“Fuck the glass,” she croaked. “Get…Rachel. Move your ass.”
He cleared a spot on the rug as best he could with his boot and laid her down gently. Then he forced his shaking legs to bear him over to the bloody carnage on the ground to scrounge for loaded weapons.
Rachel. The last thing that he could do for her.
Chapter
29
Connor stared out the windshield. His eyes burned like coals.
The atmosphere in the taxi had the tension of a bomb countdown.
There was nothing to say. It had already been said, repeated, hashed out, torn apart, attacked, picked to pieces. They were so on edge that anything anyone said annoyed the shit out of all the others, so they had collectively subsided into a gloomy, self-protective silence.
Connor sat in the front, clutching the monitor with the satellite map. Their driver sensed the weirdness, despite the language barrier, and kept casting nervous looks at him and the others, in the rearview mirror. Seth, Sean and Davy were crowded into the backseat, everyone red-eyed, grim, and tense from the strain of suppressing the thoughts of what might already have happened to Rachel, considering her ten-hour head start.
All they could do now was throw themselves at the location of the beacon in Rachel’s red coat and see what happened. Connor had called the FBI liaison in Budapest when they got to Hungary, and told him what was going on, just so that someone would be sure to follow up should the worst happen. They had been strictly forbidden to go anywhere near Novak.
What the fuck. To a man, not one of them had ever learned to do what they were told. And they were the only ones whose prime agenda was Rachel’s safety. They needed to be the first ones on the scene.
They were almost there, bumping over a narrow, ancient stone bridge over a narrow river and then down a long avenue next to a tall stone wall. All of them noted the cameras mounted at regular intervals along the top of it. The cab driver came to a stop at a big wrought iron gate. It was yawning wide open. Weird.
“We are arrive,” the driver ventured timidly.
As they watched, two men came sprinting out of the gate. They didn’t even look at the car, just ran, hell for leather, toward the bridge.
OK. Weirder.
The meter read 155 euros. Connor handed the guy two hundred-euro bills. They piled out and the cab peeled away, tires squealing. Connor didn’t blame him. It was very clearly a bad scene.
Then another guy came pounding out the gate. Davy grabbed him, slamming one of his thick forearms across the guy’s throat.
“What’s happening in there?” he demanded.
The guy gibbered in Hungarian. Davy gave him a shake and tried the same question in French, then in German. The guy just struggled and squawked, voice high. Finally, Davy flung him away in disgust.
“Get out of here,” he muttered.
The man stumbled, flailing, caught himself and ran.
“Rats leaving the ship,” Sean said. “Got a fix on Rachel?”
Connor peered at the handheld. “Got her. Let’s just go for it. They’re not manning the cameras now. The shit’s hit the fan. It’s every man for himself.”
They took off running, swift and silent, down the long, curving avenue of trees. No one challenged them; no one shot at them. A huge, decaying eighteenth-century palace came into view.
They veered around it to follow the signal, and found a long, low building that must once have been a stable. Getting closer. Forty meters. Thirty. The icon blipped on the screen, tantalizing them.
They burst into the building, peering around, guns at the ready.
No one was there, just a long row of covered parking slots. Fifteen meters, ten, eight. Dead silence.
The beacon was inside one of the cars. Connor’s heart pounded with dread. Five meters, four, three…there it was. A Mercedes coupe.
No one was inside it. They flashed their penlights in every direction. No one. The doors were locked.
They crowded around to the back of the vehicle, and stared at the trunk. The beacon was there. Connor tried it. Of course, it was locked.
He swallowed hard and pounded on it. “Rachel? Honey?”
No one answered. Seth elbowed through them, carrying a big, rusty garden implement, like heavy hedge clippers. “Everybody get the fuck out of the way.”
They all moved back, and Seth went berserk, smashing and pounding and cursing, until the back of the car was unrecognizable.
He finally jolted the lock loose. They wrenched the trunk open.
A puffy red child’s ski jacket lay there. No Rachel. Connor smelled urine. He put his hand on the carpeting under the coat, felt around.
Yes, there it was. Dampness. Pee.
“Baby piss,” he said. “They put her in the trunk. They put a three-year-old into the fucking trunk of a fucking car.”
There were about three seconds of appalled silence. Sean broke it. “Let’s move,” he said harshly. “Let’s go hunt. I need to kill something. Now.”
“Right on,” Seth growled.
A ragged burst of gunfire came from the direction of the mansion.
They took off running again.
He would recognize Rachel’s screaming anywhere. It would cut throught any kind of noise, a gun fight, an air raid, even the roaring and ringing of his ears. Val followed the sound, lurching forward in an unsteady, limping run fueled by unmixed adrenaline. He left a trail of blood behind him, but he didn’t care. If his blood supply lasted long enough to kill András, that was all he asked of it.
He lost the sound and stopped, straining to hear her again. The wounds throbbed and burned, all of them, the old ones and the new. There was a burning hole in his chest. Every panting breath hurt. Broken ribs, from the bullets that had punched into the Kevlar.
He rounded a corner. The shrill, faraway wail crescendoed. He launched himself forward again. Blood ran from the gouge in his hip, down his leg, into his boot. His foot squelched with every step.
The layout of the place was coming back. The sound seemed to come from above him, though it could be an aural illusion. He ran toward the grand staircase and took the steps three at a time, driven by terror. He would hang on as long as he could for Tamar’s sake, but he knew what his body could and could not do, wounded as he was. He knew that feeling: the faintness, the cold, the nasty tingle.
He had only minutes before his body failed him.
He stopped at the top to listen, guts sinking at the silence. There it was, a squeak, quickly cut off—to the left. He stumbled down the corridor toward the sound, abandoning all effort at stealth.
András rounded the corner, clutching a writhing, squirming Rachel under one arm, brandishing his gun with the other hand.
He stopped cold when he saw Val, jerking Rachel up so that she shielded his chest, neck and head.
Val dove for the nearest doorway as András opened fire on him, tearing the rotten door loose from its antique, rusty hinges. He pitched forward into the stifling darkness. Bullets crashed into walls, the floor, sending splinters and shards of wood, tile, and stucco flying.
At the first moment of silence, Val called out over the ringing in his ears. “It’s over, András. They’re dead. Put her down.”
“Who’s dead?” András demanded.