EPILOGUE
A week later, nestled in the small chalet in the mountains near Zell am See, Austria, Jake sipped a glass of Italian Chianti and stared at the fire burning in the stone fireplace. It was late evening, darkness complete across the Alps.
He thought about the last week. They had flown on the Agency Gulfstream from Oslo to Vienna, the doctor patching up Jake on the plane. Jake had insisted on no stitches, instead asking only for Durmabond liquid sutures. The bullet had bounced off his scapula and collarbone, but had not entered his chest.
From Vienna Jake had taken a couple of days, first traveling to Luxembourg to secure the gems in a large safe deposit box. Then he flew with a couple of the Alexandrites to Zurich to have them examined. As he suspected, each one would be worth thousands of dollars, and he had not even taken the time to find out how many had been contained in the metal box. But he guessed the total would come to at least ten million dollars.
Anna came in from the bathroom, a look of both pleasure and despair on her expressive face. She took a seat next to him on the leather sofa.
“Want me to pour you a glass?” Jake asked her. “It’s quite good.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“I told you, I will not start drinking like I did before. I was bored and going through some things. I’m better now. I can handle it. Just a little in moderation. Come on. I don’t want to drink alone.”
“You’re gonna have to. For at least six more months.”
Jake stared at her for a moment until he finally understood what she meant. “Are you sure?”
She produced a self-pregnancy stick. “This is the sixth one in the last few days. I wanted to be sure.”
“The throwing up wasn’t a bug you caught, or your problem with flying in choppers. My God, how the hell did I miss that?”
They stared at each other.
“What will we do?” she asked him.
Without thinking, Jake said, “First, I trade in some of those Russian gems. We’ll need to dump our apartment in Vienna and find a place in the mountains. I won’t raise a son in the city.”
She squeezed down on his leg. “It could be a girl.”
Thoughts of young men coming around after his teenage daughter raced through his mind, with Jake grilling each one and threatening to break every bone in their body if they touched his little girl. “No, I think we’ll have a boy. But we need to make it legal. How does Monaco sound?”
“I don’t care,” she said, wrapping her arms around him. “As long as it’s with you.”
They kissed long and passionately. Then they sat back in the leather sofa and watched the flames, listening only to the snapping and crackling of fire.
The next few minutes seemed to stand still.
When the first bullet crashed through the front picture window, Jake didn’t fully understand what was happening. As he picked up his gun and instinctively rolled to the floor, aiming toward the door, he fired at the first man who crashed through.
In the next thirty seconds, the large room filled with the loud echoing reports of gunfire, the smell of gun powder and cloud of smoke lingering in the air.
Then the noise stopped. Even the ringing in Jake’s ears gone.
On his knees now, Jake looked at his gun, the slide locked back and magazine empty. His left eye closed from moisture, which he tried to wipe away with his left sleeve. But the moisture continued to soak into his eye. He didn’t feel the pain from the bullet striking his left leg, or the one that had blown through the shoulder that had been shot in Sweden.
Crawling to the sofa, Jake dropped his gun when he saw Anna slumped against the cushions. Her chest had two bullet holes, her stomach a third and her right arm a fourth. Getting to the sofa with her, he checked her pulse as he took her in his arms.
Nothing.
Getting his phone out, Jake called for an ambulance, barely able to tell them his location before setting the cell phone down onto an end table, the phone still on.
He was frozen in time. Couldn’t understand that which was before him. He simply held Anna against him, his own breaths shallow now.
He wouldn’t hear the ambulance come. Could not understand what had happened to him. He just drifted off with Anna in his arms, tears streaking his cheeks.