He came up running.
The staccato cackle of machine-gun fire tore through the warehouse. Bullet wounds strafed the wall, ripping through the brickwork. Frost half-stumbled half-ran across the last few yards of the gantry to the stairwell. He felt the wind from the rush of bullets against his face and the sharp sting as one nicked his cheek.
He ignored the sudden flare of pain and dropped to his knees.
A second burst of gunfire ricocheted off the metal gantry, spitting sparks. Frost pulled away from them, slamming into the wall. He pushed away from it, throwing himself through the mouth of the stairwell. He was breathing hard. He was shaking as the adrenalin pounded through his system. Shouts chased where the bullets couldn’t follow. He realized the stupidity of what he’d just done as he charged around the first ninety-degree turn of the descent only to hear shouts from down below chasing up the stairs to meet him. He couldn’t exactly run back up the stairs, and there was only one place the stairs were going to emerge. He needed to mix things up.
They would be expecting him to come down shooting. In their place he would have placed shooters either side of the stairwell, covering left and right, with a good view all the way up to the first turn. There was no way he’d get down the last ten steps without being cut down in a hail of machine-gun fire, so there was no way he was going to go down those last ten steps.
As he reached the first-floor landing he stopped running. He leaned out, looking down through the mesh grill of the lowest gantry, then up at the glass ceiling. Each of the huge plate glass panels was more than twenty feet across by twice that long and slotted together with iron girders. He squeezed off three shots inside a second, each aimed at the weak point in the center of each sheet of glass. For a split second he didn’t think it was going to work, then the strain pulled the glass apart. The glass around each bullet hole spiderwebbed and splintered, each crack running deep. Then the first shard fell, and suddenly the hole it left undermined the fragile balance of the entire twenty-by-thirty sheet. And following a crack like brittle thunder a lethal shower of glass rained down. Amplified by the confines of the warehouse walls, the noise was incredible.
Frost didn’t wait to see what happened. Blowing out the glass would buy him a few seconds at best while the kidnappers took cover and shielded their faces. He charged down the final flight of stairs. One of the kidnappers lay sprawled out at the mouth of the stairwell, jagged splinters of glass buried in his chest and neck. A viscous black pool of blood spread on the concrete like some kind of mocking halo around his head. He appeared to be very dead. Frost didn’t take any chances. He put a slug in the middle of the man’s face and walked out onto the central floor of the warehouse, glass crunching under his feet.
He couldn’t see the final gunman.
He felt out the cut in his cheek. It wasn’t deep, but it was bleeding freely. He’d been lucky.
He scanned the warehouse quickly, looking for any sign of movement, any out of place shadow. Something that would give the last man away. A section of the warehouse floor was given over to forty- and smaller twenty- foot metal shipping containers. They offered plenty of places to hide. It wasn’t an exact science, but nothing in the spread of glass across the concrete floor suggested anyone had run across it so he turned his back on the containers. If he could take the last guy alive, great. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t shed any tears. Frost licked his lips. He could taste his own blood on his tongue.
He heard a woman’s scream and realized the last gunman had gone for the hostages. He didn’t stop, he didn’t think, he ran. He wasn’t about to lose anyone-not now, not when he was this close.
The gunman stood in the doorway. “You!” he yelled, waving the muzzle of his machine gun around threateningly. “Here!”
Over his shoulder Frost could see the terrified face of the woman he had spoken to through the window. She stumbled toward the man, eyes wide with fear.
The man grabbed her and pulled her close, then started to turn. He was trying to use Annie as a human shield.
“Let her go,” Frost said, keeping his voice calm and reasonable.
The kidnapper shook his head wildly. His eyes bulged, filled to bursting with the blood pumping too fast through his body, driven by his racing heart. His fear was palpable. He started to bring the snub-nose of the MP5 up toward the side of the woman’s head. Frost took a step toward him, and another, even as the man shook his head. He didn’t look like evil incarnate. He looked like an everyday Joe. Unremarkable. Unmemorable.
“It doesn’t have to end like this,” Frost said.
Less than ten feet separated them. He could smell the man’s sweat. It was rancid, like he hadn’t washed in days. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there were no replacement guards. Maybe he and his dead friends had been the only ones involved after all. He stank every bit as badly as the hostages he had kept penned up in that tiny room for a week.
“Back! Stay back!” His voice broke on the last syllable.
Frost ignored him, taking another step toward him. Nine feet.
“I’m serious! Get back!”
Frost took another step. He made no pretense of offering peace.
“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill them all!”
“Then I’ll kill you,” Frost said, quite matter-of-factly.
Seven steps.
“Truth is, it doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to kill you. You know that, don’t you?”
Six steps.
“I’m going to kill you for what you did to her son,” he nodded toward Annie. “I’m going to kill you for what you did to their fathers and their husbands. I’m going to kill you because you deserve to die. Make it easy for me, go on,” Frost urged. “Make a move. Pull the trigger.”
Frost raised the Browning. The muzzle rested less than five feet from the center of the man’s face. The madness of fanaticism blazed in his eyes.
“I’m not going to miss from here. And no matter how quick you are with that thing”-Frost’s eyes drifted toward the MP5-“I promise you, I am faster with this.”
He expected the man to beg for his life.
He was disappointed when he didn’t. The man stared at him belligerently.
“Tell me who’s giving the orders here,” Frost said.
“Go to hell!” the man snapped. He shook his head. He was wired. Every muscle trembled beneath his grimy skin.
“You’re not the man here,” Frost said. There were three steps between them now. He could taste the man’s halitosis and see every pore opening as the sweat came. “You’re the muscle. You’re a goon. You didn’t plan this. Who do you answer to? Who’s your boss?”
“Do you think I will tell you?” the man sneered. “Are you really so stupid?” He shook his head.
Without breaking eye contact Ronan Frost lashed out with his left hand, grabbing a fistful of the man’s greasy hair and pulling down hard. The move dragged him off balance. Frost pressed the gun into the center of his forehead. “Last chance. Talk.”
“I will never betray my people.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” Frost said, pulling the trigger.
The man’s head jerked back and his body went limp. Frost’s grip on his hair stopped him from falling. A ring of powder burn circled the entry wound. There was surprisingly little blood and almost no damage. The back of his head was a different matter. The exit wound was a mess of bone fragment, brain tissue and blood. Frost pushed the dead man aside and holstered the Browning.
Behind Annie, the women and children were looking at him as though he were some kind of avenging angel- they needed him, they knew that, but he scared them. He smiled at one of the older girls. She sobbed, a great heaving breath that stuck in her throat, and then as the tide of relief swarmed over her, started to cry. Her entire body shuddered. One of the women walked over to her and just held her. The sense of relief in the room was palpable.
“Okay, folks, time to go home,” he said, holding out his hand. Annie took it. She looked at him with the most intense mix of grief, thankfulness and horror. Her two girls clung to her legs. Frost reached down and scooped one up and cradled her in his left arm. She clung with both arms around his neck. “What’s your name, sweetie?” he asked the girl.
She leaned in, pressing her lips up close to his ear and whispered, “Vicky.”
