“I’m thinking feminine wiles might work better. I’ll distract them while you try to sneak in the back door.”
Rook managed an enthusiastic grin to hide the fact that he wasn’t entirely happy with the thought of her going up the long drive alone. He couldn’t help feeling protective, especially now that they were together, but he knew better than to voice these concerns. She would knock him senseless for even thinking it.
Good thing she’s not a mind reader, he thought, then glanced at her to make sure.
While Queen sauntered down the road, making a show out of enjoying the scenic vistas and fresh air, Rook looked over the hedgerow bordering the nearby field, watching for trouble. With his glasses on maximum zoom, he could just make out two figures near the farmhouse — one milling near the front entrance, and one standing on a gabled second-floor balcony. He couldn’t see any weapons and at this distance the facial recognition software was useless, but the men didn’t look like farmers to him.
He chose a circuitous path that afforded the best level of concealment behind trees and hedges. At a fast jog, he was able to cover most of the distance in the time it took for Queen to reach the driveway. When she strolled toward the house, waving like a bikini-clad model at a boat show, he darted from the fence line to a barn right behind the two-story house.
Although none of the men were now directly in his view, there were yellow dots floating before his eyes, marking the location of the men he had spotted earlier, along with two more that had come out to greet Queen.
“Hey guys,” he heard her say. “Is this the house where Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Am I in the right place?”
“Should have gone with Much Ado About Nothing,” Rook muttered, knowing that only she could hear.
“My boyfriend told me it was,” she continued, a hint of flirtation in her voice, “but he’s kind of a tool, if you know what I mean.”
“You’ve got the wrong place. You need to leave. Now.” Rook heard the tone of menace in the voice. The man wasn’t buying the dumb blonde routine, and the only thing aroused by Queen’s good looks were his suspicions.
Rook snuck to the corner of the house, crouching under the windows, as he made his way to the back door. The knob turned smoothly in his hand, and he eased the door inward a few inches, and then a few more. It wasn’t until he had opened it enough to slip through that he realized someone was in the room beyond. Fortunately, the man’s attention was turned toward the front of the house and Queen’s performance.
One of the yellow dots abruptly went red as the facial recognition program identified a man outside. Rook ignored the information scrolling in front of his eyes, focusing on the room — a dining room, with a scattering of paper plates and plastic cups on the cheap table — and on all the places where another hostile might be lurking. Seeing no one else, he slipped inside and crept up behind the man.
More yellow dots changed to red, and Rook had to fight the urge to rip the glasses off. He was about to kill a man, and he didn’t need any distractions.
He slipped the SOG knife from its sheath and struck like a viper. In one fluid motion, he wrapped his left arm around the man’s head, covering nose and mouth with the crook of his elbow, and rammed the blade into the base of the man’s skull, instantly severing the spinal cord between the Atlas and Axis vertebrae. There wasn’t much blood, but the wound was instantly fatal, and the man went limp, like his bones had turned to jelly. Rook didn’t let him fall, but instead dragged the lifeless body back across the room to the dining table and eased him into one of the chairs. As he did, the quantum computer recognized the dead man.
His name was Michael Caruthers, a former Royal Marine. Caruthers’s military record was an open book, but there was scant information since his discharge four years earlier. Rook had a pretty good idea what that meant. Caruthers was a mercenary.
Emphasis on was, Rook thought.
He didn’t feel the least bit of remorse at taking the man’s life. He had more regard for the terrorists and fanatics that he’d fought than he did for this man, who had once pledged to give his life for Queen and country, but now was willing to kill for a buck… or whatever they called it here.
He patted down the corpse and found a Skorpion vz. 68 machine pistol in a shoulder holster. The compact weapon, produced in mass quantities by Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, was cheap, and if you knew the right people, it was easy to come by, even somewhere like the United Kingdom, where access to firearms was strictly regulated. Except for the curved twenty-round magazine positioned forward of the handgrip, the Skorpion didn’t look much different than a regular semi-auto, but it was lighter and smaller than one of Rook’s Desert Eagles, especially with its wire stock folded forward over the barrel. Rook decided to leave it behind. It would just get in the way.
Caruthers had been standing at an arched entryway to a sitting room with a clear view of the front door. Rook could see another of the men — red-tagged as another former military man turned hired gun — standing in the doorway, facing Queen. There was no one else in the room, but there was a staircase leading up. Rook figured his chances of making it up the stairs unnoticed weren’t great, but they wouldn’t get any better by waiting.
“Take it up a notch,” he whispered, “and then get ready to break contact.”
“Actually,” Queen said, in a voice loud enough that he would have heard even without the glasses, “you remind me a lot of my boyfriend. Big and dumb.”
Rook rolled his eyes, then made his move, crossing swiftly to the stairs. The banister spindles wouldn’t provide much cover, but he ducked low and ascended the carpeted steps slowly, on all fours, like a stalking cat.
“Last warning,” the man at the door growled. “Get lost.”
“Fine,” Queen said. “I’m going. But I’m gonna tell my boyfriend what an asshole you are, and he’ll be pissed. He might even come here himself and kick your ass.”
“You tell ‘em, babe,” Rook said, under his breath. He reached the landing and checked both ways before continuing. There was a yellow icon floating to his left, beyond a closed door, marking the man on the balcony he had seen from afar. Rook’s instincts told him that this man was more than just a lookout. Mulamba was probably in that room, too.
He crept down the hall, checking each door along the way — a bathroom and two bedrooms, all unoccupied — and came to the door at the end, behind which the unidentified gunman waited.
“Activate X-ray vision mode,” he whispered, and smiled.
Deep Blue’s voice immediately sounded in his head. “Sorry. There’s no app for that. Yet.”
“Useless.” Rook knocked softly on the door.
“Yeah?”
A couple more muffled inquiries followed and Rook could hear the sound of someone moving through the room. When the doorknob started to turn, Rook threw his weight against the door, slamming it into the man on the other side, knocking him backward. Rook let his momentum carry him into the room. He pounced on the still uncomprehending mercenary and drove the knife blade down into the man’s sternum, covering the body with his own and clamping a hand over the mortally wounded man’s mouth to silence any outcry.
“What the—?”
Rook felt a cold surge of panic shoot through his veins. Two guys! Crap!
He looked up, saw another man standing near the French doors that opened onto the balcony. There was one more person in the room as well, a man that Rook recognized instantly as the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Joseph Mulamba was tied to a chair and had a strip of silver tape over his mouth, but his eyes were alive with emotion — fear and maybe something like hope. Rook was only peripherally aware of Mulamba. His attention was fixed on the other captor, the man who was struggling to unholster his Skorpion.