Diana slid down the ladder first, going fast but controlled, keeping her movements steady and flexed. There was an eight-foot drop from the bottom rung to the roof below. With the boots of Amber coming above her head, Diana dropped.
The wind pushed. The ladder flailed above. A service boat’s horn blared on the Thames below.
Diana hit the roof and rolled out of the landing, sticking herself against a metal vent until the other soldiers could get down.
Three more sets of boots and they were ready to infiltrate. Mercy flashed the four sticky bombs that were going to pop the glass as they came down. With slow and composed hand gestures, she showed how to stick them on to the bottom of the boot so they could kick and blow the glass at the same time.
“MI6 have those?” Diana muttered in Amber’s ears.
“Wishing you played for the Brits now, love?” He winked.
“You know how I feel about gadgets.”
It took Diana a minute to get comfortable with new technology. Her signature moves didn’t usually involve more than a pistol or whatever contents were around her. The first time she’d had to wear an earpiece, she’d put it in upside down and lost it somewhere in a muddy obstacle course. Ratanake had forced her to go back for it, wading through the dirt until she found it wedged underneath barbed wire. Looking for it had been more useful for her training than having it in the first place.
But this seemed easy—stick and kick.
They wrapped themselves with tensile cables, affixing to a sturdy part of the roof with steel clamps and a triple check of their sturdiness. Then, they dropped again. Diana pushed off the sides of the building, using the momentum to push her farther down, letting out a bit of the rope a little at a time.
The wind pushed against the green glass of the building, everything squeaking and moving with the varying pressure of the breeze and when their heavy boots hit in the wrong spot. There were two more ledges until they were lowered to the central spire where the vice-chief’s office was, where the papers were stuck to the glass, egging on Diana to come after them.
Those sheets didn’t matter because she would have come either way. No matter what.
On the last ledge, they all took a moment to stick the glass crushers to the bottom of their boots. Amber gave Diana a small salute with two fingers. She nodded back.
“Five,” Mercy counted down. “Four…”
They all leaned back with one foot raised, the other boot balancing on the lip of the ledge.
“Three—”
Diana breathed in through her nose.
“Two—”
Out through her mouth.
“One.”
They dropped, swinging along the cables, boots forward and crashing through the green glass into Amita Voss’s office.
Gunshots went off, scattered and frightened at the sudden breaking of glass and influx of soldiers in the room. To her right, somebody went down, knees cracking against the floor. Diana whipped the pistols out of their holsters as she landed in the room with half of a slide. She unclicked the cables from around her hips.
She went for exactly who she’d planned to—Asher.
If they were going to go after her son, she’d go after theirs. Besides, if Voss really hated Zabójca as much as Amber and the files said she did, then Asher would be the common ground between them, bringing them both into Diana’s crosshairs.
Running across the glass, she heard, “Mom!”
She almost stopped.
But instead, her eyes locked with Asher’s and she ran at him with full speed, knocking his knees out with her boots as soon as she was in range. He went down fast, not expecting her at all. With the pistol in her hand, she knocked the baseball cap off his head. She pulled her bicep around his neck while turning her body, yanking him so he was another bulletproof vest on top of her.
“Hey!” Diana screamed, holding the pistol out.
The wind blew inside, flinging glass and dust across the office, coating everything in gray and green. On the ground, Louis was bleeding out of a bullet that had gone straight through his neck as soon as he’d kicked his way inside. Every few seconds he let out a choked gurgle and a spatter of blood. Mercy had her gun on Zabójca. Zabójca had his gun on Wesley. Amber had his gun on Voss. Voss had her hands up by her head. Rex was unconscious, lying face first into the glass, small red cuts all across his skin.
“Don’t move,” Diana said, pointing her pistol between Zabójca and Voss and then sticking it on the middle of Zabójca’s forehead. “Don’t you fucking move, you bastard.”
“Do it!” Voss screamed from the other side of the office, causing almost everyone to jump a little. All of the eyes turned on her, but Voss’s gaze was only on Diana. Staring right at her as she screamed, “Kill him!”
“No way out of this one,” Diana said, ignoring Voss and bringing her attention back to Zabójca. The gun still on Wesley and his other hand wrapped in bandages from where she’d blown off his fingers.
“There is always a way out,” Zabójca replied, a slight smile across his face. She hated how blasé he was about all of this. Never once had he showed even a sliver of remorse over the actions he’d taken against the US military.
The wind pushed in from behind them, scattering more glass. Diana looked over her shoulder, pushed the gun harder against Asher’s skull and shook her head.
“Drop your weapon,” Diana said.
Zabójca said, “You first.”
“Kill him, Weick!” Voss screamed again.
“Shut up!” Amber snapped.
Asher squirmed under her grip, and she tightened her bicep against his neck, an occasional gasp for air coming out of his mouth. His breath smelled of coffee and pastries. There was a
