Page 24 of The 9th Man

“Just one more.”

It happened fast.

She spun on one foot and kicked the guy hard, square in the chest. The blow sent him staggering out the doorway toward the railing and spindles, arms flailing, trying to regain balance and re-aim the weapon. But Jillian advanced with another kick that sent him off his feet and through the railing, in the air, over Luke’s head. The body thudded solid into the stairs, then slid down to ground level.

“Really?” he asked. “You were doing so good.”

“He was going to shoot me.”

“Like I was going to let that happen.”

“He got on my nerves. Cocky-ass bastard. He didn’t know spit.”

Luke descended and checked for a pulse. Faint. But there.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“Peachy. He sounded Middle Eastern.”

“Israeli, I think. Hired muscle. Any idea what he was talking about with the rifle?”

“Not a clue. Benji owned a few handguns, but no rifles.”

He hated to leave something like that hanging, so he filed it away in the get-to-that-later box.

They needed to leave.

“Get that lockbox and let’s go.”

10

LUKE RAN THROUGH A QUICK SITUATION ASSESSMENT.

They were still alive, they had Benji’s lockbox and two fresh 9mms taken from the guys inside Benji’s house, they’d removed the GPS tracker on the rented Peugeot, which he’d been right about, and, knock on wood, they were finally free of pursuers. Better still, despite both the Genappe shooting and the Brussels incident getting media coverage, neither he nor Jillian had been mentioned as either suspects or witnesses. No one, though, should ever push their luck, so he decided to put some distance between them and the ugly events of the past few hours. Find a place to regroup. A change of scenery. Jillian had suggested Bruges, on Belgium’s North Sea coast, so off they went, arriving a little after 10:00P.M.After some tooling around he spotted a hotel that struck his fancy.

The Relais Bourgondisch Cruyce sat just off Bruges’ old town center overlooking a canal intersection and the old market square. The façade was half timbered and distinctly Gothic with narrow, sharply pitched roofs and gabled windows. Water seemed everywhere, with canals weaving paths through the city. Once inside their room they each had a shower followed by a brief debate over which came first, nap or dinner. They decided on the former and fell asleep. He didn’t wake up until around midnight. Opening his eyes he saw the light was on and that Jillian had the contents of Benji’s lockbox spread across the floor, studying everything. He rid the sleep from his brain and sat down on the floor beside her.

“Where’s that email address you sent the Kronos message to?” he asked.

She handed over a small scrap of paper. “That’s what I found.”

Written in block letters [email protected].

Along with the wordKRONOS.

“I searched it out,” she said. “It’s a Googlewhack.”

That was a new one. “You’re going to have to translate.”

“You really do lead a sheltered life,” she said. “Googlewhack is an obscure nerd game. The objective is to come up with a Google search that returns only one result. That email address returned zero results, so it would be a super Googlewhack.”

“Is that important?”

She shrugged. “Maybe not. But it is damn interesting.”

He was not all that computer-literate. He could make do, but he was no tech specialist. Luckily, the Magellan Billet employed several experts on twenty-four-hour call. “I know someone who might be able to make some sense of this.”

The Magellan Billet’s tech support was first-rate. Problem here? This was not official business and Stephanie Nelle had a strict rule about misusing resources. Everything had to be on deck, ready to go at all times, to support the assets in the field. No freelancing. But one particular specialist had taken a shine to him.

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