There was no way to disengage without blowing the objective and revealing that he’d played her, and there was no way to keep her in this room without having sex with her.
“What’s going on, Ryan?” Clark asked.
Ryan popped his earpiece out of his ear and slid it in his pocket, flipped off the water, and left the bathroom.
Time to go to work.
Élise was on the bed. She still had her clothes on, but her come-hither look told him he wasn’t out of the woods. He took a step toward her.
And then her mobile phone rang in her purse.
There was a momentary look of surprise on her face. Jack wondered if the distinctive chirping ring meant the call was coming from a particular number. She stood up from the bed and picked her purse up from the coffee table. While doing so she said, “Sorry. I’d better take this.”
“Sure,” Jack replied.
Hello?”
“It’s Riley. Where are you?”
Veronika Martel could tell by the Englishman’s voice that something was very wrong. “Hi, Rebecca. Nice of you to call, but I am in the U.S. at the moment. It’s very late at night over here.”
“Listen to me,” Riley continued, as if she hadn’t said a word. “There is a man in your hotel room right now.”
“What? How do you know?”
“Not relevant. The point is I do know. What I don’t know is just what the fuck he is doing, but I have men heading there now to find out. Wherever you are, you get your bloody ass back to your room right now!”
Ryan sat down on the bed and watched the Frenchwoman turn away as she held the phone to her ear. After a brief conversation she turned back around, facing Ryan, and her face went from a guise of slight annoyance about the call that Ryan thought might have been feigned to an obvious appearance of anger that was both very real and very dark. Her eyes narrowed, staring directly at Ryan.
He didn’t know what was happening, but he asked, “Is something wrong?”
The woman hung up the phone and snatched up her purse. “Who… are… you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” He tried a little chuckle and stood up, began walking over to her. Don’t leave, he told himself. “You Googled me, remember?”
When he was halfway across the small suite, she turned and stormed for the door.
“What’s wrong? Wait.”
But she was gone, almost at a run, and the door slammed behind her.
“Damn it.” Ryan scrambled for his earpiece, digging for it in his pocket, but after a few seconds he gave up with the tiny contraption and dove headfirst across the bed. He grabbed his phone on the nightstand and unlocked it, then opened the conference call. “Dom! Get the fuck out of there! She knows!”
47
Caruso had found the phone; it was in a wheeled roll-aboard whose lock he picked in twenty seconds after spending a minute checking it for telltales. Within three and a half minutes of entering the Frenchwoman’s hotel room he had the device downloading to Gavin’s specially designed unit.
And then, within seconds of his beginning the download, the frantic call came from Ryan telling him the woman was loose and on her way back to her room. Caruso was less worried about her showing up while he was here — to travel from the thirty-ninth floor to the thirty-first floor she’d first have to go down to the lobby to reach the other elevator bank — and more worried about how the hell she knew he was here in the first place. She’d gotten a call, Ryan said, so Dom assumed she had confederates in the hallway who had seen him, confederates who were somehow patched into hotel security cameras, or confederates who had bugged her room.
Whatever the case, it meant unknown parties were involved in this and aware of him, and this meant trouble.
Dom wasn’t sure what to do, so he called out to Clark. “John?”
“I’m in the lobby, watching for trouble heading your way. Don’t see anyone, but get out of there. Could be someone already up on that floor.”
“This download is gonna take a few more minutes.”
Clark said, “It’s too late for covert. They know there was an intrusion. Just snag the phone and bolt.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
Caruso slipped the two phones joined with a cable into his backpack and started for the door. Her suite was similar to Ryan’s; there was a small hallway that ran along the kitchenette and hid the front door from the living and sleeping area, and Dom ran for it, but once he turned into the little hallway of the suite, he saw the latch of the door slowly lowering.
It was too late to escape out the front.
Caruso turned and ran back into the suite, leapt over the coffee table and onto the sofa, then over the back of the sofa to the balcony door. He unlocked it and flung it open, then started outside.
There was a boom of a handgun discharge in the room behind him, then the crashing of glass right next to his head as the sliding glass door shattered. Dom took the eight-foot-deep balcony in two bounds, rolled over the side of the railing, grabbing the metal bar on the outside of the balcony, then scaling down quickly to the bottom of the railing. A second loud report from the room sounded closer than the first, and Dom struggled to hold on as his feet dangled thirty-one stories over Las Vegas Boulevard.
He heard Clark in his ear calling to him, but he concentrated on swinging his body back, away from the building, to pick up some momentum. He’d just started his swing forward when he felt his fingers slip off the metalwork of the balcony above his outstretched arms, and he looked up just in time to see an Asian man in a black hoodie leaning over the side, a suppressed pistol in his hands.
Dom swung to the balcony below him, let go fully now, and crashed onto a padded settee and then through a plexiglass bistro table. The crash knocked the wind out of him, and he knew he’d battered his arms and ribs, but he fought his way to his feet and looked back and up.
The Asian assassin could not see him from the balcony above, but he must have dropped to the floor of the balcony, because Dom now saw the pistol appear at the end of an arm that waved back and forth, pointing down to the balcony where Dom stood.
With a flash and a loud boom, the man fired. The round crashed through the locked glass door just three feet to Dom’s left.
He dove to the ground on his right.
Another round barked; this one hit the glass closer to Dom.
Dom leapt back to his feet, grabbed a metal chair, and swung it up and out at the gun. He struck it as a fourth round fired, and he knocked the weapon from the man’s hand. It arced out away from the building and fell from view.
Dom didn’t want to wait around to see if this assassin had a backup, so he turned and ran through the shattered glass door. This room was empty, thankfully, so in seconds Dom was in the hall, and in seconds more he was in the stairwell. He raced down thirty floors in five minutes, adrenaline propelling him most of the way.
By the time he made it to the ground floor, Ryan and Clark were out front, waiting for the valet to retrieve the Mercedes. Dom walked up next to them without a word, and when the car came he helped Jack get his luggage in the back.
They were back on Las Vegas Boulevard before the first responders pulled up out front with reports of shots fired high in the massive tower.
While Ryan uploaded the files taken from Élise’s mobile phone, the rest of the team broke down the safe house. Dom called Adara Sherman and delivered news that she was more than accustomed to hearing these days. It was time to do another mad scramble to get the hell out of town.