The big Russian used his left hand to move his pistol to the side of the muscular woman’s head as she desperately tried to push it away with her one free hand.
Maksim snapped at his subordinate. “Do it already!”
He punched the woman hard in the thigh, the only part of her body he could easily reach.
He raised his fist for another blow, but before he sent it down again, his earpiece suddenly came alive with Inna Sorokina’s frantic voice.
“Threat! Gun!”
This confused him. He could see Zakharova’s hands, and she didn’t have a gun. “Where?” he demanded.
“There’s a man in the window!”
Maksim Akulov rose up on his knees. “Shto?” What?
* * *
• • •
Court kicked over the railing, drawing his pistol as he did so. He only had a fraction of a second to take in the entire scene; there was one man in front of him, and the sounds of a fight out of his view on the far end of the food cart on the other side of the sofa. He couldn’t see Zoya, so he assumed she was in a fight for her life on the floor in the center of the living room.
He raised his weapon, acutely aware he was pointing his pistol in the direction of a thin wall with a family of six behind it, the one he’d encountered in the elevator. The one man he could see rising behind the sofa was wearing a room service attendant’s coat. He had one hand inside it at his waistband; he seemed to be drawing a weapon.
Court sighted in on him quickly, but just as Court began to press the trigger on his VP9, the man spun away with extraordinary speed.
Court held fire and tried to track him with his sights. He didn’t want to fire and miss. Even hitting the man dead center wouldn’t ensure that his round would not overpenetrate and strike someone on the opposite side of the wall.
As the man came back around from his spin, Court saw an arm whipping in his direction. He sensed the man throwing something underhanded towards him, so he went from offense to defense, diving away quickly to his right. A black throwing knife churned the air as it whizzed by to his left, a foot from his face. The weapon embedded in the wall behind him, and Court tried to rush his weapon’s sights back on his target while he dove through the air. He landed on the kitchen island, rolled once to his right, and came back up in a combat crouch by the sink, ready to finally dispatch this incredibly agile adversary by firing down on him from height and avoiding using the wall with the noncombatants behind it as a backstop.
But as soon as Court got his gun on his target, he saw something else in the air, already flying towards him, and before Court could shift into defense again, he felt a sharp sting on the outside of his right biceps. He dropped the pistol and it fell all the way down to the floor in the middle of the living room.
Court looked down and saw that a throwing knife had sliced him a few inches above the elbow. Blood ran freely down his arm onto the marble top. The blade hadn’t embedded itself, he knew this much, although he had no idea where it had gone.
He looked up again and saw that the man who’d injured him had dropped back below the sofa, perhaps to go for another weapon. And to this man’s right, an older, burlier man rose up from behind the cart, and this asshole already had a gun in his hand.
* * *
• • •
Zoya Zakharova finally saw an opportunity, and she knew the only reason she had been afforded this one slim chance was that Court had made it on the scene.
She was exhausted from the fight. She hadn’t been able to match her opponent’s strength or size; he’d had her on her back, and Maksim had been on her legs, but seconds earlier Maksim had stood up and begun spinning and whipping his body frantically. The man with a knee on her left arm and a gun almost to her head had sensed the movement, as well, and then he looked over the sofa. Instantly, he all but forgot about Zoya as he scrambled to get his gun aimed on a target.
Zoya used the opportunity to reach out on the floor around her, to find anything