“Just one. Big guy. He took out Terzi on two and he’s headed this way.”
The smaller one turned to the guard eyeballing Alex and shouted over the blare of the fire alarm. “Go. Now. Take Burakgazi and Yilmaz with you.”
“What about her?”
“She’s a woman. Leave her to me. Now go!”
The second one nodded and darted into the hall. Alex heard him shouting instructions to the other two men, as the one who’d stayed behind shot forward and grabbed her by the throat.
“You think we’re stupid? You think we weren’t expecting this?”
One can dream, Alex thought, then jammed the edge of the chart into his forearm, knocking his hand free.
As he stumbled back, she jumped to her feet, grabbed him by the collar, then kneed him in the balls and shoved him into the nearest wall. He reached for the gun on his hip as he fell to the floor, but before he could raise it, Alex kicked the weapon from his hand and moved in. She swung a right hook into his jaw and snapped his head to the side, knocking him out cold.
With no time to waste, Alex wheeled around and grabbed the bed curtain, wondering why Solak hadn’t uttered a word of alarm during any of this. Could he be that far gone? But as soon as she pulled the curtain aside, she got her answer.
The bed was empty.
Shit.
She checked the bathroom and found it empty, too, but wasn’t surprised. The twerp on the floor was right. They weren’t stupid. This room was a decoy. They had Solak stashed somewhere else, maybe even another floor, and that was where the other three bodyguards were headed.
Chastising herself for her own stupidity, Alex darted into the hallway. The three men had a head start, but couldn’t have gotten too far.
“Deuce, Cooper, do you read me?”
They both answered in the affirmative, then Cooper said, “I heard the tussle. You okay?”
“Fine, except they pulled a bait and switch. Solak’s not here. We’re gonna have to improvise.”
“So what else is new?” Deuce said. “Tell me what I’m looking for.”
“Three hostiles. Maybe more. They should be headed in Solak’s direction.”
“I’m on the fifth-floor landing. No sign of activity in here.”
“Nothing on the CCTV cams, either,” Cooper said, “but there’re a couple dead feeds on your floor, Alex. They must’ve cut ‘em. They’re probably still around there somewhere.”
“Roger,” she said. “I’m checking it out now.”
The fire alarm continued to ring as Alex rounded a corner to find the main corridor flooded with staff and patients in the middle of a full-scale evac. In hospitals this size, building-wide evacuations were unwieldy and impractical, so the alarms were often localized, affecting only the floors closest to the potential threat. Unfortunately, that didn’t help Alex. What they’d hoped would be a distraction was now an obstacle, and an already crowded hallway was twice as packed now, a sea of bodies in motion, all wanting to get the hell out of there.
She quickly scanned the crowd and saw nothing out of the ordinary — an orderly helping a child in a walker, a nurse pushing an elderly gray-haired woman in a wheelchair, several staffers rolling gurneys carrying patients still attached to IV drips. There was a sense of organized urgency as they all worked their way down the corridor.
Then Alex spotted him, the bodyguard who had leered at her, disappearing down an intersecting hallway at the far end. Picking up her pace, she threaded her way through the crowd, which was akin to traveling the I-695 beltway during rush hour back home.
But as she neared the nurse and the old woman in the wheelchair, something out of the ordinary registered at the periphery of her vision — a bulge in the nurse’s scrubs at the small of her back. Either she was hiding a tail or that bulge was a holster and gun.
Alex fell back slightly, nearly bumped into a moving gurney, and stared intently at the old woman in the wheelchair.
The gray hair was a wig.
Son of a bitch. Solak.
“Deuce,” she said quietly, hoping she could be heard over the sound of the alarm, “you’d better get your ass up to six. I’ve spotted the target.”
“I’m right behind you. And speaking of asses, did anybody mention those scrubs you’re wearing look a little small?”
Alex grimaced. “Thanks for reminding me. The target’s in the wheelchair about two meters ahead, dressed like an old woman, and the nurse pushing him is sporting an SOB holster and weapon.”
“Naughty nurses with guns. Be still my heart.”
“One of the hostiles is running point around the corner,” Alex continued, “but I don’t have a position on the others, so watch your back.”
The crowd had nearly stopped moving now, slowed by a bottleneck at the end of the hall.
“Roger that,” Deuce said. “We’ve got a pathology lab to our right, and if the BPs are more reliable than our intel, there should be a small freight elevator at the rear of the lab. Cooper, can you be ready to party in two?”
“I’ll be there,” Cooper told him.
“Okay, Alex, I’ve got your flank. Make your move and make it smooth.”
“Roger,” she said, then weaved past another gurney and a tight group of patients and positioned herself directly behind the nurse pushing the wheelchair, almost close enough to spoon. After a quick look around, she reached forward, slipped her hand under the nurse’s scrub top, and lo and behold, discovered the woman wasn’t hiding a tail.
Alex grabbed the grip of the weapon. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be carrying this in here.”
As the nurse started to react, Alex ripped the weapon free and jammed her heel into the back of the woman’s left knee. The joint buckled and the nurse went down with a grunt. Alex sidestepped the fall and yanked the wig off Solak’s head, shoving the nose of the pistol — a SIG Pro SP — into his upper back. “Get up.”
Someone nearby screamed and heads swiveled in their direction. Grabbing hold of Solak’s hospital gown, Alex yanked him to his feet, knowing that if the other bodyguards hadn’t already been closing in, they would be now. She shoved him toward a door about three meters to her right, marked PATHOLOGY AND LABORATORY MEDICINE.
She felt a sudden rush of movement behind her as a hand grabbed for her shoulder. But before it could fully connect, its owner grunted and hit the floor.
“Go! Go!” Deuce said, taking his place beside her.
They slammed through the door, pushing Solak in front of them, and worked their way through a maze of tables and microscopes and machines and racks of test tubes filled with blood. Alex scanned the lab and spotted a set of elevator doors down a short hallway at the rear of the room.
“At least something’s going right,” she murmured, nudging Solak in that direction.
Behind them, two more bodyguards burst into the lab — Alex’s friends from the hall outside Solak’s room. She heard the sharp cough of a suppressor and glass shattered nearby. Deuce whipped around and raised his own weapon, returning fire.
One of the bodyguards went down as the other — the grinner — dove for safety behind a lab table, and then came up firing on the other side.
Bullets whizzed past Alex’s head as she shoved Solak to the floor, then crouched and spun, squeezing off two quick rounds. The SIG wasn’t silenced and the shots echoed loudly. One went stray, but the other hit its mark, the slug ripping through the grinner’s shoulder in a burst of blood. He grunted in pain and slammed backward into a rack of test tubes, and they toppled over and shattered around him, splattering a dozen or more blood specimens across the linoleum.