“Bitch,” Kennedy heard him breath. “I damn well trained her. How dare she turn into a traitor?”
“It’s a good thing she’s gone,” Kennedy made sure her hair was still tied back after all the diving around, and looked away when she noticed a couple of SAS men assessing her. “She had the elevated ground. Now, if Drake and the Delta team have secured the Valkyries we might be able to slip away while Alicia’s occupied by Babic.”
Wells looked like he was torn between two meaningful choices, but said nothing as they raced around the house to the front entrance. They saw the chopper spin around to confront the Bentley head on. Shots were fired that bounced off the fleeing car. Then the car suddenly braked hard and stopped in a cloud of gravel.
An object was poked out of a window.
The chopper plummeted out of the sky, its operator possessed of almost supernatural instinct, as the RPG whistled overhead. As its skids touched the ground, Canadian mercenaries spewed out of the doors. A fire-fight erupted.
Kennedy thought she saw Alicia Myles — a lithe figure clad in skin-tight body-armour — jump into the fray like the proverbial lion. A beast made for the fight, lost in the violence and fury of it all. Despite herself, Kennedy felt her blood running cold.
Was that fear she was feeling?
Before she could brood over it, a thin figure collapsed out of the opposite side of the chopper. A figure she recognised in an instant.
Professor Parnevik!
He limped along, at first faltering, but then showing renewed determination and finally crawling, as bullets laced the air above his head, one of them passing within a hands-width of his skull.
Parnevik at last inched close enough for the SAS and Kennedy to pull him to safety, the Canadians ignorant, fully engaged in battle
“Right,” said Wells motioning to the house. “Let’s get this done.”
Drake helped haul the Valkyries forward as a couple of guys fixed a small amount of explosives to the bars. They threaded a narrow path through the appalling exhibits, trying not to look too closely. One of the Delta guys had come back from a morbid inspection a few minutes ago to report a black coffin sitting at the rear of the room.
An air of expectation had lasted an entire ten seconds. It took a soldier’s logic to shut it down. The less you know…
Not Drake’s logic anymore. But he seriously didn’t want to know. He even flinched like a regular civilian as the bars were blown apart.
Gunfire erupted from the room above. The Delta guards clattered down the steps, dead, full of bloody holes. In another second, a dozen men armed with sub-machine-guns appeared at the top of the steps.
Outflanked and out-gunned, covered from a higher vantage point, the Delta team had had the tables turned on them, and were now vulnerable. Drake inched towards a cabinet and its relative safety, trying not to think about the stupidity of getting caught like this and that it wouldn’t have happened to the SAS, and trusting to luck that these new enemies wouldn’t be foolish enough to shoot at the Valkyries.
There were a few moments of unrelieved tension suffered in a stifling silence until a figure came down the steps. A figure dressed in white and wearing a white mask.
Drake recognised him instantly. The same man who had received the Shield on the cat-walk in York. The man he’d seen in Upsalla.
“I know you,” he breathed to himself, then louder. “The bloody Germans are here.”
The man raised a .45 and waved it around. “Drop your weapons. All of you. Now!”
An arrogant voice. A voice that belonged to smooth hands, its owner possessed of real-world power, the kind that’s written on paper and granted in member-only clubs. The kind of man who had no clue what real world toil and drudgery was all about. A banker, maybe, born into banking, or a politician, son of politicians.
The Delta men held their weapons steady. No one spoke. The stand-off was menacing.
Again the man shouted, his breeding keeping him ignorant of the danger.
“Are you deaf? I said now!”
A Texan voice drawled: “Not happening, motherfucker.”
“But… but…’ the man stammered in astonishment, then abruptly ripped his mask off. “You will!”
Drake almost collapsed. I know you! Abel Frey, the German fashion designer. Shock swept through Drake in a poisonous tide. It wasn’t possible. It was like seeing Taylor and Miley up there, cackling about taking over the world.
Frey locked eyes with Drake. “And you, Matt Drake!” his gun arm trembled. “You cost me almost everything! I’ll take her from you. I will! And she’ll pay. Oh, how she’ll pay!”
Before he could assimilate that, Frey aimed the gun between Drake’s eyes and fired.
Kennedy raced into the room to see the SAS men fall to their knees, motioning for silence. She saw before her a group of masked men, clad in body-armour, angling their weapons into what she could only think was Davor Babic’s secret vault.
Luckily, the men hadn’t spotted them.
Wells looked back at her and mouthed: “Who?”
Kennedy made a confused face. She could hear someone ranting, she could see his side profile, the .45 he held waving inexpertly. When she heard him scream the name Matt Drake she knew, and Wells knew, and a few seconds later they opened fire.
In the sixty seconds of gunfire that followed, Kennedy saw it all in slow motion. The man in white firing his .45, her shot arriving a split-second later and tugging the side of his coat as it passed through the hanging material. His shocked face as he turned. The puffy, slack softness of it.
A pampered man.
Then the masked men — spinning and firing. SAS soldiers squeezing off well-placed shots with precision and composure. More fire coming from inside the vault. American voices. German voices. English voices.
Sluggish chaos, like the poetic tones of Taylor Swift mixed with the archaic rock of Metallica. She hit at least two of the Germans — others fell. The guy in white screamed and waved his arms, and made his crew beat a hasty retreat. Kennedy saw them covering him and dying in the process, falling like decay from a wound, but the wound lived on. In the end he escaped into a back room, with only four of his men alive.
Kennedy raced desperately down the corridor, a strange lump in her throat, an ice-pick in her heart, not even realising how worried she was until she saw Drake alive and felt a cooling flood of elation wash through her.
Drake picked himself up off the floor, thankful that Abel Frey’s aim had been every bit as loose as his grasp over reality. The first thing he saw was Kennedy rushing down the steps, the second her face as she rushed up to him.
“Thank God you’re alright!” she cried, and gave him a hug before remembering her reserve.
Drake stared into Wells’ knowing eyes before closing his own. He held her for a moment, feeling her slim body, her powerful frame, her fragile heart beating against his own. Her head was nestled against his neck, the sensation wonderful enough to send tingles across his synapses.
“Hey, I’m good. You?”
She pulled away, smiling.
Wells came up to them and locked away his sly smile for a minute. “Drake. Strange place to meet up again, old mate, and not the corner pub in Earls Court I had in mind. I have a few things to tell you, Matt. Things about Mai.”
Drake was momentarily thrown. Wells had said the very last thing he had expected. After a second he noticed Kennedy’s fading smile, and took control. “The Valkyries,” He pointed. “C’mon, while we have chance.”