“You’ve seen the footage?” David winced. That meant he would have seen David go for Molly instead of his principal.
“Just come back immediately. I need you in the office tomorrow morning. You’re being reassigned. You have no backup there. Mal’s already deployed elsewhere. You haven’t officially gotten into any trouble yet, but associating with someone wanted for questioning in relation to an assassination, well that might just be pushing the limit. You get me?”
“I get you, sir. I have plans to be at the airport in a matter of hours.” He omitted that he was going with Molly, but at least that gave Baston plausible deniability.
“Good. See you in the morning.” He hung up.
David looked at his phone. He’d basically agreed to leave Molly. He glanced back at the door to the auditorium and heard people laugh. She must be rocking her speech.
This was the right thing to do. Put her on a plane out of Greece, away from her arrest warrants, and say goodbye. It was the best for her, and the best for him. He still needed to get himself on firmer ground. But right now he had to get her away from the hotel before the police came. Christ, couldn’t they have a minute without having to run and hide from someone?
He slipped back into the auditorium, in time to see Victoria enter from the opposite side. They met each other’s eyes, nodding acknowledgment. She took a seat at the back, and David took his original seat.
Molly was showing a slide of a woman depicted in a mosaic, as David planned their escape. He’d get the bellboy to pull David’s SUV to the back of the hotel. He figured that at least some people would know exactly where Molly was, so time was of the essence. It wasn’t like her speech hadn’t been on the G20 agenda for months.
Applause startled him out of his plan. Molly stepped away from the podium and nodded, smiling at the crowd. She stepped down from the stage and headed toward him. He jumped up and opened the door for her. “We’ve got to go now. They’ve issued a warrant for your arrest.
“What? Why?” she asked trying to keep up with him.
“Don’t. Just don’t pretend you don’t know what this is about, okay? Not with me anyway.” He turned away to pick up both their wheeled suitcases from the bellboy, slipping him a twenty-euro note and the car keys before asking him to drive it around the back entrance.
“Come on,” he said striding toward the doors that took them down to a kind of loading lobby and out to the back door. He dropped the cases outside the sliding doors and they waited.
“Here,” David said, nodding toward the approaching SUV and picking up the bags.
A flare lit under the car, and in front of his eyes, the whole vehicle exploded with a white-hot blaze.
Boom.
He dropped the bags and grabbed Molly to shield her from the heat of the blast, pushing her back through the doors and turning his back to the explosion. Glass and burning material showered down around them, but David’s mind was already working at a hundred miles an hour.
It wasn’t a firebomb. It was an expertly placed explosive device, designed to totally annihilate anyone sitting inside. The whole vehicle had been destroyed. No chance for the bellboy. Someone definitely wanted them dead.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sirens sounded, and people came running around the corner into the alleyway. Her ears were still ringing, and the skin on her arms was red where the heat from the blast had hit them.
“We’ve got to run,” David said. “Leave your bag.”
“Give me a second.” There was no way she could run anywhere in her high heels, not on the cobbled streets of Athens. She ripped open her bag and kicked off her heels, grabbing her sneakers and slipping them on.
David slapped her ass, not once but a few times. What the…? “This is not the time—”
“Your skirt has embers on it.” He slapped her a couple more times and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “Come on.”
She didn’t take the time to look at the state of her skirt, but grabbed the sundress that was on top of her clothes, and took his offered hand.
David took off with her half a step behind. They ran away from the debris, and the people who were shouting and pointing, and headed to the loading dock. Once they’d cleared the hotel block, David slowed, but still ran.
“Smile,” he said, as they passed late night shoppers. He grinned at her and she smiled back, wondering what the hell he was thinking.
They continued to run, laughing and smiling until they reached a residential neighborhood. David stopped. “I think we can stop here. Are you okay?”
“I think so. I’m not sure.” She was being honest. A poor man had just got blown up, and yet she was glad it wasn’t her and David. Which made her feel like an awful person. And someone was obviously trying to kill them.
David grimaced and rolled his shoulders.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Sure. A little blast shock, but I’m fine. I’ve seen worse.” He turned to look at a bus stop street map, and she saw his back.
“Jesus. Your shirt is shredded! Let me look”—she pulled up one of the ripped tails of his shirt and saw his back was red raw—“It looks like you have really bad sunburn.” She winced at the pain he must be in.
At that second his phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and answered. “No. We’re both okay. They’ve what?” He nodded a few times. “Thanks, Mal.” He paused. “Just fuck off.”
He shoved the phone back in his pants and paced in front of the church they’d stopped in front of. “They’ve closed down the city. No one in and no one out. The police have road blocks on all the roads leaving the city.”
“So you don’t think we’d make it to the airport?” she asked, wondering what had happened to her life in the past two days.
He remained silent, obviously processing this new information. She didn’t press him. She sat on the small wall of the church and took a breath. That poor bellboy. Why would someone bomb their car? Was it because of Brandon’s note? Did she set off the chain of reactions that led to that poor man’s death?
David stopped pacing and crouched in front of her. She tried to keep her eyes on his face, but her imagination was working overtime. Did the man have family? Did they know yet? “Okay, this is the plan. We’re going to take the metro to Piraeus port, where all the tourist boats set sail to the Greek islands. You’re going to take out as much cash as you can at an ATM and then you’re going to use your credit card to buy one ticket to the farthest island we can find. That way they’ll think that you’ve left the city and we’ve split up.”
She recognized that he was detailing a plan, and she could hear the words, but she couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. The car kept exploding in her mind. Ka-boom. And then that second of silence, followed by the clang of falling car parts. Over and over. She tried to visualize what the bellboy looked like, but she couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen him.
“We can’t go to the airport, and frankly the boats would be easily caught by a police launch, so the best thing we can do is hunker down somewhere anonymous and try to figure out what the hell is going on.” He pointed down the road to the metro station, and then looked back at her.
She nodded, because that’s what he was waiting for. She was sure it was an excellent plan. He took her hand and led her to the metro station, buying two tickets with some coins.
She was still carrying her sundress, which she understood looked strange, so she folded it up as small as she could and clasped it in one hand as they sat on the train. She played with the buttons of it. What had she done? Had she killed the bellboy?
Wordlessly she slipped her hand in her pocket and passed David the envelopes that Brandon Peterson had given her.