Paul, clutching his left biceps, was staring up at Morgan. Bright red liquid seeped between his fingers.
“Thanks,” Paul hissed through clenched teeth.
“For what?” Morgan asked, pulling a handkerchief from an inside jacket pocket.
Paul glanced at his arm. “It’s not spurting out of my heart.”
“My aim was off.”
“Bullshit.” Paul managed a pained smile.
“Move!” Felicity shouted, shoving Morgan’s shoulder. “There’s a bleeding army coming up the hall.” With that, she took two long steps and dived gracefully into open air, arcing down behind the bar. On the floor, Felicity watched around the edge of the bar as Morgan scrambled to the back of the room. She heard the door slam open, and held her breath as two bullets scarred the conference table’s maple top. She saw Morgan slam his body to the left and down into the elevator just before she ducked behind the bar.
The mass of gunfire made her cover her ears with her hands. Her head was ringing and somehow it made her mouth dry. Was this what it was like in combat, she wondered. It was all handgun fire but it was so dense that it sounded like machine guns to her. She was safe for the moment but she worried for Morgan, the intended target of all that shooting. That elevator looked uncomfortably small and soon the guards would work up the courage to move in for the kill.
One story above, Adrian Seagrave’s eyes fluttered half open. The room felt like it was vibrating, as if some sort of construction was going on. He was having trouble waking up, but he had to investigate the noise.
Forcing himself to his feet, he staggered out of the bedroom and managed to reach his study. Yes, the noise was coming from below. His private elevator shaft was conducting it upward. It sounded like gunfire, but more than he had ever imagined. He leaned against the elevator casing, hesitating. He had to go downstairs and find out what was going on.
He reached toward the button, but hesitated and moved to lean both hands against the doors. He would rest for just a minute, and then summon his elevator car.
Felicity peeked over the edge of the bar, eyes bulging. She counted eleven men concentrating their gunfire on the elevator area. Revolver and automatic fire combined to create a deafening roar, reminding her of standing next to a waterfall. The air was thick with the stench of gunpowder smoke. She had heard gunpowder referred to as smokeless powder, but could hardly credit that name now. The acrid cloud was so dense she could taste it. The room literally shook with the blasts. The muzzle flashes reminded her of what Morgan had told her about the two hand grenades hanging on her belt.
She hefted one of the small black spheres. A “flash-bang” is what she remembered Morgan calling it. Some kind of stun grenade he said the British Special Air Service had first used to combat terrorists. They were designed to protect innocents in a hostage situation, and now this one might save Morgan.
Something, it looked to her like a bread tie, held the pin in. She twisted that off, pulled the pin out and flipped the spoon off. With her back to the bar and feet braced against the wall, she tossed the grenade backward, up and over the bar. Remembering what Morgan had told her about these devices, she clamped her hands over her ears and ducked her head.
Crouching in a corner of the elevator, Morgan heard the clunk of pulleys engaging, and felt the elevator cables go taut. For less than a second he considered whether it would be safer to ride up or roll back out into the room. While looking toward the bar he spotted the small black sphere rising into the air, appearing to hang in space for a second at its apogee. He recognized it immediately and his face broke into a broad grin. “I love that girl,” he whispered to himself as he covered his ears and buried his face in the elevator floor.
The small black ball arced over the crowd of shooters and dropped in front of them. It had fallen to waist height when the world seemed to explode. Almost no energy was expended in blast or heat. However, the star burst rivaled that of a thousand flashbulbs popping in concert, and even with his hands over his ears, Morgan could not be completely prepared for the concussive bang like a sonic boom that burst windows and shattered glasses on the bar.
Morgan felt the elevator lurch and rolled out of the little car as it started to rise. His ears were ringing but he was relatively unaffected, facing a room full of blinded and deafened gunmen. They were disoriented and frightened, with pounding heads and dazed wits. About half of them had dropped their guns in shock. He loved it.
With a running start, Morgan leaped into the midst of his dazzled attackers. The drop kick slapped two men to the floor. A quick spinning back kick, an edge of the hand slash to the neck and a jarring back fist put three more on the carpet. With his left, he thrust stiffened fingers into a guard’s already aching eyes. He snapped a crisp jab into another’s nose, putting him down for the count.
While all this was going on, Felicity slipped out from behind the bar. Morgan was purposely putting all of the attackers out of the fight without any further gunplay, and did not need any help, but he could see that she did not want to feel useless.
He saw Felicity seize a makeshift weapon from the bar, probably thinking she could bludgeon a few of the gunmen into submission. She stepped forward, hefting the bottle she and Morgan had been drinking from. He heard the dull thud behind him and turned to give her an encouraging smile. However, after her first swing he could see that the result startled her. As Morgan could have told her, the edge of a Napoleon Brandy bottle is a bit sturdier than the average professional strong-arm man’s head. She must have expected her glass club to shatter, like they always do in the movies.
Morgan watched her dispatch the last four of Seagrave’s hirelings with the same bottle, looking more confident with each swing. With the opposition neutralized, Morgan knelt beside Paul’s unconscious body. He picked up the white handkerchief he had dropped beside Paul and tied it tightly around Paul’s upper arm. Viscous red fluid was making his fingers slippery, but he did not care. In the past few days he had faced Central American soldiers, hired killers, bodyguards and ambushers. He was not about to let the only true professional he had encountered in the lot bleed to death.
While his fingers moved on their own, his mind was whirring like a high-speed computer, as he tried to calculate the time remaining for escape, Paul’s survival odds, and what his next move should be. Backtracking to kill Seagrave might not leave them a sufficient getaway margin, but leaving him alive could turn out to be a fatal mistake.
All of that mental activity combined with an effort to monitor Paul’s condition, track Felicity’s position and observe the status of the dazed protectors to create a form of sensory overload. Together, it all made it impossible for Morgan to pay sufficient attention to his little inner voice. Too much was happening at once. Morgan’s concentration was shaken by a single shouted word.
“You!”
Morgan looked up and to his right to see Adrian Seagrave, in yellow silk pajamas, looking aghast at the carnage in his main conference room. Time seemed to grind into slow motion. Morgan glanced at Felicity, a flash of anger quickly fading as he remembered the pre-operational briefing she had given him. The sleep mist Felicity had sprayed upstairs was a mild sedative, but clearly not sufficient to block out the mass of gunfire that had flown through that room moments ago. Even if it had, the concussion grenade shook the entire building. But Seagrave must have rung for the elevator before that, which was why it began to rise while Morgan was in it. Now the man Morgan had gone there to kill staggered dazedly out of the elevator, looking like he had wandered into a nightmare.
Within the same second, Seagrave shouted his one word, Felicity gasped, and Morgan felt a massive hairy paw clamp onto his shoulder.