Page 125 of Close Pursuit

“It’s not the girl he wants. It’s the baby.”

Alex’s blood literally ran cold. “Because she’s got uranium in her system,” he stated. “She’s the only surviving proof of what Shermayev’s goons were up to in the Karshan Valley.”

“Well done, my son, to have put that together on your own.”

“I need you to call off the Spetznatz team. Right now.”

“What will you do for me in return?” Roman asked slyly.

“Whatever you want,” Alex bit out in furious desperation as the gunfight raged in front of him.

“You love this girl?”

“Yes, dammit!” he all but shouted into the phone.

“Well, then. If you will hang up and allow me to make a phone call, I’ll see what I can do. I might be owed a few favors from Shermayev’s superiors.”

Alex stared at his abruptly disconnected phone. The only men superior to the Russian Minister of Defense were the President and Prime Minister, themselves. Crap, this was going to cost him huge. He didn’t even want to think about what Roman would demand in return. Not that Alex would hesitate to pay the price. Katie and Dawn were in there, and God willing, still alive.

He started to pray under his breath to a God he wasn’t even sure existed. But he would do anything,anything, to keep his girls safe.

In about two minutes, the gunfire stopped as abruptly as it started. Turned off all at once like a switch had been flipped The silence was eerie. Heavy. Ominous with the threat of violence about to erupt again at any second.

Alex’s cell phone rang and he snatched it to his ear. “Yes?” he bit out.

“Charles McCloud, here. Any idea why those Russians just stopped shooting at us all of a sudden?”

“I called my father. Asked him to pull strings.”

“Christ, Alex. Roman Koronov is involved in this?”

“He says those are Shermayev’s men. My father went over the general’s head.”

“Jesus. What did you have to promise him to get him to do that?”

Alex closed his eyes in chagrin. “The sun and the moon and the stars.”

McCloud made a low sound of dismay and sympathy. “FBI’s not sure how to proceed from here. Their hostage negotiators want to settle in for a nice, long stalemate. SWAT wants to ends this thing now on the assumption that Katie might be shot inside--.” The unspoken end to that sentence hung between them. She might be shot inside anddying.

Alex pinched the bridge of his nose as stress pounded through his head. “If that Spetznatz team had orders to kill Katie, she’s already—“ he gulped, “—beyond medical help. If they did not have orders to kill her, I expect not a hair on her head has been harmed.”

“Stalemate it is, then,” McCloud said briskly.

Alex pocketed his phone thoughtfully. It was decent of the man to give him a vote in how they proceeded next. Either that, or it had been a quiz. A test to see if he could think logically under the worst possible pressure. Christ, his father had raised himself a cynical son.

Hang on, Katie.

Katie ducked and Dawn screamed as a shootout erupted around them. Taped into the chair, Katie fought against the duct tape to lean her body over Dawn’s, to create a physical shield around the infant. Bullets flew around her, passing so close she felt the rush of their flight as a burst of air against her skin. Natasha’s men fired like madmen at the invaders, spraying lead in a deadly shower.

The black clad forms were at a disadvantage coming in on ropes from above and the mobsters observed no rules of combat etiquette, mowing the intruders down with merciless aggression.

The gunfire inside the space fell silent. A half-dozen bodies hung, bloody and macabre, from their ropes. Dawn took a deep breath and shouted at the top of her lungs, and Katie felt like doing the same as she unwrapped herself slowly from around the infant.

Two of Natasha’s men were down and both looked dead if the giant pools of blood around them were any indication. The third guy was swearing up a storm in the corner and hanging on to his leg like it was about to jump up and run away from him.

The vignette stabilized as no more crises were forthcoming. Time resumed its normal course. The injured man’s howls subsided to low moans. Even Dawn quit yelling. Maybe she sensed the deep, waiting settling over the place, too.

Perhaps the longest minute in history passed with only the rhythmic sound of blood dripping from the hanging corpses disturbing the quiet.

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