Two phones, two vests.
As I approached, I could see that each phone had an ID number on it and one of them matched the number I’d seen on the vest in the SUV. So if there were only two phones it might be a good sign. Maybe no one else on the boat had a vest on.
“Get down,” I ordered the woman. “Keep your hands to the sides. Lie on your stomach.”
“Who else is belowdeck?” Ralph asked.
“You’ll have to find that out by going down there,” she replied.
“Glad to.” Whoever was down there cried out again, his voice choked with pain. Ralph said, “Cover ’em, Pat. I’ll be right back.”
Before I could suggest a plan B, he disappeared belowdeck. I wanted to pat down Valkyrie and the woman to make sure they had no weapons, but if I started on one of them the other could fire at me. It would be best to wait for Ralph, then cuff these—
A shot rang out.
“Ralph!” I cried.
No reply, just the thick sound of a body slamming to the floor, and while it momentarily distracted me, it was all that Valkyrie needed.
He was on his feet in an instant and as I shot him in the chest, one of the world’s top assassins went for my gun.
79
The bullet didn’t stop him.
We struggled, and he angled my arm out of the way before I could empty the barrel into him. The woman leapt up to help him, but he didn’t need her. He was good at what he did and was able to get the SIG, but he didn’t shoot me, instead, once he had it, he just stepped back beside the red-haired woman.
The sound of a fight continued belowdeck.
“Two against one.” She nodded toward the stairs. “Not such good odds.”
“You don’t know who they’re fighting against.” I had my hands up and was calculating how to get my gun back — or how to stall long enough for Ralph to get up here or for backup to arrive.
I’d never known Ralph to lose a fight, but I remembered how thrashed his forearm was from the pit bull and I wasn’t sure if he could take on two guys with only one arm. It would depend on the guys. I had a feeling that, based on the brutish size of the dead man on the deck, whoever the men were who were down there, they were not going to be pushovers.
And if they were anywhere near as good as Valkyrie, Ralph might be in trouble.
Finally, sirens cut through the night from perhaps half a mile away and the look in Valkyrie’s eyes changed, not to fear, but to careful prudence. He was forming a plan.
“Come here, darling,” he said to the woman. “It’s time we moved along.” A widening stain of blood spread across the right side of his chest. A little too high, though. He would need treatment, but it didn’t look immediately life-threatening.
He picked up the phone from the console, the one that had the identification code that would correspond to the suicide vest on the dead man near my feet.
Oh.
Not good.
He slipped it into his pocket, then said to me, “Sometimes, Agent Bowers—”
“This isn’t you, Alexei,” I said, “remember what you—”
“I’m not Alexei anymore.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No. Alexei is dead.” He tossed a set of keys to the woman. “Vanessa, we’ll take the SUV.” Then he addressed me again. “As I was saying, sometimes you have to adapt when things don’t go as planned.”
She had only taken a couple steps when Alexei called to her, “Actually, my dear, I changed my mind. I have something else I need you to do.”
She faced him. “Yes?”
“Die.”
Her eyes widened with shock as he raised the gun and shot her in the forehead.
The same shot placement he’d used to kill his wife.
She dropped heavily onto the deck.
He calmly appraised the body, then looked my way. “A loose end. You understand.”
I tried to think like him.
Distractions and contingency plans—
The fight continued downstairs. Fierce grunts and heavy pounding.
There was a suicide vest on the dead man nearby me.
Valkyrie’s gonna blow that vest. He has the phone. He—
“Toss the key to your handcuffs over the railing,” he told me.
I did. Thankfully, my car keys and my lock pick set were on a separate key ring.
“Handcuff yourself to the console.”
I pulled out my cuffs and without hesitating at all, slung them violently toward his face. It takes about half a second for a person to respond to physical stimuli, and as he instinctively raised his arm to block the cuffs, I rushed him, brushing my hand across the console. I tackled him, went for the gun with one hand, his pocket with the other, and he wrestled away as we hit the deck, kicked me fiercely in the abdomen, and then grabbed the cuffs and my arm, yanked me toward the console, and before I could stop him, cuffed my wrist to it. Gasping to draw in a breath, I laid my free hand on the console, pulled myself up, and then held my hands off to the sides.
It hadn’t been easy, but I’d done what I needed to do. Hopefully, I’d played this right. Hopefully.
“Where do we go from here?” I said.
His gaze flicked toward the dead man on the deck. “We all go home.”
He left the boat and strode toward the SUV while I whipped out my lock pick set and went to work on the cuffs.
The sirens were drawing closer but they weren’t close enough.
“It’s time to go, Ralph!” I hollered. I couldn’t be sure things were going to work out in our favor here, not certain at all.
I finished with the cuffs just as Chekov reached the SUV.
Ralph came bounding up the steps, gun in hand, and saw the dead woman. “Where’s Chekov?” he shouted. I pointed. We had no clear shot. Together we ran toward the dock, but hadn’t even made it to the edge of the boat when Alexei Chekov paused by the driver’s door, lifted the phone, tapped in a number, and I hoped he wasn’t—
The SUV exploded violently, blowing the doors off, enveloping Chekov in a harsh mushroom of flame and flying debris.
Ralph and I turned and ducked as a rush of consuming heat enveloped us.
After it passed, we both faced the fire and the charred and burning corpse of Alexei Chekov. Ralph said, “I don’t understand. Why would he want to kill himself?”
“He didn’t.”
Ralph looked at me curiously, then at the dead man on the boat’s deck. “But how did you switch the vests?”
“I didn’t need to.” I pointed to the phone I’d gotten from Valkyrie in our scuffle. “I just needed to switch the phones.”
“Nice move, bro.”
“What about the guys belowdeck?” I asked him.
“Not gonna cause us any trouble.”
Metro and FBI Police cars came screaming around the corner and into the marina parking lot.
“So there were two guys down there?” I asked Ralph.
“Three. One was Tyree. He was restrained in a chair. He was alive, but barely. That dude was not in good shape.” Then he added, with the shade of a grin, “The other two are in worse shape now, though.”
“You fought off two thugs with only one arm?”
He held up the arm that’d been bitten and the wound must have ripped open, because it was bleeding heavily through his sleeve. “Turns out I had to get both arms involved.”
“If the hospital gave out gift cards, I’d buy you one.”
“Thanks for that.”
I headed for the stairs. “Let’s see what we can do to help Tyree before the paramedics get here.”
A slow dance.
Tessa rested her head against Aiden’s chest and leaned into his arms. It felt so good to press against his strength, to feel his arms encircling her.