Ryan tossed the gun under the bed and then ran to Ysabel’s lifeless body, sliding across the polished hardwood floor on his knees for the last several feet. Cradling her limp head in his hands, he felt wetness in her hair. He knew it was blood; he didn’t have to look.
“Ysabel?”
He started to lean down to listen for a heartbeat, fearing the worst, but just as his ear rested on her chest she coughed, weakly.
Her eyes remained shut and her breathing remained shallow.
Jack shouted loud enough to be heard all over the floor of the building in both French and German. “Aidez-moi! Hilf mir! Ambulance! Krankenwagen!”
Ryan shoved his hand into the side pocket of his blazer and breathed a prayer of thanks that he found what he was looking for.
John Clark had demanded of his team that they never went anywhere without their personal trauma kit, a tiny package of items designed by Clark and Chavez. Jack and Dom hated the things; while Clark touted them as being tiny, as far as the two rather fashionable men in their early thirties were concerned, they weren’t nearly small enough. Dom derisively referred to the PTK as his “diaper bag,” and Jack called it “Clark’s booboo pouch.”
After listening to the two younger members of his team bitch long enough, Chavez came up with the idea to have the kit items taken out of their pouch and put in plastic bags, which could then be vacuum-sealed, and this made them just larger than two decks of cards stacked on top of each other. They would just fit in the front pocket of a pair of pants now, and Jack and Dom stopped their complaining. It was still a hassle to carry a med kit twenty-four hours a day, even when they weren’t in the middle of a mission, but both men knew when to pick their battles, so they kept the packets on them at all times.
Now Ryan thanked God that he’d been forced into carrying the damn thing, and he tore the PTK open with his teeth and dumped the contents onto the floor next to Ysabel. He tossed the tourniquet to the side; she wasn’t hemorrhaging from an appendage, although she was bleeding badly from several head and neck wounds.
He used one of the pressure bandages on her forehead and another on a gash on her neck that looked like a deep puncture wound. While covering the bloody cut, he realized she’d come a half-inch from having her carotid artery severed by a knife’s blade.
He used gauze and electrical tape from the kit to stanch the bleeding on her upper-left arm and the bridge of her nose.
He knew the paramedics would likely just remove the majority of his bandaging and apply their own dressings, because they would want to evaluate the wounds. But Jack didn’t care. He had no idea how much blood Ysabel could lose between now and when they’d get here, so stopping the bleeding and keeping her stable were paramount.
With cuts and bruises as bad as he could see, he feared she might have many broken bones and even damage to her organs. He had no idea if she was bleeding internally. He’d done good work on the injuries he could see, but he had no idea if he’d done enough to save her life.
Her face was pale under the smeared blood and the gray and purple contusions.
After stabilizing her head, he moved her arms onto her lap. While doing so he noticed all the defensive wounds on her hands. There were cuts on her palms and fingers. In addition to this, her knuckles looked like she’d punched one of her attackers, and hard.
“Good girl,” he whispered, his voice cracking with emotion as he did so.
From behind he heard a man’s voice, speaking English. “Who are you?”
Jack spun around quickly, his right hand moving closer to the gun hidden under the bed.
A heavyset man in his early twenties stood in the doorway to the hall, shock on his face. His hands were empty.
Jack slipped his hand away from the pistol. “I live here. Who are you?”
“I am a neighbor.”
“Call an ambulance.”
“Four C has already called. The ambulance is coming.”
Jack had no idea who this guy was, but he needed the help right now. “Did you see who did this?”
“No. I only just arrived.”
Jack felt the man staring at him.
“You are husband? Her husband?”
“No.” He thought while he worked on her arm. “I am her friend. I just got here myself.”
The young man relaxed a little; he’d been scared by the possibility he’d stumbled onto some sort of a domestic fight, and the man who now treated the woman had just minutes ago beaten the woman. This made Jack confident the man had not been involved in the attack himself, although this guy was too portly to fit in with the three other members of the crew Jack had already encountered.
The neighbor asked, “Who did this?”
Jack shook his head while he frantically treated her. He had the presence of mind to answer the man carefully. He knew the police would be here soon, and they would take statements. What he said to this neighbor could mean the difference between the cops letting him leave Luxembourg or throwing him behind bars. “I don’t know. She comes from a political family back home. There had been some threats.”
The young man nodded again, and he asked no more questions.
Other neighbors entered soon after, and the police made it up to the fourth floor not long after that. They assured Jack the ambulance was on its way.
Ryan knew he needed to call Clark or Gerry and let them know what had happened, but he had no idea if Ysabel was going to survive the next few minutes. There was no way he was going to make a phone call until she was stabilized. Instead, he just huddled over her, rubbed her hand and her forehead with a wet compress one of the neighbors brought, and kept talking to her, telling her she would be fine.
The police let him stay with her, only because they didn’t have a clue he’d just shot a man and severely injured two others in the building. As they tried to figure out what was going on, Jack hoped they didn’t look under the bed and find the pistol he’d slid there. To reduce the chance of this even more, as he knelt behind the police, he pushed his left foot back, slid it under the bed, and shoved the gun further out of sight of anyone who wasn’t specifically checking for something hidden there. They might find it eventually, but Jack was hoping he’d be long gone by then.
Ysabel’s eyes opened a little, and they focused on his face. He soothed her with his words, again told her she would be okay, although he had no idea what sort of internal injuries she might have suffered.
She said, “I’m sorry, Jack. There were too many.”
“Don’t be sorry. You did great. You’re going to be fine, just rest.”
But she wanted to talk. “The men…”
“The men? Yes? Do you know who they were? I couldn’t identify the accents.”
She just shook her head. “The one… the one in charge. The one who did this to me.”
“Yes?”
Ysabel’s voice cracked, and tears drained down the side of her face.
“Russian.”
Jack felt the life drain out of him. Russian. He felt certain this had happened to her because of him. Because of his safe little operation in Western Europe, the one with the opportunity to roam art galleries during the day and enjoy nice restaurants at night.
“God damn,” Ryan muttered under his breath. Looking at Ysabel’s impossibly swollen face, the blood seeping through her bandages, her lip split and her eyes blackened, he knew this was all his fault.
Two paramedics pushed through the growing crowd in the apartment, then they all but knocked Ryan out of the way. He stood back against the wall by the bedside table.
They concentrated on stabilizing her neck, then they rolled her onto a backboard for transport.