length. Carey watched the man turn in a loose military rotation, then disappear out of sight.
Okay. They had to get by him and whomever else was patrolling that wing. And there was nothing to do but move forward and see what they found when they got there. Silently, Carey signaled the position of the guard, took a deep breath, then stepped out onto the carpet. There was no point in moving slowly in the wide open spaces of the corridor; there was more safety in speed. Carey sprinted down the muted softness of the dragon-patterned rug. Ant and Luger were right behind him, their weapons poised to fire.
The view of the next corridor reminded Carey of a military base. A guard station was situated halfway down the hall, two armed guards were seated at a table adjacent to a solid steel door, no doubt the entrance to Rifat's private quarters. It explained the relative laxness of security in other portions of the mansion. The outer perimeter was protected by an electronic surveillance beam, and guards patrolled the street entrance and courtyard. Rifat lived behind a coded entry door defended by two armed men. Four, Carey corrected himself, as two more appeared from what must have been a guard room to the left. Shit. Maybe there were ten more in there.
Measuring the distance to the door with his eyes, he turned back to Ant and Luger. Speaking for the first time since they'd reached their rendezvous, he murmured, “There's four I can see. I'm going to try and draw some of them down this way. You two target the ones at the desk. Wish me luck. I know about twenty words in Turkish.” And unfortunately, he thought, most of them were only appropriate in the boudoir.
Raising his voice sufficiently to reach the guards but not carry to the floor above, Carey delivered rapid fire guttural phrases having to do with one's heritage.
Without hesitation two guards ran toward him, their weapons raised. Stepping out into the corridor, Carey fired at them with two well-placed controlled bursts. Even before they began falling, Ant and Luger had squeezed off their own rounds. The two men at the desk lifted slightly from their chairs before their bodies were thrown into the wall. Even though the men were shot with silenced weapons, it didn't mean noise was eliminated. The impact sent the guards flying backwards as if they were rag dolls.
The distinctive muffled sound of the rounds hitting home was followed by a noisy disturbance as the two guards in the corridor fell heavily to the floor, and the men at the desk collapsed with a tumbling clatter of chairs. They knew the sounds would be heard by whomever was behind the steel door, so they raced forward to drag the bodies out of sight. In seconds the four guards had been unceremoniously dumped in the small alcove that had apparently served as a locker room. Then they waited.
The wait wasn't long.
The steel door opened, and two men stepped through it, their weapons drawn. One man turned to glance into the alcove only inches from Carey, who was crouched behind the door. The other guard stood in the open doorway, holding the heavy plated steel with one hand and his weapon with the other.
As the first man walked into Carey's range, he seized the man's collar and twisting hard, pulled him down. The swift hauling motion dragged his throat onto Carey's knife. The second man never had time to digest what was happening, because Ant came up off the floor under the table and finished him just as neatly.
Carey was on the wrong side of the door to see what was happening but he observed Luger's signal, “One coming.” He'd take him. And although the man came out in crisp military style with his weapon aimed and someone behind him for backup, Luger shot them both before they were over the threshold.
Now was the time to attack.
Ant went in first because he was closest, followed swiftly by Carey and Luger, and the thirty-round magazines of their guns rippled across the chests of the two guards reaching for the phone on the table in front of them. Out of the corner of his eye, Carey caught a glimpse of movement and, swiveling, shot the last guard with a burst between the eyes.
It took only an exchange of glances for each man to know what to do. They cleared away the bodies, stacking them in the alcove and closing the steel door in the event it was timed to an alarm, they reloaded and proceeded to their next barrier.
They knew they had only minutes at their disposal. Ant began setting his plastique on the lock of the second steel door to Rifat's inner sanctum. The explosion was a muffled sound, the lock disintegrated. They rushed through the door into a plush foyer carpeted in an unusual yellow ground kilim and walled in a glittering succession of mirrors.
Absolute silence greeted them.
They fanned out in a choreography from the past, rehearsed to perfection in another killing field long years ago. Each moved forward carefully, every reflex on alert, nerves taut.
They found him two rooms away, seated behind his desk. When Carey suddenly stepped into the room, his assault weapon trained on Rifat's chest, he greeted them without surprise, with unusual calm. Unknown to them, the explosive charge had set off his warning system, and the villa was on full alert.
“Count Fersten, I thought you and I might meet again.” And he crossed his hands on the leather-covered desktop as though a submachine gun wasn't pointed at him. As though he wasn't responsible for half the terrorist attacks last year. As though all the people dead because of him were numbers in a ledger of profit and not human beings with families who perhaps couldn't even begin to understand the reason for their deaths.
“You were harder to find this time,” Carey said, remembering the last time they'd met in Cannes with sycophants and starlets surrounding him, not steel security doors and armed guards.
At Rifat's casual words, Ant had moved over to the windows facing the courtyard. Easing the drapery aside a scant inch, he surveyed the scene below. It was full-scale mobilization with armed men racing toward Rifat's wing, and every light in the villa illuminated. “The troops are out, Carey. Time to go.”
“In a minute.” He wanted that minute. He wanted Rifat to suffer a brief moment for what he'd done to Egon. For what he'd done to countless, nameless people in his rise to power. There was a rumor he collected ears and brought them out at dinner parties for effect. It almost made one consider torture in return as biblical justice.
“You'll never get out alive,” Rifat said, his voice moderate, the burgundy silk of his dressing gown, a vivid splash of crimson in the glow of the desk lamp. “I've sixty men garrisoned here.” His smile held no geniality.
“A few less,” Ant said, his gaze still fixed on the courtyard below, “on the other side of those steel doors.”
“My commendations on your skill.” Rifat's smile thinned. “No one's ever gotten this far.”
Luger was guarding the doorway. “Let's go,” he muttered.
And when Carey rotated the half-turn to interpret the intensity of his voice, Rifat's hand moved a scant few inches toward the silver inkwell in the shape of a small cannon lying directly in front of his clasped hands. The flash of red caught as a periphery image warned him, and Carey fired without aiming. The impact blew Rifat back, but he recovered a moment later to his smiling, upright self.
A bulletproof vest, Carey thought just as Ant said, “We're outta here.”
“One second.”
“A half a second, that's it.”
“My dear count,” Rifat said, his voice grating with animosity at the first serious threat to his life in years, “you don't have a half-second.” He drew from his pocket a small automatic handgun, firing it before his hand had lifted. And if Carey hadn't automatically moved in practiced reaction to a pointed gun, he would have been gut shot… or lower. Instinctively he aimed for Rifat's head and fired-one close-patterned burst that no one could survive.
Luger slammed the bedroom door shut behind him just as the sound of shattering glass echoed through the shadowy room.
“That's for Egon,” Carey said as Rifat's body fell heavily to the floor, his head splashed in bloody pieces across the torn drapery and broken glass of the window behind him.
“No way we're going back the way we came,” Luger said, shoving a large dresser in front of the door. “They're halfway down the hall already.”
“They haven't climbed the balcony yet,” Ant declared with a tight smile. “Let's try a little Tarzan shit.” He was already uncoiling the nylon rope hooked to his belt harness. “Hey, Carey, are you fucking back in this world yet?”
But Carey didn't hear him, transfixed, not by the sight of Rifat's remains, but by a memo sheet on Rifat's desk with Sylvie's name, the name of the Miami hospital, and Egon's room number scratched across it in bold script.
“We've got to get out of here,” Carey said aware of Rifat's auxiliary plan now that Egon was beyond kidnapping.
“No shit,” Ant muttered, exchanging an ironic lift of his brows with Luger.
The sound of running feet was audible now, much too close for comfort. The next sound they'd hear would be
