Athena Force 12: Checkmate (22 page)

Someone from the stairwell instantly fired at the sound of his voice, chipping huge chunks of wallboard from the corner.

“Hey, I said
don’t
shoot,” Cole protested. “I’m too busy hiding to mess with you.” Okay, lying was sometimes a good thing.

“Who?” demanded one of the Elite, a voice full of annoyance and fired up with battle. “SEAL should be at the lobby!”

“Not SEAL,” Cole said. “American…in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Great. He was pretty sure that had come out as
American accident.

The Berzhaani response was instantaneous—a chorus of voices telling him to get lost. Succinct, to the point, and laced with English curses he certainly understood. Cole grinned, sardonic humor in the midst of life and death. He couldn’t blame them a bit. “Listen first,” he said, or maybe
listen one.
Dammit. “They have bombs. You know of the—” roof, what was roof, dammit? “—building top? There are more—they have…” He rolled his eyes at himself and tried again. “They have set-offs. You have to get them or—”

The building rumbled and shuddered around them, a deep sound so profound it thumped like a hollow drum in Cole’s chest. The structure shook and crackled and glass broke; Cole instinctively ducked down under the feeble protection of his own arms, wondering how many they’d set off and where those bombs had been and how long they all had until this sturdy old building crumbled down around them. In the next instant he realized that it must have been those bombs on the roof, with all their force escaping up and out and little of it directed at the capitol’s supporting structure. Those in the most danger would be the Elite just outside the building, the ones bottling the Kemenis up in their stairwell. The Kemenis had chosen this first detonation with care—something to take everyone aback, to give them the opportunity to—

Gunfire erupted anew. The Kemenis were blasting their way out of their dead end, seizing the moment to overcome outside forces battered by falling brick and shattered glass. The Elite in the hallway responded in kind, moving up to take their shots until Cole’s ears rang with the intensity of the exchange.

No fools, the Kemenis—outgunned, they rushed the Elite, taking the battle to close-quarters fighting. Cole took another look around the corner, as flat against the wall as he could be—and found himself in the perfect position to spot the lone Kemeni lurking behind the dubious cover of the stair riser, weighing two remotes in his hands.

Decisions, decisions.
Cole lifted his Hi-Power, breaking cover to take careful aim—because of course he’d had every intent to “mess with” the Kemenis from the start. Two men lurched between him and his target, lurched away…revealed the man having made up his mind, setting down one remote detonator in favor of the other.

Cole squeezed the trigger. The man jerked back, his eyes wide and surprised, and the remote tipped out of his suddenly feeble grip. For an instant it seemed as if no one noticed at all—and then the fighting seemed to hesitate, everyone at once feeling the balance of things change and tip and—

Get the remotes.
For the Elite seemed focused on the Kemenis themselves, and suddenly the Kemenis were no longer a team, but individuals squirting off in every which direction. Cole dodged his way through the chaos of fists and knives and sporadic gunfire and dived into the stairwell, catching up against the back of the stairs and abruptly too intimate with the man he’d just shot. It’d been a solid hit; the man only now began to stir, coming out of the initial daze of the impact in the center of his chest. “Be still,” Cole told him, recovering to an awkward crouch. “Help will come.”

Maybe, maybe not. But no need to kick a man when he was already down and getting a close look at death. Cole hunted for the small black remotes the man had dropped, gathering them up with a quick glance to confirm they each needed both hands for triggering. Safety devices. Something ironic about that. He dumped the injured man’s small canvas bag on the floor and used it for collecting the remotes. Four, five…six. Was that it?

This little nook had so isolated him from the chaos that Cole started when a man jumped down to block the way out; he jerked back, smacking his head on a low stair. “Dammit—”

The man before him glared with the tight, barely leashed fury of a man thwarted beyond his own imagination. “Leave those.” His voice sounded so constrained, so close to the edge of explosion, that Cole couldn’t imagine how he’d spoken at all. In perfectly fine English, to boot.

And he sounded familiar.

Cole shook his head, a careful gesture in the face of the man’s gun. “I don’t think so. And I wouldn’t hang around, if I were you. I believe by now they’re probably quite willing to shoot you in the back.”

And the man across from him—so close to him in this tight space, a man out of place with his honed, hawkish features and perfect brooding eyes—gave a little start, looking at Cole with sudden recognition.

Cole narrowed his eyes as disbelief warred with the sudden startling urge to lunge forward and rip this man apart. “We
do
know each other.”

The Kemeni’s face flashed through emotions too quickly to decipher. Wariness, jealousy, hatred—?

And Cole knew for sure. The voice on the other end of the phone. The man who’d hurt Selena. His throat tightened down; his words came out strained. “Where is she?”

Ashurbeyli—it
had
to be Ashurbeyli—grinned at him, an expression that barely looked sane. “I don’t know.”

“Then,” Cole said, shifting his weight ever so slightly, “there’s no reason I should let you live, is there?” And he lashed out with a foot from his crouching position, kicking the gun away, giving himself the chance to raise his own weapon and squeeze off a shot—but not before Ashurbeyli grabbed a too-familiar black box from his front shirt pocket and clasped it in both hands.

Cole fired anyway, an ill-aimed shot that hit Ashurbeyli just beside the join of neck and shoulder and flung him backward. And then the floor shook beneath him as muffled thunder detonated above his head—
right
above his head, somewhere here in the stairwell—and he flung himself out from under the stairs, scrabbling forward with his world narrowed to the chunks of concrete suddenly falling around him and
ow dammit
on his leg and then a serious crack on the head so his world grayed out and he had no point of reference at all; he might as well have been swimming or floundering through snow or navigating through black space or—

Cole opened his eyes. He sat against the wall inside the building, one of a dozen men similarly arrayed with legs outstretched, similarly dazed. Warm blood ran over his face and into his slightly open mouth; he sputtered, quite suddenly alert. His mustache sat askew, and Cole reached up to tug it off, learning that he hadn’t quite regained his motor skills as he clumsily hit himself in the face.

A man crouched beside him, the red cross on his white armband as unmistakable as such symbols come. “This is over,” he said. “You will be fine again.”

“I’m fine now,” Cole said, and brought his legs in so he could stand—and stared stupefied at the Aircast on his lower leg. “Huh. I’ll be damned.”

“Maybe not just yet,” the Berzhaani medic said dryly.

“But I can see to it if you do not keep yourself quiet. I have others, worsely wounded than you, who need attention.”

“Crutches,” Cole said. “I’m not done yet. My wife is still here somewhere.”

“The only women are with the hostages, and the hostages are free.”

Cole glanced down the hall—one direction and then the next, noting the arrival of the first stretchers, the clear intent to evacuate everyone from this compromised old building.

The obvious missing face. Ashurbeyli.

“I need crutches,” he insisted. “And I need them
now.
”

S
elena caught up with White at the front corner of the building just as a second explosion rocked the building. It gave a deep groan, eerily human, and a crack split the plaster along the wall, tectonic building plates drifting apart. White shoved Razidae up against the corner and propped him there by leaning against his throat, his hammy hand wrapped around the prime minister’s larynx with just enough weight to make breathing difficult. Selena ducked into the nearest function room, a small room on the end of the row, and let her gun peek out the door.

“You stupid bitch,” White said, and for the first time he sounded tired of this game. “Do you really think I won’t kill him?”

“I really think you won’t kill him
yet,
” she corrected. “And wouldn’t you be better off to use him for cover? Because it’s only going to take me a tiny little look to pinpoint you in my sights.”

White snorted. “As if that matters. By the time you manage the trigger on that useless gun, you’ll be pointing at your foot.”

Well. Yeah. Some truth to that. But she scoffed. “Oh, please. Doorjamb…stabilizer. Get it?”

And all the same…she really didn’t want to shoot the prime minister by mistake. She reached into her pocket for the marbles she’d jammed there, wondering if the same trick would work twice. Fingered them and considered it. Risky.

“Jonas White!”

She froze. Ashurbeyli’s voice. But he was out of this now, long gone with his men…with any luck, already dead. A man with his own kind of honor, too uncompromising to exist in this world and allow others to be safe.

But Jonas White cursed, only confirming what she thought she’d heard.
Ashurbeyli’s voice.
And Razidae, sounding defeated for the first time, murmured,
“Inshallah,”
abandoning himself to God’s hands.

“Where is she?” Ashurbeyli demanded, much closer now. Selena wished she dared to look; as it was she could only imagine it—White in the corner, threatening Razidae. Ashurbeyli coming up on them from the adjacent hall. Former allies, eyeing each other with blame and dislike. “And did you think you could get away with your betrayal?”

“Make up your mind,” White responded with irritation. “Do you want to get your hands on our meddling FBI agent, or do you want to posture and threaten me?”

“She was right.” Ashurbeyli didn’t sound quite like himself, and he’d stopped just around the corner. Still out of her sight. “You had your own agenda all along.
These
guns—” and he said it with an emphasis that made Selena think he had gestured with one of the guns in question “—they came from you. You lied to us from the start…made us think the United States was backing us. Gave us inferior weapons—and then came to manipulate us into saving your own faithless hide by risking our own!”

“That sounds just about right. Now get over it. Do you want me, or do you want the American woman? Because if you leave me alone, you can have her.”

“What—?” No, he definitely didn’t sound like himself. His voice had a ragged quality; his mind wasn’t so quick as it had been.

“She’s in that room just around the corner. If you can take her, she’s yours.
If
you let me go on my merry way. Otherwise I’m afraid we’ll be forced into a distasteful standoff right here, and I note that
my
gun is properly aimed.”

Then he’s not aiming at me—

“Go, then,” Ashurbeyli said, his words thick with disgust. “I think in fact that you are the worst thing I can do to the Western capitalist—”

“—dogs,” White completed for him. “Yes, yes, I know. We’re all infidel scum. But you and I can still come to this agreement. I leave her to you, and you leave me to my own fate. It is, I might add, a limited time offer.”

A moment passed in which they must have come to some unspoken agreement, for just as Selena eased around to peek into the hall, White said, “Good, then,” and gestured her way with the gun. Behind him, Razidae struggled for breath, pale beneath his normally robust complexion.

Ashurbeyli came around the corner, not as wary as he might have been. Staggered around the corner was more like it, with blood covering the side of his shirt and flowing fast enough to make the material gleam. He saw her; saw her gun, and raised his own at her in what seemed like a token gesture. His face had paled; his intensity had faded into mere determination.

And White watched. Like a greedy voyeur, he watched. As Razidae attempted protest, White shifted his weight just enough to make the man choke, closing his fingers so they dug into Razidae’s windpipe.

Ashurbeyli, his finger tightening on the trigger but then holding fast, said the last thing she expected. “I met your husband.”

Cole!
She didn’t have enough nerve to ask what had happened. Not at first. Too busy fighting all the stupid things fear did to her—the greased, wobbly knees, the watery spine, the sudden inability to breathe. And when she finally managed to open her mouth, he cut her off.

“I just buried him under that bomb. And before I left him there to die, I let him know I was coming after you.”

Horrified, she met the triumph in his gaze, holding the connection…a request for truth between enemies at the end of the battle. She saw there his triumph, and saw also his sorrow…and then a brief flicker of something that she suddenly recognized as regret. “No,” she breathed, but it was still more question than belief—more hope than knowledge. “You didn’t.”

He closed his eyes—briefly, but still long enough to make him vulnerable, and she didn’t think he’d intended to do it. And though her finger tightened on the heavy trigger of her gun, she didn’t pull it. She told herself she wasn’t quite ready to upset the balance of the moment, not with White standing poised to crush Razidae’s throat. She told herself it was too risky. But when Ashurbeyli opened his eyes, the regret shone the strongest. “It’s a shame,” he said, and shifted his gun, weary enough to allow the telltale; weary enough to let that warning slip through.

Selena dived aside, followed by the thunderous report of not one but two guns. A fiery trail plucked her sleeve, running up her forearm; she fell heavily against the wall behind the door, her stupid fake Luger raised and ready. Still on her feet; still ready for whatever came next. Her other hand finally escaped her pocket, still curled around the marbles.
Still ready—

Ashurbeyli fell through the door and thumped to the carpet. His mouth moved in a few soundless words, and then he died.

White. As Ashurbeyli came for Selena, White had betrayed him. Shot him in the back.

Selena’s fury took her by surprise. She opened her mouth to voice it…and then she thought again.
White thinks Ashurbeyli shot me.
She’d certainly hit the wall hard enough, convincingly uncontrolled.

And now she let herself fall hard to her knees, hitting the door so it slowly swung closed—at least until it ran into Ashurbeyli’s body. She slid down the door, a dramatic scrape of cloth against wood.

White laughed, damn him. Selena let herself settle so her head rested just against Ashurbeyli, her vision barely clearing the edge of the door. White, if he looked, would see only the top of her head. But White had already turned to Razidae, gloating, jamming the gun back into the prime minister’s chest and pulling him out of the corner.

Selena felt for the gap beneath the door, the way it rode high over the plush Sekha carpet. Plenty of room, oh, yes. And she had plans even if this didn’t work, but if it did she’d find it ever so sweet. One by one, she rolled the marbles out under the door, swiftly adjusting for distance until she had placed scattershot hard round objects in Jonas White’s path.
Acme marbles.
Perfect for foiling the overconfident bad guy.

Out he stepped, harshly pushing Razidae before him. And it was Razidae, already off balance, who hit the marbles first, whose foot shot unexpectedly forward. He fell hard just as White’s own foot skittered aside, and White took the brunt of it as they hit the floor.

Selena poked her gun around the edge of the door and said in her drollest tone, “Doesn’t it just suck when you get nailed by a trick a cartoon character would use? I’m the Roadrunner, by the way. You must be the Coyote. So we already know how this ends, don’t we?”

White’s face, already florid from his fall, went to dusky purple rage. He jerked his gun to bear, ready to empty the magazine at her right through the door.

She didn’t give him the chance. She braced the ill-made semiautomatic against the edge of the door and she jerked the trigger back. By the time she hauled it back down into position in the wake of the jarring recoil and trigger pull, White stared at her with two small, dull unseeing eyes, his shirt torn by her bullet, the bleeding already stopped.

For a moment, Selena rested her head against—good God, against Ashurbeyli. That made her straighten fast enough, all the painful way to her feet. A step forward, and she nudged the gun away from White’s curled fingers, and she looked down on him and said softly, “Beep, beep.”

Cole sat outside among the hostages and the injured soldiers and knew only one thing for certain: Selena wasn’t one of them.

Two things: no one would give him any crutches.

Three things: no one would go back into the building to look for Selena until the exterior had been secured. The Predator’s missiles had scarred the hell out of the back parking lot and the old coach building running along the perimeter of the grounds, scattering the approaching Kemenis—some of whom had holed up to take potshots at soldiers. One of the hostages had been wounded on the way out, and now no one could approach the building, not until the military dogs just now hitting the scene had declared the area clean.

Cole glared at the Aircast on his leg and considered hopping. He’d spotted a pair of crutches near the triage area…he knew he could reach them. The only question was whether he could reach them unseen.

They knew she was in there. They
knew.
Ambassador Allori, only recently loaded into an ambulance, had told them as much. Prime Minister Razidae, stumbling around the end of the building to be met by a squad of soldiers and a roar of delight and approval, had also told them as much. She’d stayed behind for Razidae, to rescue him—and she had. But as far as he knew, she’d gone down in an old-fashioned gunfight. He wasn’t entirely sure—he’d fallen, the shooting had started, and he’d left the scene at top speed, anticipating no survivors.

Or so he said. But Cole wasn’t willing to take him at face value. He wouldn’t have taken any man in Razidae’s position at face value, not when the man had so much of that face to lose. Bad enough that Selena had been fighting his battles; he wasn’t likely to admit he’d left her behind to do so.

Crawling. Crawling was an option, too.

All the while the capitol building groaned and grumbled and coughed smoke, threatening fiery collapse—close enough to this streetside staging area to loom, just far enough away to eliminate danger if it disintegrated. And Cole watched with a stunned disbelief alternating with complete panic, going from numbness to a fierce pain that overwhelmed the pounding of his head and the sharp ache in his leg—and then back again to numbness.

Razidae was wrong. Razidae was lying.
Lying.

Cole rested his head on fisted hands.
You’re not doing her any good like this.
He had to pull himself together. And if he couldn’t go into that building after her, he’d find someone who could. Who would. One of the SEALs. The whole damn SEAL team, if it came to that.

If he could find them.

The triage area boasted a complete mix of personnel—Berzhaani medics, International Red Cross volunteers, American military support personnel with a distinct and careful paucity of actual soldiers and the inevitable border of reporters and cameras along the perimeter, crowding each other for the best shot.

The SEALs would be staying out of sight. Bad enough that they’d been here, lurking, against Berzhaan’s wishes. Bad enough that Cole himself had been found inside the building; he’d already been promised the debriefing from hell.

It didn’t faze him. He was already there, tortured by the moments ticking by and the flames licking from the top windows and the precise, clear memory of Selena signing that she loved him as she went back to guide the hostages to safety—and eventually to face not only White, but Ashurbeyli. Of the look on her face, her well-protected heart and soul right out there for everyone to see.

For Cole to see.

Oh God.

Noise rumbled around him, the nonstop diesel
hrum-hrum-hrum
of rescue vehicle engines. The hostages cried in pain and relief, the various in-charge people shouted out orders he didn’t bother to understand. But for a sudden instant, it all seemed to stop—as if everything and everyone held their breath at once—and then let it out again to be twice as noisy. But—and Cole lifted his head to see—with the addition of vigorous pointing.

Pointing at the lone figure standing in the black, cavernous opening of the capitol’s double doors.

Crutches! Crutches, dammit!

One of the former hostages, a self-possessed young blond man with a wide-eyed young woman usually clinging to his side, appeared beside Cole. He held out the crutches Cole had been recently eyeing, and nodded at the stone steps, his expression unusually knowing. “Here,” he said. “Go to her.”

Cole had had no idea he could get to his feet so quickly, and he snatched the crutches away with such possessive ferocity that the kid grinned. Across the abbreviated lawn between the street and those Death Steps, across the sidewalk at the foot of the steps—

She was still there. Holy moly, she was still there. She stood there—
swayed
there—poised between movement and utter collapse, and therefore going nowhere. That strong, lean face was bruised along every striking line; her eye still half-closed. Blood soaked one tattered sleeve and she held the other as stiffly as he remembered.

She was beautiful.