But then she tried to sprint past me. And I understood why she was so terrified.
She didn’t know who we were nor why we were here. She’d seen me subdue a guard; for all she knew, we were stealing her away and taking her someplace even worse. Her mind was probably clouded by the trauma of her captivity. I’d seen it before.
I grabbed her. “Svetlana, it’s okay. You’re safe now.”
“No!” she screamed, trying to wriggle free. “No!”
“Svetlana, listen to me.” I spoke calmly and quietly. “My name is Nick Heller. Your father asked me to come get you out of here.”
“No!” she screamed, even louder and shriller. “Get away from me!” she said in accented English. “Leave me alone!”
She twisted one way, then another, and then raked her nails across my face. It felt like she’d drawn blood. It hurt. I grabbed her by the wrist to prevent a repeat performance. She screamed even louder and went for me with her other hand, this time aiming for my eyes. A tough girl.
“Svetlana,” I said, grabbing that wrist, too. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
She struggled mightily to free her hands. Her face had gone red, her mouth contorted in an ugly, animal-like snarl. Spittle flew from her mouth. Svetlana Kuzma, poor thing, had obviously lost it. Maybe Soler had drugged her. Maybe her confinement had disoriented her, made her paranoid, afraid of all intruders. Or maybe she’d come to think of Soler’s security guards as her protectors, and anyone else as a threat. Some version of the Stockholm Syndrome. I didn’t know what she thought. I only knew that she was deeply confused.
“Svetlana, please listen to me. We have to move quickly.”
Her eyes searched my face, scanning back and forth. She seemed to have calmed down a bit, so I let go of her wrists.
A mistake. Suddenly she kneed me hard in the crotch. That I wasn’t prepared for. I felt a starburst of pain and expelled a lungful of air. She was tough, wiry, and strong. The girl must have taken self-defense classes.
She was also complicating things considerably. We had expected any number of contingencies except having to fight the girl we’d come to rescue. I gestured to Benito, who grabbed her by the shoulders.
Then I produced a syringe from my pocket, grabbed her right hand, and jabbed the needle into the large vein at the front of her arm. I depressed the plunger, releasing a small quantity of a rapid-onset opioid sedative called remifentanil.
Benito’s mouth gaped. “Why you do this?” he said furiously.
“We didn’t exactly have a choice.”
“This is not our plan! Now we have to carry her out!”
“A lot easier to carry an unconscious body than someone who’s fighting you all the way.”
In a matter of seconds she slumped in Benito’s arms. Together we set her down gently on the carpet.
I grabbed the guard’s pistol, a 9 mm Astra, from the floor. As the two of us dragged his inert body into the suite’s bathroom to get him out of sight, his two-way radio crackled.
“What are they saying?”
“They’re-they’re responding to a panic call,” Benito said, his eyes widening.
“Panic call?”
“It comes from inside this room.”
“But how? He didn’t even have a chance to call for help.” I glanced around, then saw the wireless panic button fob on Svetlana’s bedside table, which I hadn’t noticed before. She must have hit it when she jumped out of bed, calling for help.
Why had Soler provided her with a panic button?
But there wasn’t time to ponder this or anything else: A loud electronic Klaxon had begun to sound in the hall outside the bedroom, and probably throughout the mansion. “They’re on their way,” Benito said, his voice shaking.
“From where?”
“I think they said the east wing.”
I glanced at my watch. “We can make it. I figure we have about a hundred and twenty seconds before they get here.”
He shook his head, his face grim. “Less. It won’t take them that long.”
“It will if they stop to get weapons. Which they will.”
“What do you mean? They all carry guns.”
“No. The heavy-duty stuff. Standard protocol when there’s a major intrusion, I bet.”
“Heavy duty…?”
“Assault rifles. Submachine guns. AR-15s and M-16s.” They were listed on the firearms registration Soler had filed with the Barcelona police. And they were kept in a secure storage cabinet off the butler’s pantry downstairs. Obviously the guards wouldn’t carry submachine guns around, not in a private home. In the event of a major intrusion, they’d grab their weapons from the tactical rack.
“Madre de Dios.” Droplets of sweat had begun to appear on his face. “We have to run. Leave her here! We don’t have time to take her with us.”
“Wrong,” I said. “She’s why we’re here. Come on. We have plenty of time. Grab the equipment. I’ll take her.”
I turned her over on her stomach, then kneeled in front of her head. Her shallow breathing told me she was unconscious but okay. No respiratory distress. I hooked my elbows under her shoulders and hoisted her in a sort of fireman’s carry. She was small and slight and couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. She smelled good: Her hair gave off a sweet, faintly floral, scent. She still had the delicate skin of an innocent young girl. In repose she seemed fragile and vulnerable, which brought out my protective instincts.
Out in the hall the alarm was earsplittingly loud.
We made it downstairs and out the door, got her into the back of the ambulance-we left the gurney on the porch, to save a few precious seconds-and jumped into the front.
Benito, his face now streaming sweat, pulled the ambulance away from the house. We seemed safely on our way out when he yelled something and slammed on the brakes.
Three guards had us surrounded. Two in front and one on the driver’s side. Pointing assault rifles at us. Ready to fire.
Maybe Benito had stopped because he didn’t want to run anyone over. Maybe he stopped because he didn’t want them to fire at us. Whatever his reasoning, he’d just made a serious miscalculation. I would have kept going, force them to get out of my way and thereby hope to mess up their aim.
But there was nothing to be done about that now. I saw that he was panicking, on the verge of giving up.
Each of the guards held a black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a civilian version of a military infantry rifle. This was a reliable and accurate weapon, high velocity, fast handling, with not much recoil. Probably thirty rounds in the magazine. It had a range of almost two thousand feet.
Four very ugly barrels were pointed at us, swaying back and forth. One of the guards was shouting something.
“They want us to get out,” Benito said. “What we do?”
“We get out.”
“You have the gun.”
“Ever hear the expression ‘bringing a knife to a gunfight’?”
“Madre de Dios. They going to kill us. Now what we do?”
“Just watch me,” I said. “And stay calm.”
We got out, hands in the air. The alarm Klaxon was still going, amplified by loudspeakers out here. The front of the house blazed with emergency lights. Another guard yelled something at me, and Benito translated: “He wants our hands on our heads. He wants us to, er, interlock?-interlace-our fingers.”
We obeyed his orders. We had no choice.
The same guard, obviously in charge, shouted something else.
“He sees the pistol tucked into your belt. He says if you lower your hands even a millimeter they will pump you full of lead.”
“Understood,” I said.
Benito translated, but he didn’t have to. They knew I wasn’t stupid enough to reach for my weapon in a situation like this. Not with four semiautomatic rifles pointed at me. The guy in charge barked an order, and another one of the guards strode up to me, the matte black muzzle right in my face. I could see the selector lever, on the left side of the receiver, pointed up to Fire.