The Hunters

reached the back deck. He fired once, barely missing her right shoulder but hitting the French doors in front of her. The glass shattered on contact, which surprised everyone in the hallway because it was supposed to be bulletproof.

Despite the chaos, Kozlov made a mental note to kill the contractor who had installed the window. Then he returned his focus to the gunman.

He fired again. And again. And again.

Every time his bullet just missed.

Kozlov watched in amazement as the intruder reached the end of the hallway but didn’t stop running until ‘he’ leaped off the third-story patio with reckless abandon. His national pride soared when he watched the gunman do the same. Kozlov thought it was suicide to go after the thief in that way, but he appreciated the dedication. As soon as he learned the new guard’s name, he would reward him for his bravery.

Just to be safe, Kozlov waited for several guards to join him before he led them down the hallway to where the intruder had made ‘his’ escape. In Kozlov’s mind, the intruder had to be a man because women were incapable of such feats of strength. Of course, it was assumptions like that that helped her get away.

Hoping to find the intruder’s blood on his carpet, Kozlov saw nothing but broken glass. Disappointed, he raced to the balcony where he expected to see two crumpled bodies on the pool deck below. Instead, he saw something that sickened him to his very core: the gunman was helping the intruder out of the pool.

It took a moment for it to all sink in.

The two of them were working together.

Kozlov’s face turned red as he roared, ‘Kill them both!’

7

It took Callahan nearly ten minutes to reach the surveillance van through the mob of gunmen that filled the street outside of Kozlov’s house. Not because the guards were hassling him — just about everyone in the neighborhood knew what the Feds looked like — but because Callahan was hassling them.

When it came to gun laws, New York City had some of the strictest in the nation. Callahan knew he could bust all of them on felony charges if he had wanted to. Instead, he tried to use the threat of arrest to obtain more information about that night’s events while Koontz filmed the scene from afar.

Callahan realized the odds of getting information from one of Kozlov’s men was pretty unlikely, especially with so many of them packed together. But he hoped this approach would spook someone into revealing something of value in the crowd.

As luck should have it, one of the lead guards spotted Callahan and spread the word through the ranks: if anyone told the Feds about the upcoming art auction or about the intruder who had tried to rob the basement vault, the offending party would be shot in the face and fed to the sharks. That message was repeated again and again in Russian and Ukrainian until everyone on the street had gotten the word.

Unfortunately for them, Koontz got it, too.

Inside the van, he laughed at the irony of the warning. By telling his underlings what they shouldn’t say, the lead guard had actually revealed everything.

That was taking stupid to a whole new level.

Koontz was still laughing when his partner reached the van. He looked forward to briefing Callahan on everything he had heard — and how he had obtained it — but before they had a chance to speak, gunfire rang out from across the street.

Koontz threw open the van door and pulled Callahan inside.

‘Who the hell is shooting?’ Callahan demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ Koontz said as he turned his attention to the van’s computer system. He punched a few keys and tried to locate the source of the sound, using the parabolic microphones that a tech team had covertly planted around the neighborhood.

Callahan checked his weapon. Unlike the thugs outside, he was legally allowed to shoot people in Brighton Beach. ‘Please be Kozlov. I want to be the one to arrest him.’

Koontz shook his head. ‘Sorry. He’s shouting, not shooting.’

‘Figures. What’s he shouting about?’

‘He just yelled, kill them both.’

‘There are two of them?’

Koontz nodded. ‘That’s what “both” means.’

Callahan sneered. ‘And both of them are in the house?’

He shook his head. ‘Were. They were in the house. They just jumped off a balcony into Kozlov’s pool.’

Callahan waited for more. ‘And?’

‘And nothing. The guards are looking for them.’

‘Then so are we,’ Callahan said as he opened the van door. ‘If they’ve been inside Kozlov’s house, we need to find them before the guards do.’

Jack Cobb was soaking wet, but at least he was alive.

And, thankfully, so was Sarah.

Water poured from his suit as he yanked her from the pool. He had millions of questions for his partner-in- crime, but they would have to wait for now. There was little time for chitchat with Kozlov’s guards giving chase.

Despite the danger, Sarah scolded him as they hustled toward the fence in the back of the grounds. ‘I could have done it myself, you know. I didn’t need your help.’

‘I could see that,’ Cobb replied sarcastically. ‘You had them right where you wanted.’

‘It wasn’t them,’ she countered. ‘It was one man. No, scratch that. It was the man. I could have ended everything right there.’

‘Ended what, exactly? Our mission wasn’t to kill him. It was to rob him. You need to put your Agency training behind you. The only way you’ll survive as a criminal is to think like a criminal.’

‘But I’m not a criminal!’ she insisted.

‘Not yet, you aren’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!’

Sarah realized there was no point in arguing. They could pick up this discussion later, once they had evaded the Russians and made it safely to their rendezvous.

That is, if they made it to their rendezvous.

‘Okay, Mr Helper,’ she said as they scaled the fence together. ‘Now that you’ve decided to get involved, what exactly do you have in mind?’

Cobb scurried to his right and scanned the terrain. ‘I say we run down the beach as fast as we can and hope the Russians don’t catch us.’

‘That’s it? That’s your big plan? I swoop down like a bat in the middle of the night and break into the most heavily guarded compound this side of the White House, and your big plan is to run as fast as we can?’

Cobb shrugged. ‘Part of it.’

‘Wonderful. What’s the other part?’

He fought the urge to smile. ‘Hey McNutt, can you hear me?’

A new voice entered the conversation. ‘I can hear you, I can hear her, and I can hear gunfire. The only thing I can’t hear is the nerd. Is he still on the line?’

‘Still here,’ Garcia assured them.

‘Oh goody,’ McNutt teased, ‘if we have any questions about Star Wars or time