Terminal Vendetta (A Diana Weick Thriller Book 3)

by Cate Clarke

  Diana Weick

  London, England

  When Diana and Amber landed in London, they were swarmed by photographers and journalists. The footage of Diana saving Axtell from the sniper shot had gone viral, and she was suddenly all over the news again like when she’d first become a SEAL, everyone trying to get a shot of “the green-faced woman.” Keeping his arms around Diana and his hands in the face of the photographer’s lens, Amber led her through the airport until they could get to a cab. But there was no respite. There was no moment to recover from the jet lag because both of their phones began to buzz and ring.

  “Bloody hell,” Amber muttered, looking down at his phone screen and then up at Diana.

  “MI6…” Diana said.

  “It’s in lockdown.”

  Overhead, a helicopter whipped by. Diana rolled down her window to watch it fly over the city of London and across the River Thames.

  “Hostage situation…” Amber muttered to himself. With the phone screen tilted onto its side, he passed it to her, a grim look over his face.

  And there on the screen in crisp grayscale CCTV footage were two ghosts—Rex and Wesley, her ex-husband and her son. Something caught in her throat, tears or a scream, Diana couldn’t be sure, but it came out as a shocked crackle of spit. She slapped her chest, ensuring that her heart hadn’t stopped.

  Taras was right. Rex had been alive this whole time. Diana had been running around, hunting the Readers, trying to kill Zabójca when her son had been waiting here in London for her to come rescue him. Catching a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, the cabbie throwing her nervous glances, her face was completely white. If she had the time, she would have passed out. But there was no time to faint, no time to reflect on the relief and absolute fear that was washing through her.

  They had to return to the place where Ratanake had been shot, where she’d found Nelson Rank’s dead body and where Wesley had almost been killed by Zabójca. After this, she would ban Wesley from entering the United Kingdom altogether.

  A slight broken laugh came out of her.

  “Are you okay?” Amber asked, gently taking the phone out of her hand and putting his palm on her leg.

  She thought about taking his hand, about collapsing into his chest and weeping into his button-up shirt. But she couldn’t let it out now. If she let it all out, she wouldn’t be able to accomplish what she needed to. It was the only thing that she needed to do—the only thing on her mind was saving Wesley and Rex from a second bout of death.

  The cab tried to bring them to MI6 headquarters but the street was blocked off by barricades. There were several parked news vans just outside of it and beyond the police barricades, SCO19 Specialist Firearms Command vans and cop cars lined up in front of the cream and green building. With a quick flash of their IDs, Diana and Amber made their way through the barricade. Signing off with Hoagland had proved to be useful—without that asshole, she may have been stuck on the outside looking in.

  “Ms. Weick.” A woman approached with long blonde hair that was pulled back into a braid. She was in a full black and navy SWAT-style uniform, and she reached out her hand as she approached, walking toward them along the stone wall that surrounded the headquarters. “I’m Jillian Watts with SCO19. We’d love to have you in on this.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Diana said.

  Watts raised her eyebrows and gestured to a van behind them, opening the back door to a variety of screens and wires. They had CCTV footage of a blank hallway, broken glass strewn out across the floor. Then, there was a drone camera, capturing a large office beyond a huge window of green glass.

  There were four pieces of paper lined up along the window, each affixed with massive amounts of tape. It said in black marker—one word on each sheet—GIVE ME DIANA WEICK.

  “And that’s your kid in there as well, correct?” Watts asked, looking over her shoulder. Diana stared at the screen. To the right of the papers, Wesley and Rex were lined up on their knees, their hands behind their heads. On either side of them were Zabójca and Asher, holding pistols to the temples of her son and ex-husband.

  “Where’s Voss?” Amber asked.

  “Sitting at the desk,” Watts replied. “Behind the papers.”

  “Is she a hostage too?”

  “Unconfirmed,” Watts said, crossing her arms.

  “Negotiator?”

  “You’re looking at her.” Watts crouched down in front of the screen, stretching out her fingers before zooming in on Wesley and Rex’s faces. Pressing her lips together and swallowing something back, Diana took a step forward.

  “Sorry, Ms. Weick… not sure if you heard me but…” Watts said. “This is your son, correct? And ex-husband?”

  “I heard you,” Diana replied. “Yeah, it’s them.”

  “This was all on this ‘Reader’ organization, then?”

  Diana and Amber exchanged glances. No one had as much information as they did. And Diana wasn’t going to waste her time explaining everything that had happened over these past few months to a police official that she didn’t know if she could trust.

  “I need a way to get up top,” Diana said, turning away from the screen and squinting at the window high up in the clear sky, the papers the size of playing cards from this distance. “Can you guys get me up there?”

  “I suppose we could,” Watts said.

  “Blow the glass when I get close and I can get the drop on them,” Diana said.

  “Seems risky,” Watts replied. “They may shoot the hostages as soon as the glass is blown.”

  “The exploding glass should be a sufficient distraction,” Amber said from behind them, hopping out of the back of the van, shaking the hand of another MI6 agent that passed by, giving them a somber smile.

  “Give them what they want, hey? Let me talk to my team,” Watts said and shuffled off to one of the other vans.

  “You trust Voss?” Diana cupped a hand over her eyes, the glass of Vauxhall Court reflecting the sun in sweeping green beams.

  “Absolutely not,” Amber said.

  “Well, we know that she and Zabójca have history…” Diana said. “But were they in on this together?”

  “Unlikely…” Amber replied. “From what I could gather, she absolutely hates him. If we don’t get up there soon, they’ll kill each other.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “As long as Wesley and Rex don’t get caught in the crossfire.”

  Diana sighed and said, “Good point.”

  They loaded into the helicopter, Watts wrangling both Diana and Amber SCO19 uniforms with bulletproof vests and automatic pistols strapped to their thighs. They wouldn’t let them go alone so Watts had stuck them with who she claimed were her two best—one short slim man with ridiculously long fingers, Louis, and another woman with dark features and a completely silent gait, Mercy Okpara.

  The whipping of the helicopter blades as they rose into the air seemed to synchronize with Diana’s heartbeat, a hard thumping against her chest with every rotation.

  It was good that Voss was so important. It meant her office was high up and that it was easier to access from the top of the MI6 headquarters. Still, it had been a long time since Diana had scaled a building. She was nervous, the emotions stirring through her and pulling at her focus.

  Amber looked at her from across the helicopter, his dark and intense stare pulling her gaze into his as he said, “Focus on me, Weick.”

  She nodded, her mouth going dry and making it difficult to swallow.

  It was all she could do—stare at Amber until the helicopter started its descent and settled into a hover. It was the first time in a long time that she had felt truly nervous, and on top of that, though she started off her journey rogue and alone, she was far from it now. Strength in numbers—that was something Ratanake had taught her, and it had been the reason she had taken on Taras Kushkin. But a part of her wished she had trusted him more. Maybe Rex and Wesley wouldn’t be on their knees with guns
to their heads right now if she had trusted him with what he knew.

  With one deep breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth, Diana rallied. She wouldn’t let her emotions get the best of her. Not now.

  She stood up—taking the lead and opening the hatch after the helicopter pilot gave the signal. With her boot, she kicked and slid the rope ladder down to the flat patch of roof below them. The MI6 headquarters was essentially a collection of stone and glass squares stacked on top of one another like a medieval castle mixed with the Capitol Building.

  Diana slid down the ladder first, going fast but controlled, keeping her movements steady and flexed. There was an eight-foot drop from the bottom rung to the roof below. With the boots of Amber coming above her head, Diana dropped.

  The wind pushed. The ladder flailed above. A service boat’s horn blared on the Thames below.

  Diana hit the roof and rolled out of the landing, sticking herself against a metal vent until the other soldiers could get down.

  Three more sets of boots and they were ready to infiltrate. Mercy flashed the four sticky bombs that were going to pop the glass as they came down. With slow and composed hand gestures, she showed how to stick them on to the bottom of the boot so they could kick and blow the glass at the same time.

  “MI6 have those?” Diana muttered in Amber’s ears.

  “Wishing you played for the Brits now, love?” He winked.

  “You know how I feel about gadgets.”

  It took Diana a minute to get comfortable with new technology. Her signature moves didn’t usually involve more than a pistol or whatever contents were around her. The first time she’d had to wear an earpiece, she’d put it in upside down and lost it somewhere in a muddy obstacle course. Ratanake had forced her to go back for it, wading through the dirt until she found it wedged underneath barbed wire. Looking for it had been more useful for her training than having it in the first place.

  But this seemed easy—stick and kick.

  They wrapped themselves with tensile cables, affixing to a sturdy part of the roof with steel clamps and a triple check of their sturdiness. Then, they dropped again. Diana pushed off the sides of the building, using the momentum to push her farther down, letting out a bit of the rope a little at a time.

  The wind pushed against the green glass of the building, everything squeaking and moving with the varying pressure of the breeze and when their heavy boots hit in the wrong spot. There were two more ledges until they were lowered to the central spire where the vice-chief’s office was, where the papers were stuck to the glass, egging on Diana to come after them.

  Those sheets didn’t matter because she would have come either way. No matter what.

  On the last ledge, they all took a moment to stick the glass crushers to the bottom of their boots. Amber gave Diana a small salute with two fingers. She nodded back.

  “Five,” Mercy counted down. “Four…”

  They all leaned back with one foot raised, the other boot balancing on the lip of the ledge.

  “Three—”

  Diana breathed in through her nose.

  “Two—”

  Out through her mouth.

  “One.”

  They dropped, swinging along the cables, boots forward and crashing through the green glass into Amita Voss’s office.

  Gunshots went off, scattered and frightened at the sudden breaking of glass and influx of soldiers in the room. To her right, somebody went down, knees cracking against the floor. Diana whipped the pistols out of their holsters as she landed in the room with half of a slide. She unclicked the cables from around her hips.

  She went for exactly who she’d planned to—Asher.

  If they were going to go after her son, she’d go after theirs. Besides, if Voss really hated Zabójca as much as Amber and the files said she did, then Asher would be the common ground between them, bringing them both into Diana’s crosshairs.

  Running across the glass, she heard, “Mom!”

  She almost stopped.

  But instead, her eyes locked with Asher’s and she ran at him with full speed, knocking his knees out with her boots as soon as she was in range. He went down fast, not expecting her at all. With the pistol in her hand, she knocked the baseball cap off his head. She pulled her bicep around his neck while turning her body, yanking him so he was another bulletproof vest on top of her.

  “Hey!” Diana screamed, holding the pistol out.

  The wind blew inside, flinging glass and dust across the office, coating everything in gray and green. On the ground, Louis was bleeding out of a bullet that had gone straight through his neck as soon as he’d kicked his way inside. Every few seconds he let out a choked gurgle and a spatter of blood. Mercy had her gun on Zabójca. Zabójca had his gun on Wesley. Amber had his gun on Voss. Voss had her hands up by her head. Rex was unconscious, lying face first into the glass, small red cuts all across his skin.

  “Don’t move,” Diana said, pointing her pistol between Zabójca and Voss and then sticking it on the middle of Zabójca’s forehead. “Don’t you fucking move, you bastard.”

  “Do it!” Voss screamed from the other side of the office, causing almost everyone to jump a little. All of the eyes turned on her, but Voss’s gaze was only on Diana. Staring right at her as she screamed, “Kill him!”

  “No way out of this one,” Diana said, ignoring Voss and bringing her attention back to Zabójca. The gun still on Wesley and his other hand wrapped in bandages from where she’d blown off his fingers.

  “There is always a way out,” Zabójca replied, a slight smile across his face. She hated how blasé he was about all of this. Never once had he showed even a sliver of remorse over the actions he’d taken against the US military.

  The wind pushed in from behind them, scattering more glass. Diana looked over her shoulder, pushed the gun harder against Asher’s skull and shook her head.

  “Drop your weapon,” Diana said.

  Zabójca said, “You first.”

  “Kill him, Weick!” Voss screamed again.

  “Shut up!” Amber snapped.

  Asher squirmed under her grip, and she tightened her bicep against his neck, an occasional gasp for air coming out of his mouth. His breath smelled of coffee and pastries. There was a moment of squirming silence as everyone contemplated their next move. Anything too fast or sudden could lead to Wesley being shot in the back of the head. Sure, Diana would be able to kill Asher, but it wouldn’t be worth it. The value of Zabójca’s son was not equivalent to hers—in more ways than one.

  “Don’t move!” She heard Amber scream it first and then the ting of metal against the carpet.

  There was a sudden bright white light that filled the room—the familiar pop and gleam of a flashbang. She blinked. Asher squirmed. Her feet hit the edge of the window, the metal frame coated with small pieces of glass that crunched under her boots.

  There was a gunshot and a scream. A slamming of someone against the wall or against the floor.

  Diana blinked again, trying to regain her vision, trying to determine who had even thrown the flashbang in the first place.

  Asher pulled his head back, bashing it against her nose.

  Though her grip didn’t loosen on his neck, she lost her footing on the edge of the window, slipping.

  It could have killed her. She could have fallen to her death from one of the executive offices of the MI6 headquarters with the whole world watching. News cameras would zoom in on her smashed brain on the roof. MI6 and SCO19 members would take off their hats to commemorate her bravery and stupidity. Her son and ex-husband would watch all of the life drain from her face as she fell, never able to erase that trauma after all that they’d been through.

  But she caught herself with one hand. Her fingers curled around the edge, glass digging into her soft pads and palm as she tried to realign her grip.

  She screamed out, each movement of her hand more painful than the last.

  Her feet dangled in the air undern
eath her, kicking against the side of the building, trying to climb her way back up. The wind picked at the bottom of her boots and the back of her neck. The muscles in her forearm pumped up and out of her arm, clawing at the glass edge.

  She threw her left arm up, grabbing on to the rim with both hands.

  The helicopter hummed behind her as if it was considering coming to get her. But there was no way it could get this close to the building without smashing out the glass and the sides of the building with its blades.

  A hand came down onto her wrist.

  “Diana!”

  She looked up to meet Amber’s dark eyes. He reached for her with both of his hands.

  “Don’t worry. I got you,” he said.

  But just as his other warm palm wrapped around her wrist, something hit him from behind, over the back of his head, and he went down like a rock. His body splayed out on the edge above her, out cold, his weight pushing down on the edge of her fingers and crushing them against the glass.

  She tried to pull herself up again, Amber’s unconscious body acting as a counterweight. This time she managed to get up—thankful for all the pull-ups she’d done alongside her personal training clients in the last year. It took some maneuvering to get herself up, using Amber’s clothes as an anchor to get back into the office.

  And as soon as Diana was up, she was down again. The same heavy thud that had hit Amber walloped against the back of her head. The last things she saw were both Amber and Rex’s unconscious bodies, and Wesley’s wide eyes. The last things she heard were the whir of the helicopter blades in the distance and a woman’s voice saying, “You will do what’s required of you.”

  Chapter 27

  Rex Tennison

  London, England

  When Rex’s eyes flickered open, his face was stinging. Wind was forcing its way into the open wounds that the broken glass had left behind all over his face. He was being gathered to his feet and when he resisted, the arms didn’t try to stop him. Was it not another enemy? Rex had gotten so used to constantly being surrounded by terrorists and bad guys that the sudden lack of resistance caused him to fall over onto his side, his cheek rubbing against glass once again.