“So you have a plan?”
“It’s not fully formulated yet, but I do have an idea.”
Kemal stroked his chin and stared at Petrov. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear it, shall we? Your partially formed plan is better than anything I’ve come up with.”
“I won’t dispute that fact,” she said with a wry smile. She stood up and began pacing around the room.
“If Mr. Hawk is going to come for me, let him come for me,” she said. “We may not know when he’s going to arrive, but if we plan accordingly, he’ll walk right into our trap.”
“You want to set a trap?” he asked.
She nodded. “And then I want to personally dismember him slowly, piece by piece.”
CHAPTER 6
Lisbon, Portugal
HAWK SHIFTED IN HIS SEAT in the waiting area of St. Mark’s Hospital. He cracked his knuckles and looked at the ground. Then he stood up and paced around for several minutes before restarting the endless cycle of fidgeting. When he returned to his chair, he looked at the row directly across from him and noticed a young boy whose eyes drooped along with the corners of his mouth.
“It’s going to be okay,” Hawk said in Portuguese.
The boy gave Hawk a faint nod and then resumed staring blankly around the room.
Hawk cracked his knuckles again before Alex grabbed his hands.
“Maybe you should take your own advice,” she said.
“This is Blunt we’re talking about here,” he said. “It’s not just an exercise in patience. If he doesn’t make it out of this alive . . .”
She patted his hands. “You’re right. This is Blunt we’re talking about. How many times has he been in a situation like this? Three? Four? Five? He’s going to pull through.”
“That was a lot of blood at the villa. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him bleed like that.”
“Just don’t think about the terrible outcomes so much, okay? Worrying about things that haven’t happened yet is a waste of time.”
Hawk stood up. “I’m going to the chapel to pray.”
“You? Pray?” she asked.
“God knows, I’m not the religious type. But there comes a time when you realize that you need help in this messed up world.”
“And you’re just going to rub the little bottle and God will come out like a genie and make everything better?”
Hawk shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but I do know I need some peace right now. Praying is one way I find that.”
She forced a smile. “Then you go pray. Pacing around here certainly isn’t going to change anything or bring you what you need.”
* * *
ALEX WATCHED HAWK exit the waiting room before she turned to Samuels, who was hunched forward in his chair, elbows resting on knees.
“Want some coffee?” she asked.
Samuels shook his head. “I’m fine. I don’t need any jitters right now.”
“Are you as worried as Hawk?”
“I never feel completely at ease when someone is in surgery for getting shot, but it didn’t look that bad to me. Then again, I’m not a doctor. But from my experience, Hawk is probably taking this way too hard. I understand that Blunt is like a father to Hawk in some respects. And I can see how that might make it more stressful.”
“But Blunt’s going to be okay,” she said.
“Is that a question, or are you trying to convince yourself?”
“Maybe a little bit of both? I don’t know. I know he’s pulled through worse than this before.”
“The waiting is the hardest part. You always feel so helpless.”
“Sounds like you’ve spent plenty of hours in a hospital anticipating a report from a surgeon.”
Samuels nodded. “I had one of the best big brothers a guy could ask for. Matt was a godsend to me. He used to pick me up from college on the weekends and take me out to eat. He knew I was barely making it, trying to work to pay for school and keep up my grades. He graduated just before I started my freshman year at the University of Texas and started working straight out of school as a pharmaceutical rep. He used to mail me letters once a week. Some of the guys teased me about it and would say it was from my secret admirer. I guess Matt’s handwriting wasn’t exactly what you’d consider masculine, which stood in stark contrast to his 6-foot-4, 220-pound frame. But I didn’t care that they teased me about. I loved it.”
“What happened?”
“We were at a club late one night a few months after I’d graduated and started working for this security firm in Austin. I wanted to leave early, but he wanted to stay. We were celebrating his friend’s twenty-fifth birthday and I’d had enough. I certainly didn’t want to go to work with a throbbing headache the next morning, so I caught a cab home. But Matt stayed and partied with his friends.”
Samuels paused and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly before continuing.
“The bar we were at wasn’t even in a sketchy part of town, but pipe bombs can be placed anywhere. And the shrapnel packed inside doesn’t discriminate either. Four people died aside from the coward who hurled it and then later took his own life after the cops pinned him down.”
“Who was the bomber?”
“You think this is the part where I tell you it was a Muslim kid and that’s why I wanna fight terrorism, right? But it wasn’t. Just some mentally ill bartender who’d been fired from the club they were at. He wanted to strike back at them, make them pay for what they did. In the end, all he did was make a mess of several families’ lives before losing his own. And what for? Because he lost his crappy job serving alcohol to people trying to forget about the reality of their lives for a few hours every night. There were no winners in that situation.”
“Your brother died at the hospital?”
Samuels nodded. “It was intense. Initially, they were optimistic that he’d be able to
