard Tito. “T-6, do you have GPS units on you?”

  “Yes, and magnet dart gun,” Sam replied.

  “Good,” Tito said. “A reminder! All team—do not fire standard weapons directly at any escaping car. The captive guards and team members will be in target area. Remember—no bodies can be left behind! This must be clean.”

  In the entry hall Lindsey met up with Sam, Tito and Tia. Tito hand-signaled Tia and said, “T-5, assume diversion position outside. Repeat diversion as needed.”

  Tia dashed out the front door. “On me,” Tito commanded, looking at Lindsey and Sam. The two of them followed him out the front door. Tito indicated with a hand signal that Lindsey should take up a position near the main garage door opening. Lindsey did as ordered, but felt a rush of fear. The site had no cover for her except her stun shield.

  Tito and Sam dashed across the curved drive and ducked down beside the easternmost of the two fountains. The two snow-cloaked blips on the satellite photo had proved to be large matched fountains.

  Tito continued, “T-1 and T-6 are now at O. T-3, standing by with MGL.”

  Gunfire sounded inside the garage. Lindsey dropped into a squat, her shield extended in front of her, her heart thundering in her ears. The old wood doors burst open, and the tires of a limo screeched as the car shot forward. Through her earwig, Lindsey heard the sound of Marko struggling, swearing in Italian and then a loud oof.

  What’s happening?

  Tito rose and began firing magnetic GPS darts at the fleeing limo. Monique fired flash-bangs and smoke grenades to try to blind and confuse the driver, Slick—the only person Lindsey could see in the car. Hell fire! Did he have Jeremy? Did he have the disks?

  “T-2, here,” Marko said, panting. “Prime target secure. Secondary target alone in car.” Lindsey leaped up. Slick made a surprise U-turn, spewing snow and gravel as he drove out the other end of the driveway.

  “All team, stop that limo, BAMP!” Tito’s voice said in the earwig.

  BAMP. “By any means possible.” An explosion sounded, and then the ack-ack-ack of at least two Mk-48-O models, momentarily deafening Lindsey. But to no avail. Slick’s car was fast disappearing down the lane of trees.

  “Hold fire,” Tito said.

  The sudden silence seemed to ring in Lindsey’s ears.

  Lindsey checked her watch. 6:54, still ten minutes before sunrise.

  She ran into the garage. Marko was flex-cuffing Jeremy, who now endured a nasty, bleeding cut at the corner of his mouth.

  “Teal is still in the basement,” Lindsey said. “I’m going to her.”

  “I’ll meet you in the kitchen,” Marko replied.

  Lindsey found Teal still sitting on the floor, her back to the dank wall. She was trying to peel the duct tape from her mouth. Lindsey helped her stand up, and Teal grabbed Lindsey in a breath-stealing hug, long and fierce. Lindsey felt tears welling
and blinked them back. “Come with me to a better place. I’ll get the tape off.”

  Marko had flex-cuffed Jeremy’s hands behind his back and taken him into the chateau’s kitchen. Lindsey and Teal joined them. Without a word being spoken, Marko stepped over to Lindsey, pulled her close, and pressed her head to his shoulder. He didn’t need to use words. They simply stood that way a long moment. She let herself relax into the feeling of being safe—and cared for.

  Then, with the help of Tia’s first-aid kit, Lindsey gingerly eased the tape from Teal’s lips. Other team members were rounding up gear and captives—all recovering from their stuns and PepperBall ordeals. Before they left, the team would bind the men with everyday, common rope, they would clean the site of ammo and anything else incriminating, and when they were well away, they would inform the authorities where the men could be found.

  Jeremy kept muttering and swearing. He’d handed over the disks he’d been attempting to take with him as he fled. “I goddamn well knew you were Athena. I knew it,” he muttered again.

  “Stop moaning, Jeremy,” Marko said. “Where is your office?” He pushed Jeremy out of the kitchen. Bringing Teal and the first-aid kit, Lindsey followed them.

  In Jeremy’s office, Marko shoved Jeremy into an armchair and took the seat at Jeremy’s computer, which was still turned on. “You may think you’re a brilliant scientist, but you’re canal scum, a common criminal.”

  Marko inserted a disk, opened a file that was in English, and started reading it. Lindsey watched over his shoulder. She had no way of evaluating whether Jeremy’s procedures were correct or not. At least it wasn’t simply garbage. It looked like sophisticated formulas and procedures. Marko put in a new disk. Jeremy stood up and Marko didn’t protest when Jeremy also started looking at the screen.

  Teal took Lindsey’s hand. “Thank you, Lindsey. Thank you so much,” she said.

  Lindsey squeezed back.

  “My parents?”

  “Someone from the Academy will contact them soon. When we’re safely out of this country and in a secure location.”

  “I have so much to tell you about what I think is really going on here, but…” Her stomach growled. “…do you have any food? I’m so hungry.”

  The earnest look in the girl’s lovely eyes made Lindsey want to ransack the house. She was about to say no, but she checked the first-aid kit, found several nutrition bars and handed them to Teal, who tore one open and bit off half.

  Tito’s voice over the earwig said to Tia, who was with Monique, now back with Ferris at the safe site, “T-5, did the GPS magnets stick to the limo?”

  “Yes. Three of ’em. I’m tracking them now. The man’s heading toward Prague.”

  “T-2, are the items legit? Are they what we’re looking for?”

  Marko answered quickly. “I’m checking now. There’s a lot here.”

  “Stop scrolling,” Teal said to Marko. She leaned closer to the screen, frowning at the names. “Nikki Bustillo and Jessica Whittaker are girls at the Academy.”

  “Okay,” Sam said through the earwig. “I heard that. Good enough for me. We have finished cleaning up.” She chuckled. “Some folks are not happy. Let’s exit.”

  Marko ejected the disk, placed it in its labeled case and grabbed the other four cases. For a microsecond Marko looked at Lindsey in a way that was soft with caring and with optimism that the ordeal was almost over. He rose and turned off the computer.

  The first sun rays appeared in the east as Lindsey hurried out of the chateau with Teal. Marko jerked Jeremy along.

  “I need my medicine,” Jeremy whined.

  “Shut up, asshole!” Marko said.

  Lindsey and Teal had run less than halfway across the field to the safe area when Ferris’s voice suddenly yelled into her earwig. “Incoming chopper! Assume combat alert!”

  Chapter 37

  R unning with Teal at her side, Lindsey looked at the girl in sudden horror. Someone in that chopper was coming to take Teal. Lindsey couldn’t think how she knew this, but she was certain. Though her ears were still ringing from all the gunshots, she could hear the approach of the chopper through the earwig. Ferris asked permission to fire the MGL.

  “Negative,” Tito said. “Continue to maintain low profile. We don’t know who these guys are yet.”

  Lindsey looked back at Marko. He’d fallen too far behind as he struggled with and prodded Jeremy to move. Lindsey looked ahead toward the safe area. She and Teal wouldn’t make the two hundred-and-some yards before the chopper was on them. The tree line was closer. She steered Teal toward it. They could work their way to the safe area by winding among the bare, ice-laden trees and snowy evergreens.

  “All team,” Tito said, “hide and wait. Only if things turn hostile do we use lethal force.”

  Lindsey and Teal reached the trees and squatted under the low, drooping branches of a towering conifer to look for Marko. Grateful for the precise movements afforded by the rappelling gloves, Lindsey popped another cartridge in her Taser and pulled out her Beretta, as well.

  She watched Marko yank Jeremy down next to the tree nearest the southwest corner of the chateau. And then the chopper loomed overhead, hovering while its pilot obviously considered the landing site. The pilot ignored the wide open field between O building and the road, a clear site that would have made anyone disembarking an easy target.

  Instead it began descending over a spot that would put it in the center of a triangle formed by the coordinate points of Lindsey, Marko and the secure area. Letters on the side of the dark green military-type chopper appeared to be in Cyrillic.

  “T-1 to T-3,” Tito said, “can you make the chopper?”

  “It’s an H1-17 out of the Czech Republic. It could be Czech cops,” Ferris said.

  “If only,” Tito said. “Can you guarantee that?”

  “No. Only that it’s Czech. Don’t know who is in it.”

  Tito added, “T-2, does this look like the chopper you saw last night?”

  Marko answered, “Possibly. Same size and shape. Similar sound. But it was too dark for me to confirm absolutely.”

  Teal tugged at Lindsey’s parka sleeve. “I don’t think it’s the police. There are very bad, evil feelings pouring out from the men in there.”

  A look of bleakness darkened Teal’s eyes. Her face rippled into a frown. She was shivering in only a sweatshirt, jeans and tennis shoes. Lindsey stripped off her parka and put it on Teal and gave Teal the knit gloves on loan from the botanist. Lindsey’s adrenaline was running high, and the special gear she was carrying would help keep her plenty warm, though a part of her wondered how she could have even a drop of adrenaline left.

  The chopper landed, its position slightly closer to Lindsey than to Marko or their secure area. “The girl thinks our visitors aren’t cops,” Lindsey said into her earwig as the side door of the chopper burst open, facing the chateau. The new arrivals were protected from everyone’s line of fire except Marko’s—and he only had a handgun and a PepperBall launcher, nothing that could stop the armed men pouring out of the chopper door.

  Six invaders moved out in silence and scattered, hunched over and running like vermin toward the building and along the walls. They all wore uniform gray parkas. The chopper kept its rotor turning while two men headed for the back of the chateau. Three others headed toward the front and would pass not thirty feet from Marko and Jeremy. One stayed near the chopper. All of them carried shields and AKM-47s.

  The man guarding the outside of the chopper kept staring into the woods, almost as if he could see Lindsey and Teal, although at a hundred feet away, he surely couldn’t see into the snowy branches of the massive fir tree. “Don’t move,” she whispered to Teal.

  And then she saw why the man seemed to be staring right at them. The early rays of the morning sun had risen to an angle that cast Lindsey’s and Teal’s deep footprints in the snow into sudden dark blue shadows, creating a path as clear as elephant tracks leading directly to them. Nonchalantly, he t
urned and walked toward the front of the chopper and then further on out toward the front of the chateau, as if he hadn’t noticed a thing. But surely he must have.

  The two guards moving along the chateau’s rear wall disappeared around the far northwest corner. Lindsey relayed this to the team.

  The chopper guard kept scanning the area in front of the chateau, and Lindsey could see his profile, lips moving rapidly. With his parka hood up, it was impossible to tell if he had an earwig, but he certainly could. She started thinking of all the signs of the struggle she’d been too intensely involved in to consider before: the smell of smoke, OC gas and explosives still in the air, craters the size of kiddie pools from the grenades, the many foot trails in the snow out front. Marko’s and Jeremy’s trail would jackknife back toward their meager hiding place at the tree. Marko surely had to know how vulnerable he and Jeremy were.

  “This is T-1,” Tito said. “The three men that entered the chateau have exited the building after looking around. They may have talked to the men we secured in the basement. The other two who disappeared in back of the chateau are now unaccounted for. If these guys aren’t cops and are also after our package, we gotta hope they think they’re too late. Otherwise, the Neutron Dance is about to begin.”

  Please keep this simple. Let it be cops. But they sure weren’t wearing cop uniforms. Or Czech military uniforms.

  “T-1 to T-3. If these bandits make one wrong move, take out the chopper.”

  “Copy,” Ferris answered.

  “All team. The three in front are splitting up. One is heading to the garage, one…stepping off the drive area and into the snow toward the west fountain, the other toward the east fountain.”

  What the hell were these guys doing?

  Her attention snapped back to the man guarding the chopper. He jerked and she heard him speak. A split second later he dropped to the ground facing Marko’s tree and began firing his automatic at Marko and Jeremy. A steady barrage of weapon fire began in the front of the chateau, as well, magnified by all the earwigs also picking up the sound.