“Okay,” she said to herself in a whisper. “Move!”
Far to her left, almost half a block away now, she saw her two cops, a duet of green uniforms moving at a quick pace.
Well, no turning back now. She walked briskly. Get this over fast. Make this your own type of smash and grab. No nonsense permitted. God bless Rizzo and his ice pick.
She felt in her jacket pocket and found the pick. She clutched it and felt her sweaty palm on it. She crossed one street corner. So far so good.
Now, once again: Where is Rizzo? She threw a sideways glance over her shoulder and didn’t see him. Where was he? She looked again.
Come on Gian Antonio. Don’t be slow about this. Timing is everything.
She continued walking. A second street corner crossing.
Okay, two thirds of the way there. So far so good. She was still alive. She tried to steady her pace. She knew Rizzo had to be back there somewhere. He had to be.
Far up ahead she could see the end of the block. She knew she needed to turn the corner to follow…She quickstepped her pace, got there, and did a quick evasive maneuver. She went out into the street, so as not to be too close to the building. She wished Rizzo would close ranks with her.
Where was he? How could she have lost him? Unlike the busier main street, the side street was quiet. Up ahead a parked car with Guardia Civil markings waited, as per the plan.
On the side street, windows were barred and grates were down against the night and the people who populated it.
In her gut she had the same feeling she had had in Kiev before all hell had broken loose. Was it an animal sense by now, an instinct telling her that danger lurked somewhere? Or was it just a survival skill, telling her to play the game carefully?
Then she could see the cruiser clearly. One of the men in uniform stood leaning against the front hood, near the tire, his arms folded, watching her approach. The other stood by the rear trunk. He was several years younger than the man in front. No nametags. No ranks. Like the rest of the evening, these guys didn’t look right. It wasn’t just that her radar was beeping now, the alarm sirens were raging.
She stopped short, about twenty feet in front of them.
“Buenas noches,” she said. She would handle this in Spanish.
“Buenas noches,” one of them answered. They almost laughed.
“La pietà,” she asked. “¿Dónde está?”
They both smiled. Something was off with their smiles too.
“In the trunk,” they said. The man in uniform at the rear of the car stepped away, several paces, very carefully. By now she knew, this was no ordinary transaction.
Where is Rizzo!
She didn’t want to turn. She knew better than to take her eyes off two players in a quasi-criminal transaction.
“Be a gentleman. Open the trunk for me and bring it here,” she said.
“Come get it,” one of them said.
“No. I’ve come this far. The final few paces are up to you.”
Her hand remained on the pick. But she felt naked. They had guns!
Where is Rizzo!
Then she heard footsteps behind her. Comforting ones. That had to be him, didn’t it? She felt eyes on her back. She felt a presence, maybe twenty feet behind her.
There was a moment of standoff.
“I brought a friend,” she said, still in Spanish.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” the man to her left said.
“Just give me the pietà if you have it,” she said.
There was another moment of hot sweaty standoff. Five seconds that played out like a month. She cocked her head slightly and glanced behind her to see where Rizzo was, angling so that her eyes were only away from these two creeps for a millisecond.
No Rizzo. Actually, she saw where he wasn’t. But she could see a man she had never seen in her life before. An Asian, sharply dressed in a dark suit. Midthirties. Handsome. Killer-good-looks handsome.
Now it all made sense. She had been trapped and set up. She turned back toward the car. There was movement behind her, as if the Asian were jockeying for a better angle. She watched the men in front of her and saw something strange in their eyes too.
She was certain: the three of them were together and she had waltzed into their trap.
Then she read the look of the men in front of her. Their hands were moving slowly toward their weapons. She would have fled, but quick movements are suicidal during a crossfire.
In front of her, both of the uniformed men reached for their sidearms. And a voice came from behind her. The Asian screamed out in English.
“Alex! Get down! Get down! Get down!”
She saw the guns come up in the hands of the men in front of her. Big, mean, automatic pistols. Urban warfare stuff.
The two men spread out quickly to their sides to get a better angle on her pursuer. She was right in the middle. Her mind was so filled with pounding blood, fear, and danger that her instincts took over. She knew that if she moved to the left or the right, she would be in the line of fire from the Guardia Civil and if she stayed upright she could be shot in the back.
So she went down, hitting the pavement hard as the gunfire broke out all around her. She ducked and threw her arms and hands over her upper torso and her head. She waited to feel the impact of a slug and the searing pain that would hit her.
The gunshots resonated with a terrifying sound. The ammunition sailed all around her. In a vision that would play out in her mind forever, just like the dark bloody visions of earlier this year in Kiev, she saw the younger Guardia Civil man take a shot in the center of the chest.
The shot propelled him backward against the car, where the force of his recoiling body kept him stationary for several seconds even though his own weapon had flown from his hand and into the air. A second shot from behind her hit him and threw him sprawling onto the hood of the car, where he remained.
In the same instant, the second Guardia Civil man, the older one, fired at the man behind Alex. He got off a barrage of shots from his automatic pistol. Some of them flew directly over her prone body at the Asian. But he must have missed with every one of them because the shots from behind her kept coming in return.
Four, five, six of them. Several of the bullets impacted across the Guardia Civil man’s chest. He reeled and spun. But the final shot from behind Alex was the coup de grace. It hit the man square in the center of the face.
Alex, cringing, unable to pull her gaze away, had an excellent view. The final bullet blew away the left side of the man’s skull. The hat flew away, as did a bloody mass of brain and pulp. The body spun wildly, spasmed, tumbled over the rear trunk of the car, and rolled wildly into the Calle de la Paz.
Two dozen shots must have been fired, all in the space of a few seconds. Everything was quiet for a moment. Then Alex heard the footsteps from behind approaching her.
Alex turned her head, gasping for breath, a hot sweat soaking her, convinced that the death that she had evaded in Kiev would now find her on a Madrid sidewalk several minutes past midnight on a warm summer night.
She slowly rose with her hands against the sidewalk. Her eyes widened at the vision behind her. Bathed by the light from a streetlamp, the gunman behind her stepped forward. There was a pistol at the end of each arm.
The vision was surreal. He had carried the weapons much as he had fired them, with a precision and carriage that was almost inhuman. No wonder he had been able to fire off so many rounds at once. He had been firing with two weapons at once. But the accuracy had been as astonishing as the speed. He stood no more than twenty feet from her. And now a revised realization. He wasn’t with the fake cops at all.
Yet before him now, she was helpless. Sweat poured off her.
“Go ahead,” she said, reverting to English.