Saving Liberty (Kissing #6) (4 page)

I got awkwardly to my feet: there wasn’t a lot of room, behind the stand. I crouched there between her legs and took a second to think and assess, like they’d taught me in the Marines. I slotted a fresh magazine into my pistol and measured the distance to the kid. It would be close to a suicide mission even if I could grab him and keep going. Stopping, turning, and running back to Emily would make it much more likely that I’d get hit. But leaving her undefended wasn’t an option. I was bleeding: a bullet had winged my left shoulder but I’d been too busy carrying Emily to notice at the time. Picking a kid up off the ground was going to
hurt.

I looked down at Emily. “
Stay here.”

She nodded.

I took a deep breath... and ran, squeezing off a shot in the direction of the sniper as I went. I had no hope of hitting him at this range: I was pretty much firing blind at the distant glint of metal. But it might make him keep his head down.

A bullet sliced through the air three inches in front of my face.
Or not.

I thundered towards the kid, firing off two more wild shots. The kid had stopped and was just standing there, the bottom of his t-shirt twisted in his fingers, looking at the bodies around him. I thumped into him and kept moving, hoisting him over my shoulder. At least he was too scared to struggle.

I slid behind a tree like a baseball player stealing third base. Bark exploded from the edge of the tree, the shot missing us by a quarter-second.

I panted and scrambled to my feet. The longer I stayed there, the more time the sniper would have to prepare. I ducked my head and
ran,
charging like a bull. I didn’t bother firing back, this time, just went for raw speed. Emily and the safety of the stand were only thirty feet away. Twenty feet.

A bullet punched a hole straight through the hem of my flapping t-shirt.

Ten feet. I resisted the urge to close my eyes.

A bullet skimmed my hair, so close I swear I felt the heat of the round against my scalp.

And then I was pressing the kid to Emily’s chest and throwing myself over both of them like a protective blanket. My whole body was soaked with sweat. But at least now we’d be safe. How long had it been, since the shots started? Three minutes? Four? An almighty army would be descending any minute. All we had to do was to stay put.

That’s when I heard the footsteps scrunching through the grass. Confident and assured. Not the steps of a man watching out for a sniper. The steps of a man who’s protected by one.

There was a second shooter.

I heard a scream and a gunshot and now I
did
close my eyes. I could picture the plan, now, as if it was laid out on a military map. One sniper, to take out the Secret Service and any other heroes. One man on the ground to walk around and take out those who made it into hiding. With the sniper watching his back, he was untouchable. Hell, if they had radios, the sniper could direct him right to each hiding place.

The footsteps were coming closer.

He was heading right for us.

Emily

I lay there panting, the kid pressed to my chest. He’d started to cry and I was making wordless little
shh
-ing noises and wishing I knew something about being a mom.

The panic was like cold, black water that kept threatening to push me down and drown me. It had nearly taken me a couple of times already, but Kian had brought me back. The press of his body against mine was my life raft. As long as I could cling on to him, I’d be okay. It was something that went beyond his physical size or the fact he had a gun, even beyond the fact he was a bodyguard. From the second he’d grabbed me, I’d just felt so...
protected,
in a way I never had before, not even when I was in the White House before all this started.

And then I felt him slowly draw away from me and sit up, pressing his back against the stand. And I realized it wasn’t over.

“Someone’s coming,” he whispered. “Stay where you are.”

I nodded and put my arms around the kid. I could feel his tears wet against my neck and wondered why I hadn’t started crying myself. I think I was too scared to.

Then I heard the footsteps myself. Heavy footsteps—a man almost as big as Kian. They were as slow and relaxed as if he was out for a stroll and that only made it scarier.

Kian was staring at something opposite our stand. A display the kids had made about pollution, with clouds made of silver card dangling on strings. There were hazy reflections in some of them: I caught glimpses of the man, walking up behind us. The stand was only waist high. In another few seconds he’d reach it, lean over and….

Kian sprang to his feet and twisted around to face the stand. He and the gunman fired at the same time.

And Kian missed.

I let out a scream as I saw a bullet hit him in the shoulder and knock him back on the ground, his pistol bouncing out of his hand. Then the gunman was right up against the stand, looking down at me and the kid.

My arms tightened around the kid. I rolled us over, wincing at the pain in my leg, so that the kid was hidden beneath me. I stared up at the gunman with fear and desperate, irrational anger. “
Why?”
I begged, my eyes finally filling with tears.

He had close-cropped blond hair and strong, craggy features: he’d almost have been good looking, but the cold deadness in his eyes made him terrifying. “It’s just business,” he said with a shrug. And leveled his gun at me.

Kian

I was down. My right arm was useless: I could barely move it. That left my left, and I was a lousy shot with my left even when it
hasn’t
been clipped by a bullet.

But a lousy shot is better than no shot.

I gritted my teeth and rolled towards my gun, crying out as my injured shoulder mashed into the ground. I clawed my pistol from the grass, came up to sitting, aimed one-handed at the gunman and emptied the magazine. Every shot sent pain reverberating through my arm and I gritted my teeth and panted through it.

On my final shot, I managed to wing him. It was enough to make him duck down behind the stand.

And then, behind me, I heard the most welcome sound in the world: sirens. And the thump of helicopter blades. They were coming.

The gunman peeked over the top of the stand. I was hoping he hadn’t heard my gun click empty and thought I still had a few rounds left. We glared at each other. He was definitely ex-military: I could see it in the way he carried himself, in the way every decision was coldly tactical.

Including the decision to retreat. He turned and fled, disappearing into the trees just as a small army reached us.

They swept in on both sides of me: Secret Service agents in suits, DC police in uniform and SWAT guys in full tactical gear. Everyone was suddenly pointing guns at me, which was when I remembered I was sitting there in civilian clothes with a gun in my hand, six feet from the President’s daughter. I let my gun fall from my fingers and four guys pinned me to the ground.

I saw them separate Emily and the kid and then Emily was lifted into the air and carried off at a run by two Secret Service guys. She stared at me until she disappeared from view. Her eyes were huge and terrified, as if she’d never feel safe again.

Emily

I live in the White House.

Not the part of the White House you see on TV, with its grand white columns and Oval Office. Deeper. The residence, where the President’s family lives while he’s in office, a place the press aren’t generally allowed and where your public tour won’t take you. Deeper still inside that are the bedrooms and the last room you come to, right at the end of the corridor: that’s mine.

I was protected by a fifteen mile aerial exclusion zone, backed up by anti-aircraft defenses. Inside that, the most fiercely-guarded, closely-monitored ground perimeter in the world. Inside that, bulletproof windows to guard against crazed gunmen, tire shredders to deal with suicide bombers in vans and reinforced doors to protect us from rampaging mobs. Within the walls, hallways patrolled by armed Secret Service agents who could swap their handguns for assault rifles in the event of a breach, security doors that could seal off the residence and evacuation routes down to the secure bunker in the basement in case of absolute, total security failure.

I was the best-protected woman in the world, beyond anything envisaged for a princess in a fairy tale.

And I still didn’t feel safe.

Things after the park are a little blurry. I don’t remember spacing out, or going catatonic, or whatever you want to call it. But I can only piece together about half an hour of memories of that afternoon and apparently I was at the hospital for over six hours, so clearly I wasn’t
there
for some of it.

I know that I was taken to the designated emergency evacuation hospital for the President and his family, and that I was treated in a closed-off corridor guarded by the Secret Service, so I didn’t see any of the other people who’d been hurt. I know some were taken to other hospitals and that there were twenty-two injuries in total, enough for the hospitals to call on all of their trauma staff.

I know that I was lying face-down on a bed with a doctor working on my wound when I heard that the number of deaths was confirmed at six. Four Secret Service agents, one cop and one man identified as a private security contractor. I threw up, when I heard that, especially because no one had been able to tell me where Kian was, or how badly he was hurt. When I eventually found out that the guy killed was a park security guard in his sixties, I slumped on my bed in relief... and then immediately hated myself for being relieved, as if the fact it wasn’t Kian made it any less awful.

No kids were hit. No one knew if that was by design or by sheer luck, but I offered up a prayer of thanks.

Hale, the head of my Secret Service detail, would live, but the bullet he’d taken in his side took him off active service: he’d be working a desk for the rest of his career.

The Secret Service’s first move, almost as soon as the first shot was fired, was to evacuate the President to the bunker: they were worried about coordinated attacks and were fully expecting shooters to start advancing across the White House lawn. The First Lady was in Texas, giving a speech: she was rushed off stage and secured in her hotel room.