“Then what?”
“Not my problem. Not your problem.”
“I know he cannot be left to go on the way he’s been doing since Nungsan. I know that. But it would be fucking ironic if he ends up in a black-site prison and no one knows he’s still alive.”
“There’s no way to make it right, True.”
“You need to get here soon.”
“I’m coming.”
“I think they’re going to take him somewhere.”
“I’m coming. Stay out of sight. Wait for me. Promise me, True.”
She hesitates, but then says, “I’ll do what I can.”
She ends the call.
“You will stay out of sight,” Colt orders in his deepest command voice. “They’re waiting for you, True. They’re expecting you to show.”
She has crept downstairs until she’s just a few steps from the bottom. Male voices reverberate in the passageway, speaking rapid-fire Arabic that she doesn’t have the skill to follow. “Tell me their positions,” she whispers to Colt.
“They’re positioned to kill you. Put your head around that corner and you’re—”
Shaw screams, a drawn-out animal roar of agony.
True’s eyes go wide. It’s all she can do to hold her position when instinct is telling her to go to him, to help, to do what she can. His scream fades out, and to her horror, nervous laughter follows. “What are they doing to him?”
“Not sure,” Colt says. “This goddamn worm! I can’t see. No, wait. Wait. I think they picked him up. They’re moving out. Yeah. One of the new guys has him over his shoulders. Taking him up the street. I think he’s fainted. Or he’s dead. Either way, they’re leaving. The ARV too.”
“Are they all leaving?”
He hesitates. “I think so. I can’t tell for sure. No one’s in the passage. Stay where you are. You’ll be okay.”
That’s one option, but is it right action? Here, now, Rihab only has four soldiers with him. There won’t be a better time, a better place to confront him, to take Shaw back. But Lincoln is not here, while Rihab and his crew will be gone in just a couple of minutes.
She is the only one who can slow them down.
She makes her decision. She’ll do what she can, but she’ll do it from the high ground. Colt’s protests are loud and virulent in her ear as she turns and sprints up the stairs, back to the second level, then to the roof.
The stairs come out beneath the covered end of the terrace. She arrives, chest heaving, heart thumping hard. The fixed roof casts heavy shade across the upholstered furniture of the sitting area—a sharp contrast to the bright white, sunlit walls out under the open sky.
As she moves from shade to sunlight, her shoulder brushes a curtain tied back against a supporting column, setting it swaying. “Shit,” she whispers. Extraneous motion is distracting, and it’s a giveaway, but at least she’s alone.
She holds the Triple-Y at her shoulder as she advances cautiously, moving closer to the edge of the terrace. She needs to get just close enough to look into the street. A glimpse, seen past the gun sight:
Shaw. His body is draped over the shoulders of a man who’s moving quickly up the street on the heels of two more men. Another is already at the top of the street. That one, she thinks, is Farouk. He looks back at her. He’s got a tablet in his hand.
Ah! The fucking ARV.
Down in the street, on the edge of her vision, something moves. Her brain registers it as a gun barrel rising from behind a parked car and before conscious thought kicks in, she drops to her knees, collapses to her side. A fusillade of heavy-caliber slugs slams into the terrace wall, sending concrete and plaster chips flying over her. She’s sure Farouk can’t see her anymore but the shots keep coming. It’s like he’s trying to chew down the wall.
Then it stops.
Colt is swearing: a long low stream of profanities.
“I’m still here,” she whispers to him.
Staying low, she rolls to her knees—and motion draws her eye. At first she thinks it’s the swaying curtain, but her visor picks out a point deeper in the shadow of the sheltering roof, a point at the top of the stairs, and highlights it.
Her mind flashes on the math: four enemy in the street, one more whose location is unknown. She fires a single shot at the point her visor has marked, then dives to the side and rolls. Concrete chips from the terrace’s shattered wall grind into her hip and shoulder and tear at her shirt. She hisses at the pain but doesn’t slow down. Scrambling, she gets behind an empty hip-high terracotta planter just as a flash-bang grenade goes off. She hunches, shading her eyes with her arm as a second one follows.
Ian, she thinks, grateful that she’s still thinking. Bright sparks dazzle her eyes and her ears are ringing. It could have been so much worse, but she got lucky. The blasts dissipated across the open rooftop and she caught only the edge.
She peers past the terracotta pot. The shade under the roof and the stunned state of her vision make it hard to see, but her visor finds a target for her. It throws a new highlight: Ian, his lanky athletic figure half hidden behind the wall enclosing the stairs. He’s leaning out just a little, looking for her, his pistol held in a two-handed grip.
She thinks, Now he has to gamble. He has to ask himself if the flash-bang put her on the ground, somewhere out of sight. If so, he has to hurry, because she won’t be down for long. If not, when he moves he makes himself a target.
He darts out of the stairwell, crosses to the shelter of a column that holds up the roof. No curtain on this column. He pivots around it, swinging the pistol to cover the span of the rooftop. “Stay down and you won’t get hurt!” he shouts.
She bides her time, a half-second, waiting until his chest is exposed. And then she leans out from behind the terracotta pot and fires off two shots that hit over his heart. There’s no blood. His vest has caught the slugs, but he goes down anyway. The shock has probably put a temporary stop to his heartbeat.
She runs to secure him. Well, she hobbles really, as her right calf threatens to seize up, but she gets there. She kicks his pistol out of reach. He’s groaning, trying to push himself up, so she kicks him in the head. “Stay down and you won’t get hurt,” she tells him.
She still has Shaw’s multitool. Its blade is sharp. She uses it to cut a tasseled rope from the nearest curtain.
“Ian’s buddy is coming to check on him,” Colt says.
“Fuck.” Another kick convinces Ian to be still while she secures his arms behind his back. While he’s still woozy, she ties his ankles together. Then she pats him down. The only interesting things she finds are a phone and an electronic car key. She takes them both, but powers down the phone.
“Okay, where’s Farouk?” she asks Colt as she moves to the stairs.
“He’s coming in through the passage. Alone.”
She heads down as quickly and quietly as she can manage. “With or without the ARV?”
“No ARV. He wants his man cred.”
“Man cred,” she scoffs. “That’s your generation. He’s only coming in because it’s too hard to steer the ARV without the camera.”
She stops on the second level, peering out from behind the wall that encloses the stairwell. The position allows her to see over the balcony and down the length of the courtyard to the small citrus trees and the fountain, the two chairs and the bench beyond. The overturned table.
How long since Guiying first walked into the courtyard? Thirty minutes? Less?