he was trying to speak. He mouthed the words silently.
Stephen ran up behind her.
'Stay back,' she told him.
His heavy breathing seemed right at her ear.
Movement—Atropos's arm shot out and pulled the hangar door shut.
She couldn't fire, not with Allen out there. She ran to the door. Sounds came from the other side. The squeal of a hinge, rattling metal. A lock! She pulled at the door. It wouldn't budge. She listened. Silence. She backed away, aimed at where she thought the lock was, fired. A second later, two holes ripped through the sheet metal. Atropos was shooting through the door. She spun away.
'This way!' Julia shouted, retracing her route to the side entrance. She pushed through into the alley beyond. She was on her second bounding stride when muzzle flashes erupted from the front of the alley. Bullets zinged past, rattling the metal walls as they struck. No gunfire. He was using a sound suppressor and subsonic rounds, the same rig he had the night before. If it was outfitted with a laser sight, he hadn't turned it on.
She returned fire, aiming high. She wanted Atropos to think twice about shooting at them, but she couldn't risk hitting Allen.
Stephen crashed through the door.
'Down! Down! Down!' she yelled.
More flashes and explosions as their enemy shot at Stephen. He bounded off a wall, landing heavily on the ground.
She laid down cover fire, hoping Atropos would believe he was in jeopardy of being hit. She looked back and saw in the brief light of the closing door Stephen sprawled in the dead center of the alley. He wasn't moving.
'Stephen?' she growled, panic cinching her throat.
'Yeah?' Low, quiet.
'You hit? You all right?'
'We can't just lie here. He's got Allen. We gotta—'
He didn't finish. She heard scraping against the concrete, the faint rustle of clothes. A shadow shifted to her right, moving past.
'Stephen—!'
Bullets sailed around them, punching holes in the metal walls, tearing chunks out of the wood fencing that sealed the alley behind them. The deafening reverberations seemed to last forever.
Finally Stephen whispered, 'I'm okay.' He was just ahead of her, on the ground. 'He's trying to pick us off.'
'We can go over that fence behind us, try to come circle him.'
'He'll see us.'
She thought about their options. She ejected her spent magazine and replaced it with the one she kept with her shoulder holster.
'Why isn't Allen fighting?' he asked.
'Atropos had him in a death grip,' she said. 'He may have passed out.'
'Or he's already dead.' Stephen's distress was obvious. He was on the verge of doing something rash.
'If we rush him, then we all die.'
He said nothing, then: 'I'm going over that fence. You stay here. He can't cover us both.'
'Wait a minute.' She watched the disappearing rectangle of near-black at the head of the alley.
'What?'
'Just a sec.' She tossed the empty magazine against the opposite wall, fifteen feet in front of their position. There was no response from their attacker. She stood and began walking slowly forward, keeping to one side. 'Keep your eye on that door,' she whispered, indicating the hangar's side entrance. She moved faster up the alley.
Near the end of the alley, she moved out from the wall in a wide arc. She pictured the area to her left: the tarmac in front of the last hangar, an open space leading up to the parked planes, then the jet. To her right, far past the hangar she'd just exited, were the terminal buildings and . . . She didn't want to think about what else they might find crumpled on the ground before the hangar doors. Atropos would be on the left. She braced herself for action as more and more of the area on the left side of the opening came into view.
Fully expecting to find the assassin pressed like a malicious shadow against the hangar wall, she poked her head out of the alley, drew it back in fast. Clear. Hesitating only slightly, she glanced in the other direction. Despite their situation, some of the tension she'd been holding in her neck and shoulders drained away—Atropos had not deposited Allen's twisted body on the tarmac. She found hope in that.
She signaled for Stephen to join her. When he had, they stepped into the open together. They saw it at the same time—
The Cessna.
Beyond the parked planes, it was taxiing over to the runway.
'Oh no!' She was too shocked to say anything else.
Stephen said it for her: 'Allen! Atropos is taking him!'
She ran—not directly for the plane, but straight out from the alley, parallel to the jet. She would cross the tarmac and meet up with it at the runway. Far off to her left now, it would have to come back in her direction to take off. She tried not to think, only to run.
Amazingly, Stephen kept pace, then actually pulled ahead. The jet's speed increased as it turned onto the runway. Neither of them saw the wide expanse of grass that separated the parking and maintenance tarmac from the runway. Stephen hit the edge of it first and went down in a tumbling mass of dirt and grass and groans. Julia hurdled him and pushed harder. She was on a direct trajectory to intercept the plane in about twenty seconds.
She squeezed her fist, feeling the gun. The jet picked up speed fast.
She wasn't going to make it. She leaped over a runway light and hit the pavement just ahead of the jet. In seconds it would pass.
She leveled her pistol and sent a volley of lead into the cockpit windshield. Little plumes of glass dust marked her direct hits—
Then it streaked by: whining jet engines piercing her skull, gusts of turbulence slapping her face.
She ran after it . . . ten yards . . . twenty . . . No use.
'Nooooo!' she wailed. She watched it become airborne, grow smaller, and disappear.
sixty-five
Pain . . . blinding . . . screeching . . .
Unbearable.
Allen's right shoulder felt as though a knife had been plunged into it. Flames of agony fanned out from it in hot waves, causing perspiration to erupt from his pores, drenching his hair, stinging his eyes.
He slowly swung with the movement of the jet. Handcuffs ripped into the flesh of his wrists and lower hands as the weight of his body attempted to slip his hands through the cuffs, slung over a hook in the cabin's ceiling. Streaks of blood ran down his arms. He would have used his legs to support himself had they not been hog-tied and pulled backward by a rope that looped around his neck. Relaxing his legs, allowing them to droop, pulled the noose tight against his trachea. So, through the maddening pain, through the bouts of light-headedness, he held up his legs.
But nothing compared to the excruciating pain in his shoulder. Atropos had nearly wrenched his arm off when he'd seized him outside the hangar, yanking and twisting it high behind his head. Certainly, he had torn it from its socket. Delirious, Allen pictured an anatomical chart showing the head of the humerus pulled free of the glenoid cavity, the rotator cuff crushed, the coracohumeral ligament snapped. Meticulously detailed, those charts were coldly indifferent to the suffering they described. Dangling by his arms now was like probing a gunshot wound with a shovel.
The heavy punching bag Atropos had knocked from its hook in order to hang Allen like a side of beef rolled lazily across the carpeted floor toward him. He squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. He braced himself for the jolt of fresh pain that would ignite within his shoulder when the bag bumped his knees, which were, he guessed,
