Текст книги "Adrenaline"

Автор книги: Jeff Abbott

Соавторы: Jeff Abbott
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

48

I WANT IN,” I SAID TO PIET. “But on my terms.” Then I turned and launched a hammering kick into Nic’s face. He crumpled. I didn’t want him talking, so I slammed a second kick, precise, into his throat. Not hard enough to kill but enough to keep him nice and quiet.

Piet had a gun out, leveled at me, before my foot was down. It was good to know he had more than that stupid for-show sword. The women screamed and retreated against the wall; I raised my hands.

“He’s your problem. Not me.” I pointed at the sprawled Nic with a tip of my toe. Nic made gaspy, breathy noises, eyes blinking in shock. “He’s setting you up. He wants to take over your operation.”

“Outside.” Piet gestured with the gun, screamed at the women to be quiet. They fell into a snuffle of tears and whispers. He gestured toward Nic. I pulled Nic to his feet, shoved him staggering out into the hallway and back to the main room. I pushed him as the twins hurried out and Piet shut and locked the door. Five seconds I was alone with Nic, but that was all I needed as the twins and Piet rushed up behind us.

“What the hell is your problem?” Piet said.

“He’s busting on you,” I said. “Selling you out. Check him.”

Nic moaned through his ruined lip and broken teeth. He started to sit up, consciousness rousing, and Piet pushed him back down to the floor with the barrel of the gun.

“He wanted me to lie about you to Edward. Say that you had been stealing girls from shipments for another client, reselling them.” I kept my voice steady, looking at Nic as his eyes widened in horror. Because, you know, I was telling the truth. It’s always easier to tell the truth than to lie. “He wanted you out, and himself in as lead trafficker. He figured there’s more in live women than in photos of little kids. He’s working for someone else who wants your business, and betraying you is the cut.”

Piet kept the gun glued on Nic, who stayed still and bubbled blood from his mouth where my heel had smashed lip and teeth. He ran a hand along Nic’s pockets, under the jacket.

At first I thought Piet had missed it. He stood, not even aiming his gun at Nic anymore. Then I saw the thin little tube in Piet’s hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger. He held it up to Nic’s face. Nic blinked.

“What is this?” Piet asked, in a whisper that sounded like dirt sliding off a coffin’s top.

“I don’t know, it’s not mine,” Nic mumbled. “He’s a goddamned liar, Piet. Who are you going to believe, him or me? You know me.”

“Yes. Yes, I do know you Nic.” Piet inspected Mila’s little transmitter. He tried to cut it apart with his thumb, failed. He opened a knife from his pocket and sliced into the microphone and unpeeled it apart carefully. I’d had seconds to slip it into Nic’s pocket. Giving up the transmitter would be cutting my only link with Mila, assuming she hadn’t been grabbed by Howell and his men, but I had to do it. It was my way to save Piet’s victims and to put all the blame on Nic when Mila rescued them. My heart beat out a hard, skittering rhythm in my chest.

I watched Piet’s face as he inspected the state-of-the-art device. “God damn it,” he said. “This is like freaking spy gear. Who are you working for, Nic?”

“No one… I work for you. He’s lying. You don’t know him, you know me.”

“Yeah, and you’ve had the hate for me for weeks,” Piet said. “You think I’m blind? You always had your goddamn precious nose up in the air around me. Who do you work for? Stand up.”

Nic stood. The light in his eyes shifted. Darkened in rage, the anger of the trapped animal. “I don’t work for anyone but you and Edward. He’s tricked me. He’s tricked you. He planted that on me.”

I shook my head. But Piet raised the gun from Nic to me.

“I guess I have a choice to make,” Piet said.

49

CALL IN REINFORCEMENTS?” August asked Howell. They sat in the van, half a block from the address provided by the Chinese student. It was a gray block of industrial space. Multiple buildings, but the complex looked mostly deserted. Two vehicles parked in front of one door at the end. The rest of the parking lot space was empty.

“You’re rather timid,” Howell said. “Surprises me.”

“One man’s caution,” August said. “I don’t want my friend dead when he’s more valuable to us alive.”

“I like the idea of moving now. No witnesses around,” Van Vleck said.

“I want this kept quiet. I don’t want to attract the attention of the Dutch authorities. What do we have in the van?” Howell asked.

“Four assault rifles, bulletproof vests, infrared goggles.” August looked at him with a scowl. “There’s only the three of us.”

“I can count, Agent Holdwine.”

“I think, respectfully, we should call in backup.” August glanced at Van Vleck. “Capra is trained. We don’t know about the other guy. We should go in with overwhelming force.”

“Two vehicles here. One van, that brought Capra and his contact. The other car’s small. There’s not an army inside.” Howell smiled. “Let’s go, gentleman. I am tired of Sam Capra being a problem for us.”

Van Vleck and August started putting on the bulletproof gear.

“Get that young man to his feet,” Howell said, gesturing at the Chinese hacker. “We’ll use him.”

50

MILA PARKED HER CAR a few blocks away from the warehouse, at a small café. She pressed her earpiece and closed her eyes for a moment. She heard most of the conversation between Piet and Sam, the offer to Sam of one of the captives to rape. Her breathing grew very calm; a hot, hollow rage expanded in her chest.

She wore a black trench coat over her suit—she had a gun for each pocket and now she also carried a retractable baton. It was her favorite weapon, and she imagined beating Piet and Nic senseless with it. She hurried toward the machinists’ shop on foot.

She heard Sam’s advice to search Nic and the discovery of the microphone and knew what Sam had done. She applauded him. But he was cutting her loose, severing the one tie between them so as to delve closer to these monsters.

But if Howell blundered in now, he would ruin their chance to break inside the ring.

Mila watched the van, crouching from behind a corner a block away. She saw the back of the van open; the Chinese student they’d grabbed lurched out, hands bound. She could see the kid’s face was battered and bruised, a wet smear of blood below his nostrils. Then the two thick-necked men. Then Howell. All armed.

The three men stopped at the door. She could see the Chinese boy shake his head. They’d stopped at an access keypad by the door. The Chinese boy, hands shaking, entered a code.

The four men entered. Mila hurried toward the van. They were going in full throttle, so they were more worried about their front than their back.

She slid under the van and began to count, watching the door. Her timing would have to be impeccable if Sam was to survive.

51

HIM OR ME?” I ASKED. Nic looked too shocked to speak.

“Or both?” Piet said. “I don’t need trouble.”

“But you still need help,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t even have bothered to talk to me. Nic thinks you’re a joke. He ever make fun of your sword?”

The corner of Piet’s mouth jerked. Sometime in those months, Nic’s disdain had been noted and filed. “Everything you said is correct,” Piet said. “Here. Fine.”

And he handed me the gun. “Kill him.”

Final test. If I was a cop or a plant, I wasn’t going to gun down an unarmed man. This was the line that no one with a shred of decency left would cross.

What decency did I have left? I raised the gun; my head crowded with Lucy and the baby. This man had helped kidnap and assault women, shipping them into slavery. He was smuggling weapons. He was hacking into government databases and stealing information. He was trading in photos of assaulted and abused children.

And I was what—a courtroom on two legs?

I guess I was.

Him or me. And with me, my family.

I fired.

The bullet caught Nic in the chest and he fell back. Bad shot. It didn’t kill him outright. Sorry, Nic. He looked at me with a wrenching stare of agony and hate and I fired again and his face didn’t matter anymore.

I wouldn’t see it again, except maybe in my dreams.

I pulled my shirt loose, wiped my prints off the Glock, and handed the gun back to Piet. My hand didn’t shake. And for one moment the past five seconds seemed like a life that happened to another man.

“Well,” Piet said into the silence. He stared down at Nic’s body.

“Well,” I said. Well, well, well. Who was I now?

“Let’s get to work.” He gestured at the goods. “I like your ideas, but I’ve already got a load of goods to use as camouflage. You reinforced my opinion as to what would work best.”

Nothing like brownie points from the trafficker. I inspected the boxes. Counterfeit cigarettes.

“You’re going to ship your super-duper top-secret stuff inside illicit cigarettes that you then sell in the United States and double your profit. Two birds, one stone.”

“I maximize my efforts.”

Piet was much smarter than he looked. He gestured at the boxes. “About a million euros’ worth.”

I pointed at the shredded, destroyed microphone. “You better hope there wasn’t a tracker in there. Whoever he worked for will be coming when contact gets cut.”

“Which is why we’re going to move everything right now. The women, the cigs.” He turned to the twins and started issuing hard orders in rapid-fire Dutch.

How could I get the women to safety without blowing my cover? Right now, I couldn’t. The thought hurt.

I heard a soft ping. A door opening. I couldn’t see the front door from here: the boxes and boxes of illicit cigarettes made a labyrinth between here and the front door.

I was counting on the arrival being Mila. Which meant I wanted Piet heading out the back with me, abandoning the captives and his goods. “Are you expecting anyone?”

“No,” he whispered. We leaned against the wall. Stacks of boxes barred part of our view. He gestured at the twins, who took up positions ahead of us, closer to the door.

I saw a figure step into view. Not Mila. A thin, young Asian man, walking in, wearing an ill-fitting jacket and loose jeans. He had thick black hair cut in a bad slash; tufts stuck up like little exclamation points.

“He works for Nic,” Piet said. “Hacker.” For some reason he retreated back toward the table.

The Asian kid stumbled forward into the dim light and I saw he’d been beaten. Really worked over. One of the twins—the bald one—said, “Hey, what are you doing here?”

The answer was a bullet that sang out and caught the bald twin in the throat. He sagged to the floor. His brother bellowed a shocked scream and started blasting the boxes with his assault rifle. Puffs of brown powder danced in the air: the fragments of cigarettes, tobacco exploding into miniature clouds by the impact of the bullets ripping through the boxes.

And someone, from cover near the front, shot out some of the lights. I saw the Asian kid scream and run, and then he caught a bullet and sprawled to the floor.

Chaos. Near darkness. I couldn’t let them shoot back—this could be Mila. Piet ran around one corner of the stacked boxes and I followed him.

Ping. Another light shattered. One light left, directly over the metal table.

I saw a figure standing near us, laying a round down toward the remaining twin. A dark-haired man. Piet fired before I could react and the man toppled, screaming in English. Both he and Piet raised to fire and I yanked Piet back, out of the line of fire. I needed him alive for now.

“God damn it, what the hell…,” Piet coughed.

“These have to be cops,” I said. “Who else would give Nic a wire like that? We need to get the hell out.”

We ran and an explosion of bullets tore through the cardboard maze.

52

I HEARD A CLANG, metal landing on concrete, and then a blast tore open the biggest stack of the cigarette boxes. Flame erupted from the flying debris; the hot, sweet scent of tobacco crowded the air. The thrum of the blast nearly deafened me. I turned as Piet fired back and I saw him drawing aim on a man through the tendrils of smoke.

August. The Company was here.

I grabbed Piet’s arm, spoiling his shot. The bullet pinged to August’s left and he ducked behind an unused machinist’s lathe. He hadn’t seen me.

“What the—”

“Just run, come on!” I shoved Piet toward the exit. I ran back toward the attackers, vaulted over the lathe and hammered both feet into the side of August’s head as he risked standing up. He sprawled. I didn’t think he had seen me yet. I had to keep it that way without killing him. I grabbed his gun.

The remaining twin ran toward me, expecting me to put a bullet in August’s head. Instead I raised the gun I’d just taken off August and fired right between the twin’s eyes. He had about a second to look surprised before he collapsed.

I ran like hell.

If Howell took me back into custody now, I was done. I would spend the rest of my life in a prison. I couldn’t prove that I worked for Mila’s secret do-gooders, that I was trying to infiltrate a criminal’s inner circle. I would just be a bitter ex-employee keeping company with a slaver. I would vanish back into Howell’s prison, sealed in stone. Or be dead and buried, unmarked, unmourned. Everyone who thought I was a traitor was going to think they were right.

I heard a roar from the lathe. Howell’s voice. Yelling.

I ran past Nic’s body. Piet reappeared, gun in hand, and laid down fire behind me, driving Howell back into cover. I could see Howell returning fire, and then—in a moment when Piet paused to reload—fire coming from the front door.

Someone was shooting at Howell from the other side.

He turned, returning fire. On the other side of the steel door I heard the captive women screaming and sobbing.

I grabbed at Piet. “Come on.”

“No. I’m not leaving these bitches here.”

“They’re not worth your freedom. They’re not worth losing the big job.”

I could see on his face he hated to give up—but he listened.

We ran down a hallway and hurtled out into the clouded light of the gray day. A Volvo van was parked in the rear.

Piet held out an electronic key. The van’s lights blinked; it made the oh-so-welcome click of locks opening. We jumped inside; Piet jabbed the keys in the ignition and slammed into reverse. We roared backward, straight, Piet not taking the time to spin out and turn yet.

Howell came through the back door when we were about thirty feet away.

He saw me, and a scowl swept across his face. He had been wrong to give me a moment’s trust. I was a traitor. A criminal.

The evidence was running away before his eyes.

Piet jerked the wheel and we hurled around the edge of a building, gunning out of their sight.

“They’ll throw up roadblocks,” I yelled.

He just spun the wheel around and floored the van. We exploded out of the industrial park, revving onto the service road, dodging around several slower-moving cars.

“Got to get enough distance then find new wheels,” he said. “We can carjack someone. There’s a school nearby, a mother won’t fight us.”

“But she’ll see our faces.”

“You still have a bullet?”

“Let’s do this the easy way. I can hot-wire anything.”

“Takes too long.” He slammed a frustrated hand against the wheel. “I hate losing those whores.”

I was free from agonizing about the captive women; Howell would make sure they were safe. Now I just had to keep Piet from killing someone else so we could catch a ride.

“Those weren’t cops,” I said. “They’d already have blocked out the industrial park. They didn’t. So who the hell was Nic working for?”

Piet didn’t answer for a minute so I did.

“Rivals.”

“Rivals?” Piet said. “You mean other traffickers.”

“Or maybe whoever the Turk was working for,” I said. I wondered if Piet would now mention Bahjat Zaid’s name.

“Well, we are going to take care of that problem.”

I loved that we, although he was horrifying company. Fine for him to think we were a team; easier for me to slide the knife past the ribs when the most happy time came. I fought down the thought. Enjoying killing people? That was a downward slide in which I had no interest.

He pulled into another sprawling industrial park that wore a concrete gray anonymity. He wore a mulish frown on his face; he seemed almost eager to find a victim, to vent his rage.

He spotted a young man carrying a box, walking toward a Mercedes parked at a remove from the others. “Him. We’ll take his.”

“I don’t want you to kill someone over a car, Piet. Every small crime we have to do is a crack in the chances of pulling off the bigger job.”

“Don’t talk to me like I haven’t worked before,” he said, annoyance in his tone.

“I’m not. But you kill only when absolutely necessary.” That was true. “This isn’t necessary yet.”

His face reddened. He did not like being lectured.

“I’ll take care of the car. Without killing the guy. You stay here. Keep your face out of sight. I don’t want him to see you.”

“He’ll see you. If he does, you kill him.”

“He won’t see me.” I slipped out of the van as Piet kept driving, slamming the door, running. The guy, bespectacled, thin, started to turn toward me and I hit him, a single precise blow at the base of the neck. He crumpled and I caught him. I pulled him out of sight, gently set him down in front of a cluster of other parked cars, where a narrow strip of anemic grass lay facing the concrete wall of the office park. His breathing was regular.

He had Mercedes keys in his pocket and I fished them free. Piet was already out of the van and running toward me. I ran to the Mercedes, unlocked it and slid behind the wheel.

“That was extremely smooth,” he said. But his tone of voice wasn’t admiring. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“Canadian Special Forces.”

He said nothing more. I peeled out of the industrial park. “Where to?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I trust you, Sam,” he said. And he tightened the grip on the assault rifle he held.

53

MILA RAN. She’d fired four rounds into the machinists’ shop, with calculation. She wanted to confuse, to unsettle. She’d winged the blond in the arm and had forced Howell and his men to concentrate on her for a full minute, which hopefully had given Sam time to flee.

Then she’d retreated, running across the parking lane and around a corner. A CLOSED sign—Gesloten— hung in an office and she’d worked the lock with a kit in her pocket, ducking inside before she could be spotted. She slammed the door closed and hurried to the curtained office window to watch.

Five minutes later Howell and his two men emerged. No sign of the Chinese hacker. The big blond clutched his arm, his jacket sodden with blood. The other man stumbled, hit in the leg. Both men looked more pissed than hurt. Howell’s face wore blind rage.

The van pulled away. So. Howell was not treating a crime scene like a crime scene. Maybe he would call the Dutch police; but then there would have to be explanations as to how Company personnel had arrived at the warehouse and engaged in a gun battle. And although the industrial park looked neglected and empty, someone nearby might have heard the shots and summoned the police.

Ten seconds after the van roared off, she made her decision. Howell wasn’t waiting for the police, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t calling them, and they might arrive within minutes. She had very little time to scope out the building.

Mila slipped back inside the old machinists’ shop. The smell was of close-in gunfire, acrid; the sweet smell of tobacco.

She saw a spill of blood drops, heavy, near one of the lathes. The Chinese student had taken a bullet in the head. She glanced down at him, didn’t see breathing. The ID on him was still in place and she took that; anything that could delay the police investigation was to her advantage. She checked an abandoned office. Empty. She hurried through the entire office space, tense, her breath tight, expecting to see Sam’s dead body. But there was no sign of him.

Then she headed down a short hallway and found a shuttered steel door. Here. They had to be here.

Mila picked the lock with care, as quietly as she could. The mechanism eased and her hand went back to her gun. She took a deep, calming breath, leveled the weapon and kicked in the door. Screams greeted her. Eight women, half-naked, bruised, chained to the wall.

For a moment she faltered. A pain as sharp as a steel blade went through her chest, made her spine ache. She stared at the women and they stared back at her. Then a surge of indignant strength rose in her bones. Revenge was its marrow. Had Howell not realized these women were here? Or did he not care? Or was he calling the police anonymously to report their presence? It didn’t matter. She could not, would not, leave them.

Most of them kept their gaze low to the ground, but one, a redheaded teenager, glanced up at her.

Mila tried English. “It’s okay. It’s all right. You’re safe now.”

The red-haired girl spoke to her in Moldovan. “Who are you?”

Mila switched to Moldovan. The words tasted like a sweet she’d loved as a child. “You’ll be safe. I’m getting you out of here. The bad men have gone.”

“Who are you?” the redhead asked again.

“A friend. I want you to do exactly what I say, because we may not have much time. I’m going to get you to safety. And then home.”

“We have no money to get home,” one of the other women said. Her lips were purple with bruising.

“I know,” Mila said. “I will take care of you all.” She stepped back out in the hallway, knelt by Nic’s body. In his pocket she found a set of manacle keys. In his palm she saw Sam’s transmitter, stripped apart. She scooped it up from the dead man and tucked it in her pocket.

Her hands shook as she unlocked the women from their restraints. Her head flooded with forgotten sensations: the low rumble of the traffic on the boulevard, the odor of cheap pizza, the warmth of a gun in her hand, the breeze through the open windows of the warm Israeli night as she walked through the rooms of the damned, the man that she’d left alive roaring that she’d be killed a thousand times one day for what she’d done. She shoved the memories down.

A couple of the women started to moan and cry, in Moldovan, hardly believing that their horrific ordeal might be over.

She was thinking: they need shelter, doctors, documents. She was not thinking about Sam Capra. For the moment, he was on his own.