stacked against him. As Orla was wont to say, that only made it more interesting. He double-checked the Browning for a chambered round.
“You’re going to be all right,” he promised her. He needed her to believe that. He needed hope to galvanize her, not paralyze her. “In a few minutes it will all be over.” He pushed away from the window before she could answer him, glanced over his shoulder to be sure the night watchman hadn’t doubled back, and then set off around the corner.
There was another wide, green steel overhead door and beyond that a small door. He crept up to it. He saw a small weather-worn fire exit sign and beneath it, the warning that the door was alarmed. He doubted the alarm was still functional, but given the fact they had a night watchman and a Doberman prowling the grounds, he wasn’t about to take any chances.
He looked around for another way in.
Then he looked up.
An old rusty fire escape stair dangled just out of reach.
He smiled. People were a lot laxer about security on the third, fourth and fifth stories than they were on the ground and first floor. He backed up a couple of steps, then took a running jump. Reaching up, Frost snagged the last rung of the ladder and hauled himself up hand over hand until he got his first foot up on the fire escape. The rusty metal made a god-awful racket as it groaned under his weight. He didn’t have time to worry about it.
He ran up the first set of stairs then along the wire-mesh platform to the second set of steps. He didn’t try the first, second or even third fire door. He went straight for the fifth-floor, not looking down as he ran across the wire platform. The door was locked, but the wood around the lock was so rotten it didn’t take a lot of persuading to open. He bumped his shoulder up against the door, once, twice, straining the woodworm-riddled frame, and on the third bump the frame splintered and the door swung open. It wasn’t quiet. All he could do was pray that it was quiet enough.
Frost stepped inside. The vaulted ceiling of the old warehouse was cathedral-like, panes of frosted glass with iron girders holding the whole thing together. The moonlight streamed in through the glass, casting shadows that stretched to every corner of the wide-open warehouse floor. The crane gib and winches were all still in place, though the mechanisms had almost certainly seized up with two decades of disuse. He wasn’t about to risk swinging down on the dangling chain like some sort of comic book hero.
He took a moment to scout out his immediate surroundings. He was on a gantry that ran all around the top floor of the warehouse. There were maybe half a dozen doors on each side of the building which, he surmised, led to the old offices. All of the windows along the gantry were dark. Down in the center of the concrete floor five stories beneath him, he could see two men sitting on packing crates. They appeared to be sharing a smoke.
The Browning was accurate enough over this kind of distance that they were a comfortable shot, but he had no intention of taking it. The next few minutes were all about silence. He ghosted along the gantry, looking for the stairs down to the next level. He found the stairwell in the far corner, meaning he had to cover the entire length of the warehouse floor. He kept looking down over the side. Neither man looked up.
Frost took the stairs, keeping his shoulder pressed against the wall as he half-ran down the ninety-degree turns of the stairwell. He didn’t go all the way to the bottom. He wanted to know as much about what he was up against as possible, so he crept out onto the second-floor gantry. Like the one much higher up, the gantry ran around the re circumference of the warehouse. He could see down through the floor all the way to the ground. Conversely, that meant anyone who happened to look up would be able to see him. As trades went, it was one he was happy to make. The pair he’d watched from the fifth floor told him all he needed to know about these guys and their operation. They’d been watching their hostages for over a week now without incident. They were complacent.
He moved out along the metal gantry. Two more men came out to join the others at the packing crates. They were big guys. One had a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 slung casually over his shoulder. Frost watched the way the man moved. There was an easy confidence about his posture as he sank down beside the others. He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit up. Frost waited and watched. He tried to think through the numbers. If Annie had seen eight guards, the odds were they were running two shifts, four and four. He didn’t recognize any of them as the night watchman, which meant there was at least one more out there whose whereabouts was unaccounted for.
There was no way he could take them all at once. He was going to have to pick them off one at a time like the ten green bottles accidently falling. Not so accidentally, he amended silently. These would have bullet holes in the back of their heads. That made falling the only natural thing to do.
The MP5 guy stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette under his boot.
It would be easy to move along the gantry and squeeze off two quick shots, taking out a couple of the guards, then make his way down to the ground. They wouldn’t know what had hit them, and in the panic that followed he’d have time to clear up the loose ends. What he didn’t know was when they changed watches, when the relief would arrive, how many of them there actually were in the old warehouse, and if the sound of the gunshots would carry to the watchman outside. These were variables he couldn’t control. Adding more guns to the mix meant more room for things to go wrong. The situation became harder to control. All he needed was for one of the kidnappers to go through to the room they were using as a cell and start shooting.
His instinct was to dictate the scenario.
That meant striking hard, fast and, if possible, remaining unseen.
He crept along the gantry, conscious that the slightest movement could catch a kidnapper’s eye at any time. He kept as close to the wall as possible. It took him a full minute to get into position. Frost crouched down. He had a perfect view of the killing ground beneath him. The Browning felt heavy in his hand, hungry. He’d carried the gun for what felt like all of his adult life. He had a parasitical relationship with the thing. It had kept him alive more than once, but sometimes it felt as though it thirsted for blood. This was one of those times. He breathed deeply, forcing the rise and fall of his lungs to stay steady.
Frost raised the Browning, drawing a bead on the man with the MP5. The kidnapper turned away from him, as though challenging him to put the bullet in the back of his head. Frost didn’t care about cowardice or seeing the whites of his victim’s eyes. That was Hollywood bullshit. A dead goon was a dead goon. It didn’t matter how he got there. He wouldn’t score points in goon heaven for taking the bullet face first. Honor was for the Samurai. It had no place in saving the lives of these women and children.
He kept the gun steady, breathing in, breathing out. He wanted to time the shots with the exhale for accuracy.
Beneath him, the kidnapper threw up his arms and spun on his heel. The MP5 banged off his hip. He looked up, and seemed for a heartbeat to be looking straight at Frost. Frost squeezed down on the trigger, slowly increasing the pressure until it was a hair from firing.
And stopped himself.
At the last moment the gunman looked away, barking something at his compatriots. Frost expected an explosion of gunfire. It never came. Their voices carried, loud in the huge space of the empty warehouse. It took Frost a few seconds to realize what had them so agitated-they were waiting for instructions. They were arguing about whether they should go in there and kill the hostages. Their contact hadn’t called in and they were getting fractious. The joker with the MP5 seemed to be the one with the itchiest trigger finger.
Frost put him out of his misery.
The back of the man’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brains.
Frost squeezed off a second shot, taking one of the men sitting on the crates high in the forehead. His body jerked back, a crack opening above his right eyebrow as his eyes widened in shock. It was a comical expression caught between surprise and fear, not the kind of look you’d want to carry into the afterlife. The dead man slumped sideways, falling from his perch on the crate. His leg kicked out as he fell and twitched uncontrollably for a full thirty seconds before the last vestiges of life convulsed out of his body.
Frost didn’t wait for that to happen.
While the other two reacted, diving for cover from this unseen threat, he made a run for the stairw His boots clattered loudly off the metal gantry, his footsteps echoing through the confines of the warehouse. The report of a gunshot cracked. He neither knew nor cared how close the shot came. The bullet didn’t hit him. That was all that mattered. Another shot sounded. Frost threw himself forward, hitting the gantry hard and rolling on his right shoulder. This time he saw the puff of concrete dust as the bullet buried itself into the wall six inches from his head.
