It had come from behind the nearest sport boat.
Of course.
Trish couldn’t help making noise when she surfaced alongside the fiberglass hull. Her craving for oxygen had reached the critical stage. Nothing mattered except air.
She gulped breath after breath, and then the boat lurched, someone hopping aboard.
Down.
Blair crossed the bow in one stride and peered over the port gunwale into the dark water.
Directly below him, a blur of silt and thrashing legs.
He fired twice. The Glock’s sound suppressor was degrading with use; these shots were louder than the last.
The diver vanished under the boat. Had he nailed her She’d been close, but he hadn’t had time to aim. It was just point and shoot.
He watched hopefully for a cloud of blood.
Trish knew she’d been shot at, didn’t think she’d been hit.
Still, the man knew where she was. He had the high ground. He could get her as soon as she emerged from beneath the boat.
What now, Trish Think.
Think or die.
No blood in the water. Robinson had one of her nine lives left, it looked like.
But only one.
Blair pivoted in the bow, scanning the water on all sides. The boat was small, a Sea Rayder mini-jet, lightweight and barely bigger than a dinghy. He could cover every angle from this vantage point. She couldn’t get away. She-The boat listed with a sharp impact from below.
What the hell
Another blow-starboard side-the boat rocking.
Trying to capsize him, the little bitch.
His radio dropped into the bow. He groped for a grab handle, missed it, and the boat lurched again.
Stumble. His knees banged the gunwale, momentum carrying him forward, and suddenly the world was spinning like a turntable as he was pitched headlong into the lake.
A fist of black water closed over him. For a split second he was disoriented, helpless.
But he’d grown up near water, been dunked plenty of times.
And he still had the Glock.
He whirled in a haze of his own air bubbles, scanning the dark for a target, and something flashed past his face.
A chain-handcuffs-she’d snagged him from behind, drawn the chain around his neck.
Although the surface was only inches above him, he couldn’t raise his head, couldn’t breathe.
The gun. Shoot her.
He raised his arm, elbow bent at an acute angle, the Glock pointing upside down over his shoulder, and risked a blind trigger pull.
Trish saw the gun come up, saw the silencer twist toward her.
She leaned hard to her left as the Glock bucked, bubbles hissing from the tube, a 9mm round blowing past her face like a torpedo.
Probably he couldn’t shoot again. Probably the water pressure would prevent the slide from cycling fully, and the gun would jam.
But she wasn’t counting on it.
Knees wedged against the killer’s back, she twisted her wrists, jerking the chain taut.
He fought her, thrashing savagely, a whipsawing marlin, and she hung on, her mouth squeezed shut against the urge to scream.
Her wrists were on fire, the cuffs biting deep. His larynx must have been crushed by now-God, he couldn’t hold out much longer, just couldn’t.
The gun swiveled directly at her face. He jerked the trigger. Nothing happened.
It had jammed, thank God.
An instant later air burst from his mouth in a silent shout, and he went limp.
The pistol dropped from his slack fingers. She pulled free, snatched it, then broke water, gasping.
Below her, the killer sank slowly into the silt, maybe unconscious, maybe dead.
Leave him there, a hard voice said in her mind.
But she couldn’t. She needed the gear on his belt.
Anyway, that was the reason she gave herself as she crammed the Glock in the waistband of her pants and submerged.
She grabbed him by the neck of his nylon jacket. He was impossibly heavy, a hundred sixty pounds of inert mass.
It was a hard struggle to haul him to the surface, harder still to kick for the shore with her burden in tow.
The beach wasn’t more than ten yards away, but her vision was graying out, her heart skipping beats by the time she reached it.
Staggering, gasping, she dragged the man onto the sand and rolled him on his back.
Exhaustion dropped her to her knees. She leaned over him, staring into his face.
He was so young. A teenager. Seventeen Not even.
With a shaking hand she felt his left carotid artery. Pulse faint but regular. Her ear to his lips, she heard no whisper of breath.
She’d been trained in CPR but had never expected to use it under circumstances like these. Part of her rebelled against the idea.
But she couldn’t let him die. Though he would have killed her and laughed about it, he was a person, wasn’t he He mattered to somebody.
Pinching his nostrils, she tilted his head to face the sky. His airway should be open; still, he wouldn’t breathe.
She pressed her mouth to his, blew air into his lungs. His chest lifted but didn’t deflate. She fed him another breath, and this time his chest heaved as air hissed out of his mouth in a splutter of droplets.
He coughed, eyelids fluttering. Awake.
Intent on keeping him alive, she hadn’t stopped to consider that he was still a threat.
She reached for the Glock, but before she could grab it, his right hand closed over the chain of her handcuffs and snapped both arms forward, holding them uselessly outstretched.
For a frozen moment he stared up at her. “You saved my life,” he rasped in a voice like sandpaper.
Mutely she nodded.
He bared an evil smile. “Big mistake.”
With his left hand he plucked the Glock from her waistband.
Nobody had ever taught her the proper defensive move for this situation. Instinct guided her as she ducked under the gun and thrust her upper body forward.
The crown of her head caught him hard on the chin. His jaws clacked. The Glock cast up a white puff of sand as it fell, and for the second time in five minutes, she felt him go limp.
Was he really out or just stunned Get the gun, get the gun.
She scrabbled blindly for the pistol, recovered it, cycled the slide manually as she rolled on the sand, kicking clear of him in case he went for her with his knife or his fists.
When she looked up, she saw he hadn’t moved. Unconscious-or faking
