She knocked on the door and a second later a woman swung it open. Ella recognized her at once from the briefing: Molly Cruise, and she immediately started talking to her. A minute later, Molly walked out of the house in a daze and turned right on the sidewalk.
Ella radioed the rest of the team. “Molly’s just going to get me a coffee from the place down the road,” she said quietly into her mic. “I told her to wait there for me. She won’t realize what’s happened for hours.”
‘How the buggery fuck does she do that?” Milo said.
“That’s confidential, Milo,” Ella said. “You know that. I’m coming back to the SUV.”
“Okay everyone,” Mason said. “Ella’s got the door open and sent Molly Cruise down for a latte. We go in three, two…”
Zara closed her eyes as she listened to Mason counting down. Even at sunset the heat in Frankfurt was still hot, and a heavy humidity was stifling the city. The hum of the main road traffic filled the air and the sound of laughter and mischief floated across from a café a few doors away. From their position on the roof she and Milo had an elevated view of the city. In the west, an orange ribbon divided the industrial skyline from the sky above. When the sun finally sank beneath the smog, the night, with all its pleasures and horrors, would begin for real.
A stark memory of her time in the Los Angeles Police Department burst into her mind. She had been tracking down a notorious serial killer called the Choker along with the rest of her team of detectives. They were a hard-boiled crew of men. There had been another woman on the team — Alice — but she was the Choker’s latest victim. Now, they were all just about ready to burn the freak alive, but there was just one problem.
They had to catch him first.
When they tracked him down, it was to a crack house in Lincoln Heights. Once upon a time in the west, the place had been a former recording studio with twelve bedrooms but by the time Lieutenant Dietrich pulled up in her unmarked Ford Club Wagon it was a broken-down warren of danger and filth. Lurking somewhere inside was the Choker, and she decided she was going to scale the south wall and get in on the top floor.
The memory was cut dead by the sound of Jed Mason: “…One, all teams go!”
She lowered herself down through the skylight and touched down on the unpainted floorboards below like a cat. Pulling her gun, she slid a round into the chamber and silently crossed the loftspace on her way to the door. Milo was just seconds behind her.
She reached out to turn the handle when she heard gunshots coming from downstairs, and then Caleb Jackson’s voice crackling through the earpiece. “Asset’s not where she’s supposed to be… sweep the whole house!”
She ran forward, joined now by Milo, and they reached a white-painted door. “We’re on our way, Cal!”
Zara moved to open the door when Milo stopped her. “Wait — you hear something?”
“No, what?”
“Someone’s coming!”
Zara leaned in and also heard footsteps outside the door. Reaching for a grenade on her belt, she turned to Milo and gave him a wink. “Put your mask on! This could get dangerous!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Snatching a CS Handtoss grenade from her bag, Zara kicked the door open with her boot and rolled the weapon out into the hall. The grenade exploded in a thick, white cloud of noxious gas and the next thing she heard were two men coughing and gasping for air. Milo was wearing his mask now, and peered into the gloom through the visor. “They’re still coming!”
“Not for long.” Coughing with the gas, Zara fired the Glock 23 into the cloud and killed the two men, and then quickly slid on her gas mask before making her way down the stairs. She pulled her wrist up and spoke rapidly into the palm-mic. “Just took out two of Ezra’s local thugs up here. You got anything for me on the asset’s location yet, Cal?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We’re pinned down by some heavy fire on the first floor.”
“That means ground floor, Milo,” Mason threw in.
She heard someone else pounding up the stairs. Heavy footsteps. A man. She guessed it was Bjorn Brick whom Ezra had briefed her about earlier. She watched as his enormous frame came bobbing up through the CS gas and saw he was wearing a gas mask.
When Brick’s head was in the right place on the stairs, she kicked her leg out as hard as she could and caught the end of his mask’s filter canister with the toe of her boot. The power of the unexpected impact smashed the mask into Brick’s face and knocked it away from his mouth and nose. He fell back immediately with the force of the strike and them tumbled almost comically back down the stairs.
“Nice kick!” Milo said.
Zara heard his hefty frame crunch into the landing but he was obscured once again by the gas. He was going to be pretty pissed about getting belted like that without any warning, so she figured it made more sense to finish the job while he was still disoriented. If you’re going to poke a bear, then better off do it in his eyes.
She leaped off the top step and flew through the CS gas like a ninja, landing with a controlled thud on the landing. She was on her own. Brick had come to his senses and rolled away, and now he was hiding somewhere for her in one of the mansion’s other rooms. An angry bear with a score to settle.
She heard gunshots and realized Brick was firing on them. “Get down!”
They hit the deck and she fired back, emptying her magazine in the hope of taking out the Spider.
“You’re firing at ghosts, Z!”
Milo was right. She tossed the gun and made her way down the next staircase. “Keep up, Miles!” she said, and swept her gun from side to side as she gave chase to the Huntsman.
Dr Evangeline Starling heard gunshots all around her, but thanks to the bag on her head she saw nothing but blackness. She was disoriented, scared and she felt sick, and when the shooting got closer she was certain she was going to die.
She didn’t even know where she was. They had let her see the ankh, but that was in this windowless room and when she had done their bidding they had put the bag back over her head. The last time she had seen daylight was when she had stepped inside the Harvard Museum of Natural History and that was back in Boston. She had no idea where they had taken her but she knew it had involved a long flight.
She could be anywhere.
And now there was a gun battle raging around her and she was tied to a chair with a sack blinding her and preventing her from defending herself. She worked hard to control her nerves, but couldn’t stop herself from jumping every time one of the guns went off. If she made it through this it would be a miracle.
In the kitchen, Mason and Caleb were still under heavy fire. Mason saw in the reflection of the chrome refrigerator that their tormentors were Kyle Cage and Iveta Jansons. He knew Zara and Milo were hunting Bjorn Brick upstairs and Molly Cruise was trying to buy a latte without any money down the street, so that meant Linus Finn was guarding the asset.
Caleb took the brunt of the fire, keeping his head below the level of the kitchen units while he reloaded his weapon. Mason provided cover fire and managed to drive both the Spiders from the kitchen and back out into the hall. He could smell CS gas and knew Zara must have deployed it. It was a standard weapon they used on their retrieval missions when they ran into trouble.
Suddenly he heard the firing go silent, and peered over the counter to see both Cage and Jansons peel off and make a break for it. Linus had obviously ordered a retreat. The Raiders hadn’t caused anywhere near enough havoc to force a man like Linus to back off yet, so that meant they had what they wanted.