Page 6 of The Mad Don
I wait, and five minutes pass. Then another five. I look through the scope across the wing windows, the front entrance, and the line of cars in the parking strip. Nothing. No shadow on any glass. No shift in the standing guards at the gate.
It is too still. A house this size, with aDonas restless as this one, does not sit at eleven on a Friday night without one window changing, one door opening, one car starting in the driveway. There should be staff around. There should be a guard lighting a cigarette. There should be a kitchen light coming on for a glass of water.
There is nothing. I lower the scope.
And then, on the third floor of the east wing, a beam of light moves across the inside of a curtain.
A flashlight, clearly held by a hand. Sweeping from left to right.
I hold my breath and listen.
Underneath the wind, I hear a sound far away, growing closer—the whine of engines on a back road. Not coming here.
Going somewhere else.
The dock!
My stomach drops. The Italians are not in this house. They left before I got here, or they left while I was watching, or they were never going to leave from here at all. The flashlight on the third floor sweeps once more and goes dark.
Someone is signaling. But who are they signaling?
I think very fast as I look at the men around me.
Have they been bought?
If they have been bought, all six of them will know it. If only some of them have been bought, the ones that have not will still hesitate. Either way, the next thirty seconds will tell me everything.
I shift my hand slowly down to the holster at my hip. I keep my eyes forward on the scope, like I have seen nothing.
I roll to my right, and I shoot Yegor in the side of the head out of sheer instinct; he was compromised.
Two of the men raise their rifles at me immediately.
One of them calls out, “Cover, we have her, hold position?—”
We have been compromised! These men aren’t for us!
I shoot the man talking in the throat.
And all hell breaks loose.
The first bullet hits me square in the center of my chest, and the vest takes it. The impact knocks the breath out of me, but my legs are quick. I roll and come up at a crouch, and the second round hits the vest at my ribs, and the third round goes past my ear and into the tree behind me. The bark explodes.
I have to run.
I cannot try to fight them all. I am one against four, and the slope is slippery. I am exposed, I have to get to the car, I have to get on the radio, and Kirill needs to know in the next 60 seconds, or the shipment is gone, and so is he.
I go down the slope at a dead sprint. The pine cover is thinner than I want. Two more shots find the vest in my back, and oneof them hits low enough that I think for half a second it has gone through. It has not. I keep running.
The car is at the bottom of the slope, hidden between two trunks. The driver is inside with the engine off.
The driver steps out of the car as I reach it. He has his pistol up, and he shoots at me before I can think.
It hits me in the upper arm. I feel it goes through the meat and out the back, and my left side goes useless. I raise my own gun with my right hand, and I shoot him in the head, and his body drops against the open door. I kick him out of the way and get into the driver’s seat.
The four men on the ridge are coming down behind me. I can hear their feet. I turn the key, put the car in gear, and floor it.
The windshield shatters before I have made it twenty meters. Glass goes across the dashboard, across my lap, across the side of my face. I duck and keep my hand on the wheel. Another round hits the back windshield. Another finds the back tire, and the car swerves to the right.
