Ruthless (21 page)

… and kill them.

Advantage: Sienna. I know that sounds funny since I was at least four-on-one in this encounter, still hurting, ouchie ouchie, but seriously … compared to what I’d been through so far, evading and killing four guys in a parking garage sounded like a walk in a park. And I don’t mean Central Park at night, either, I mean like a walk in a really peaceful park at night. Like maybe the Magic Kingdom or something. I’ve never been, but it’s gotta be peaceful, right? Except for screaming toddlers.

I decided my best plan was to move up to the second floor while these guys were still sneaking their way into the first floor. Then I’d have time to do stuff to distract them, like maybe …

… well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

I heard someone enter the garage on the far side, the one closest to the headquarters, just as I was heading up the ramp to the second floor. I kept my footsteps as muffled as possible. Surprisingly, my boots helped, making soft whispers only as I crept up the incline and left the first floor behind. The up ramp was a simple rectangle, parking spaces on either side. It was pretty full, too, because we had lots of agency cars on the first floor, along with all the cars of all the reception guests.

And then I got to the second floor and saw the giant, gaping hole in my strategy.

I was used to being in the garage during the daytime, when all the worker bees of the agency were here, fighting for parking as low to the ground as they could. (There was no elevator.) The ramp was usually full all the way up to the third floor, even in the afternoon.

Now, with the only people here being the guests for the reception, the second floor was nearly abandoned. It was Dodge City at high noon out there. I half expected a tumbleweed to come blowing between the dotted lines. Hell, it could have had five spaces all its own.

I heard whispers behind me and cursed silently as I realized that creeping back down that ramp was certain death. No doubt about it, I was stuck here with sparse cover. Now my best bet was to get to a stairwell and ascend to the topmost floors, where maybe one or two cars were parked, at most. Maybe I could use one of them as cover, or for some of those distractions I’d planned, because the second floor wasn’t going to be good for much besides my death. I needed time and some space to maneuver, and getting as far from the enemies as possible was the only way to accomplish that.

I crept on, moving around the three-wire divider that was strung between poles to keep people from falling down the sides of the ramp. I hurried to the corner of the empty parking garage, scrambling under the dull fluorescent lights to keep from making noise as I moved. I made it to the brick stairwell in the corner and paused at the door, putting my ear to it to listen.

I heard nothing.

I eased the door open carefully, taking notice of the fact that my fingers were still feeling particularly numb at the ends. I kept my HK cradled in one hand, ready to sweep into the stairwell firing. After all, at that point my position would be pretty well given away, might as well go out in a blaze of glory. And bullets. Mostly bullets; killing these faceless idiots wasn’t going to do much for glory. I’d killed the strongest man on the planet, after all. Nameless mercs weren’t much of a feather in my cap, so to speak.

I opened the door, and it squealed just slightly. I froze, listening. I doubted the sound was easily audible on the floor below, but if someone—by chance, which was one in four, since there were four stairwells—happened to be in this very one, they had almost certainly just heard me.

I waited. Listened.

Heard nothing.

I slowly shut the door, easing it through another squeal as it closed, hoping that wasn’t the noise that gave me away. I kept my eye fixed on the downward path, making sure someone didn’t sneak up on me.

Once the door was closed, I started up the stairs with a confidence. This might actually work. I might actually be able to get to the top floor and—

The sound of gunfire from below was a rude interruption to my train of thought, and I felt bullets spray against the wall, showering me with concrete shards. I felt a sudden stinging in my right eye and dropped instinctively.

It saved my life.

The next stream of bullets spattered the wall behind where my head had been a moment earlier. The firing came from below.

Yep. Wrong staircase. What were the odds?

Oh, right. One in four. Crap. Looked like their luck had changed. Mine, too, but not for the better.

I started toward the squeaky door, figuring maybe I could get back into the main garage area. My backpack clung to my back, my frozen camo starting to melt in the warmth of the heated garage. Clearly the camo wasn’t doing much to hide me, dammit.

I reached up for the door, pulling the handle. I couldn’t see the gunman who was spraying the area around me with liberal amounts of lead, but it wasn’t a stretch to assume he wasn’t far down the stairs. I opened the handle, listened to the squeak as I pulled it open—

And felt the door rattle under a hail of bullets from inside the garage. I shoved it closed, hard, with my shoulder, sick in my gut from knowing what this meant.

My retreat was cut off.

Feeling cornered was not exactly a new experience for me, even before this marvelous night in which I wore formal wear and metaphorically tangoed with more men than I cared to. As in, “Tango down!” It was looking like this time I was the tango, though, because another spate of bullets pelted the door above my head, as the merc in the stairwell with me made his own play to kill me with another burst.

Being powerless really cuts down on the available options. I hate that. Also, I never wanted to leave my couch again.

Footsteps closed in on the door, and I knew I had only a few seconds. Rummaging through my backpack, I grabbed a smoke grenade and tossed it down. It clinked on its way to the bottom of the stairwell. I thunked my boots against the ground on the side of the walkway, trying to produce a false impression that I was bolting upstairs, then waited for the response.

It didn’t come.

I heard the smoke grenade pop down the stairwell. I’d thought about going with a flashbang, but those were a little more chancy. Grey smoke flooded the stairwell, surging up to my level before the footsteps outside the stairwell had even reached the door.

As quietly as I could, I slid headfirst down the stairs, careful not to knock the butt of my gun against anything at all. I was as noiseless as a young woman could be while swimming down stairs. Fortunately the hiss of the smoke grenade covered some of it.

I made it to the landing below and waited until I heard the sound of gunfire from the guy who’d kept me from going up. A flare of muzzle fire lit up the smoke, and I realized he was about ten feet in front of me, heading up. He was working on instinct, his actions guided by what he thought I’d do. In the face of overwhelming odds and a bunch of guys about to reinforce him from the second floor, my smartest move
would
have been to head up.

But he’d already inadvertently given away the fact that he was the only one between me and the first floor exit because he hadn’t shouted, “Grenade!” when I tossed that smoker down there. He’d just quietly gone about the business of covering himself. Which meant he was either alone or the worst team player on the face of the planet.

I was banking on the former; mercenaries generally have some military training, and that’s the sort of thing you don’t just forget to do.

Besides, if I was wrong, I was going to end up no more dead than if I tried to escape up. That was certain doom.

I made myself a part of the wall, leaning hard against it, clearing myself out of the stairwell path as the guy charged up, firing willy-nilly and blind in an effort to keep me from getting up to the third floor and beyond. If I’d still been trying to go up, I would have seriously reconsidered my actions right about then.

Instead, I popped up from behind him as he passed me in the smoke without a thought that I could have been lingering on the landing. I drove my Gerber knife into the place where the skull meets the base of the spine and twisted. It was harder without my meta strength, but I got it in there. He didn’t make much more than a noise of protest before it was done, and he dropped. I had to step quickly to keep from having his falling body knock me over. I dodged neatly over him, and I pushed him to the side then listened to him thump down the stairs, keeping my steps only semi-quiet as I charged to the first floor.

There had been a decent interval of time since I’d heard shots at the second-floor entry to the stairwell. I’d figured this was where things would get troublesome, with those reinforcements pouring into the stairwell and hampering my progress. But they were taking their sweet time, messing around with the door handle and opening it oh-so-slowly. It took me a moment to realize why: the claymore I’d left at the first door had made them cautious. Fool me once and all that. Well, I could certainly use the delay.

I slammed against the exit bar on the first floor and burst out of the smoky stairwell into fresh, cool air. The fluorescent overhead lighting was a welcome change from the obstructed view of the stairs offered after I’d tossed the grenade, and I immediately ran, doubled over, for the cover of the nearest car. No shots greeted me, so I assumed I was alone for a brief moment in time.

Which was good, because I had plans that required at least a brief moment of time.

I could hear shouting in other parts of the garage, and muffled yells from the stairwell behind me that told me someone had probably discovered my handiwork in there. Not to brag, but that was an ace sort of kill, pulling that off. Totally ninja.

I crept along, sneaking in front of the bumpers of cars, keeping low and watching through windshields and out the back of vehicles as best I could. I didn’t see any movement, which was the biggest giveaway. I made my way as quickly as I could to the part of the garage where we kept the agency vehicles.

There was a keybox like the kind valets use, with a numbering system to denote which keys go to which parking space. In space one was the car used for the director, a lovely SUV made to government specs, complete with armor. It wasn’t exactly Nick Fury’s car from
The Winter Soldier
, but I liked it. I seldom used it myself because I don’t really love driving, but in a pinch it was a hell of a vehicle.

Now it belonged to Andrew Phillips, I supposed, so I didn’t really think anything of it when I grabbed the keys and planned my next bit of mayhem. This one would involve vehicular homicide and more destruction of government property, so I felt like I’d picked the right car for the task at hand.

The garage attendant, bless his soul, had always parked the car for me. It was a big damned SUV, and the genius who’d designed the parking structure had made the parking spaces with Honda Civics in mind, forgetting that this was America and we drove cars big enough to challenge garbage trucks for road dominance over here, dammit. As a result, the attendant always parked the cars he drove backward, front end facing out so that if I desperately needed my car, I could just get in and go. He said he did it for insurance purposes, whatever that meant. He had a whole monologue about it, but I just nodded politely and tuned him out.

I crept up on the car, unlocked the door quietly with the fob (one click) and opened it wide enough to thrust my backpack in first. Then I slid up into the driver’s seat and kept myself low in the seat, so that I could look out through the steering wheel and see what was going on in front of me. For now, there was nothing going on.

But I suspected that was about to change.

I waited, undertaking a little modification and preparation while I did so. I’d once heard in a movie (
Under Siege 2
, a classic of American cinema) that chance favors the prepared mind. I wasn’t leaving much to chance here. These guys wanted to find me, they probably figured I was here on the first floor, and I wasn’t going to disappoint them in their search. They were definitely going to find me, all two or three of them that remained.

Of course, they were going to be sorry they found me, but hey, no plan survives contact with the enemy, guys. (That one’s Sun-Tzu.)

I’m detecting a pattern in my quotes. It probably says something about me.

I waited and waited, for what seemed like hours but was probably only minutes. The fluorescent bulb just ahead of me had developed a flicker, but the insulation in my car was so good I couldn’t hear the hum. Points for that, because it’s an irritating noise.

Pretty soon I saw the first mercenary emerge. He crept along, breaking cover in the row of cars to my right and crossing the row to wait behind the hood of a sedan. He’d just checked the exit door over there, I figured, and determined that there were in fact no footprints heading out.

Just like I figured they would. Predictable.

Two other guys came creeping along the row, one just in front of me, and I slid down even further, counting out thirty seconds before I bobbed back up enough to peer out again. He’d hardly made an exhaustive search; it looked like he was coming together with his buddies for a confab. I counted one, two, three of them, and breathed a sigh of relief as they congregated near the trunk of the sedan.

They were on either side of it, trying to keep themselves from being exposed in case I was waiting somewhere in the garage with a gun, but also leaning toward each other enough to minimize their volume. I realized in that moment that these geniuses—these super geniuses who’d been trying to kill me—didn’t have radios. Why? Maybe they figured the government could overhear them?

It all worked in my favor, though, because I quietly buckled myself in and started my car, making sure to set the lights to the “off” position first, rather than let them snap on automatically. I figured that might buy me an extra second of surprise as I threw the car into drive and floored it.

Someone with a gentler temperament than me—like, oh, I dunno, Conrad Hilton—might have used this opportunity to escape. Not me, apparently. I’d felt the fear for my life and it had passed somewhere around the time Miksa Fenes tried to burn me into ash, around the time I figured out what these Russians were planning to do to my prison. Leaving aside the obvious worries of what could be happening to the hostages, I was left with one overwhelming emotion: rage.