After that meeting, she’d secured two hundred million dollars in funding.
He’d revealed all of this to an independent journalist, and it formed the bulk of the article that had just been published, the article everyone would wake up to tomorrow morning.
Rachel said, ‘Baby, what’s wrong?’
He realised he hadn’t responded to her for several minutes. He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Just…the specifics I gave to the media…’
She knew him almost better than he knew himself, so she didn’t need elaboration. ‘It’s anonymous but Heidi will know one of the sources was you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s okay, Ernie. She’s going down on a sinking ship. What’s the worst she can do, refuse to give you your bonuses? She’d only be digging her grave deeper.’
‘Yeah.’
Something told him that wasn’t the worst she could do.
Someone knocked on the front door.
Loud pounding, urgent. A fist against the wood, three times. Serious weight behind it.
Rachel jolted in his arms. ‘Who’d that be?’
He felt sick in his core. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Expecting anyone?’
He shook his head.
She shrugged, reached out and picked up her wine and sipped it. ‘Let’s just leave it. Probably some junkie.’
He nodded, drew her closer.
Listened to the deep quiet.
Someone kicked the front door in.
Two bashes of boot heel to the flimsy wood and the lock smashed, the door swinging inward on its hinges and bouncing off the opposite wall, taking a gouge out of the plaster. The noise was horrendous. Rachel leapt off the couch with a scream, but before she or Ernie could even start running, three men had come into the small living area. Ernie was a small man, five-eight on a good day, and physical fitness wasn’t high on his current priorities. These men weren’t particularly tall either but they were broad, all three pale and hard-edged and built like linebackers.
One of them was high on something. ‘Sorry about that.’ An Eastern European accent, the volume amplified. His pupils were dilated. ‘It’s rude not to answer your door, Ernie.’
He exaggerated the wrong words, the flow garbled.
Ernie and Rachel stood gawking, speechless. Ernie’s heart crashed against his chest wall.
This was a dream.
Had to be.
He couldn’t explain the violation he felt. He had no illusions as to what these men were here to do, and it made him more furious than it was possible to convey. This wasn’t just his home, it was a sanctuary, an escape from the oft-brutal corporate world, and the way Heidi conducted herself was the most sickening and vapid extension of that world. She’d brought her hyper-materialist soullessness here, to his sanctuary.
He went to shout at them, but the guy who’d done all the talking ignored him and turned to look at Rachel. ‘Huh. You’re not on the roster.’
Her face was white. ‘What?’
The guy went quiet.
His buddy said, ‘Petr?’
Petr looked over his shoulder, those large pupils flaring. ‘She’s not part of the package. So she’s just a witness.’
The buddy nodded an understanding. ‘Yes. Right.’
He pulled out a sleek Steyr M9-A1 pistol and shot Rachel through the forehead.
Something inside Ernie broke, never to be repaired. He saw her fall back, saw the blood spray out the back of her head, saw it coat the sofa that she collapsed upon. But that piece of his mind didn’t let him put it together. She was his whole world, and she was gone.
Then it got worse.
Petr jabbed a finger at Ernie. ‘You are part of the package. So it’s got to hurt and we’ve got to prove it hurt.’
He walked right up to Ernie and thundered a fist into his gut.
52
Alexis tore into San Mateo in the dead of night.
Houses and condos and small apartment buildings flashed past on either side, and the SUV she’d stolen from the Russians roared. She slowed down three streets from Ernie’s address and pulled in front of a café that lay dormant, shut down until the early a.m. rush.
She leapt out and ran as fast as she could manage while maintaining tactical awareness.
Something Slater had drilled into her, time and time again, until it was muscle memory. At first it’d seemed banal, the repetition mind-numbingly boring, but now she understood its purpose. She didn’t even have to be cognisant of it. She automatically went through the motions of sweeping shadows, keeping her back to walls.
She made it to his ground floor condo with her heart in her throat. She saw the door hanging wide open and her heart leapt somehow higher.
Then the noise of the gunshot whipped out onto the empty street.
Muffled by a suppressor, so it wouldn’t cause pandemonium, but there’s still that unmistakable punch even when silenced.
Alexis didn’t even take the time to breathe or compose herself. She just ran quietly in through the open doorway, her own priorities falling away, replaced by an irrepressible urge to help.
In that moment she didn’t recognise how alike Slater she had become.
Later she would.
If there was a later.
She moved at top speed without making a noise, feet turning over at a high cadence. Ten or twelve short, sharp footfalls as she flew down the front hallway and then she tensed her quads and hamstrings and glutes to use as stabilisers as she slowed herself down.
There was a dead woman sprawled on the sofa.
And, beside the body, a curly-haired man in his forties getting punched in the stomach by a pale squat guy. The Russian had one hand around the back of Ernie’s neck and was using the other fist to throw uppercuts into his gut. Ernie was crying and shaking and yelping with each blow.
Two other men stood looming in front of Alexis, facing Ernie and the Russian. From the way they watched proceedings from a distance, she assumed the Russian was Petr, the head honcho. Just from the positioning, she could tell he was the one with full control of the situation.
She stepped quietly up to the two hulking bodyguards and pumped the trigger once each, putting the rounds through the backs of their heads.
Unsuppressed.
The gunshots roared like
