CHAPTER EIGHT

Reid couldn’t see a thing. There were no windows in the facility. The workers in the other room must have thrown some breakers, because even the sounds of the machinery in the next room faded and fell silent.

He quickly reached out for the place he knew Otets to be and grabbed onto the Russian’s collar before he could make a run for it. Otets made a small choking sound as Reid yanked him backward. In the same moment, a red emergency light came on, just a bare bulb jutting from the wall just over the door. It bathed the room in a soft, eerie glow.

“These men are not fools,” Otets said quietly. “You will not make it out of this alive.”

His mind raced. He needed to know where they were—or better yet, he needed them to come to him.

But how?

It’s simple. You know what to do. Stop fighting it.

Reid took a deep breath through his nose, and then he did the only thing that made sense in the moment.

He shot Otets.

The sharp report of the Beretta echoed in the otherwise silent room. Otets screamed in pain. Both hands flew to hold his left thigh—the bullet had only grazed him, but it bled liberally. He spat a long, angry slur of Russian curses.

Reid grabbed onto Otets’s collar again and yanked him backward, nearly off his feet, and forced him down behind the bottling conveyor. He waited. If the men were still inside, they would have definitely heard the shot and would come running. If no one came, they were outside somewhere, lying in wait.

He got his answer a few seconds later. The swinging double doors were kicked open from the other side hard enough to smack against the wall behind them. The first through was the man with the AK, tracking the barrel left and right quickly in a wide sweep. Two others were right behind him, both armed with pistols.

Otets groaned in pain and gripped his leg tightly. His people heard it; they came around the corner of the bottling machine with their weapons raised to find Otets sitting on the floor, hissing through his teeth with his wounded leg prostrate.

Reid, however, was not there.

He stole quickly around the other side of the machine, staying in a crouch. He pocketed the Beretta and grabbed an empty bottle from the conveyor. Before they could even turn, he smashed the bottle over the head of the nearest worker, a Middle Eastern man, and then jammed the jagged bottleneck into the throat of the second. Warm blood ran over his hand as the man sputtered and fell.

One.

The African with the AK-47 spun, but not fast enough. Reid used his forearm to shove the barrel aside, even as a fusillade of bullets ripped through the air. He stepped forward with the Glock, pressed it beneath the man’s chin, and pulled the trigger.

Two.

One more shot finished off the first terrorist—since clearly that’s what he was dealing with, he decided—still lying unconscious on the floor.

Three.

Reid breathed hard, trying to will his heart into slowing down. He didn’t have time to be horrified by what he had just done, nor did he really want to think about it. It was as if Professor Lawson had gone into shock, and the other part had taken over completely.

Movement. To the right.

Otets crawled from behind the machine and made a grab for the AK. Reid turned quickly and kicked him in the stomach. The force of it sent the Russian rolling over, holding his side and groaning.

Reid took up the AK. How many rounds were fired? Five? Six. It was a thirty-two-round magazine. If the clip was full, he still had twenty-six rounds.

“Stay put,” he told Otets. Then, much to the Russian’s surprise, Reid left him there and went back through the double doors to the other side of the facility.

The bomb-making room was bathed in a similar red glow from an emergency light. Reid kicked open the door and immediately dropped to one knee—in case anyone had a gun trained on the entrance—and swept left and right. There was no one there, which meant there had to be a back door. He found it quickly, a steel security door between the stairs and the southern-facing wall. Likely it only opened from the inside.

The other three were out there somewhere. It was a gamble—he had no way to tell if they were waiting for him right on the other side of the door, or if they had tried to circle around to the front of the building. He needed a way to hedge his bet.

This is, after all, a bomb-making facility…

In the far corner on the opposite side, past the conveyor, he found a long wooden crate roughly the size of a coffin and filled with packing peanuts. He sifted through them until he felt something solid and hauled it out. It was a black matte plastic case, and he already knew what was inside it.

He set it on the melamine table carefully and opened it. More to his chagrin than surprise, he recognized it immediately as a suitcase bomb, set with a timer but able to be bypassed by a dead man’s switch as a fail-safe.

Sweat beaded on his forehead. Am I really going to do this?

New visions flashed across his mind—Afghani bomb-makers missing fingers and entire limbs from poorly built incendiaries. Buildings going up in smoke from one wrong move, a single misconnected wire.

What choice do you have? It’s either this, or get shot.

The dead man’s switch was a small green rectangle about the size of a pocketknife with a lever on one side. He picked it up in his left hand and held his breath.

Then he squeezed it.

Nothing happened. That was a good sign.

He made sure to hold the lever closed in his fist (releasing it would immediately detonate the bomb) and he set the suitcase’s timer for twenty minutes—he wouldn’t need that long anyway. Then he plucked up the AK in his right hand and got the hell out of there.

He winced; the rear security door squealed on its hinges as he shoved it open. He leapt out into the darkness with the AK leveled. There was no one there, not behind the building, but they had certainly heard the telltale squeak of the door.

His throat was dry and his heart was still pounding like a kettledrum, but he kept his back to the steel façade and carefully eased his way to the corner of the building. His hand was sweating, gripping the dead man’s switch in a death grip. If he released it now, he would most certainly be dead in an instant. The amount of C4 packed into that bomb would blow the walls of the building out and flatten him, if he wasn’t incinerated first.

Yesterday my biggest problem was keeping my students’ attention for ninety minutes. Today he was white-knuckling a lever to a bomb while trying to elude Russian terrorists.

Focus. He reached the corner of the building and peered around its edge, sticking to the shadows as best he could. There was a silhouette of a man, a pistol in his grip, standing sentry on the eastern façade.

Reid made sure he had a solid grip on the switch. You can do this. Then he stepped out into plain sight. The man spun quickly and began to raise his pistol.

“Hey,” Reid said. He lifted his own hand—not the one holding the gun, but the other. “Do you know what this is?”

The man paused and cocked his head slightly. Then his eyes went so wide with fear that Reid could see the whites of them by the moonlight. “Switch,” the man muttered. His gaze fluttered from the switch to the building and back again, seeming to come to the same conclusion that Reid already had—if he released that lever, they’d both be dead in a heartbeat.

The bomb-maker abandoned his plan of shooting Reid, and instead sprinted away toward the front of the building. Reid followed hastily. He heard shouts in Arabic—“Switch! He has the switch!”

He rounded the corner to the front of the facility with the AK aimed forward, the stock rested in the crook of his elbow, and his other hand holding the dead man’s switch high over his head. The sprinting bomb-maker hadn’t stopped; he kept running, up the gravel road that led away from the building and screaming himself hoarse. The other two bomb-makers were gathered near the front door, apparently ready to go in and finish Reid off. They stared in bewilderment as he came around the corner.

Reid quickly surveyed the scene. The other two men held pistols—Sig Sauer P365, thirteen-round capacity with fully extended grips—but neither pointed them. As he had presumed, Otets had made his escape through the front door and was, at the moment, halfway to the SUV, limping along while holding his hurt leg and supported under one shoulder by a short, portly man in a black cap—the driver, Reid assumed.

“Guns down,” Reid commanded, “or I’ll blow it.”

The bomb-makers carefully set their weapons in the dirt. Reid could hear shouts in the distance, more voices. There were others coming from the direction of the old estate house. Likely the Russian woman had tipped them off.

“Run,” he told them. “Go tell them what’s about to happen.”

The two men didn’t have to be told twice. They broke into a brisk run in the same direction their cohort had just gone.

Reid turned his attention to the driver, helping along the lamed Otets. “Stop!” he roared.

“Do not!” Otets screamed in Russian.

The driver hesitated. Reid dropped the AK and pulled the Glock from his jacket pocket. They had gotten a little more than halfway to the car—about twenty-five yards. Easy.

He took a few steps closer and called out, “Before today, I didn’t think I had ever fired a gun before. Turns out I’m a really good shot.”

The driver was a sensible man—or perhaps a coward, or even both. He released Otets, unceremoniously dropping his boss to the gravel.

“Keys,” Reid demanded. “Drop them.”

The driver’s hands shook as he fetched the keys to the SUV from his inner jacket pocket. He tossed them at his own feet.

Reid motioned with the barrel of his pistol. “Go.”

The driver ran. The black cap flew off his head but he paid it no mind.

“Coward!” Otets spat in Russian.

Reid retrieved the keys first, and then stood over Otets. The voices in the distance were getting closer. The estate house was a half mile away; it would have taken the Russian woman about four minutes to reach it on foot, and then another few minutes for the men to get down here. He figured he had less than two minutes.

“Get up.”

Otets spat on his shoes in response.

“Have it your way.” Reid pocketed the Glock, grabbed Otets by the back of his suit jacket, and hauled him toward the SUV. The Russian cried out in pain as his gunshot leg dragged across the gravel.

“Get in,” Reid ordered, “or I’ll shoot your other leg.”

Otets grumbled under his breath, hissing through the pain, but he climbed into the car. Reid slammed the door, circled around quickly, and got behind the wheel. His left hand still held the dead man’s switch.

He slammed the SUV into drive and stomped the gas. The tires spun, kicking up gravel and dirt behind it, and then the vehicle lurched forward with a jolt. As soon as he pulled back onto the narrow access road, shots rang out. Bullets smacked the passenger side with a series of heavy thuds. The window—just to the right of Otets’s head—splintered in a spider web of cracked glass, but held.

“Idiots!” Otets screamed. “Stop shooting!”

Bullet-resistant, Reid thought. Of course it is. But he knew that wouldn’t last long. He pressed the accelerator to the floor and the SUV lurched again, roaring past the three men on the side of the road as they fired on the car. Reid rolled down his window as they rolled by the two bomb-makers, still running for their lives.

Then he tossed the switch out the window.

The explosion rocked the SUV, even at their distance. He didn’t hear the detonation so much as he felt it, deep in his core, shaking his innards. A glance in the rearview mirror showed nothing but intense yellow light, like staring directly into the sun. Spots swam in his vision for a moment and he forced himself to look ahead at the road. An orange fireball rolled into the sky, sending up an immense plume of black smoke with it.

Otets let out a jagged, groaning sigh. “You have no idea what you’ve just done,” he said quietly. “You are a dead man, Agent.”

Reid said nothing. He did realize what he had just done—he had destroyed a significant amount of evidence in whatever case might be built against Otets once he was brought to the authorities. But Otets was wrong; he was not a dead man, not yet anyway, and the bomb had helped him get away.

This far, anyhow.

Up ahead, the estate house loomed into view, but there was no pausing to appreciate its architecture this time around. Reid kept his eyes straight ahead and zoomed past it as the SUV bounced over the ruts in the road.

A glimmer in the mirror caught his attention. Two pairs of headlights swung into view, pulling out from the driveway of the house. They were low to the ground and he could hear the high-pitched whine of the engines over the roar of his own. Sports cars. He hit the gas again. They would be faster, but the SUV was better equipped to handle the uneven road.

More shots cracked the air as bullets pounded the rear fender. Reid gripped the steering wheel with both hands, the veins standing out stark with the tension in his muscles. He had control. He could do this. The iron gate couldn’t be far. He was doing fifty-five through the vineyard; if he could maintain his speed, it might be enough to crash the gate.

The SUV rocked violently as a bullet struck the rear driver’s side tire and exploded. The front end veered wildly. Reid instinctively counter-steered, his teeth gritted. The back end skidded out, but the SUV didn’t roll.

“God save me,” Otets moaned. “This lunatic will be the death of me…”

Reid wrenched the wheel again and righted the vehicle, but the steady, pounding thum-thum-thum of the tire told him they were riding on the rim and shreds of rubber. His speed dropped to forty. He tried to give it gas again but the SUV quaked, threatening to veer again.

He knew they couldn’t maintain enough speed to break the gate. They would bounce right off it.

It’s an electronic gate, he thought suddenly. It was controlled by the guard outside—who would no doubt at this point be aware of his escape attempt and be ready with the dangerous MP7—but that meant there had to be another exit to this compound.

Bullets continued to pound against the fender as his two pursuers fired on them. He flicked on the high beams and saw the iron gate coming up fast.

“Hang onto something,” Reid warned. Otets grabbed the handle over his window and muttered a prayer under his breath as Reid yanked the wheel hard to the right. The SUV skidded sideways in the gravel. He felt the two passenger-side tires come off the ground and, for a moment, his heart leapt into his throat with the notion that they might roll right over.

But he held control, and the tires set down again. He stomped the accelerator and drove right into the vineyard, crashing through the thin wooden trellises as if they were toothpicks and rolling grapevines flat.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Otets screeched in Russian. He bounced heavily in his seat as they drove over the planted rows. Behind him, the pair of sports cars squealed to a halt. They couldn’t follow, not through the field—but they were probably aware of what he was looking for, and they knew where to find it.

“Where’s the other exit?” Reid demanded.

“What exit?”

He yanked the Beretta from his jacket pocket (no easy feat, with the violent bouncing of the car) and pressed it against Otets’s already-shot leg. The Russian screamed in pain. “That way!” he cried, pointing a crooked finger to the northwestern edge of the compound.

Reid held his breath. Please hold together, he thought desperately. The SUV was sturdy, but so far they had been lucky they hadn’t broken an axle.

Then, mercifully, the vineyard ended abruptly and they were back on a gravel road. The headlights shined on a second gate—made of the same wrought iron, but on wheels and held together by a single link of chain.

This is it. Reid clenched his jaw and slammed the gas once more. The SUV lurched. Otets howled some indistinguishable curse. The front end collided with the iron gate and smashed it open, knocking one side right off its hinges.

Reid breathed an intense sigh of relief. Then the headlights flashed again in his rearview—the cars were back. They had doubled back and taken the other road, likely branching from the opposite side of the estate house.

“Dammit,” Reid muttered. He couldn’t keep going like this forever, and if they shot out the other rear tire he’d be dead in the water. The road here was straight, and seemed to be inclining upward. It was also better paved than behind the gate, which only meant that the sports cars would catch up that much faster.

The trees were thinning on the right side of the road. Reid’s gaze flitted from the road to the passenger window. He could have sworn, through the cracked glass, he saw a shimmer, like… like water.

A rush of memory came to him, but not the flashing visions of his new mind. These were actual memories, Professor Lawson’s memories. We’re in the Ardennes. The Battle of the Bulge took place here. American and British forces held the bridges against German panzer divisions on the river…

“Meuse,” he murmured aloud. “We’re on the river Meuse.”

“What?” Otets exclaimed. “What are you babbling about?” Then he ducked instinctively as bullets splintered their rear windshield.

Reid ignored him, and the bullets. His mind raced. What was it he recalled reading about the Meuse? It sliced through the mountains, yes. And they were on an incline, heading upward. There were quarries here. Red marble quarries. Sheer cliffs and steep drops.