We both watched as the door came up. My forehead was bleeding. I kept wiping the blood out of my eyes. We both had our necks bowed, looking for feet or legs to appear beneath that slowly rising curtain. The Humvee made a lot of noise in that cramped space, and the door was not quiet, either, which was probably why we didn’t hear the man coming through the side door from the house until he was right there.
I tried to swivel the shotgun around, but he was too close. He grabbed the barrel and pushed it straight up with one hand. With the other, he stuck a semiautomatic into the car. I let go of my weapon and went for his. He got a couple of rounds off just as I slammed his arm against the dashboard. The cabin filled with the smoke and the smell and the sound. Rachel was screaming something, and he was trying to pull his arm back. I was kicking at his arm with both feet and feeling around with one hand for the Taser. Out of the blue, his fingers slipped from the grip of the gun, and he started screaming. Rachel had powered up the window and pinned his arm to the ceiling.
“Drive!” I yelled. “Drive! Go!”
She hit the gas, and his masked head whipped around, because he could see what I had seen-that there was about three inches of clearance on his side between the Humvee and the side of the garage doorway. The machine roared out of the gate, and the jamb instantly peeled off our attacker. When he stopped and we kept going, his arm whipped past my head and then disappeared completely. Rachel skidded out into the street. She must have hit the remote again, because as we were pulling away, the garage door was coming down.
17
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO HARVEY’S, RACHEL NEARLY RAN me over going through the front door. I found her in the kitchen with Harvey, standing next to him with his face in her hands, staring soulfully into his eyes.
“Baby,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you. Are you all right?” Then she kissed his forehead and smiled as she wiped a tear from her eye. If it was a performance, it was a good one. It might also have been a posttrauma realignment of priorities. It was hard to tell with Rachel.
As for Harvey, the way he blushed in her presence made him look more alive than I had seen in ages. He reached up, took her hands in his, and kissed each one. Then he looked at me.
“Oh, my God. What happened?” The alarm on his face told me I must have been a mess.
“I’m all right.” I had a skull-pounding headache, but everything else seemed to be working. “Where’s Bo?”
“After he got your call, he brought more men over. He is showing them the back.”
“Rachel can tell you what happened. I’m going to get cleaned up, and then the three of us have to sit down and talk.” I left the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes.
Bo came upstairs almost immediately. I had washed the blood out of my eyes, found a clean shirt, and just retrieved the first-aid kit from under the sink in the bathroom loosely designated as mine.
“What happened?” he asked, focusing immediately on my most obvious injury, the contusion on my forehead.
“I think I got whacked in the head with the butt of an assault rifle.”
“Let me see.” When he looked behind the damp, bloody washcloth, he seemed concerned but not alarmed. It was the sort of thing that qualified as routine in Bo’s line of work. But his jaw tightened. Violence against women was another of his deeply entrenched rage buttons, and no matter how hard I tried to change his view, he considered me a woman first and a professional colleague second. He put down the toilet seat cover.
“Sit.”
I did, happy to let someone else be in charge. He worked quickly and expertly, cleaning and dressing the wound.
“Drazen’s got some technical operators,” I said. “These guys were pros.”
“How many?”
“Two for sure. Maybe three.” I didn’t know if the one we had scraped off the Humvee in the garage had been a third man or the Taser man. “They had all the gear. Masks and night-vision goggles and armor. All kinds of firepower. Bat belts. They were definitely Velcro guys. Owwww.”
“Hold still.” He dabbed at the gash on my head, which had become the primary focus of all my nerve endings. “Voices?”
“I didn’t hear any. They weren’t talking, and there was too much other noise.”
He put the lid on the bottle of peroxide and found the trash can for the pile of bloody cotton balls that had accumulated from his ministering. “They were not Drazen’s men,” he said. “He knew nothing of what happened.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I spoke to him. He told me.”
“But they were looking for Rachel. I mean, I think they were. They were looking for someone, and they were ready to take me out, so it must have been her.” I started to stand up, but a wave of nausea put me right back down. “He must be lying to you, Bo.”
“He wants Roger Fratello. He wants you to find him. Why would he kill you?”
I looked into his face, trying to detect whether he believed what he was saying or whether he believed it because Drazen had told him to. All I saw was a lot of stress in his eyes and deep creases in his thick forehead.
“If they weren’t Drazen’s men, then who were those guys?”
“I don’t know. When my men got to the address you gave me, there were no bodies.”
“No bodies? It’s been, like, an hour. Are you sure they were at the right place?”
“As you said, technical operators. There were no shells or weapons or bodies. They cleaned up.”
I leaned back against the tank and thought about it. If it wasn’t Russians, there was only one other possibility. “Blackthorne.”
Bo had found a large adhesive bandage. He peeled off the back and centered it over the cut. “Who is Blackthorne?”
“It’s a what, not a who. A private military firm. Army for hire.”
“Yes, yes. We had many such groups in my country. That is how the Croats beat the Serbs.” He perked up at the memory. “Their militia was trained by one of your American companies.”
“Blackthorne had a car parked outside Rachel’s house. They’re all ex-military and intelligence. These guys must have been from Blackthorne.”
“What did they want?”
“Rachel.” This time when I got up, I managed to stay on my feet. “And she’s about to tell me why.”
Harvey and Rachel were still in the kitchen when we went downstairs. I settled in at the table with them with a big glass of cold water and a bunch of ibuprofen. Bo went off to make calls. He was still working his way off the Boston PD’s “person of interest” list. Looking across the table at the newly constituted couple, I was almost afraid to begin.
“Rachel, why is Blackthorne after you?”
“Who’s Blackthorne?”
“A private military firm.”
“Mercenaries?” She looked at Harvey. “French Foreign Legion? That kind of thing?”
“No,” Harvey said. “These are private firms that provide military services for profit.”
“They can do that?”
“It is sometimes appropriate for governments to transfer some of their public responsibilities to the private sector.” Harvey’s measured tone was a nice balance to Rachel’s increasing shrillness. “It can be more efficient on many fronts, including cost.” Harvey looked at me. “Why do you ask?”
“I think that’s who came after us at the house.”
“That’s terrific,” Rachel said. “That’s just great. First the Russians, and now I get to have a bunch of mercenaries on my ass.”
“You have no idea why?”
“Not a clue.”
I could have pushed harder, but there was so much to cover. I moved on. “You killed Vladislav Tishchenko.”
“In self-defense.” They said it in stereo.
“We’ll talk about that in a second. Let me just get all the facts out first. You killed him, but Drazen thinks Roger Fratello did it. He’s looking for Roger to, I don’t know, exact his revenge, and he thinks Harvey can tell him where to find him. It’s possible he thinks this because some mole inside the FBI tipped him off. That’s pure speculation, but it could make some sense, because we know the FBI also thinks that Harvey can help them find Roger.” I pulled out the only unoccupied chair at the table and put my feet up. “The FBI wants Roger because he tipped off his Russian-actually, Ukrainian-business partner, who I assume is Drazen Tishchenko, that there was an FBI agent undercover at Betelco. Drazen then either killed this agent or had him killed. Is that true, Rachel?”