Her hand ached to hold that Glock.
Kyra saw a large break in the traffic. She waited until the cars got closer, then turned suddenly and sprinted onto the street. Crossing the eight lanes took almost three seconds, her timing had been perfect, and the traffic closed up behind her. The raid teams would have to find their own break in the cars to cross without getting hit. Kyra angled right again, then ran north up a side street until she reached the Avenida México intersection. She turned east. Her legs and lungs were both burning now. Her right arm still wouldn’t come up higher than her stomach.
Three blocks to the safe house.
The avenida curved to the northeast. Kyra followed the bend and saw the Galería de Arte Nacional ahead to her right. She looked behind her and saw no one. The raid teams were probably still looking for a break in the Avenida Bolívar traffic. She ran left in between two large buildings, found a concrete doorway, and leaned against one of the pillars to catch her breath. She didn’t want to stop long, but the adrenaline would carry her only so far. Her bad arm was starting to ache a bit and Kyra knew that she was running up against the limits of her endurance. Her chest was heaving and her legs burning. She hadn’t paced herself, had probably just run a six-minute mile, and the exertion was catching up to her.
She looked back down the avenida and saw no one. Then she listened. In the distance, more than one engine was racing faster than it should, tires screeching. Kyra stumbled back onto the sidewalk and started running again, north this time.
Two blocks to the safe house.
Kyra passed only a few pedestrians over the next hundred meters. She looked back. The SEBIN teams were nowhere she could see and she started to relax. They had been out of visual contact too long. They could find her now only if one of the cars got lucky or if she made a mistake, a favor she didn’t intend to grant.
She reached the Avenida Urdaneta and looked west. The high-rise was there. Kyra ran toward the building, half-stumbling now. Her leg muscles were starting to give out. She looked down an alley and saw a car blitzing along on a parallel street far too fast. They were close.
One block to the safe house.
The sounds of the cars were louder now and her endurance was fading quickly, faster than she had expected. She couldn’t stay on the street much longer or one of the cars would find her. Her arm ached now, like the pain was deep in the bone, and it was becoming harder to ignore.
Kyra reached the edge of the apartment building and ran up the side street. The safe house was on the fourth floor and the building had a service entrance on the east side. She reached the door, then fumbled in her pants for the key that the deputy chief of station had slipped her before she’d left for the meeting. Her hands were wet from the rain, both shaking hard from the adrenaline rush. She tried to use her right, but it was numb at the fingertips and she had to switch to the left.
She finally jammed the key into the lock, the door opened, and Kyra slammed it open with her body. She closed it behind her, locked it, and leaned back against the entry.
She knew she wasn’t safe, not yet. But she was off the street and that was something. Finding her now would involve a door-to-door search of a dozen square blocks or more. Caracas was all skyscrapers and shantytowns with little in between. There would be tens of thousands of apartments in the search radius. The SEBIN had no picture of her to show the locals and no guarantee that she had stopped running so soon.
Four flights of stairs. Her aching lungs and thigh muscles hurt so much that the thought made her want to cry.
Move. Kyra willed herself forward. She could hardly think at all.
She found the stairwell entry ten feet down the hall. Kyra climbed the four stories, almost pulling herself upward on the handrail the entire distance with her good arm. She managed not to fall into the hallway, then staggered toward the safe house apartment. The hall was empty.
Kyra found the right number, fumbled the keys again, and finally managed to open the door. She stepped inside, closed the door, and threw the dead bolt. Her heartbeat finally slowed a bit. Her lungs still burned, but she was catching her breath, finally. Her legs were weak and she wanted to collapse onto the floor.
Safe. Not really, she knew. But as safe as she could be right now.
The keys fell from her hand onto the wood floor. She left them and searched for the light switch.
The safe house apartment was maybe a thousand feet square, just a single bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting room, and a kitchen, all clean and bare-bones. She found the bed and fell onto it.
Kyra had forgotten about the arm. She felt pain erupt from her right side as she landed on the mattress, and the agony was more intense, more sharp than anything she had ever felt. She cried out, then stifled it, afraid that the neighbors would hear her. She didn’t know how thin the walls were. With her good arm she pushed herself back up to sitting and finally looked down at the aching limb.
There was a hole in her leather jacket, midway between her shoulder and elbow. Kyra pulled the jacket off, carefully, but movement was agony now. The dark stain on the back of her arm was surprisingly large. Deep red, almost black where it mixed with her shirt, it ran all the way down to her wrist.
She knew there would be only one way of getting the shirt off without serious pain. She pulled a Leatherman from her pocket, held it in her left hand, and opened the knife blade with her teeth. She slipped the blade under her collar and pulled it to the right, then around the junction where the sleeve met the shoulder. She cut the sleeve loose. It slid off her arm and fell with a wet noise onto the floor.
There was a tear across her triceps, skin and muscle torn loose in a shredded horizontal line. She couldn’t see the bone at the bottom of the gory furrow only for the blood. Adrenaline had masked the pain.
When—?
The brain has a gating mechanism that had kept her mind focused on the more immediate pain, and the adrenaline had kept her from feeling the gunshot wound. Her brain got its first look and switched its focus from her tortured lungs and legs. The pain from the laceration detonated across her upper body, cutting off her thoughts, and Kyra had to stifle an open scream.
The first aid kit would be in the bathroom. Kyra stumbled in, trying to keep her arm from moving, and found the large duffel bag under the sink. CIA security, former Boy Scouts she was sure, always came prepared. The trauma kit was designed more for a war zone than a metropolis. Trying to focus through the haze, Kyra found the two items she needed most. The first was a roll of QuikClot gauze. The second was a morphine syringe. She stabbed herself with the needle in the arm, just above the wound and had to suppress another scream as it entered her torn flesh. She depressed the plunger, then pulled the needle out. It was the longest ten seconds of her life.
Her arm began to numb and her body finally began to stop shaking and relax. Kyra felt the pain begin to fade and steeled herself for the next bit of self-surgery. She balled up a wad of QuikClot in her left hand, the only one she could still feel, and packed it into the wound. The cloth stopped the bleeding almost on contact.
The morphine worked fast. She hadn’t been able to think when she dosed herself, hadn’t checked the amount. Whatever the dosage, it had been enough. Too much, maybe.