Page 76 of Dangerous Passion

Drake brought the cellphone back to his ear. It felt like it weighed ten tons. “Grigori, listen. Keep … the Gulfstream 4 … ready to go. I’m coming down with a passenger. Don’t—don’t know when I will make it. Stay by the plane.”

“Yes, boss,” came Grigori’s deep voice and Drake wasreassured. If it took him a year to make it down to the Tampa airfield, Grigori would be there, the plane serviced and ready for takeoff in a few minutes’ time.

Streaks of black crossed his field of vision.

His hand was still on Grace’s arm. “Grace. My love.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the road, trying to hold the wheel steady, but she nodded. She was listening.

“We need to make it as fast as we can to Tampa, Florida. Don’t stop unless you have to. I have a plane waiting for us there.”

“No! Are youcrazy? You’re wounded, Drake. You’re losing blood. I’m sure the stitches in your shoulder have been torn and your back is ripped open. And you’re concussed, probably badly. I’m taking you to Ben, right now. Which hospital does he work in?”

He was fading, his voice so weak it could barely be heard over the noise of the engine. He had to make Grace understand how important it was to get out of New York as fast as she could. To linger was to invite death.

“Promise me.” His hoarse voice cracked as his fingers tightened on her arm. She chanced a glance at him, wide-eyed at the tone of his voice, then looked back at the road. “Promise me you won’t stop as long as you can stay awake. We must—“ he coughed, something in his chest exploding with pain, “we must get out of New York and make it down to Tampa. Promise me you won’t stop until you must.”

The darkness was almost complete. He could barely see, barely think.

His fingers tightened even more, the last dregs of his fading strength. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” she sobbed, risking another quick glance at him. He saw from her face that he looked bad.

“Won’t … die,” he promised, hoping he could keep it.

He fought the weakness, with everything in him, but it won.

The world turned black.

Pizdets!Shit!

Rutskoi looked at the message he’d just paid another fucking $100,000 for.

Drake and woman gone. Blood on floor, walls. Living room full of bullet holes, room completely burned.

It had been almost impossible to see anything in the thermal imager because of the fire that witch had started. Against all the odds, Drake and his bitch were still alive.

Cocksucker had made it out, but at least Rutskoi had wounded him. Or the woman. Or both, he thought viciously. Let it be both. Let them be bleeding their fucking hearts out on the street.

When he understood that Drake and the woman had probably made it out of the room, Rutskoi had sprinted to the rooftop and had taken out the helicopter on the opposite roof with ten incendiary rounds, watching with satisfaction as the helicopter exploded and fell in burning pieces through the snow to the street 30 stories below. Just to vent his frustration, Rutskoi had shot the pilot who had come out of a small, warm shed on the rooftop. It had given him immense pleasure to take Drake’s pilot down.

Shit.

No, control.He needed control. He waited a moment, forcing himself to move into the sniper’s mind-set of dispassionate detachment, then descended back down the stairs.

Rutskoi went back into the empty apartment and calmly broke down his Barrett, placing the pieces in their foam cutouts with steady hands that didn’t in any way betray the turmoil inside.

Drake had escaped. Okay. But the game wasn’t over yet. He was wounded and he hadn’t been able to escape with many resources.

And he was running with a woman he cared for. She would slow him down, force him to make mistakes. Drake was an operator, a clever, ruthless man. He would do what was necessary to survive. But with a woman to drag along behind him and protect, Drake would slip up. And Rutskoi would get him.

Rutskoi knew exactly how to track him down.

Terabyte.

Twenty genius hackers working out of Estonia, who provided around-the-clock services to anyone, for the right price. They could find out anything on anyone. Need dirt on your new boss? Terabyte will deliver a dossier including video footage of the boss fucking a call girl in 24 hours. Need to know someone’s bank password? Easy. Terabyte could get classified information in a day, top secret information in a day and a half. Word had it that one of them had been the NSA’s top cyber expert and could hack into the array of military satellites circling the globe.

For the right price, they would monitor the entire world for any appearance of Grace Larsen or Viktor Drakovich, in any of his incarnations.

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