Sean quickly slid a new magazine into his gun.
“You always carry extra ammo on vacation?” she said sarcastically.
He ignored the cynicism and pointed straight ahead beyond a circular, vinyl couch.
“Tower bridge,” he ordered. Just as he did, an elevator dinged. “I don’t think that’s our ride,” he said.
Angela Weaver stood against the wall calmly holding her Glock with both hands. The new box-style sound suppressor looked bulky but was actually quite light.
She’d ordered her four men to flush Wyatt out of his hotel room and down the hall towards Venezia Tower. If they got lucky and made the kill? Bonus. She hadn’t expected that, though. Not from these mercenaries. She’d also not expected the woman who accompanied Wyatt. The face seemed familiar, but she couldn’t’ place it. Of course, in the confusion, one of the four men had taken a bullet to the leg and was writhing in agony. Blood trickled from his thigh.
Professional killers? Barely.
“Can you walk?” she asked, coldly.
The man shook his head while he clutched the wound. “I don’t think so.”
She lowered her weapon and squeezed the trigger, sending a bullet into the man’s head. The body went limp as the other three looked on without emotion. “Don’t get shot,” she said plainly. “I don’t pay you to stop bullets.”
The others nodded grimly.
The elevator doors began to open as Sean and Emily jolted across the room and two men in similar attire to the ones from before stepped out with weapons raised. Slightly surprised to see their targets so soon, they only got off a few wild shots as Sean and Emily fired first, pounding them with several rounds. One man dropped to the floor while the other slinked back into the elevator.
The doors closed quickly, something that had irritated Sean on a few occasions during his stay. This time, though, he was grateful as it bought them a few extra moments to clear the circular room and get into the tower bridge. He scooped up the fallen enemy’s handgun and kept moving.
As they turned a corner and entered the skyway at a full sprint, it was then he realized why the attack thus far had been somewhat half-assed. At the other end of the corridor stood a tall, young-looking man in a black suit and tie with four other men dressed in the matching long-sleeved shirts and black pants, all holding guns aimed in their direction. Three of the men were standing, two others crouched down on one knee, poised to fire. They were being herded to a place with no escape.
Chapter 8
Tommy carefully plugged in the narrow computer tower and connected it to a monitor. They’d taken the brain of the unit to a separate office from where the crime scene investigators were still working. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for but he knew that whoever had killed Terrance was looking for the same thing.
Tommy clicked the mouse on a few different files hoping to find something, anything that might be related to what Nichols had been working on. He went into the recent files that Nichols had been working on but noticed nothing unusual there. Thinking back to a few weeks ago, he remembered Sean telling him how they had found something at Borringer’s house. The old man had hidden it on a shelf, in plain sight. He typed in a search for files with the word decipher in them. Nothing came up. Then he tried typing in code breaker. Again, nothing.
Minutes went by as he kept hammering away at the keyboard trying to find any clue as to where the files could be. Finally, he leaned back and let out a huge sigh of frustration. “I have no idea what he had or where he put it,” Tommy said with resignation.
Will ran his hand through his hair. He was pretty sure Tommy Schultz and his friends still had no clue he was working for the Order. But he still had to be careful. In the background, a few other CSI workers were busy finishing up, packing cameras, tools, and other technical devices.
He racked his brain to come up with an answer, but these types of things weren’t Will’s strong point. He hated riddles. The more straightforward things were the better.
Then Tommy had a thought. He sat forward again and clicked on the search bar, this time entering his own name. T-O-M-M-Y. The screen blinked for a second and then one file appeared in the left hand corner. It read, “Tommy’s project.”
Will scooted in closer. “You got something?”
“Looks like it,” Tommy answered, annoyed that he’d been concerned with some complex combination of words when the answer was actually very simple.
He clicked on the file. A dialogue box opened. The words inside it were not what they’d wanted to see. Password required.
Chapter 9
Sean was angry at himself for being so stupid. He should have seen what they were doing. Should have seen it from a mile away. Maybe he had gotten rusty.
A young man in a suit stood at the end of the corridor with a smug look on his face. Something about him seemed familiar but Sean couldn’t place it.
“Your luck has run out, Mr. Wyatt,” the suit yelled down the glass hallway. “Throw down your weapons. There’s no way out of here.”
Sean’s eyes darted around trying to find an escape route but there was none. The tower bridge was encased in glass and steel, ten floors above the ground. A jump would be suicide, if he could even get the glass to shatter.
“Who are you?” he shouted back.
The man didn’t answer at first. He wasn’t into conversations. Instead, he raised his weapon. “Last chance, Wyatt!”
Suddenly, the suppressed sound of a small, automatic weapon could be heard off to the right the enemy position. A bullet tore into the suit’s left shoulder and sent him reeling back, taking his aim away from Wyatt and Starks. A barrage of bullets sliced through the other four men as they all turned, too late to react. The first three were sent flying backwards with round after round riddling their bodies. The fourth dove out of the way but had launched himself directly at Wyatt. Sean snapped out of his trance and finished him with a single shot to the head and he fell face down on the thin carpet. “Go!” he yelled at Emily. She didn’t wait to hear it twice and took off towards the pile of bodies.
Angela and her remaining men heard the chaos around the corner. They’d taken up a position at the entrance to the tower bridge and waited to see if their quarry would try to backtrack. She’d heard the exchange between James and Wyatt. Idiot. Why hadn’t he just shot them there? Now there was someone on the other side with what sounded like an automatic weapon.
She shoved one of the men aside and stepped to the corner to take a peek at what was happening. As she leaned her head around the edge of the wall a shot rang out and erupted the wall right in front of her face. Her reaction was quick and she ducked back out of sight immediately. That was too close.
Sean had barely missed the target’s head, but he’d sent a message.
While Emily ran forward towards the Venezia Tower, he’d covered the rear in case any of the men waiting behind them decided to get brave and move up. To his surprise, it looked like a woman had taken the quick look around the corner.
All of the enemies lay motionless. Suit and tie was gone but Sean realized there was no time to look for him.
Standing twenty feet away down the hall on the right was a woman in a pair of khaki shorts and a black v-neck tank top. She was holding a HK-5 sub-machine gun with a silencer equipped on the end. Over top of her shirt hung a thin, black leather coat that stopped just above her knees. Sean stared at her for a moment. Her black hair was down to her chin in the front and a little shorter in the back with tanned skin that spoke of years spent in the sun, probably on a beach. Deep, brown eyes stared back at him, sizing him up. When she spoke, her lips seemed to move in slow motion. “We should probably leave,” she said in a distinct, Spanish accent.