“Shit.”
“Well, a little tighter than that. I’ll send you the information.”
“It’s better than we had,” Dahl said, as Kenzie watched Tremayne and his guards. They would be getting antsy now, wondering what was going to happen next. She waved Tremayne on, essentially telling him to make the drop and get it finished with.
“It is.” Hayden sighed. “It is. We can work with this. Of course, I’d have put a pretty firm, friggin’ guess that it would be the mountains of Peru.”
“That would have been pure conjecture,” Dahl said. “The treasure could have been moved over the centuries.”
“I guess.”
With the conversation winding up, Kenzie made her presence known. “We’re heading for the drop here. Then we’re done.”
It was a signal to Dahl. “I’m on my way.”
She broke the connection and slipped her phone in her purse, now more than ever acutely aware of Tremayne’s reputation and his vicious instinct for survival. Darkness swarmed outside, interrupted by the ever-more-infrequent glares of streetlamps, traffic lights and lit road junctions. The neighborhood grew shabbier, the frontages now barred. She knew these places well. She’d once frequented them in many a city, after making deals. There was a time when she really believed she had found her vocation, a career for life. Now, more than miss any aspect of it, she hated what she’d become.
Trying to change all that. Was this the heart Dahl kept banging on about? The only people who’d previously shown faith in her were those who’d trained her to become a professional killer. She wasn’t sure how to take Dahl’s convictions because she had no real experience of trust though the last decade to base them on.
And before that… life was a haze of memory. Repressed. Unnecessary distractions, her instructors said. The things she could remember revolved around her family and how the men in authority had allowed them to pay a terrible price, a chunk of retribution leveled at the Israeli government but metered out on an intensely personal level.
Confused, lost, she held on to team SPEAR as if they were the shaky raft after a shipwreck. She wanted to belong, but knew she never would.
Twenty minutes passed before the F-Pace pulled to a halt outside a metal shutter. Its sides were rusted, its door pockmarked. Tremayne stayed put and then the door started to roll up, the sound an ear-splitting screech that made Kenzie grimace.
“Not the most subtle entrance.”
“This guy doesn’t do subtle,” Tremayne breathed. “Nor does he have to. Cracktooth owns everything you can see.”
Cracktooth? Kenzie watched, prepared and waited as the most dangerous moment of the evening approached. She wondered if Dahl had arrived, but couldn’t count on it. She watched Tremayne exit the car, hand over the relic and then perform some kind of transaction on a portable tablet. All seemed well. A crooked-toothed, straggly-haired individual cracked a jagged smile.
Tremayne bent at the waist and then glanced back through the window at her, nodding, smirking and baring his teeth. The grinning man raised a gun.
Not like this. Not now.
She couldn’t move more than a meter before the gun went off.
CHAPTER SEVEN
She flung herself full length, grateful that the car had a roomy back seat. A bullet shattered the glass, spraying the interior and her back. Another came immediately after, the noise overwhelming, the closeness to death a living nightmare. Kenzie squirmed, falling to the rear footwell. A third bullet punched through the back door, disappearing through the seat where she’d just sat. She heard Tremayne complaining that he’d “just bought the fucker”, and then a noise above her head.
Cracktooth opening the rear door.
Kenzie pushed hard off her heels, angling her body through the door and hitting Cracktooth in the chest with her head. The blow wasn’t hard enough to move, nor even stagger him, but it was packed with surprise, and brimming with fury.
She landed hard on the road outside, ignored the pain and rolled against his legs. A peripheral glance showed Tremayne turning to his guards who were exiting the car, no doubt reaching for weapons too. This was about as bad as it got.
Kenzie changed tack, rolling under the car.
She pushed with both legs, wrenched her arms, scraped her skin and tore her dress. The hot exhaust brushed her shoulder, an intense kiss that would leave a permanent mark. Material tore at her knees. She flattened herself as much as she was able. She saw Cracktooth’s shoes move back and then his knees appear as he bent, making her writhe with even greater purpose. She saw other feet appear to the front of the car — the guards — then one set appeared at the side she was aiming for.
Now Cracktooth waved his gun under the car. She heard his laughter.
A shot. The bullet passed perilously close to her head, taking out the front tire. Tremayne cursed once more. Cracktooth could barely contain his mirth.
Kenzie squashed herself into a tight, flat shape and squeezed out the other side, then kicked at the legs that stood there. The guard was waiting, but hadn’t expected the instant attack. He jerked forward, inadvertently pulled his trigger, and fired. The bullet slammed into the concrete next to Kenzie’s head, the bullet as close as any had ever come to ending her existence.
Once, she’d have welcomed it. Not today.
“Ya get bitch?” A nasty, simpering drawl, spoken in French.
Kenzie saw but a single chance and only seconds of her life remaining. Using every muscle that had taken intensive years to mold, she whipped her body upright in a single movement, used the momentum to slam her forehead into the guard’s and squinted as an explosion of blood covered them both. The guard collapsed, poleaxed. The gun slipped from his hands; straight into Kenzie’s.
And even then, even with such inventive, skilled accomplishments, she was too late. A guard came around the front, gun leveled. Cracktooth was headed around back. Tremayne pointed a pistol at her over the hood of the car, still wearing that infuriating smirk.
“Not. Good. Enough,” he mouthed.
The answer came in the form of a slicing, reverberating gust of wind, a high-pitched whine, and then a thick chunk of sound as a black, two-foot long Japanese blade somehow ended up lodged right through Tremayne’s throat. The man’s eyes bulged, his hands flexed and then he fell to his knees, already dead.
Kenzie didn’t miss a beat.
All around her men stared, gasped, and one man let out a whiny guffaw. The Israeli fired her gun, sending the guard in front of her flying backward, then slid over the front of the car in an attempt to recover her weapon of choice.
The vehicle was high, slowing her, and she left smears of blood and skin across its smooth metal nose. Cracktooth had barely missed a beat, and now fired again, shattering the front windshield and covering her diving body with shards of glass. She hit the ground again, swearing and cursing, and asking for at least one of her impacts to get a little goddamn easier.
Aware of another object blasting out of the shadows she glanced up. Torsten Dahl hit like an avenging angel, hurling a trash can at Cracktooth and then following it up with his substantial body. The villain flattened like wet paper, folding and then smashing into the car, leaving a man-sized dent, rebounding off Dahl’s muscle-bound structure and then folding again. Bones broke and that was the only sound. Cracktooth never uttered another word.
Kenzie saw two more guards, both looking unsure. Fighting the urge to grab the katana, she fired close to them and watched them run. Dahl appeared at her side.
“You okay, Kenz?”
“What do you think, Torst? That is no way to use a katana.”
“It had the desired effect.”