came from several blocks away, but the sound was unmistakable to a trained ear. It was clearly pistol fire.
Court had been as surprised at the sound as the man holding him obviously was, but Court didn’t wait around to see how this man responded to the gunfire. He swept his right arm up, broke the man’s grip on his shirt, then threw a punch at the side of the man’s head that did nothing more than knock out his earpiece. The man bent forward and charged him, slamming Court into and then through the bank window, and both men flew inside, Court landing on his back and his opponent crashing down upon him amid a shower of glass.
* * *
• • •
Zoya spun to the sound of the gunshot behind her, then trained her weapon back on Inna. Even in the darkness Zoya could see that her former colleague at SVR had been as surprised at the sound as she had been.
Just as she turned away to move off into the dark, Zoya heard the woman call out to her in Russian. “Last chance, Sirena. The faster you run, the quicker we’ll finish you.”
Both women then heard the sound of a large pane of glass breaking in the distance, from the opposite direction as the gunshot. Sorokina turned to look that way, and Zoya used the opportunity to lower her pistol and take off through the monuments.
Every one of the simple polished concrete statues around her—and there were thousands—felt like a threat, a watcher in the night, an assassin breathing down her neck. She felt claustrophobic, near panic as she fled, desperate to get back to the relative safety of her hotel room and to call in to Brewer, because at this point she didn’t know what else to do.
* * *
• • •
Court shook broken glass off his face before it dropped into his eyes and created even more problems. The man above him had his arms pinned, and though Court practiced judo and Krav Maga, he was too weak to get the man off him through any of the standard moves he would normally use in this situation.
Sirens clanged all over the small bank, echoed into the night, and Court knew that in seconds this now-empty street would be full of onlookers and police.
He stopped trying to pull away, and he went limp. The man above him sensed the unstated surrender, and then he looked around for his weapon, which had fallen free when they’d slammed into the tile flooring of the bank. He saw it a half meter beyond Court’s head where he lay back on the floor, and the man started to reach forward for it.
And with this Court found an opportunity, though he groaned inwardly with the realization of what was about to happen.
As the man straddling Court leaned forward to scoop up his pistol, Court launched his head upward with all his might. With a sickening crack his forehead met the bridge of the man’s nose, breaking it, stunning him, and causing him to slump over onto his side and off Court.
The American pulled himself to his feet with the last of his strength, rubbed the already swollen goose egg on his forehead, and climbed back out through the window as men and women began streaming out of the hotel across the street.
He staggered off in a daze, unsure about anything that had just happened, but keenly aware that his only objective right now was escape.
* * *
• • •
Semyon Pervak pulled the wallet off the ground next to the dead man, and then he climbed off him, his ears ringing from the gunshot he’d fired moments earlier. He put his hand on the trunk of a tree to steady himself, reholstered his weapon under his shoulder, and then turned to the west.
He was on the eastern edge of the massive Berlin Tiergarten, a 520-acre wooded park in the center of Berlin, through the middle of which ran the wide boulevard Strasse des 17. Juni.
Pervak knew the Adlon was to the east, as was the closest U-Bahn station that would take him out of the area, but the darkened tree-lined pathway to the west afforded him his best chance of escape. Were it not for the thin line of maple and oak between himself and the street, he would be in full view of the rear of the U.S. embassy right now, and he had no doubt that there would be cameras there