Kate dropped from the Cessna at two thousand metres. The wind screamed in her ears like mad furies and her heart pounded with adrenalin as it always did when she left a plane and began a freefall. She loved the raw terror of the acceleration, the seconds dragging out as she rushed toward the earth.
Until her jump Kate had thought only about taking down her target.
Target
. A nice way of thinking about the man she had married. She had worried about the details as she always did when she planned a job. That part was finished now. Things went as she had anticipated or they didn't. There were no more adjustments, no modifications, and no contingencies that were not already in place. It was no longer the
target
. It was Robert: the traitor, the mercenary, the assassin, the liar, the thief. The
ex
in every bitter sense of the word.
When they were still talking about the man who had killed Robert, T. K. had profiled him at one point and suggested that he was something of a coward who lacked the courage to take care of his own problems. It had been a reassuring insult against a hated and still unknown antagonist. Now that she knew the man she came for, Kate was not ready to admit anything of the sort. She was convinced Robert had courage. He would put up a fight - kill her if he could. But there was something in his character she could not define. Sociopath that he was, there was some feeling in the man. Cut the rope. He had bumped her on purpose and sent her off the ledge. She knew that, but he had also known she was tied into an anchor. Pushing her over the ledge was not an attempt to kill her. And he had not cut the rope as he ought to have done if killing her was the point. He had told one of the Austrians to do it, almost as an afterthought.
Why? The face she saw before her as she went over the ledge still troubled her. She had never understood the expression, but she thought maybe he had fallen in love. In which case it was regret. He had certainly put on the act as an affectionate lover. And in those last days she had seen him grow thoughtful, as if wrestling with some decision. That night on the Eiger he had seemed melancholy. Had he been reconsidering his options, wondering if he had to lose her along with everything else? Thinking about. . .
not
killing her? Telling her he was in trouble and hoping she would run off with him? He should have known he had only to ask. She would have gone with him into hiding. She had harboured no doubts about the man she loved; she had held to no morality except love. So why hadn't he said something? Why had he taken her up the mountain to die?
She could tell herself it did not matter. He had made his choice that night and they had both lived with it, but his refusal to cut the rope still nagged at her. Easy enough to do. She was hanging out of sight. All he was looking at was a piece of rope. He could have cut it rather than tell one of the Austrians to do it. The only logical conclusion was that he had felt something for her and could not bring himself to kill her with his own hand.
What she hated most about him was that flicker of humanity in his soul - if that is what it was. It made her doubt herself and what she was doing. It made him something more than a despicable coward who needed to be destroyed. After the years of mourning she had devoted to him she wanted to end things cleanly. She wanted him to feel the hurt he had caused. Instead, she spent her last moments of her freefall thinking about why he had not cut the rope himself!
Robert had become larger than anyone in her life, greater in her mind than her own father. She had let Ethan stand in Robert's shadow. And Ethan, who was the smartest and bravest man she had ever known, had endured her silent comparisons without a murmur of complaint. He had accepted second place to a dead man because it was the only place she would allow him. And for all of that there was no danger he would not risk for her. He had even let her come alone because it was
her
fight. T. K. had resisted, but Ethan had understood. This was what she needed. Even if it killed her, it was
her
revenge, the thing she had waited over a decade to accomplish.
Robert had been playing at love. If it had taken him at the end, if he had actually developed feelings, he had not let it sweep him away. He had overcome his affection for the sake of the money. That was the point. He was at the bottom of it all a confidence man. He used the emotions of others for his own gain. He was a pretty
face
. His smiles were rare and beautiful, his wit quick without being cruel, but there were hollow places where there ought to have been heart and soul.
Even Luca knew it. That was why he had taught her how to fight. He would not betray Robert. He had sworn an oath, the same as Giancarlo, but if it happened that she could find Robert on her own, Luca wanted her to be ready.
That was the kind of friendship Robert Kenyon inspired in those who
really
knew him.
Carlisle rolled toward Irina as soon as he understood what had happened. Touching her he whispered. 'Someone is here!' But he was thinking,
Kate.
He heard Irina moving without seeing her until she crossed in front of a window, her naked silhouette black against the grey moonlit sky. Turning away from her, Carlisle found a pair of pants and a sweatshirt on a chair close to the bed. He rummaged in the closet for his climbing shoes and a jacket. He found his handgun and holster in his bedside table.
Then he heard glass breaking at the gatehouse.
*
Kate's canopy unfurled with a reassuring snap, slowing her hundred-mile-an-hour plunge over the next several hundred feet. With her NVGs strapped into place she spent the next few seconds sighting the house and working the toggle lines. She was on course to land on the rooftop but was anxious to find the direction of the wind before she got too low. There were always currents this close to a mountain, but they were quiet and sometimes as uncertain as a spring rain.
She risked a glance toward the gatehouse and then looked at the mountain looming up behind the Bartoli farm. When Kate had come here with Luca to learn to fight she had spent hours on those rocks, not once using a rope - at his insistence. For weeks she had practised using weapons and cracking alarm systems. The rocks had been a terror at first, but then they began to clear her head and take her back for an hour or so to the innocence that had died on the Eiger.
At five hundred metres, Kate called out her position. At three hundred she drifted in a lazy circle, finally catching some wind. Before she got too low, she took both toggles in her left hand and pulled the grenade launcher free from one of her two thigh holsters. The weapon appeared to be nothing more than an oversized revolver. She fired three grenades into the windows on the upper storey of the gatehouse. When she heard the glass break she tossed the weapon away.
Carlisle went to his bedroom window. The lawn was dark, the trees and gatehouse completely blacked out. Kate was out there. He just could not see her yet. This was how he always knew she would come - whenever he had let the thought take hold of him.
Hell hath no fury.
Three explosions rocked the gatehouse in succession - then a gas line blew - sending fire and smoke soaring high, the blast illuminating the front lawn briefly.
'What happened?' Irina asked.
'The gatehouse,' he answered. That was not how the police would have handled a raid. This was Kate.
'How many are coming, David?'
He searched the shadows. He thought about Kate, Ethan Brand and Malloy. They had got out of Hamburg in one piece and were coming to kill him. Exactly as Giancarlo had told him it would turn out.
'I don't know. I can't see anyone. . .'
Kate drifted toward the gently sloping roof, turning out with the wind and then back into it so her canopy caught the breeze at the last moment and let her step into her landing softly with her weight on her good leg.
As soon as she was down she gathered the canopy and wrapped it around one of the chimneys to keep it from giving away her position. She pulled a long rope from her belt and tied it off to the master bedroom's fireplace chimney. Then she walked down the slope keeping the rope taut. She leaned out beyond the guttering to have a look at the bedroom window. Next she let the rope dangle beside it to get a fix on the length she needed.
She brought the rope back up, taking hold of it just beneath the point where it had dropped below the window frame. Walking back up the slope a couple of steps, she whispered, 'Where are they, T. K.?'
'They're directly under you,' Malloy answered into her headset.
Kate pulled her Uzi free from her second thigh holster, fingered the safety off, took a deep breath, pointed the weapon toward the roof and then squeezed the trigger.
Something like forty rounds came through the ceiling in the first seconds of the assault. The bullets tore out plaster chunks and thumped into the plank floor. Carlisle and Irina dived toward the doorway and spilled out into the hall before either of them responded with a volley of pistol fire into the ceiling.
They were still firing into the ceiling when the second volley came - this time breaking the bedroom windows. The bullets came snapping through the walls and crashing crazily around them.
As she went down the roof Kate picked up speed and jumped off her good leg. She went out, turned toward the building and squeezed down on the Uzi for a second burst. The clip emptied into the glass and wood and broke the window frame apart before she got to it.
She swung into the window, letting go of the rope as she did. Kate dropped only a couple of feet, but she tried to favour her good leg. In doing so she came down on a chunk of plaster and lost her footing, slamming hard into the floor.
Her night vision goggles flew off. Her Uzi skittered across the plank floor. She felt woozy and could tell her wound had started to bleed again, but she came up fast with her Army Colt extended and ready.
She knew the shape of the room. Using the pale light of the windows to get her orientation she made her way toward the stone wall of the fireplace. That was the only spot in the room where their bullets would not penetrate through the walls.
Just as she touched rock, she heard a volley of pistol shots from the hallway. Some thirty bullets broke through the wall. When it had finished she heard two clips bouncing to the floor, fresh ones snapping into place.
'They're pulling back,' Malloy said as Kenyon and the female finished emptying their guns. 'Kenyon is moving toward a window! Girl? Girl! Are you there?'
'Is she okay?' Ethan asked.
'We've lost contact.' Malloy saw the male climbing through a window. 'Kenyon is going out a window!'
'What about the female?' Ethan asked.
'I can't find her.'
'What do you mean?'
'There's no heat signature! Girl? Give me a signal if you can hear me.'
The moment the clips dropped Kate swung out from the fireplace and cut the wall with her Colt - seven rounds waist high - then rolling into the open doorway she dropped her empty clip and slapped in a second.
But suddenly the house was quiet. She could feel plaster dust still falling, see the frame of a window in the room opposite her own - a grey square of pale light. Everything else was black.
She waited, heard something - the creak of a shutter, she thought, and fired through the walls again. This time whilst she reloaded, a pistol answered - ten rounds in controlled bursts, one of them smashing into her armour, missing her skull by inches. Kate jerked in fear and surprise, then rolled out of the line of fire. She heard the wood cracking behind her. She emptied her third clip through the wall and reloaded with a quick snap.
In the other room there were no more shots fired. Running? Dead? Or saving ammo? Kate needed the NVGs, but she did not dare give up the ground she had fought to take. If she retreated back to the centre of the room she would be exposed and vulnerable to a counterattack. She had them hiding from her at the moment, and just maybe running out of ammo.
She needed to take the fight forward, not fall back.
'I still can't find the female.'
'Maybe she went out the window,' Ethan told him.
'I can see all the windows,' Malloy said. 'Girl, can you hear me?' he said. When Kate still did not answer, he told Ethan, 'This is not good.'
Irina Turner had settled against the heavy fieldstones of the fireplace in the guest bedroom. She had fired out most of two clips and had maybe five-to-seven rounds left. No more clips and no armour. And not a word from David. None from the
gatehouse either, not that she expected anyone to have survived that explosion. That meant she was alone. The good news was her assailant appeared to be alone as well. More must be coming, she knew, but for the moment Irina had a chance. She felt about the fireplace until her fingers closed on a metal handle. She lifted the thing carefully. She had the shovel. She set it back into its holder and felt for the companion piece. This time she got some weight. The poker.
'I give up!' she shouted in Spanish, then in English. 'I surrender!'