Dark Rivers of the Heart

all. Jesus, no. These agency people, as she had described them and as he had seen them in action, wouldn’t hesitate to blow away a hostage, even a woman or a child, to get at their target — especially not early in an operation, when witnesses were the most confused and no reporters were yet on the scene with cameras.

He didn’t want innocent blood on his hands.

Of course, they couldn’t merely wait in Hallmark until the agency went away. When they weren’t found in the supermarket, the search would surely spread to adjacent stores.

Their best chance to escape was to slip out the front door of the card shop while the hit team’s attention remained focused on the supermarket, try to get to a parked car, and hotwire it. Not much of a chance. As thin as paper, as thin as hope itself. But it was all they had, better than hostages, so he clung to it.

With the chopper landing virtually at the back door, the card shop was so hammered by the screaming of engines and the pounding of rotor blades that it couldn’t have been noisier if it had been under an amusement-park roller coaster. The Valentine banners trembled overhead. Hundreds of novelty key rings jangled from the hooks of a display stand. A collection of small ornate picture frames rattled against the glass shelf on which they stood. Even the walls of the store seemed to thrum like drumheads.

The racket was so ungodly that he wondered about the shopping center. It must be cheapjack construction, the worst crap, if one chopper could set up such reverberations in its walls.

They were almost to the front of the store, fifteen feet from the women at the window, when the reason for the fearful tumult became obvious: The second helicopter settled down in front of the shop, beyond the covered promenade, in the parking lot. The store was bracketed by the machines, shaken by cross-vibrations.

Ellie halted at the sight of the chopper.

Rocky seemed less worried by the cacophony than by an unfurled poster of Beethoven — the movie-star Saint Bernard, not the composer of symphonies — and he shied from it, taking refuge behind Ellie’s legs.

The two women at the window were still unaware that they had company. They were side by side, chattering excitedly, and though their voices were raised above the clamor of the machines, their words were unintelligible to Spencer.

As he stepped to Ellie’s side, gazing at the chopper with dread, he saw a door slide open on the fuselage. Armed men jumped to the blacktop, one after the other. The first was carrying a submachine gun larger than Spencer’s Micro Uzi. The second had an automatic rifle. The third toted a pair of grenade-launching rifles, no doubt equipped with stun, sting, or gas payloads. The fourth man was armed with a submachine gun, and the fifth had only a pistol.

The fifth man was the last, and he was different from the four hulks who preceded him. Shorter, somewhat pudgy. He held his pistol to one side, aimed at the ground, and ran with less athletic grace than his companions.

None of the five approached the card shop. They raced toward the front of the supermarket, moving quickly out of view.

The chopper’s engine was idling. The blades were still turning, though at a slower speed. The hit team hoped to be in and out fast.

“Ladies,” Ellie said.

The women didn’t hear her over the still considerable noise of the helicopters and of their own excited conversation.

Ellie raised her voice: “Ladies, damn it!”

Startled, exclaiming, wide-eyed, they turned.

Ellie didn’t point the SIG 9mm at them, but she made sure they got a good look at it. “Get away from those windows, come here.”

They hesitated, glanced at each other, at the pistol.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Ellie was unmistakably sincere. “But I’ll do what I have to do if you don’t come here right now!”

The women stepped away from the storefront windows, one of them moving slower than the other. The slowpoke cast a furtive glance at the nearby entrance door.

“Don’t even think about it,” Ellie told her. “I’ll shoot you in the back, so help me God, and if you aren’t killed, you’ll be in a wheelchair forever. Okay, yeah, that’s better, come here.”

Spencer stepped aside — and Rocky hid behind him — as Ellie guided the frightened women along the aisle. Halfway through the store, she made them lie facedown, one behind the other, with their heads toward the back wall.

“If either of you looks up anytime in the next fifteen minutes, I’ll kill you both,” Ellie told them.

Spencer didn’t know if she was as sincere this time as when she had told them that she didn’t want to hurt them, but she sounded as though she were. If he had been one of the women, he wouldn’t have raised his head to look around until at least Easter.

Returning to him, Ellie said, “Pilot’s still in the chopper.”

He moved a few steps closer to the front of the store. Through the side window of the cockpit, one of the crew was visible, probably the copilot. “Two of them, I’m sure.”

“They don’t take part in the assault?” Ellie asked.

“No, of course not, they’re flyers, not gunmen.”

She went to the door and looked north toward the front of the supermarket. “Have to do it. No time to think about it. We just have to do it.”

Spencer didn’t even need to ask her what she was talking about. She was an instinctive survivor with fourteen hard months of combat experience under her belt, and he remembered most of what the United States Army Rangers had taught him about strategy and about thinking on his feet. They couldn’t go back the way they’d come. Couldn’t stay in the card shop, either. Eventually it would be searched. They could no longer hope to reach a car in the parking lot and hot-wire it, behind the backs of the gunmen, because all the cars were parked to the front of the chopper, requiring them to pass in full view of its crew. They were left with one option. One terrible, desperate option. It required boldness, courage — and either a dash of fatalism or an enormous measure of brainless self-confidence. They were both ready to do it.

“Take this,” he said, handing her the canvas bag, “this too,” and then gave her the Uzi.

As he took the SIG from her and tucked it under the waistband of his jeans, against his belly, she said, “I guess you have to.”

“It’s a three-second dash, at most, even less for him, but we can’t risk him freezing up.”

Spencer squatted, scooped up Rocky, and stood with the dog cradled like a child in his arms.

Rocky didn’t know whether to wag his tail or be afraid, whether they were having fun or were in big trouble. He was clearly on the brink of sensory overload. In that condition he customarily either went all limp and quivery — or flew into a frenzy of terror.

Ellie eased open the door to check the front of the supermarket.

Glancing at the two women on the floor, Spencer saw that they were obeying the instructions they’d been given.

“Now,” Ellie said, stepping outside, holding the door for him.

He went through sideways, so as not to bash Rocky’s head into the door frame. Stepping onto the covered shopping promenade, he glanced toward the market. All but one of the gunmen had gone inside. A thug with submachine guns remained outside, facing away from them.

In the chopper, the copilot was looking down at something on his lap, not out the side window of the cockpit.

Half convinced that Rocky weighed seven hundred rather than seventy pounds, Spencer sprinted to the open door in the helicopter fuselage. It was only a thirty-foot dash, even counting the ten-foot width of the promenade, but those were the longest thirty feet in the universe, a quirk of physics, an eerie scientific anomaly, a bizarre distortion in the fabric of creation, stretching ever longer in front of him as he ran — and then he was there, pushing the dog inside, scrambling up and into the craft himself.

Ellie was so close behind him that she might as well have been his backpack. She dropped the canvas bag the moment she was up and across the threshold, but she held on to the Uzi.

Unless someone was crouched behind one of the ten seats, the passenger compartment was deserted. Just to be safe, Ellie moved back down the aisle, checking left and right.