twitched slightly. Stay cool, she told herself sharply, and forced herself to keep strolling as though she had seen nothing strange at all. If an)’ of the men who had murdered the rest of her team were watching right now, reacting suspiciously would be a dead giveaway. With the emphasis on dead, she thought grimly.
Forty meters from Kessler’s driveway, she turned aside while reaching into the pocket of her jeans as though looking for her keys. Then she pushed open a small gate set in the high stone wall and entered the spacious front garden of the neighboring villa. Wide gravel paths meandered between barren flowerbeds now mounded with snow. Up at the house, a light shone over the door, but the rest of the building?built to look like a Renaissance Italian palazzo ?was dark. She was in luck. The owners were not yet home.
Now that she was out of sight, it was time to move faster. Randi sprinted across the garden, staying off the gravel paths to avoid making too much noise.
She ran straight for the length of wall that marked the edge of Kessler’s property. Barely slowing down, she leaped up, caught the edge of the stone wall with her gloved hands, and then swung herself up onto the top. For a moment, Randi lay still, pressed flat against the rough surface of the mortared stones.
She was conscious of her pulse pounding in her ears, but ignored it, focusing instead on any faint sounds that might be rising from the grounds next door.
At first she heard nothing, just the wind keening through the tree branches overhead. But then she began to pick up different sounds, first the soft crunch of someone prowling back and forth on gravel and concrete, and next the muffled, static-laden squawk of a brief radio transmission. Her best guess was that these noises were coming from roughly twenty to thirty meters away.
Slowly, Randi swung down off the wall on the other side. She dropped lightly to the ground, spun around to face the direction from which she had heard the sounds, and crouched low, drawing her pistol in the same motion with a quick, fluid, and lethal grace.
Her eyes narrowed. She was in good cover among the tall trees and flowering bushes planted around Kessler’s Edwardian-style home. Although lights glowed behind several of the villa’s second-floor windows, casting elongated rectangles of faint illumination across the open lawns near the house, this narrow fringe of woods was wrapped in almost total darkness. Staying low, she slid cautiously to the right, edging around broad tree trunks and snow-crusted shrubs, carefully watching where she put her feet to avoid snapping any fallen branches and twigs.
Suddenly Randi froze and crouched even lower, trusting to the shadows to stay hidden. Not far ahead, no more than a few meters away, she had seen something moving, a brief glimpse of a figure outlined by the light from Kessler’s house.
She peered intently through the tangle of underbrush and the maze of low-hanging branches. She was looking at a man, a short, heavyset man in a suit and a thick wool overcoat. He was pacing slowly up and down along the driveway. In one big, beefy hand, he held a small tactical radio. In the other, he gripped a pistol fitted with a silencer. He looked nervous. Despite the cold, his forehead glistened with sweat.
Randi looked past him. There were two cars parked in the space between the villa and the garage. One was a dark red Mercedes sedan. The other was the black BMW she had shot up during the brief, brutal action along Clayallee. Another man in black clothes and body armor sat slumped against the side of the BMW. Blood-soaked bandages were wrapped tightly around his extended right leg. He was either unconscious or dead.
She nodded, knowing now that she had guessed right. Renke’s assassins must have driven straight here after wiping out her surveillance team. The other black-clad gunmen must still be inside dealing with Ulrich Kessler.
The heavyset man they had left outside on guard turned again on his heel and paced back toward the two cars. He checked his watch, swore worriedly, and then lifted the radio to his mouth. “Lange, this is Mueller,” he said tensely. “How much longer?”
A harsh voice crackled over the radio. “Five minutes. Now sit tight and stay off the air. Lange out.”
Listening, Randi made up her mind. She was going to have to go in after these bastards. There was no time to call for a new backup team. And waiting here to ambush Renke’s men when they came out of the house was a non-starter. If she was lucky, she might be able to drop one or two of them before they nailed her, but those silenced submachine guns they carried gave them too much firepower to face in a stand-up fight out here in the open. Inside, in a close-quarters battle, she would actually have slightly better odds of surviving.
A quick, self-conscious grin flashed across her lean, taut face. “Better” in this case was probably only the difference between “no chance at all” and “one chance in a thousand.” Then her grin faded. Any chance at all was still more than the other members of her team had gotten.
Intently, Randi studied the short, paunchy man called Mueller as he nervously paced up and down. Should she try to take him prisoner? No, she decided coldly. That would be far too risky. If he managed to shout or radio a warning to his heavily armed comrades inside Kessler’s house, she was as good as dead.
Still watching Mueller parade back and forth in increasing agitation, she put one hand in her coat pocket and pulled out a noise suppressor of her own.
It screwed tightly over the muzzle of her Beretta.
Ready now, she took careful aim, sighting coolly down the barrel. Phut.
Phut. Her pistol coughed twice. The metallic noise of the bolt crashing back as the weapon fired seemed to hang forever in the hushed evening air. In reality, she knew, both sets of sounds would be almost inaudible to anyone more than ten meters away.
One round hit Mueller in the chest. The second tore open his throat. The heavyset man went down in a heap and lay twitching and gurgling, bleeding his life away across the cold concrete. He was dead in seconds.
Randi swiveled rapidly, swinging the Beretta to cover the man she had wounded earlier. Her finger tightened on the trigger, ready to fire, and then gradually eased off. He had not moved. Hurrying now and staying low, she raced out from under the trees and across the open driveway, careful to keep the cars between her and the house. She reached the BMW and dropped to one knee beside the silent, motionless man. He sat as before, propped up against the side of the black car, with his shattered leg stretched out in front of him.
While she held her pistol aimed at his head with one hand, she felt for a pulse with the other. Nothing. And his skin was already growing cold. There, lying on the concrete beside him, Randi saw an empty syringe. Her mouth tightened in disgust. That had undoubtedly contained an overdose of mor-phine or some other fatal drug. Renke’s men must be under orders not to leave any wounded behind them ?not even their own.
Then she saw something else, a black angular shape, set on the hard ground next to the dead man. It was his submachine gun. His comrades must have left the weapon beside him, waiting for the lethal drug with which they had injected him to take effect.
Scarcely daring to believe her luck, Randi unscrewed the silencer from her Beretta and shoved the pistol back into her shoulder holster. Then she reached across the corpse and snagged the abandoned submachine gun.
Moving quickly and confidently, she examined the weapon, a Heckler &
Koch MP5SD, found a nearly full thirty-round magazine, yanked back on the cocking handle to chamber a 9mm round, and set the firing selector for three-round bursts.
Pleased, she patted the weapon with one hand. At least now she had firepower parity with the bad guys. Of course, that still left her outnumbered by at least three-to-one, Randi reminded herself coolly?by trained killers. Trained killers wearing body armor.
Then she shrugged. Waiting longer was not going to make this any easier.
She took one more deep breath, counting down inside her own head. Three.
Two. One. Now!
Randi jumped to her feet and dashed for the side of Kessler’s villa, half-expecting a sudden burst of gunfire from one of the lighted upstairs windows.
Instead, there was only silence. She reached the house and flattened her back against the wall, listening hard for the startled shouts that would tell her that she had been spotted.
Still nothing.
With the MP5SD tucked firmly against her shoulder, Randi glided forward again, edging around the corner until she had a view of the front door.
She kept going, caught up in an adrenaline rush that made her intensely aware of every nerve ending, and of even the smallest movements around her.
