Countdown to Zero Hour (21 page)

The odd conversation angled into an argument when Garin started to touch her prep bowls and baking dishes.

She rapped the butt of her chef’s knife on the top of the island and insisted, “My kitchen. My kitchen.”

The language didn’t matter. He understood.

The escalation hit the other guards, as well. Vasily spoke up softly, staying just at the border of the kitchen and the dining area.

Garin turned on him, fury in his eyes, but held himself together and didn’t challenge the other man. They exchanged sentences while the new, giant guard looked on, disappointed that the whole scene was being diffused.

Most of Garin’s fuel had burned off. But he couldn’t leave without a parting shot. He circled his hand over the whole kitchen and enunciated very clearly for Hayley,
“Rassolnyk.”

With a last glance at the knife that remained in her hand, he turned and left the kitchen, sweeping a wake of bad energy throughout. She worried that the soot of his anger would settle on what she was cooking, spoiling it all before it hit the stove.

The curtain dropped on the scene, and the other guards went from being spectators back to their jobs of scowling mean and carrying guns. She tried to return to her cooking but was too shaken and had to stand at the counter, taking deep breaths to bring her racing pulse down. The house was on the brink. Somehow she’d managed to hold it together during her confrontation with Garin. But when things really snapped, it would be chaos.

And that son of a bitch would not give up. He’d set them up at the hotel, failed and continued to exploit every opportunity to harass her when Art wasn’t around.

When she was calm enough to cook again, she set back into the process. It didn’t last long enough. After a few extra touches to what she’d already done, the food was off, taking care of itself. Beef stewed and the gratins roasted.

She watched the clock again, not knowing what it meant.

Art had the answers. But he’d been gone so long. Had they found out who he was? The house was dead quiet. Maybe this was the way they did things. Silently. With the casual and polite calm Rolan used to button his coat.

If they knew about Art, they would come for her next.

The back door of the kitchen was unlocked. She could run. But on the other side of the dirt yard was the wall. Too high to climb. The guards would see her by then. She stared out the windows on the door, trying to plot any path to safety. There were none.

Art had told her to get out of the kitchen if it wasn’t safe anymore.

It was time to leave.

She put her hand on the back doorknob, and a voice whispered over her shoulder.

“Not that way.” Art placed his hand over hers. “You’re right to get out, though.”

She swallowed the rising dread from the too-quiet house and turned to him. “Are you okay?”

He nodded slowly. “I will be.” Potent energy resonated in him. He was focused, the way she’d seen him when he fought. “Martha’s leaving soon. You should walk her to her ride. Stay on the front steps.” His hand brushed over the small of her back, then found where the knife was clipped under her coat. “Be ready.”

Like a dance, they turned. He led until they both faced the front of the house. Martha, tired from her day’s work, came into the kitchen and retrieved her purse from the cupboard.

Art told her,
“Gracias por todo.”

“De nada.”
Martha smiled, friendly. Her attitude grew guarded as she faced the rest of the house.

Hayley pointed at her own chest, then the path to the front door.
“Camino...”

Martha nodded her understanding, and the two women left the kitchen together. Hayley took one peek back and saw Art angling out in the direction of the service hallway.

She made a silent promise and wish and prayer to anyone listening that it wouldn’t be the last time she ever saw him.

A guard who’d made the run to town, either picking up or dropping Martha off, was already in the car with the motor running. He smoked a cigarette, hanging his arm out the open window and down the door.

Hayley exchanged
“adiós”
with Martha while they were still on the front steps of the house. That was where Hayley stayed. The guards at the gate pulled it open while Martha got into her car. There were other guards along the front of the house behind Hayley.

As soon as the car pulled through the gate, it closed with a solid clang. Hayley tracked the car into the desert. The sun was low enough now to be in her eyes, and she shaded them, watching the squirrel tail of dust twitch toward the horizon.

Hayley had positioned herself where Art had told her. It was about to happen. Armed men patrolled in front of and behind her. She waited, heart pounding, exposed on the front steps. Her trembling hand unbuttoned her chef’s coat. She couldn’t breathe any easier, but she would be able to reach the knife as soon as Art ended the world.

* * *

Through the small window in the service bathroom, Art watched Martha’s car leave. Last he’d checked, the bosses remained in the second-floor conference room. All the objectives were in one place. Hayley was outside the house.

It was time.

His last act as an undercover agent was flushing the empty toilet, false justification for why he’d been in the room. From this point forward, he was an operator.

He left the bathroom and went down the hall to the utility stairs. No one paid him any attention as he descended, pulling his pistol. Hopefully his team would pay attention to his upcoming signal and show up. If not, then his objective would narrow down to one task. Get Hayley out alive.

From the bottom of the stairs, Art aimed his pistol across the basement at the charges attached to the propane lines. No more lies or pretending. He was a member of Automatik. The attack started now.

Art fired the shot.

* * *

An explosion knocked the wind out of Hayley’s chest. The windows on either side of the front door blew out, scattering tiny shards of glass across the stairs at her feet.

Guards ran, guns at the ready, mouths open with shouts she couldn’t hear. Her ears rang with the blast, and she stumbled to maintain her footing. It felt as if the front steps of the house were pitching and buckling, but she didn’t know if it was the wood and concrete moving or her equilibrium being knocked off axis.

An angry plume of yellow fire and black smoke rose from the back of the house.

Art had shaken everything.

But how could he do that from safety? Had he sacrificed himself to make the blast?

Terrified by the thought, she hurried toward one of the tall windows on the side of the door but was bumped out of the way by one of the rushing guards. He pushed her to the ground and leaped for the front door.

A crackling sound burst behind her, loud enough to push through the wool that seemed to fill her ears.

Several bullets tore into the guard’s back, and he toppled into the open doorway. Hayley spun, scraping her hands on the hard steps and glass bits, to see where the shots had come from.

Two men, dressed in all-black tactical gear, were working their way up through the parking area in the front yard. There were already three dead guards in their wake, by the gate.

The two soldiers moved with crisp efficiency from one car to the next. Louder shots blasted from the second floor above Hayley’s head. The men took cover and fired back. Chips of plaster and concrete and glass rained down on her. She remembered that Art had told her to stay outside, but it felt like only a matter of time before one of the bullets from the steady stream that burned past her would find its way into her flesh. The one path she could run was toward the house.

The flames from the barrels allowed her to keep track of where the shooters were. She scrambled up the stairs to the front landing of the house. It was a challenge to get her legs to work, but when confronted by the dead guard at the door, she stood and bolted into the foyer of the house.

Chaos. Yes, Art’s team had arrived, but the Russian guards weren’t going to lay down their weapons without a fight. The men she’d been feeding for the better part of a week were now sprinting from corner to corner, guns drawn.

Shots popped throughout the house, kicking up plaster and punching deadly holes in the walls. The intensity of the panic cranked higher when the lights of the house all snapped off. Only the late sun, cutting into the windows from the edge, illuminated the rooms. The shadows were deep enough to not be trusted.

At the end of the main hallway on the first floor, she saw more daylight than she expected. The explosion had torn a hole that smoked from a ragged edge. The damage extended beyond what she could see. Was Art in that destruction?

He’d told her to get out of the kitchen. To find somewhere safe.

But there was no safety. One of the guards skidded to a stop in the middle of the foyer, staring at her, wide-eyed and howling in Russian. He raised his gun, aiming it at her chest.

Chapter Eighteen

The bullet struck the charge on the pipe, shattering it and sparking the first small explosion. Flames swirled around the rupture. Knowing the destruction would escalate quickly, Art turned to sprint up the stairs.

Burning propane hissed out behind him, then popped with the bursting lines. Wood and drywall shattered. He knew the kitchen was being torn out from under its floor. He was halfway up the service stairs when the fire reached out to the propane tank and blew the whole thing.

The hot wave rushed along his back and shoulders, jetting up the narrow stairway. He stumbled to keep his footing and found that the walls weren’t square anymore as he banged along them. When he’d been planning this stage of the operation, the thought had crossed his mind to have Hayley with him. He’d know she was safe if she was at his side. But he was glad he’d gotten her to the security at the front of the house, even if she wasn’t immediately behind him or directly within view. There’d have been no way for the two of them to cram their way up the steps fast enough with the flames raging.

It felt like it took a day to get to the top of the stairs. Fire growled behind him, and the building crashed and collapsed. Finally in the service hallway, he saw the destruction.

The kitchen was gone. Water pipes angled, broken from where the back wall had stood. The floor had been bitten away as far as the island, leaving the countertops in shattered piles that crumbled into the basement.

Blowing the tank had done its first job. The cinder block wall on the south edge of the compound had been breached, a fifteen-foot section lying in rubble. Beyond it was the desert, and hopefully “Bolt Action” Mary, if his team was in place.

Art had to act as if the team was coming. Hayley was out front. He knew she’d be safe there for a moment and could find cover at the edges of the house. His first objective was in the back.

Guards moved in a panic all around him. The majority of them kept their heads and found cover, guns drawn and peeking out to try to assess what was happening. Four or five were at a loss and stood exposed, shouting questions to each other. The most loyal acted on instinct, streaming up to the second floor where the bosses were. Art and his team would meet them there. That was where the heavy fighting would be.

A submachine gun chattered from the front of the house. Art recognized the methodical pattern. Automatik had arrived. The guards knew they were there as well and opened fire in opposition.

The battle had begun.

Art ran to the edge of the destroyed kitchen, then up past the dining area to the abandoned living rooms. All the windows had been blown out by the blast. He sped through the jumbled furniture to the open frames. The can lights in the ceiling blazed, contrasting the darker sky over this side of the horizon.

He fired four shots out of the house, two bullets into each generator. The motors sputtered, sparked and popped, then died.

Immediately the lights in the house flicked off.

Gunfire crackled from the nearby outside corner of the house. Someone fired blind at the sound of Art’s shots. With his objective complete, he didn’t need to stay and engage. His only thought then was to find Hayley.

Sprinting back through the house, he saw that most of the guards were now either upstairs or had taken up defensive positions around the perimeter. They shouted to each other, trying to keep tabs on where the attack was coming from, but it was a deafening chaos. There was no one leader to coordinate, and there had never been a set plan for something like this.

From down the long central space of the house, Art saw Hayley stumble into the foyer. Inside was not a good place to be. It sounded like the firefight at the front of the house had reached a temporary back-and-forth stalemate and must’ve driven her in through the door.

Before Art could call out, a guard blocked his view of her. It was the same man who’d mad-dogged him when he’d first arrived and was trying to get into the house with Hayley’s food cooler.

Now the man shouted at Hayley and raised his gun to point at her.

Art ran toward them, his pistol drawn. If he fired now, the man might pull his own trigger as he died. Hayley would be hit. But if Art reached him, he could knock the gun away and finish the man while Hayley was in the clear.

She acted first, yelling broken Russian to the man. Sentences sounded like a mix between a menu and a string of insults. The man appeared confused but finally peered in the direction where she pointed, insistent.

As soon as he glanced away, Hayley dove to the ground in the opposite direction. The gun was no longer pointed at her. Art raised his own weapon and fired twice, killing the man.

The guard’s gun went off as he fell, shattering a wooden banister behind where Hayley had just been standing.

Art sped to her. She pushed backward until her back hit a wall. Her eyes were so wide, taking in the shocking, destructive world. When she looked at him, a different level of awareness rushed in, sharpening her.

He reached down, and she reached up. Their hands connected, and he helped her stand.

“Any injuries?” he asked, gripping her close with one hand, his pistol in the other. He wanted to check her over and linger on her face, relieved to know she was with him, but had to keep scanning the house for threats.

“No. None.” Breathless, she hurriedly questioned, “You? Are you okay? That explosion...”

“I’m good.” He dodged forward to grab the fallen guard’s gun, then took cover again with Hayley behind a corner next to the large stairway. “And my team is here.”

She reported, pointing at the door, “Two out front.”

“Pinned from the second floor.” Shots continued from that level. “Jackson and Harper can’t flank up there from their position.” Though shots did come in from the north, where the SEALs were. But the upper house defense was too dug in and would slow Raker and Sant from the west. He handed her the guard’s pistol, with the quick instruction, “Use it.”

She held it correctly, though without a lot of confidence. “Are we getting out of here?”

“To get out, we have to go through.” He tugged on her hand, and the two of them edged quickly into the service hallway. “Front’s a dead end. Can’t get out the doors or go up the main stairs.”

He’d hoped the utility stairs on this end of the house would be a clean way up, but there were too many men moving up above in the guards’ rooms’ hallway.

“Holy shit.” She stumbled, gaping at the wreckage where the kitchen had once stood.

“I was looking forward to that stew.” He tested the floor for stability and moved them around the hole in the house.

Hayley cursed. “My knives.”

He understood what it was like to lose a trusted tool. “We’ll get you new ones to train.”

Fragments of a man breaking cover on the outside edge of the house caught in Art’s peripheral vision. He pulled himself and Hayley down and away as shots popped and bullets streaked in steep angles from the ground up. Holes burst in the ceiling.

Art returned fire; a few bullets to keep the man pinned. But it took him away from the newest threat. Stepan, the massive bodyguard, rushed toward Art and Hayley, his huge hands open and ready to crush anything in his path.

As Art swung his pistol around toward Stepan, a bullet parted the air, entered the giant man’s chest and exited out the other side of his rib cage. He stumbled forward and crashed to the ground, skidding to a stop several feet away.

Hayley gaped. “How...who...?” She glanced around without breaking cover.

“Mary’s got our back.” The shot had come from the south, where the cinder block wall had been toppled.

Another large bullet from her rifle smacked into the base of the house, near where the guard had been shooting up at Art and Hayley. The man had to keep down in order to stay alive, leaving Art with the opening he needed.

He sprang to his feet and hurried himself and Hayley into the broad living room. The path to the back stairs was blocked. He and Hayley threw chairs and a table out of the way to get access.

They started to mount the stairs, but Hayley hesitated.

“Wait.” She swung her gaze from the dark stairway to the blown-open windows in the living room behind them. “Why the fuck are we going deeper into this?”

“Because if we go outside that way—” he gestured toward what appeared to be freedom in the back, “—the guards at the perimeter will get us. Mary can’t keep them all pinned down.” He took the first step up. “We take our time, stick to cover, the rest of the team joins us and contains the bosses.”

Which might take a while. From the sounds of the firefight on the other side of the house, both teams had yet to make it within the walls of the house.

But the attention of the guards was forward, allowing Art and Hayley a quiet ascent to the second floor. They crept up the steps. Any sound they made was masked by the periodic gunshots. The guards were setting up their defenses and making a stand. It was unclear if the bosses were threatened enough to join the fight or if they were just huddled together in the conference room, waiting for their men to take care of the problem.

Art was three steps away from the top, where he could see only a piece of a room, sliced bright and dark by the low sun. Hayley remained close behind him. The second safest place for her would be five hundred miles away from the battle. But that just wasn’t a possibility. He maintained his mission directive, knowing he’d protect her through every twist and turn.

The silhouettes of two rushing guards cut off the light at the landing. They reared up, shocked and ready to fight, when they spotted Art and Hayley.

* * *

Everyone was shooting around her. But could she pull the trigger? Two guards barreled down toward her and Art. They would kill her if they had to.

Even if she was psychologically ready to shoot at them, there was no way to aim without putting Art in danger. He stood between her and the guards, putting himself in harm’s way.

He acted fast, firing twice, once into each man. One of them arced backward, falling away from the stairs. The other guard staggered. He looked like he was about to collapse, but something held him up.

All the energy drained out of the man, yet he stood. Somehow he lurched forward and flung himself down the stairs at Art. The impact drove Art’s back into her, and she stumbled on the stairs. She dropped her gun, afraid that if she gripped it too tight it would go off.

Art twisted, pushing the limp man past him and beyond her down the stairs.

Then she saw how the wounded guard had maintained his attack. Vasily had thrown him, and now rushed down at her and Art.

Art tried to bring his pistol into the fight, but Vasily was already too close. He pinned Art’s wrist to the wall. The Russian’s face was as calm as stone while he punched Art twice in the gut.

He tried to strike him again, but Art drove a knee up hard, catching Vasily in the stomach and pushing him back to the opposite wall. The bodyguard didn’t even wince. He continued to control Art’s gun hand and reached behind his back to pull a short, hooked knife.

Art saw it coming and twisted so the blade scraped along the wall. By the time Vasily swung back for another attack, Art had drawn a long, thin blade of his own and countered the strike.

The two men struggled and turned on the narrow stairs, knocking into the walls and cracking the wooden banister. Hayley was pinned between them and the body of the fallen guard behind her.

Her gun was long lost, and the back stairway was too dark to search. She could get only glimpses of Art’s intense face and the flashes of the blades in the murky shadows. It felt like any second, more guards would pour in from the top or come scurrying up from the living room below.

They had to get out of the stairway.

Art obviously knew it. He bared his teeth, smashing Vasily on the wall again and again, even as the hooked blade dug into his left shoulder.

Hayley had her own blade. She tightened her fist around the push dagger and dragged it from its sheath. Vasily was too intent on Art to see her attack coming. She had to stop him from hurting Art. She punched and slashed at the guard’s hand.

His eyes popped wide with shock. The wounds on his hand opened up, making him drop his knife. Vasily raged at Hayley as if betrayed. He started to make a lunge for her but stopped short. A jagged groan escaped his throat, and he slouched.

Art muscled Vasily to one side of the stairs, then let the man fall down where the other guard lay. As Vasily descended, Art’s knife pulled free from his chest.

“Thank you,” Art whispered, leaning close and helping her sheathe her knife.

“You’re hurt.” Seeing him take the wound had been too much. She was part of this war now. She’d drawn blood. The violence was hers.

“It ain’t a thing.” He put his knife away and pulled off his jacket. It draped over the fallen men in the stairwell. After searching over the stairs for a moment, he turned back to her, placing the dropped pistol in her hand.

Trapped. In the house. On the stairs. She had no choice and took the gun. The same way she’d been forced into violence. Anger burned in her. Other people tried to control her life. She couldn’t let them anymore.

At first her rage had been aimed at Art. When she’d thought he was just a criminal, it was easy. Then after the truth of his mission was revealed, the complications fractured the fury. He was cornered, as well.

He’d done everything he could to protect her. Now he was fighting to get them free.

Once again starting up the stairs, Art murmured without taking his focus from the top, “You’re the master chef. You showed me a thousand new ways to taste. You’re beautiful and unstoppable and nothing that these people do, nothing you do to survive, takes that away.”

His words led her up through the shadows of the stairs to the landing where sunlight streaked in hard planes. Art held up a hand to slow her, then checked over the area quickly. Shots popped through the house, but not in the immediate area.

Art stepped forward, waving her with him, and the two of them hurried away from the stairwell and to cover at the corner, where the room opened up between two long hallways. From the height of the second floor, she could see more of the destruction below. Smoke continued to pour from the burning edges of the wrecked house. The blast from the propane tank had left a crater in the dirt and a halo of devastation that stretched beyond the toppled cinder block wall.