Although, if he hadn’t, he would have dived headfirst after her.
As it was, it had taken him far too long to hook onto a plant that didn’t get uprooted. He’d had a clear and sudden vision of the two of them going over the side of a cliff, and him being unable to do a goddamn thing to save them.
It was amazing how fear could mask pain.
He’d gotten whacked directly in the balls by some errant branch, but he didn’t feel a thing as he hauled Gina up and into his arms, as he lay there on the jungle floor, just holding her.
And shaking with terror.
The difference between dead and not dead had never been so hard to see. It was the slimmest of lines. Possible to cross at any given moment.
As Max now approached the edge of the cliff, he tested each hand- and foothold.
“Max,” Gina called again.
“I’m okay,” he called back. He had to make sure that the cliff didn’t just look daunting from this perspective and . . .
Nope. There was no trail down. No obvious or easy route.
The view was breathtaking—the green of the jungle making the hills and valleys below look inviting, like they could jump and land with a bounce on its softness. The harbor town was a splash of color in the distance, the ocean beyond shimmering and blue.
The cliff curved around to the south—with no way to circumnavigate it in sight.
Max climbed back up the steep hillside to Gina. It was actually easier to climb up than down, because he could grab and hold on to roots and vines that he tested before trusting them with his full weight.
“This way,” he said, pointing out a path that would parallel the cliff.
She reached for him, and he took her hand.
And once again they were moving.
Jules kicked out the battered driver’s side window so he could crawl from the wreckage.
The engine was steaming and making that ticking sound that engines made when they cooled down after being too damn hot.
Emilio was gone. He hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, and he’d somehow departed the car—either involuntarily or by choice. Possibly when, plunging down that hillside, Jules had managed to remove his sidearm from his shoulder holster and discharge it.
His aim had been questionable, but he’d hit the son of a bitch, that much he knew. There was a spray of blood on the passenger side window.
And as far as Emilio’s grand exit? Whether it had been on purpose or not, Jules hoped it had been at bone-crushingly high speeds.
Still he hadn’t been under consideration for that FBI team leader position for nothing. He held his weapon now as he squeezed out of the window—which was much narrower than usual due to the partially crushed roof.
Damn, he was lucky he was vertically challenged.
His right leg wasn’t working very well and instead of standing outside the car, he fell to the ground. The damn thing didn’t hold his weight, didn’t want to move at all. Like it was someone else’s leg that was now attached to his body.
He crawled, using his elbows to pull him away from the car. Ow. Ow. Ow.
And Jesus, his head. Despite the airbag, he’d whacked himself something fierce. His brain felt scrambled, his vision funkatacious, all doubled and blurred.
But he was alive.
He knew he was alive, because every cell in his body hurt. His armpits hurt. His toenails.
But first things first. Warn Max.
He had to roll onto his back, which made him feel exposed, kind of like a turtle or a cockroach. But it was the only way he could dig for his phone.
He found it—covered with blood.
Son
of a bitch, that was
his
blood. That bastard Testa had shot him.
Jules put his weapon down on his stomach, in easy reach, as he checked out the damage.
The bullet—small caliber, or he’d still be back in the car, in two very dead pieces—had caught him in the fleshy part of his side, going in, front to back. There was an exit wound, which was relatively good news.
Stopping the bleeding would be better news.
He applied pressure with his left hand as he wiped his phone off on the leg of his jeans with his right. God
damn
it, no wonder sitting up was as much of a challenge as walking. No wonder he hurt so freaking much.
He wished his head would stay attached to his shoulders. Damn, he was woozy. But okay. Okay. First things were still first. This wasn’t his phone, it was Max’s—which meant he had to call himself. He concentrated, trying to get his eyes to focus . . .
“They took the cell towers out. You won’t get through.”
Big ugly shit, on a big ugly stick.
“I guess it was too much to hope that you’d broken your neck,” Jules told Emilio, turning his head to look—yes, it also would’ve been too much to hope he’d lost the damn thing in the melee—into the barrel of the other man’s gun.
Gina recognized that sound. It was the sound of her nightmares.
Max was several steps behind her and he started shouting, “Get down, get down, get down!”
They were being shot at.
He was on top of her, shielding her, pushing her forward. “Go! Go!”
With Max right behind her, Gina ran.
Just moments before, she’d been so relieved. They’d finally come down off the mountain and onto a road that led them back to a cluster of houses.
But that road had curved to the right and . . .
Max and Jones had both said quite a few choice words.
Because they were back where they’d started. At Emilio’s house.
And there was nowhere to go but forward. The road opened on to that village square—an empty, dusty marketplace surrounded by a knee-high wall, surrounded by other houses.
There was no one about—no one on foot, at least. There had been children playing there when they’d left Emilio’s, but upon their return both the square and the streets were like a ghost town.
Until the shooting started.
Across the square there was a truck—no, two. One was smaller—a Jeep—with some sort of machine gun mounted on it. It was bouncing toward them, making that awful ripping sound.
“Get them inside!” Jones shouted.
Max grabbed Molly—he already had Gina—and pulled them both with him into the shadows of Emilio’s garage.
The ripping sound was louder then, as Jones fired back at the trucks, as he backed his way into the garage, as Max lowered the garage door.
Someone was screaming, and it wasn’t until Max got in her face—“Gina! Were you hit?”—that she realized she was the one making all that noise.
So she stopped. Because God knows it wasn’t helping.
“Are you hurt?” he asked her again, checking her, touching her, turning her around.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Are you?”
Jones came out of the house—which was weird. She hadn’t seen him go in. “Clear,” he told Max.
“Good,” Max gently pushed her toward Molly. “Get inside.”
“We’re fucked,” Jones told Max. “There’s no back door, remember? They’ve got us pinned.”
“This place is built like a fortress,” Max said. “There are worse places to be pinned. Let’s get as much of this inside as we can.” He was taking the guns from the back of Emilio’s blue car, piling them into Jones’s waiting arms.
“I can help,” Gina said.
Max pulled a backpack out of the trunk. “Here.” It was so heavy she staggered under the weight.
“Ammo,” he said, “take it inside. Go!”
Gina handed it to Molly with the warning, “It’s heavy,” and Max gave her another. She was ready for it this time.
As she went into the house through that door, she realized that it looked like one you might find on a bank vault.
Or a bomb shelter.
Or your house if you were a super-paranoid gun smuggler and kidnapper and all-around baddie, and you wanted to withstand a siege against an entire army.
“Gina, are you . . . ?” Molly had blood on her hand. She touched the backpack again—there was even more now, on her fingers. Bright red.
Gina looked down at her own hands, at the pack she was carrying.
There was blood on hers, too. “It’s not me,” she told Molly.
Heart in her throat, Gina turned back to the garage, where, yes, Max was bleeding.
C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN
You’re bleeding,” Gina said again.
“I know,” Max also said again as he surveyed the weapons and ammo they’d taken out of the trunk of that car. “I’m all right, though.”
He’d taken the two women back into what he thought of as the hostage room as Jones, far more nimble without a bullet in his ass, did a closer look-see at the rest of the building.
From the quick glance Max had had of the lower level—kitchen and two living areas, one with a window and one without—Jones’s eloquent description of this place was dead-on. It truly was re-in-fucking-forced.
Emilio had installed far more than a bunch of super doors in his narrow little two-story house. The few windows—all on the front of the structure—were encased with entry-proof bars.
At first glance that wasn’t so different from many of the other houses on this street in this semi-well-to-do part of a piss-poor island. But unlike the other houses, these bars were not designed merely to discourage the casual burglar. These bars were meant to keep out the most determined intruders.
The walls were thick, too—three feet in some places. Even the interior walls. Which was unusual, to say the least.
Miniature security cameras positioned outside the house added a high-tech slant to its impregnability.
Gina got in his way. “
All right
is what you are when you’re
not
bleeding.” She was indignant.
And scared to death, Max realized. For him.
He gave her his full attention. “I’m mostly just bruised,” he said. This entire scenario had to be a nightmare for her. God knows that he’d been sent on his own little time-traveling trip to hell when she’d screamed, back when the shooting first started. Instant cold sweat. The last thing Gina needed now was to think he was going to drop dead any second. “The bullet that hit me was almost completely spent.”
But she still looked so worried. “I don’t know what that means. Spent?”
“Think about the physics of firing a weapon,” he explained as he went back to sorting ammunition: 9mm versus .44 cal. Grabbing the wrong ammo could have deadly consequences. An HK 9mm MP5 submachine gun was a formidable tiger of a weapon. But an MP5 with a backpack of .44 caliber bullets was about as formidable as a poodle.
“A bullet doesn’t just follow its trajectory until it hits something, right?” Max continued. “Because what if there’s nothing there to hit? You can’t fire an assault weapon on the Jersey Shore and expect to hit someone in Spain, just because there’s nothing but ocean between the two of you.”
“Well, yeah,” Gina said. “Obviously.”
“A bullet travels until it runs out of energy,” he told her. This was good. They were talking, and she didn’t look so scared, and the topic wasn’t anything that would add to the swirling chaos inside his head. He was able to sound cool. Calm. “But when it does, it doesn’t just stop and drop, like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It keeps moving forward, but it’s less and less effective. It’s spent.”
“So if the bullet that hit you was spent,” she asked, crossing her arms, “why are you bleeding?”
“It was almost spent,” he corrected her.
Gina got in his way. “Let me see.”
“Later,” Max lied.
She somehow knew. She always did have a highly honed and super-sensitive bullshit meter. “I want to see it now.”
“Do you want me to just drop trou?” he asked. “Right here?”
She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. She just looked at him.
And that same heat that had always sparked whenever Max gazed for too long into Gina’s eyes jumped to life. Instant meltdown, like stepping into a steam room.
It wasn’t so much that he wanted to fuck her, except it was.
Except it wasn’t.
It both was and wasn’t, because really, when he had been told that she’d died, what he’d wanted more than life itself was for her to still be.
Just be.
Just Gina. Alive.
Except her being alive and breathing and standing right in front of him got all mixed up with sex and pleasure and guilt and the memory of the way she’d smiled and the sparkle in her eyes that had turned into such satisfaction when he’d . . . when they’d . . .
Right now she practically jerked her head away, breaking that eye contact, and Max—always good at helping his mental chaos come to a full boil—found himself wondering if she’d had this same instant animal attraction with the father of her unborn child.
He placed two Beretta M9s over by the 9mm ammo as gently as he possibly could. This was not the right time for
that
conversation.
She sighed and he was sure she was going to retreat—maybe go check on Molly. But she turned back to him instead. “Look, I’m sorry, but I just want to make sure you’re really all right.”
Christ. “Gina, it’s going to look bad, you’re going to freak. You’re just going to have to trust me. I’m not bleeding to death. I’m not going to die.” He wasn’t leaving her. Not in any way, shape, or form. “At least I’m not if you let me have a second to think and figure out what we’re going to do next.”
Saying that was dirty pool, but it worked. She backed down. “What can I do to help?”
“Go make sure that Molly’s all right.”
When they’d first come in here, Molly had made a beeline into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
“She’s all right,” Gina told him now. “She’s giving us privacy. You know, in case we wanted to say something heartfelt to each other. Like, thank you for quitting your job so you could rescue me.”
She was a smart woman. Max wasn’t surprised that she’d figured that out.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” he said, “I haven’t quite managed to rescue you yet.”
“Or: I’m sorry I still piss you off,” she said.
He sighed his exasperation. “You don’t piss me—”
“Or maybe even something like: I really didn’t expect you to come at all,” Gina said quietly.
God damn it, what could he say in response to that? “You thought I’d just, what?” he asked tightly. “Shrug it off? Because you’re not my responsibility anymore?”
“Oh, great,” she said. “The R-word. I was wondering how long it was going to take before I heard that one. I’ve
never
been—I’ve never
wanted
to be your responsibility. Is that really why you came all this way? Because even though I’m no longer your responsibility, you still feel—wait for it!—responsible for me?”
For the love of God . . . “Gina, how about we fight
after
you’re safe?”
“How did you survive, Max?” She was very angry. “All those months, with me in Kenya? Didn’t it drive you nuts, thinking I was maybe gonna get eaten by a wild animal, or . . . or . . . killed in some tribal dispute?”
Like her friend Paul Jimmo had been.
Max lost it. He felt himself just . . . snap. “Yes, it drove me nuts,” he found himself shouting at her, part of him looking on in complete horror. “It made me freaking crazy!”
“Well, it shouldn’t have!” she lashed back at him. “You wanted me to leave. You can’t have it both ways, Max. You either have me in your life or you don’t. And when you chose
don’t,
you gave up the right to be driven freaking crazy! You gave up the right to—”
“
I
gave up?” he asked, disbelief dripping off every word. “
You
left
me.
”
“No.” Gina got in his face. “You left
me.
Do you have any idea what it was like—”
“To have to live with me?” he finished for her at high decibels. “Yeah, I do, Gina, because I fucking have to live with me! 24/7. And I’m sorry that I put you through it, too. Goddamn it, I’m sorry about all of it—
all
of it! And you want to hear something really fucked up? What I’m sorry about most of all is that I didn’t go to Kenya and drag you home a year and a half ago!”
Okay, so that was probably something he never should have told her.
In the dead silence that followed, she was looking at him with the same amount of stunned surprise on her face that she might’ve worn if her father’s schnauzers had suddenly started singing opera. In harmony.
But Jones came thundering down the stairs, saving them the further embarrassment of attempting to speak civilly after that conversational train wreck.
The really stupid thing was that Max had been wanting to apologize to Gina for a long, long time. He definitely owed her one, but Christ, that had come out really wrong.
What he’d really wanted to do was tell her that he was truly, honestly, sincerely sorry—about almost every single thing that had happened between them, over the past few years.
Well, almost everything.
The nights that he’d actually slept because she was there in his arms, the way she made him laugh, her insistence on reading aloud to him while he was in the hospital, that look she gave him from beneath her eyelashes, that smile right before she locked the door and . . .
Okay, he definitely felt sorry about all that, too, but it was a bigger, more complicated kind of sorry.
“The top floor is divided into five small rooms,” Jones reported, and Max made himself pay attention.
Molly even came out of the bathroom to listen, which meant private time was officially over. Thank God.
“Two are in the front,” Jones continued, “but only one of them has a window. Three in the back without—and one of those rooms has the same security monitor setup that’s in the kitchen. Three screens, showing views both from exterior and interior cameras. The rooms are all smaller than they should be, but then I realized that the walls are seriously wide, even up there. Best I can think of is Emilio played host to more than one involuntary guest at a time and didn’t want them communicating with each other.”
Gina was still staring at Max, her eyes filled with tears.
Great. Good job, Bhagat. Make the girl—
Woman. Shit.
Make the woman cry.
“What kind of professional criminal owns a house that’s built like a fortress,” Max put voice to one of the important questions that they needed to be focusing on, “but doesn’t have a back door or escape tunnel? Have you looked at his security cam setup?” he asked Jones.
He nodded, scratching the back of his hand with the stubble on his chin. “Yeah, I was going to mention that. That seventh exterior camera, right? You think—”
“Oh, yeah,” Max said.
Emilio had seven security cameras in place outside of his house. One on the roof, two showing different angles of the front of the house, one in the garage, two on the sides of the house. There was no need for one in the back—the building was built against that steep mountainside.
Yet there remained one last mystery camera. It showed what looked to be a dense patch of jungle in the middle of nowhere.
That camera had to be placed at the end of Emilio’s escape tunnel.
Had
to be.
“What are you talking about?” Molly asked, trying to follow.
“We think Emilio
does
have some kind of tunnel out of here,” Jones told her. “We just haven’t found the damn thing yet.” He turned back to Max. “Maybe you should look in the kitchen and living room—see if you can find it. Because I couldn’t.”
Boom.
“What was that?” Gina asked.
“Grenade,” Jones answered, already heading toward the kitchen, Molly at his side. “They’re going to have to do better than that. This place is solid.”
Max followed more slowly, trying not to wince from the very literal pain in his ass. Gina was right behind him, watching his every move.
“So would you have dragged me home by my hair?” she asked him, her voice low.
What? Oh, wonderful. It figured that she had something to say about Max’s “drag her home from Kenya” remark.
“Because I definitely wouldn’t have gone,” Gina told him, “unless you dragged me by my hair.”
How could she joke about something like that?
“A chest thump or two would’ve been a nice touch,” she added. “Nothing like a good alpha caveman chest thumping to make me totally hot.”
“Okay,” he was going to say, “you can stop now,” but he had a sudden flash of memory—not of Gina, laughing on top of him, but instead that shroud-covered young woman who could have been Gina, lying in the airport morgue. It was all he could do not to fall to his knees and thank God he’d found her alive.
“Am I pissing you off yet?” she asked. “Oh, wait. It’s
you
who’s so good at pissing
me
off.”
As he grabbed for the kitchen counter, she mistook his unsteadiness for pain.
“God, Max,” she said, all sarcasm instantly vanished. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, wanting to reassure her, but afraid of the subhuman noises that might come out of his mouth if he tried to speak.
“I’m so sorry.” Gina put her arms around him, and ah, God, it nearly did him in.
“I’m sorry, too.” Max had to pull away from her, definitely pissed—at himself for putting that frightened look back on her face.
But he had to focus on the problem, and he scanned the room, looking for that escape route.
If he were Emilio, where would he have put it?
The man hadn’t cut costs anywhere in this house—the appliances in the kitchen were all restaurant quality.
Max took a few more seconds to slow his breathing, to fully reemerge back into this world—the real world, in which Gina truly hadn’t been lying there, dead on that table.
He forced himself to check the video monitors that were built into the wall—technology circa the early 1990s, when digital was fantastically expensive. All of the security cameras were still up and running, the three screens flipping from view to view to view. They all showed that the troops surrounding them were still keeping their distance. There was no sign of any damage from that grenade.
That was good.
He or Jones should probably go up to the second floor in a very short while, and fire a shot or two dozen down into the dusty street. Make that army continue to stay back out of range.
Last thing they needed was some cowboy coming up to the windows, trying to dislodge those bars.
Not that it would be easy to do.
Max had never been on this end of a military takedown before, never mind that this particular military wasn’t as powerful or well-equipped as the one he was used to working with. It was still impressive—all those soldiers and trucks. He knew more and more would be arriving with each passing hour.