Page 60 of Jacob

Man, this was so not him.

Next to him, Nick made a noise.

“What?”

“So weird to see you smiling. I think I’ve seen that maybe twice in all the years I’ve known you. The last time I saw you smile was when that asshole government contractor shot himself in the foot trying out the new Rossi Rifle.”

Yeah, that had been really satisfying. But Nick was right, Jacob didn’t smile on mission. “Not smiling.”

“Oh man. Ear to ear.” Nick grinned. “Looks very strange on your face, which is definitely not made for smiling. Though I guess I’ll have to get used to it.”

Jacob punched him in the arm. Hard. Unfortunately, Nick was muscle-bound and didn’t flinch. Didn’t even move.

Nick pulled out his cell while whistling ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’. Jacob’s eyes were rolling in his head. Nick thumbed a number on speed dial and touched the comms in his ear.

Jacob didn’t say anything. Nick was perfectly capable of driving and talking on the phone at the same time. There was very little traffic and anyway, the police here were not exactly sticklers. Who knew if the country had gotten around to drafting laws on texting and driving. He didn’t even know if they had laws against drinking and driving. The country was pretty new, pretty raw.

He’d been looking out his window, recognizing a few landmarks, thanks to having studied maps of the city intensely on the way over.Study the terrainwas ingrained in him. Going into a situation blind was a nightmare and could cost you your life.

Some snow was sticking to the ground in a park that was two blocks from the hotel. It wasn’t a very well-kept park, but the snow covered the bald patches and covered the garbage that had been dumped around the base of a bronze statue of some Vostokovan who’d done something pretty painful, judging from the puckered expression on his face.

The silence next to him made him look over. Nick was tense, thumbing again at his phone. “What’s wrong.”

Nick met his eyes. “O’Keefe and Dusan aren’t answering.”

A bolt of horror lanced through Jacob’s body. The men who worked for them always picked up on the first ring, unless they physically couldn’t. There was only one explanation for them not answering and it was too awful to contemplate.

“Try—” Nick said, but Jacob was already calling Alex. His hand trembled as he thumbed the number on speed dial. His hand never trembled, but now it was as if he were affected by some kind of terrible palsy. Alex’s phone started ringing. He felt his heart contracting in his chest as the phone rang and rang and rang. Even if Alex were in the shower, she knew enough to keep the cell with her at all times. Jacob couldn’t imagine any scenario where she wasn’t answering, unless?—

Not going there. But his body was going there anyway. He was pumping out fear sweat in great surges, something that had never happened to him before.

He swayed as Nick took a corner almost on two wheels. Thank God there weren’t any local cops around because if they tried to stop them, Jacob would start shooting. They were going to get to the hotel and up to the suite just as fast as humanly possible and nothing was going to stop them.

Nick pulled up to the entrance of the hotel and braked to a rocking stop. Jacob exited running, not bothering to close the door. There was a drumbeat of terror and panic in his head which he was trying to quell by imagining various scenarios.

Alex wasn’t answering because she was in the shower and couldn’t hear. Her phone was out of juice—though that didn’t square with her meticulous scientist brain. Still, it could happen. The phone had fallen and broken. Though that would be hard because his company cellphones were all ruggedized. They cost more, but he had never heard of one of Black Inc.’s phones becoming inoperable, unless it took a bullet.

As he was running through various possibilities, while running to the bank of elevators, he kept coming up against the hard fact that the guards weren’t answering. There wasn’t any scenario he could think of where that would happen.

Unless…

Nick made it into the elevator cabin just as he stabbed the button for 12 and as the elevator rose—horribly slowly it felt like—they pulled out their weapons and moved into shooting stances. Somehow, Nick had taken the time to grab ballistic vests in the back seat and they both fit them over their torsos.

By the time the elevator doors opened, they were ready for bear.

The doors opened onto… nothing. Both of them had been prepared for a firefight, ready to fight their way into the hotel suite, but there was nothing. Jacob stepped forward warily, weapon up and out, but saw nothing. Nick nudged him, pointing downward, and Jacob saw.

If he hadn’t been so panicked, so consumed by tunnel-vision, he’d have seen it immediately too. A couple of canisters. Two downed men.

He pointed his gun at the floor, crouching on his haunches next to the canister. He sniffed the air. “Fentanyl,” he said. “There’s that ammonia scent. Has to be. They’ve been out at least an hour. I called Alex at 11:15 and everything was fine. Check them.”

Nick bent and put a finger to the side of the neck of both men, looked up and nodded. They were alive.

Heart pounding so hard it felt like it would pound its way out of his chest, Jacob approached the door into the suite. He rapped with his knuckles. “Honey? Honey, it’s me. Can you open the door?”

He had his hotel card in his hand and signaled to Nick that he’d go high and left and Nick should go low and right. They’d done this a thousand times before, but never before had he been terrified of what might be on the other side of the door.

He’d had ISIS members, drug cartel sicarios, Albanian traffickers on the other side of the door and all he’d felt was cold determination. Not this gut-wrenching horror at the thought of finding a wounded or—God!—dead Alex on the other side.

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