If she remembered the layout of this place right, she was still on the first floor up… but now she could hear the pounding of feet coming up the stairs from below, and she knew they were going to catch her before she could get anywhere near the front door.
Directly in front of her was a door, a big set of French double doors, in fact, with tall, curtained windows.
“You!” a voice bellowed behind her. “Stop right there!”
She leaped forward, propelled by all the terror that had driven her from that bloody room. Bringing her arm up to protect her face, she hit the flimsy door full-on, smashing through the windows in an explosion of shattering glass and splintering wood.
Through the disintegrating door, she slammed into the iron railing of the balcony beyond and very nearly went over. She caught herself, though, just as a gunshot rang out from inside the house. The street twelve feet below was quiet, midnight dark save for the pools of illumination beneath the street lamps and the distant movement of traffic headlights on the main highway. The early April night air was bitterly cold on her bare skin, and for the briefest of moments, she hesitated.
Then she glimpsed movement on the pavement up the street, a shadow beneath a street lamp with an oddly shaped head. Was it?… yes! A bobby! Never, in her line of work, had Patricia Summers been so happy to see a policeman.
“Help me!” she shrieked. “Please!…”
Glass crunched underfoot behind her. Someone was coming through the shattered door to the balcony. Then another gunshot exploded close behind her, and she felt something like a red-hot wire sear through her flesh high on her right side. Without waiting for another shot, without even looking, she vaulted the railing. There was a dizzying rush of air past her body as she fell… and then she slammed into grass and soft earth with a thud that drove the breath from her lungs. She’d fallen about twelve feet, she guessed, and with a clumsy landing at the end of it, but at least she’d missed the wrought-iron fence topped by sharp spikes that lined the plot of earth where she’d landed. Quickly she scrambled to her feet, intending to run toward the policeman, only to have her ankle turn beneath her weight and pitch her to the ground once more.
“There she is!”
Rolling onto her back, she looked up at the balcony. The Oriental woman was there, looking as cold and as hard as ice. Beside her was a man with some kind of automatic weapon — she didn’t know what kind, only that it looked dangerous. He started to aim at her, but the Oriental woman held up a hand. Had they seen the bobby up the street?
The woman was aiming her silenced pistol.
Patricia screamed as loud and as hard as she could and rolled away from the fence, banging up hard against the building’s wall. She thought she heard the thump of the pistol, but she couldn’t be sure; this close to the building, though, she didn’t think the people inside could see her, and if they couldn’t see her, they couldn’t shoot her.
Her ankle burned like fire; she must have twisted it in her fall. Her side was burning where a bullet had scratched her, and she was bleeding from a dozen minor cuts she must have picked up coming through the window. Rising again, still screaming as loud as she could to attract attention, any attention, she began hobbling toward the street, leaning heavily against the wall. There was a gate in the iron fence ahead, a gate with a latch just opposite the building’s front door, but to reach it, she would have to leave the relative shelter of the wall and run for the street.
At twenty-eight, Patricia Summers was a survivor. Her dad had walked out on a family of six kids when she was just five, her mother thrown out of work during the big recession in the seventies; Mum had struggled along on the dole for a while but eventually lost herself in a bottle. With no education beyond the fifth grade, Patricia had supported herself and the other kids doing what work she could find. The promise of a career as a model — as if you had a chance at modeling without going to school! — had turned out to be the come-on for a London “escort service.” It wasn’t long after that before she’d been exchanging sex for money.
She didn’t like it, but life was a bitch whether you liked it or not… and no matter what happened, she was not going to follow Mum into that bottle. Patricia knew how to do what had to be done, and she knew how to make quick decisions without second thoughts. The name of the game was survival.
Steeling herself, she took a deep breath, then lunged for the gate. The latch was stiff and her hand slippery with her own blood. She fumbled it twice… damn! Damn! Come on!…
With a grinding crack the gate swung open and Patricia dashed through. She could hear the lock on the front door of the house being turned. If only her ankle…
Shit! She was down again, on her hands and knees, but she kept crawling. Could they see her from the balcony? Were they shooting at her? She didn’t stop to look, but kept crawling.
“’Ere now, miss!” an authoritarian voice said from the darkness just ahead. “What’s the idea?”
It was the bobby, jogging toward her across the pavement.
Damn it, did all bobbies carry guns nowadays? She couldn’t remember. Once, back in gentler, more innocent days, the British police has never been armed, but in recent years that had changed, especially in the rougher parts of England’s cities.
But was this one armed? She desperately prayed that he was.
“Watch out!” she screamed. “They’ve got guns! They’re trying—”
She was interrupted by a long, staccato burst of fire off the balcony from which she’d just fallen. Ricochets whined off the street a few feet away, and a fleck of broken stone stung her cheek. With a smooth, powerful movement, the police officer swept her up in his arms, spun about, and dashed down the pavement. Automatic gunfire followed them, stabbing at them through the dark… then abruptly ceased.
Moments later, in a sheltered doorway down the street, the bobby hung his overcoat over her shoulders and proceeded to question her. She told him everything, not even lying when he asked her what she and Sharon had been doing in the pub when O’Malley had picked them up, and minutes after that she could hear the wailing of approaching sirens.
Poor Sharon…
“Well, miss,” the bobby said. She was shivering violently now, despite the heavy coat, and he guided her to the stoop within the doorway and made her sit down. “I guess that’s one trick you’ll always remember, eh?”
“Not if I can help it,” she said, and then she started crying. God, how she wanted to forget the sight of Sharon’s ruined face.
Someone was shaking Roselli by the shoulder. When he opened his eyes, a flashlight was glaring in his eyes. “What the fuck?”
“Sorry, mate,” a Britisher’s voice said from the blackness behind the light. “Rise and shine. We got a hot flash in a few minutes ago. Briefing in thirty, and you Yanks are invited.”
Roselli groped in the darkness for his watch on the tiny nightstand next to his rack and peeled back the Velcro cover. When he squinted at them hard, the luminous digits told him what he already knew… that it was zero-dark-thirty in military parlance and entirely too early for civilized people to be up and about.
SEALs, however, never thought of themselves as civilized, and neither, evidently, did their SAS hosts. As he swung his legs over the side of the rack and set them on the cold linoleum deck, his tormenter straightened to shake Magic Brown, occupying the upper rack above Roselli’s head.
“What’s up, Razor?” Jaybird asked from across the aisle that divided the barracks into two long lines of double-decker bunks. He was already half dressed, pulling his fatigues from the seabag hanging at the head of his rack.