Vision Impossible (37 page)

I found the small manicure set right away and unzipped it with trembling fingers. Pulling out the toenail clippers, I extracted two of the syringes and ran back to Maks’s side.

He was curled onto his side now, convulsing and frothing at the mouth. “Ohmigod!” I cried, shoving him onto his back and yanking so hard on the front of his shirt that buttons flew off in every direction. Straddling his torso, I lifted the syringe just like I’d been taught in my training and plunged it straight into the right side of Maks’s chest.

He convulsed so hard he actually sat up and threw me off-balance. I fell sideways but managed to recover, then raised the other syringe and plunged it into the other side of his chest.

Maks gave one loud heaving breath and lay still.

I was panting so hard I was seeing stars, but I backed up off him and waited to see if he’d sit up and tell me that he was perfectly fine now, thank you very much.

He didn’t.

My radar pulled my attention back to the syringes still in the cuticle case. I had an overwhelming urge to give him a second round of the antidote, but I hesitated for several seconds debating about whether that was a good idea. No one at the CIA had told me what giving an extra dose of the antidote would do, and I wondered if I’d kill Maks by injecting him with another round.

My intuition insisted that I needed to act quickly, and I needed to give him an extra dose. Steeling myself, I removed two more syringes and administered another dose, hoping they would do the trick.

But as I watched, Maks’s color didn’t return and his breathing remained very, very shallow and it seemed to me that he might be getting worse. I started to tremble and knew I needed to find Dutch. He’d know what to do. As I was getting to my feet, I reached for the key, and that’s when I noticed the folded piece of paper lying next to Maks on the floor.

With a small gasp I realized it was the note and the map I’d written to Dutch and given to Mandy.
“Oh, no!”

I grabbed the map, my purse, and the key and ran out of the room, barely managing to still my hands long enough to lock the door behind me. I then made a mad dash up the stairs to the third floor, and was only vaguely aware of the shouting and angry voices coming from outside.

Reaching the landing, I ran headlong down the hallway, panic fueling my every step, and to this day I don’t quite know how I made it so far, so fast, in four-inch heels.

When I reached Dutch’s door, I twisted the knob, not even bothering to knock, and thrust it open. Dutch was standing in the middle of the room looking at something hanging from the door to the bathroom. It took me a minute to realize that the blue-faced figure hanging grotesquely on the door by a black leather belt looped around her neck was Mandy.

I opened my mouth to scream—it was all a little too much for me—when I felt a hand clamp firmly over my mouth. I stared up at Dutch, my eyes watering, while he shook his head vigorously. “Shhhh,” he said softly; then he let go of my mouth and curled me into his arms.

I sagged against him, suddenly so exhausted I could barely move. He set me down on the floor because my legs refused to hold me up, and I leaned next to Mandy’s suitcase, which was parked next to the bed. “Jesus!” I cried. “Oh, poor Mandy!”

“It took me a while to get into the room,” Dutch said, bending low to talk to me. “Whoever killed her locked the door after they left.”

Numbly I lifted the key I’d taken from Maks, and pushed it into his hand. “Try that in the door, will you?”

Dutch took the key and moved away, and my eyes went back to her prone figure for a moment. She was so blue and still, and I felt like I was going to throw up.

I turned my head in the other direction, and the tags from Mandy’s suitcase tickled my face. I pushed them away, but something about them caught my attention.

“The key works in the lock,” Dutch said from across the room.

“Dutch!” I whispered, motioning him back over to me.

He came right over and I showed him the tags. “Las Vegas,” he said, eyeing them, then Mandy.

“She flew in from the same airport where Oksana was killed!” I said.

Dutch looked back to me again. “Someone was using her and Oksana,” Dutch said.

I nodded. “And when they were done using them, they killed them.”

“Grinkov?” Dutch asked, holding his palm open to show me the key.

I shook my head. “I thought so,” I said, “but now I’m not so sure. I think there’s someone else responsible.”

“How do you know there’s someone else?”

“Because Maks has been shot by a dart!”

Dutch stood up quickly and pulled me up too. “Is he dead?”

“No,” I said. “At least, maybe not yet. I gave him a double dose of the antidote, but I don’t think I gave it to him in time.”

“Where is he now?”

I was dizzy with all the recent events happening around me, and closed my eyes trying to get the world to stop spinning. I opened my eyes again and saw the urgency on Dutch’s face. The window to the room was open and a strong wind gusted in, billowing the curtains and allowing me to see directly out into the garden, where it appeared the sheikh either had just died or was in the final throes before death, because the commotion around him seemed to be escalating. “He’s in our room,” I said. “It didn’t look like he was going to recover, so I came to get you.”

Dutch moved over to the window and peered outside. More thunder rippled across the atmosphere and the shouting below grew volatile. “Something’s happened to the sheikh,” he said.

I nodded dully. “He was also shot with a dart.”

“You saw it?”

“I think so.”

Gunfire erupted from down below, followed by screams and angry shouts. Dutch moved swiftly to my side and swept up my hand. “Time to go,” he said, pointing out the obvious.

We paused long enough for him to grab Mandy’s homing device, which she’d left on the nightstand, and as we dashed out of the room, he gave it to me with a stern, “Keep this with you.”

I tucked the pen down my dress, clipping it to the inside of my bra, while we rushed down the hall and over to the stairs. We made it to the second floor, and just as we reached the landing, I saw Grinkov’s butler knocking on Maks’s door. “Sir!” he called urgently.

Eddington’s face lifted and our eyes locked. “Go!” I told Dutch as the butler’s mouth fell open, and we hurried as fast as we could down the rest of the stairs.

Gunfire continued to sound all around the premises along with screams and the shattering of china and glass. Dutch and I ducked low as we moved down the stairs to the ground floor, where chaos reigned. “Do you have your gun?” he asked, reaching into his blazer to pull out Des Vries’s weapon.

I held up my purse. “Yes!”

“Good,” Dutch said, and we ran out from the stairwell. Dutch began moving us toward the front, where everyone who was fleeing was naturally gravitating, but I stopped him and said, “No! We need to get to the back! There’s a gate in the wall of the garden and I think we can get through it if we hurry!”

Dutch’s lips pressed together like he didn’t like the idea, but he trusted me enough to turn direction and pull me down a side hallway that ran along the back of the house. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, and my radar was telling me we were headed in the right direction, so I kept close to him and tried to keep my heels from clicking too loudly on the floor.

Of course, I shouldn’t have worried; the chaos all over the grounds was enough to mask even Mandy’s horse clomp.

At one point in our stealthy course through the house, Dutch paused outside a closed door where I could hear several voices yelling inside. There was also a loud static noise in the background, but I couldn’t make out a single thing anyone was saying. Dutch pulled his scrambler pen from his dinner jacket, twisted the cap, and placed it on the ledge above the door.

The effect was immediate. From inside the panicked yelling increased dramatically. Dutch and I hurried away as fast as possible and barely managed to round a corner down a smaller hallway before we heard the door burst open and someone shout angrily in alarm.

“Keep moving!” Dutch said when I stopped to try to remove my shoes.

“I can’t run in these!” I told him, mentally berating myself for not changing into different shoes before I’d left Maks to find Dutch.

“Keep them on!” he warned, and reached back for my hand again. “You’ll cut your feet to shreds if you don’t.”

We made it to the end of the hall and Dutch stopped in front of another closed door. He tried the handle, found it locked, and stepped back from it, pulling me with him. “Stand clear,” he said, right before he brought his foot up and karate kicked the door just above the handle.

It burst open and we darted inside, coming into a small library of sorts. Dutch moved to a single glass-paned door with a sheer curtain, the very one I’d attempted to open earlier that morning, in fact. As we moved to it, the glass suddenly shattered and a hail of bullets rained into the room.

Dutch threw himself over me and we went crashing to the floor. I heard him grunt in pain as he tried to shield me from the gunfire, and for one awful moment I was convinced he’d been hit.

The gunfire aimed at us diminished the moment another round of bullets sounded from across the lawn. I concluded that whoever was shooting at us had just gotten shot. “Dutch!” I said when the rain of bullets stopped threatening our lives.
“Dutch!”

“I’m okay,” he said with a groan, rolling off me but holding on to his left side where his bruised ribs were still healing. “Come on,” he said, after taking a breath and getting to his knees. “We’ve gotta move.”

Squatting down low, I followed him over to the ruined door, immensely grateful that he’d insisted I keep my shoes on when my feet crunched on the broken glass. Dutch kept me behind him as he chanced a look out onto the lawn. “Why is everyone shooting at each other?” I whispered.

“It’s the death of Sheikh Omar,” Dutch said softly. “I’m sure his bodyguards thought he’d been poisoned by Boklovich or one of the others who wanted to take him out of the bidding, and they started the gunfight. Since everyone here is armed to the hilt, it’s likely everyone’s shooting at everyone.”

“Great,” I said, wondering if our situation could possibly get any worse.

“Get your gun out,” Dutch told me.

I dug into my purse and pulled out the small pistol, which brought me little comfort when I thought about the assault weapons being carried by every single one of Boklovich’s guards.

I clicked the safety and held it in the manner that I’d been taught, waiting anxiously behind Dutch. My radar pinged and I nudged him. “Honey! We’ve got to go
now
!”

He looked over his shoulder to stare meaningfully at me, mouthed, “Love you,” then took me firmly by the left hand and we dashed out to the terrace.

T
he first thing Dutch and I had to navigate when we came out onto the lawn was a dead body. To this day, I’m not sure if it was a man or a woman; I just knew the person was dead by the blood . . . lots and
lots
of blood.

My stomach clenched and I felt myself gag and double over. Dutch pulled me close and swept me up in his arms, not even pausing while he hurried over to the wall and began to run with me down the side.

Overhead small droplets of rain hit my face and a cool wind came with it. I swallowed hard and pushed on his shoulder. “I’m okay!” I told him, just as the sky really opened up and the rain came pelting down.

Dutch paused by a tree, where he set me down and we hid for a moment to catch our breath and assess the lawn. I peeked out through the rain and saw it littered with bodies. I tried not to look too close, but even that random observation told me that Boklovich appeared to be one of the casualties.

“Oh my God!” I gasped when I saw just how many people were down. Dutch was right—everyone
was
shooting at one another!

“Come on,” Dutch said, reaching for my hand again. “We can’t stay here.”

“The gate is at the far end of the wall,” I told him when we began to move again. I kept praying that we wouldn’t encounter a guard, and judging by the stream of gunfire still echoing above the thunder, lightning, and rain, most of the fighting had moved to the front of the house. I was immensely grateful to my crew that they’d pushed us to the back, because as we continued to dart along the wall, I thought we might yet have a chance.

And with a small flutter of my heart I saw the ivy covering the gate just ahead. “There!” I said, pointing it out to Dutch.

In ten more strides we got to the gate and both of us began to tear the ivy away. It was slick and wet and clung to me, tangling around my ankles, but I was hardly worried about that. I just wanted out of that stupid yard and I didn’t yet know how we were going to get beyond the padlocked gate.