Rogue Strike (A Troy Stark Thriller—Book #6), page 16
Troy picked up the gun.
The man fired again.
BANG!
He was pumping holes into the dumpster.
Troy held the gun up and fired straight into the air. He wanted to let that guy out there know he was armed, too.
BLAM!
It was loud. Troy's ears were really ringing now.
He peeked over the dumpster. The man was backing down the alley, leaving his dead and dying comrades behind. Two other men ran past him, heading down the alley. The gunman saw Troy and raised the rifle again.
Troy hit the ground.
BANG!
It was further away now. Troy barely heard that one. He couldn't tell where the shot went.
Dubois. They're going after Dubois.
The rifleman was the rear guard. If Troy wanted to catch them, he had to shoot his way past that guy. It wasn't going to happen. There had to be another way.
He peeked again. Up ahead, well down there now, the rifleman backed into an alley to Troy's left. Now, that guy held all the cards. He could hide there and pop Troy as soon as he came close. Troy would have no cover.
Troy's lungs burned. He could still feel the other man's phantom fingers around his throat. At Troy's feet, that man lay still now.
Far away, he thought he could hear a chorus of angry voices, shouting to each other in a language he couldn't understand. Dubois was in danger.
The narrow alley, lined with aged buildings and trash cans and the occasional flash of graffiti, seemed to constrict around him. Troy searched for an out - a side alley, a rooftop, any advantage.
Back the other way, he spotted a fire escape ladder dangling within reach. It had the benefit that it was further away from the man hiding around that corner. The guy would have to expose himself, and then take an uncertain distant shot. He probably wasn't going to do that.
Troy ran down to the fire escape and leapt, catching it in his strong grip. The structure groaned under his weight, creaking as though it might rip from the brick wall and send him crashing back down to the concrete.
He scaled the rusted rungs, the white paint flaking off against his fingers. His muscles coiled and sprang, propelling him up to the first landing. He rolled over the railing and landed on the old ironwork. The entire framework creaked and groaned again and shook all the way up. For a second he thought his weight would collapse the whole thing.
He groped his way to his feet. He needed to move fast. There were stairs here now, no more ladder. He climbed, his breathing ragged, dragging himself upward.
“Dubois,” he said.
Another gear kicked in at the thought of her name and her face. A surge of adrenaline went through him, and he began to take the stairs two at a time. It wasn't over, not by a long shot. He reached the top landing, three floors above the street.
There was a view of the city skyline, tall modern skyscrapers, old stone buildings, here and there the minarets and spires of Eastern Orthodox churches, all of it blanketed in snow. To his right was the meeting of the Sava and Danube Rivers. It looked dark green in the morning light.
There was no time to look at this.
He took off in the direction Dubois had gone, heavy boots pounding across the snow and ice. A line of roofs were ahead of him, satellite dishes mounted here, there, and everywhere.
This roof ended with a low wall. Troy slowed, then came to the wall and stopped. The next building was lower and two meters across an air passage. Troy jumped onto the icy wall, held his balance, paused for a second, then leapt out into nothing.
He took the gap easily. He touched down on the next roof, covered in tarpaper that someone had shoveled. Troy was on a row of packed-together narrow buildings now.
He ran across them, leaping from one to the next without even slowing. His feet slid in the snow and ice. He reached the edge of one roof, where the gap to the next was quite wide. He barreled towards it, and leapt, feeling the chasm open and close below him.
He reached the end of the block and turned left.
Another gap coming. Troy burst off the building's edge. There was a moment, out over nothing, arms and legs pumping like a man falling from a great height. The alley seemed far below him.
Now he could hear the shouts. He looked to his left and down.
In the alley below him, Dubois was running. She was fast, men falling behind her. But looking ahead, another group had managed to outflank her.
Troy swore under his breath.
There had to be a way to get down there. An airshaft was to his right.
He went to it. It was piled high with all manner of garbage. There was no one down there, and it led out to the alleyways. But the garbage didn't mean anything. It wouldn't break his fall. If he dropped that distance, he would die. There was no fire escape and no ladder.
“Dammit!”
Troy gazed across the rooftops.
No help anywhere.
He began his pursuit again. He leapt to another rooftop. Below him, a deadly drop-down, Dubois had come out into an open courtyard between buildings.
The men surrounded her on all sides.
Shoot them! Shoot them!
A man approached Dubois. He raised his hands. Her foot shot out, a front kick that caught the man in the groin. The men shouted, and a few of them laughed.
Troy took the small pistol out. It was the color of sand, a gun he didn't recognize, some old make from the former communist world. He ejected the magazine. It held five shots, three of which were already gone.
Troy groaned. He checked the chamber. Nothing in there. There were two rounds left.
He looked into the alley. There were eight guys down there, one of whom was the rifleman. Suddenly, four attacked Dubois at once.
A surge of bodies swarmed over her, dragging her down like a pack of wolves overwhelming a lone deer. Stark's instincts screamed at him to fight, to shoot them with the two bullets left to him, throw the gun at them, then launch himself into the air, fly three stories down, land on top of them and tear them all apart.
It was impossible. He wasn't going to jump off the building, and if he killed any more of these guys, he was only going to make Dubois's fate worse.
As he watched, a man opened a red wooden door into one of the buildings, and within seconds everyone, including Dubois, had disappeared inside.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
7:45 am Central European Time
Sasha Pechersky Building
Zeleni Venac
Belgrade
Serbia
"You sent us here. What did you think we were going to do?"
Troy burst into the safe house apartment, on the phone with Miquel and Jan. They were both in the office, early, but not early enough.
There was a good chance this apartment was compromised by now, but Troy came barreling in without hesitating. If bad guys were already inside, or if they followed him here, he would kill them with the last shots left in his gun. If that didn't work, he would tear them to pieces with his hands.
"I understand," Miquel said. "But when you self-authorize an operation like this, you put us all in a very difficult and dangerous…"
“Miquel!”
If Troy could reach through the phone and grab Miquel by the throat, he would do it.
Miquel was still talking. Troy wasn't listening.
"What is this Miquel, cover your ass now? When have you ever NOT green-lighted an operation? Now you're concerned. Why, because this one went wrong? I know. You have to explain it to your superiors. I understand that. But I have to get Dubois back. I have bigger problems than you do right now."
Troy might be burning a bridge here with Miquel. That was okay. The person he needed was Jan. Jan was tracking Dubois's location.
Miquel had gone silent.
“Jan, is her chip still broadcasting?”
When Troy found out that Dubois had a GPS microchip embedded in her skin, he had been amused by that knowledge. Now, he wasn't amused at all. He wasn't relieved, either. That chip was the last, tenuous thread that attached them.
"Yes," Jan Bakker said. "It's still broadcasting. I have the location."
“Where is it?”
“There’s no way you can go there now.”
"Jan," Troy said. "I need that location."
"It's daytime, Agent Stark. You will not get in and out of there alive."
Troy shook his head. He put the gun down on the wooden table. He paced the room like a caged tiger. There was a sense here of searing loss, of separation, of unbearable pain. He was in a state of terror that he had never known before.
He tried to speak calmly. "Let me be the judge of that, please."
“You will put Dubois’s life at risk, as well as your own.”
Troy had nothing to say to that.
“The Belgrade Police…” Jan began.
"It's no good and you know that. These people are all connected to each other. If we reveal what we're doing here, and those guys are somehow involved, Dubois is as good as dead."
“Let’s do this,” Jan said calmly.
“DO NOT contact the police here, Jan.”
"I won't. But let's make a trade, okay?"
Troy could barely restrain himself from screaming.
“A trade?”
"Yes. You told me you took photographs at the dock, of the ship, and the people there. Send me those. I'll start the people running through the facial recognition software. It will only take a moment and can run in the background. I'll launch a program to try to match the ship to known river freighters working those waters. That will also only take a moment."
“Jan…”
"Both programs will run in the background and will require no more input from me. Then I will look for schematic drawings of the building, and the buildings surrounding where Dubois appears to be held. Once we have those, it will at least give you a fighting chance. But you should wait until nightfall."
Troy said nothing. Jan was either the most reasonable person on the planet or the one who was most utterly without emotion.
“Agent Stark?”
Troy nodded. "Okay. I'll do it."
He took a deep breath in an attempt to calm down.
“I’m sending it right now.”
He hung up the phone, brought the photos up, and sent them into the ether.
“Special delivery,” a voice said from behind him.
Troy spun around, half-expecting to get shot. The door to the flat was open. He had come in here in such a storm that he hadn't bothered to lock it, or maybe even to shut it.
A man stood there in a blue uniform. He was a small man with light brown skin and a dark beard. He was good-looking, almost like a soap opera actor. He was carrying a large plastic bag with a brown paper bag inside of it.
“You ordered breakfast?” he said.
He looked down at a slip of paper in his free hand.
"I've got a nice big Serbian breakfast here. Fresh bread, with butter and jam. Still warm out of the oven. I've got yogurt, cheese, sausage, and kajmak that's to die for."
It was Alex.
Alex was the emissary from Missing Persons. He was a man with a unique skill set, and he always seemed to turn up eventually, often at the exact moment Troy needed him.
“This is a lot of food, but breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
He came into the room and put the bag down on the table.
Troy felt like his head was floating somewhere above his body. His feet seemed far below him. "How did you know I was here?"
Alex shrugged. "Your friend got herself chipped. Do you think we didn't know that? We've been monitoring you guys the whole time. As a matter of fact, it's incredibly convenient when someone is chipped. Persons thinks you should probably get yourself done, too. It's the in thing, Stark."
A surge of rage passed through Troy again. He stepped up to Alex, towered over him, grabbed him by the lapels of his weird delivery boy uniform, and shoved him up against the wall. Alex was lighter than air, and it seemed like he left his feet.
He deserved it and more than that. He deserved Troy's fist plunging through his face. His flippant attitude was too much. Thousands of people were dead. And Dubois was gone.
"I've just about had it. Persons knew all about this before it happened. What are you guys doing? I'm about to kill somebody."
Suddenly, a gun appeared in Alex's hand. Alex was like a magician, and he had just pulled a rabbit out of nowhere, not even a hat. He pressed the muzzle up under Troy's jaw. It wedged against the fleshy part, just beneath his tongue.
"You need to relax," Alex said. "Something bad could happen here."
Troy felt nothing about that gun. No, that wasn't true. He felt he could kill Alex before Alex had a chance to pull the trigger.
“Tell me what he knew,” Troy said.
Alex shook his head. "Persons didn't know anything. He knew about the missing biologist. And he knew she had some kind of relationship with an online writer. He knew something might be coming, but he didn't know what. That's all. If he had known anything more, he would have told you. Or we would have stopped it some other way. What happened in Romania and Moldova, believe me, nobody in Persons's world wanted that."
"What were they loading on that freighter?" Troy said. "Was it the disease?"
"How should I know?" Alex said. "I just got here myself."
Troy's shoulders slumped. He took a breath and nodded.
“Okay.”
He let go of Alex's lapels. Alex's gun snaked away and returned to wherever it had come from. It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
Troy turned and went to the delivery bag. Down at the bottom, among all the cardboard food containers, was what he was really looking for and knew he would find.
He reached in and pulled out the can of Rock Star. It was still cold.
He grunted and opened it.
“Can we stop it?” he said.
"The ship?" Alex said. "Yeah. I suppose. Those guys did not wait around. The ship left the dock ten minutes after you did. It's headed south on the Danube, toward Romania. We can watch it from the sky, and someone can interdict on the river. Probably not the Serbians. But there are about five thousand NATO troops over in Romania right now from half a dozen countries. There must be some special forces or SWAT types among them. Interpol can request that they storm the ship. Talk to your boss about that."
Troy shook his head. "Not you guys?"
"What, guys?" Alex said. "We don't have any guys. We don't make official requests. I think sometimes you overestimate who and what we are."
"Okay," Troy said. "I'll talk to him."
He turned and faced Alex again.
“I have to get Dubois back.”
Alex nodded. "I know."
"I don't want to wait for those guys to tell me her location. Do you know where she is?"
"Yeah," Alex said. "We know."
“Will you tell me?” Troy said.
"It'll be ugly. If you make it out, no matter what happens, if you have her or not, we're going to want to leave the country immediately."
“I need weapons.”
Alex shrugged. "I have some."
Troy gestured at the apartment around them. "What about this place?"
"I don't know for sure," Alex said. "But I'd assume it's cooked. You guys made a hell of a splash out there. The bad guys are probably on their way here."
Troy sighed. "We've got bags. A couple of tablet computers. Clothes. Things they can identify us with. We can't let them have that stuff."
"There's a chute in the hall that goes to the incinerator," Alex said. "It still works. I checked. Just burn everything. Torch it, and let's go."
He went to the table, picked up the food bag again, and tucked it against one arm. Troy stared at him.
Troy nearly laughed. "But not the food."
“An army runs on its stomach,” Alex said.
Troy shook his head. "I think I'll keep my tablet."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Time Unknown
Place Unknown
“Who are you?” a deep male voice said in heavily accented English.
She didn’t know the answer.
She woke up for a few seconds and then fell into a dream again. She wasimmersed in some other world - a world without pain or thoughts, without feelings or experiences. She drifted in darkness.
Waves of oblivion flowed over her for long periods of time, entire lifetimes passed, an infinity of time, and then they were replaced by a fleeting surge of consciousness again, but only for a moment. She floated in a black eternity. She passed out of time and space, and she was forgotten. She had even forgotten herself.
The darkness was one where you realize that the worst is just moments or even seconds away. It was the kind of darkness the condemned man experiences when he is brought to the scaffold to be executed. It was that kind of darkness.
They had beaten her nearly unconscious, then covered her head with a black hood or sack.
One of the men had carried her. Her small body was slung over the man's shoulder like a sack of rice. He had dumped her here, wherever here was.
Soon she would be killed. There would be no explanation of anything - just this darkness, perhaps a moment of confusion or struggle (perhaps not even that), and then death.
Tears flowed from her eyes, across her cheeks and slidall the way down on to her neck.
She lay where she was and could not move.
It was dark in here. It was cold. She was in pain.
And she was awake.
She had been unconscious for a period of time, but now she was awake. It hurt to be awake. Being unconscious was better, and she longed to return to that state. Though truth be told, she was aware of the pain even then.
"You! Who are you?"
Dubois didn't answer. The perfect answer was elusive. If she said she was Interpol, what would they do? Kill her, probably. She had seen too much. If she continued to claim she was a tourist, what would they do? Let her go?
Maybe. Maybe they would.
“Can you hear me?” the voice said.
She couldn't see the man who owned the voice, not because of the darkness itself, but because of the black hood over her head. It turned out she had been wrong before - the hood was not completely opaque. She could see shadows through it, but nothing else.
