So what’s her plan here?
She tests the bedroom windows. No special locks on them. She’s on the third floor, but there’s a short drop from the window on the far wall to the side roof. Snow is falling. She checks the closet. No heavy coat. One sweatshirt. She throws it on. It won’t be enough. Not with this cold.
But again, what choice does she have?
No more hesitation.
She pushes open the window, and a blast of cold shoves her back a step. She closes her eyes against the wind and swings her legs over the sill. Her sneakers scrape against the stone roof as she drops out the window and closes it behind her.
Oh man, it’s freezing.
The ground, except for the coil-heated part of the lawn, is blanketed with snow. She wonders how much time she has before Brovski starts knocking on the door. Not much, she imagines.
Time to move.
No way to go down the front. Not with the black-suited men still crisscrossing the lawn. She has to find another way. The wind is already biting her face. She can’t stay out here too long. The exposure will get to her soon.
Keep moving.
A plan... Well, not really a plan. Almost a plan. A bare sketch of a desperate, impossible idea comes to her.
Head to the back of the house, she tells herself.
The roof tile is slick, and she nearly falls before regaining her balance. She ducks low and starts half sprinting, half skating toward the back of the estate. With a shaking hand, she sees the battery on her phone is down to 4 percent. Shit. She hits send. No response. She hits send again and jams the phone back in her pocket.
She needs both hands to keep her balance.
Maggie tries to remember that weird house tour with Oleg Ragoravich.
Man, was that really only yesterday?
It is too cold. She should go back. Maybe the Marc griefbot is wrong. Maybe Brovski and Ragoravich don’t mean her harm. She did the work she’d been hired to do. People know she’s here. Or at least, well, when she thought about it, only one person knows: Evan Barlow. So if she vanishes now, if she is somehow thrown out of a helicopter into a deep hole, somewhere in the forests of Russia, what would happen to her? Would Barlow come forward? And if he did, so what? What could anyone prove?
But the griefbot had said it best: She’d done facial surgery on Ragoravich. Why? None of it had been to improve his looks. She’d known that right away. It was clearly done to disguise him. To change his identity. The type of surgery she’d performed would fool any facial-recognition program at, say, an airport or border crossing.
But still. Would they kill her?
She starts slipping as she reaches the edge, nearly sliding right off the rooftop. She claws her way to a stop at the drainpipe. She sits up, her legs dangling over the side of the roof. She stares down.
Way too far to jump, even with the snowbank.
There has to be a way.
There’s a fire ladder to her right. Perfect. She scooches toward it. When she reaches out and touches the top rung, she pulls her hand back. The metal is so cold it feels as though her hand might freeze-stick to it.
“Doctor McCabe?”
The wind snatches most of the sound away, but she knows it’s Ivan Brovski.
She has no chance. Not really.
Surrender? Is that her best option?
Ivan again, calling from the window: “Maggie?”
She lays flat on the roof. Her head hangs off the edge. She looks down. No one is directly below her. She turns her head to the right. Nothing. She looks to the left.
Two black-suited men. They have guns out.
What the hell is going on?
Maggie hears a shuffling noise from behind her.
Someone else has come out on the roof. They’re coming toward her.
No choice now. She pulls down her sleeves, so that the cuffs cover her palms. Makeshift gloves. She jumps on the ladder and starts down it. If her memory and geography are correct, she is over the indoor pool right now.
So what’s the plan?
She’d considered working her way back indoors and then finding a place to hide. The palace is huge, with lots of rooms. It could take a long time to find her. But then she remembered that the place was loaded up with CCTV. There is nowhere she can go without being spotted and found.
Including probably this roof.
So the only way is to keep moving.
She still has one idea though. A dumb one. A desperate one. But if the swimming pool is where she thinks it is, then so should be... yes.
The glass walkway is right where she hoped it would be.
She is on the third rung of the ladder when she sees cords of stacked firewood. Good, she thinks. That might help. She climbs farther down the ladder. When she’s halfway down, she looks up.
CinderBlock is staring down at her.
Maggie’s eyes widen as she watches him take out his gun. He points at her. Their eyes meet and Maggie can see in his casual, almost bored expression what’s about to happen.
CinderBlock is going to shoot her.
He isn’t going to shout out a warning. He isn’t going to call for her to halt or freeze or surrender.
He is simply going to pull the trigger.
Maggie sees it coming. By the time she hears the blast, she’s already pushed off the ladder. She falls backward. The bullet whizzes past her leg, clanking a metal rung below her. There was no time to look down before she jumped, so she doesn’t know how far the fall is. She tucks her legs in, braces herself, lands hard.
The momentum forces her into a roll through the snow. The cold bites her skin hard and deep, nearly paralyzing her.
Keep moving.
It’s a funny thing. When she first pushed open the bedroom window, she wondered when her military training would kick in. When would the calm descend on her? When would her heartbeat stay under control? When would she be cool and detached and analytical?
Nothing had prepared her for this.
And yet.
And yet the training had kicked in — it just hadn’t announced itself. It is a part of her. No, there is nothing routine or rote here. No, she’d never trained on how to escape an oligarch’s mansion via a window on an icy rooftop. But time has indeed slowed down for her. Here Maggie is, with a man firing shots at her from above, freezing in the snow, and she has something that resembles a strategy and even a plan.
Using the momentum from the fall and roll, she jumps behind the firewood just as the next shot rings out. When you watch someone fire a handgun on television, it seems like a pretty accurate weapon. It is not. The truth is, CinderBlock is now a good forty to fifty feet away from her. The wind is howling in his face. The cold is numbing his shooting hand.
It’s hard to be accurate.
He realizes it too. She can see him grab his phone to call in reinforcements. That gives her a chance to make her next move. She picks up a log from the firewood. It’s frozen solid. Solid enough? She will find out. She sprints at the glass walkway where Ragoravich had led her on his tour. There is a small spiderweb crack in one of the panels. That might help. She rears back with the firewood and hits the window crack as hard as she can.
The glass shatters.
She doesn’t look behind her. She doesn’t look up. A bullet strikes nearby and more glass shatters, raining down on her. She ducks and covers her head and jumps through the shattered window and into the walkway. Then she turns left as another shot rings out. In the corner of her eye, she sees a black-suited man round the corner and sprint toward her. Maggie clocks that he’s there, but that doesn’t change her plan.
She just needs to pick up the pace.
The door to the car showroom is unlocked. She hurries through it, shuts it behind her, throws the deadlock. The room is pitch black. It had been that way when Oleg Ragoravich brought her here. He’d hit the light switch on the left. She does that now. The lights boom immediately on in shade-your-eyes bright. Maggie doesn’t shade her eyes.