back up to the man and realized it was Jason, the young case officer he’d met in London.
Now the man just forty yards down the staircase fired a controlled but constant string of fire. Court heard rounds zipping over his head, and he was satisfied Jason was starting to get the hang of it.
All the fire from behind stopped immediately as the pursuers scrambled for any sort of cover in the narrow close.
At twenty yards Zack shouted out to Jason. “Get in the car!”
The case officer ran off to his left, out of view, and as Court himself approached the turn he shouted, “I hope you backed it in!”
He turned the corner, slowed, and saw the nose of a Land Rover pointed right at him, facing a long, straight stretch of road.
“Good job, kid,” he wheezed to himself, completely out of breath now.
Zack and Court climbed into the Land Rover, Zack taking the front passenger seat, and, as Jason stomped on the gas, Hightower began reloading his MPX.
Right in front of them two men with Kalashnikovs barreled down the stairs on the left and out into the street. They turned, saw the onrushing SUV, and made to raise their weapons.
Zack was still reloading; Court had no gun in the backseat.
Zack said, “Run ’em down, Jason!”
The CIA officer started to swerve to miss the men, an automatic movement, but Zack grabbed the wheel and shifted it back to the left. Jason recovered quickly and, at fifty miles an hour and accelerating, he slammed into both men in the street, crumpling the hood of the Land Rover and spiderwebbing the windshield as an AK slammed into it.
But the airbags did not deploy.
Zack slapped Jason on the back roughly. “Atta boy! And you even thought to disable the air bags, too! Damn fine work for a rookie, kid!”
Court caught a glance at Jason through the rearview mirror. The kid looked like he was about to have a heart attack. Court reached up and squeezed the young man’s shoulder. “Relax, Red. Just breathe and drive. We’re good.”
Court directed him to the east, and seconds later he saw Zoya and the Asian woman moving purposefully up the street amid a crowd panicking about all the gunfire emanating from just a couple of blocks away. “Stop!”
Jason stomped on the brake pedal, the Land Rover squealed to a halt, and Court opened the back door.
Zoya pushed the woman forward, right in front of astonished passersby. The white SUV squealed again as the driver floored it.
Zoya grabbed a roll of electrician’s tape in the door of the SUV, then spent several seconds binding the woman’s hands behind her back. She put more tape all the way around her head, covering her mouth and hair at the neckline.
Then, with wild eyes and in a rushed and fluid motion, she grabbed Court by the back of the neck. She pushed him back against the side door, put her entire body on him, and kissed him deeply.
Court’s fight-or-flight reflexes spun in confusion, but within a few seconds, he kissed her back, aware simultaneously that the adrenaline coursing through his body now was having a nearly complete painkilling effect on all his injuries of the past forty-eight hours.
That’s not going to last long, he told himself.
When she finally pulled off him she said, “Thank you.” He saw his own blood streaked on her face.
In the front passenger seat Zack’s head was craned all the way towards the action in the back. He said, “So . . . yeah . . . I was there, too. So . . .”
Zoya glanced his way quickly. “Thank you, sir,” she said, then turned her attention back to the man next to her.
Zack muttered to himself as he turned back around to the front. “You’re welcome. Not exactly the same as what he got but . . . you’re welcome.”
When Zoya pulled back away after kissing Court again, he looked down at his left hand. The back of it was a deep purple, and it was swollen at the wrist.
“Shit,” he said. “This is broken.”
“Shooting hand?” Zack asked.
“Negative.”
“Don’t need it. Carry on,” he replied matter-of-factly.
Jason directed Zoya to a medical kit in the back of the Rover; from it she pulled a chemical cold compress that she activated by breaking a capsule inside a plastic bag. Almost instantly the eight-inch-by-six-inch compress whitened with frost. She put it on the back of Court’s hand, then began wrapping it with an ACE bandage.