She debated what to do next. If she hadn’t left her cellular in her purse, and her purse in the shop, a logical first step would have been to check in with Cynthia down at the house. Minus that option, she could reverse direction, skirt around the back of the store to the other side, and take a look at what was happening downhill from there… or maybe from the woods edging the property. It seemed paranoid, sure. Could be she was letting herself get very carried away with things. And say she were. Besides possibly winding up soaked to the bone, what did she stand to lose by being careful? At worst she’d feel foolish later on, have a laugh at her own overactive imagination as she was drying off with a towel. And at best — who knew? Really, who knew what these guys were doing out here?
Or what they might have done at the house to get the dogs so upset, Julia thought, aware of their undiminished barking.
She backpedaled, her hand still on Viv’s breast, gently prodding the greyhound to join her, wanting to move behind the shop where the men couldn’t see them.
Viv didn’t budge. Her fur was slick from the rain but she seemed indifferent to it, almost oblivious, and was staring at the two men in coveralls with her ears raised stiffly erect and turned forward. Although her body remained tense, she was no longer trembling.
These were not encouraging signs. Julia had found that Viv took to baths with less complaint than many greys, but she was still water shy, and like all members of the breed highly sensitive to changes in temperature. Under ordinary circumstances a chill downpour would send her into a squirmy run for cover. Instead, she had not moved from her alert set and was studying the men with her head pointed toward them like an arrow.
Julia gave her another little push.
“Let’s go, Viv,” she said in a low, insistent voice. “Now.”
The grey offered a final bit of resistance and then complied.
Moments later Julia was hurrying past the shop’s steel back door. Viv stopped once to look behind them, but Julia got her attention with a light tap to the head and urged her on.
Julia had gone just beyond the door when she saw a second pair of men in power company uniforms rounding the opposite side of the building.
They spotted her at the same time, locking their eyes on her, staring straight at her through the driving rain.
Then they started walking rapidly toward her.
Julia froze with alarm. She did not know who these people were, or what they wanted. Didn’t understand what was happening. But there was no longer any question that they meant trouble.
A heartbeat later, she realized how serious it was.
As she watched the men approach, Julia saw both of them reach into their coveralls and suddenly bring out weapons, guns of a sort she knew weren’t pistols, but thought might be Uzis or something very similar.
She glanced over her shoulder, her heart lurching. The men she’d seen at the west window had turned the corner of the shop and were advancing on her from behind, those same compact assault rifles also having appeared in their hands.
They were closing in.
Four armed men.
Closing in on her from both sides.
Julia stood rooted in place another second, trying to think despite the terror whirling through her mind. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t retreat, and recognized it would be hopeless to consider making a run for the woods. What, then? What was she supposed to do?
Her eyes darted to the back door of the shop. If she could make it inside, get to a phone fast enough, she’d at least have a chance to call for help. The police, her father’s security people…
It was her only option.
“Viv!” she shouted. “Come on!”
Julia hurled herself at the door, tore it open, and ran into the shop, Viv sprinting after her, following her inside a half second before she slammed and locked it behind her. She passed through the storage and orientation rooms to the rear of the counter, lunged for the phone by the cash register, snatched it up… then suddenly felt every ounce of blood in her veins drain toward the floor.
There was no dial tone. No sound in the receiver. Nothing but the flat, crushing silence of a dead line.
All at once Julia remembered seeing the workers, the men who’d been posing as workers, high up on the utility poles as she’d driven in from the road a little while ago.
The telephone wires, she thought.
Whoever they were, they had cut the wires.
She stood for the briefest of moments, her breath coming in broken gasps, Viv pressing against her leg in the cramped area behind the storefront counter. Then she heard a loud thump outside the storage room, another, and knew her pursuers were trying to break their way in through the door. One chance left, and not much time. She tossed down the receiver and grabbed her purse off the counter, snapping open its clasp, reaching inside.
At the rear of the shop, a crackle of automatic gunfire, then the sound of the back door bursting open. Steel or not, the bullets would have destroyed the simple cylinder lock in its knob.
She groped in the purse for her cellular phone, pulled it out, flipped open its earpiece. There were footsteps behind her now, hurrying through the storeroom. Only seconds left. Julia’s heart racing, she fingered the cellular’s ON button, listened to the inane electronic theme that sounded when it was powering up, waited with maddening helplessness for the little smiley face welcome image to pop up on the LCD screen—
She had enough time to see the figure of a tall, broad man appear outside the storefront entrance, just enough to note his utility worker’s uniform through its glass pane before the door exploded inward with a loud crash, the little clutch of bells above it jangling wildly, its wood frame fracturing, splintering apart as something stormed into the shop ahead of the man, an animal, a huge black-pelted dog, hurtling forward at his shouted instruction, coming straight at her, all fur and teeth.
That was when Viv leaped out from behind the counter.
Kuhl had kept his stubby MP5 subsonic extended as he kicked in the rescue center’s door, ordering Lido forward with the German commands demonstrated by Anagkazo.
The sight of a greyhound dashing out around the end of the counter caused him some small surprise and perhaps even a cold flash of appreciation for its pluck. But his cardinal rule was to be ready for the unexpected… why else had he acquired the Schutzhund dogs?
The grey leaped at his alpha in a blur of speed and collided with it midair, knocking it down onto the floor with its own momentum, snapping at it with a kind of rumbling growl. Its teeth sank into the alpha’s shaggy black hide and slicked its breast and neck with blood.
Kuhl swung his carbine at the greyhound from where he stood in the door, squeezed off a rapid three-round burst. Crimson spurting from its flank, the grey emitted a shrill yelping scream that sounded almost human, rolled from his alpha in a flail of limbs, and then lay heaped on the floor.
The situation remedied, Kuhl shifted his attention to his target. She stood behind the counter, staring at the greyhound’s still, blood-splashed form with mute horror. There was a cell phone gripped in her right hand.
Kuhl did not pause. He held his MP5 straight out and crossed the room toward her, simultaneously calling Sorge and Arek from the parking area. Back on all fours near the sprawled grey, his lead dog seemed essentially unharmed despite the deep bites it had sustained.
Kuhl ordered the alpha forward again.
“Voran, hopp!”
Go on, over.
Lido reared toward the four-foot counter, bounded over it, and fell upon the Gordian daughter — a leaping drive that knocked her back against the wall and then down onto the floor under his mammoth weight. Fixing its eyes on her right hand, interpreting the phone it gripped as a possible weapon, the alpha took quick action to disarm her and buried its fangs in her wrist.