where he’d seen Drummond.
Shit.
Court didn’t go directly into the fire. Instead he found a bedroom across the hall, pulled the comforter off the bed, went into the bathroom, and threw it in the tub there. He turned on the shower and let it run over the fabric, then looked back over his shoulder only to find the bedroom filling quickly with smoke as the fire spread. He dropped to his knees to stay below the rising black cloud, then sloshed the comforter around in the water for a few seconds, making certain the entire thing was soaked. Then he rose again to his feet, pulling the heavy waterlogged comforter around his shoulders and head as he moved towards the fire-engulfed library.
Moving into the room, he looked immediately towards the veranda but couldn’t see it through the smoke and flame, so he dropped to his kneepads and began crawling, still holding the wet comforter around him for protection.
But as he made his way to the doorway outside, he stopped his advance. There, some twenty feet away from him, a clearly dead Clark Drummond lay on the tile.
Court shifted his attention to the far wall of the room. To the right of the old executive desk there, the floor had caved in, taking bookshelves, most of the bathroom, and Court down with it. But when he checked the desk, he was happy to see both the computer and the printer still there on a waist-high stand.
The heat was all but unbearable, so Court rose, ran for the printer, and snatched the one sheet of paper on top. He stuck it in his dump pouch without looking at it, then reached for the computer. Upon inspecting it, though, he saw that the back had been removed. He felt around inside and realized the hard drive was gone.
“Dammit,” he said to himself. Hanley was going to blow a fucking gasket.
He considered checking all the drawers in the desk but almost instantly decided against it. He had no choice now; the acrid smoke and the flames were forcing him out of the library. Forgoing any more of his rushed sensitive site exploitation, he turned and made his way towards the veranda, though he couldn’t see anything in front of him.
Once outside he found that the flames behind him were still too hot to bear. He threw off the comforter and ran for the railing, passing Drummond’s corpse as he did so. He fell over the side of the veranda, landed on the steep gradient of the jungle hill thirty feet below, and began rolling down, faster and faster.
Mercifully, he came to rest in especially thick jungle foliage, and here he spent nearly a minute coughing and wiping soot out of his eyes.
His camo pants were burned below the knees, but he didn’t feel like he’d been burned himself. Still, his wound stung as hot as the fire he’d just braved, and his body was racked with pain and exhaustion.
He vomited into the brush around him, ravaged by both his sickness and the smoke.
Tonight was a nearly complete mission fail, no doubt about it, but now the only thing he could do was cut his losses and get out of the country without getting caught.
Court rose slowly, stiffly, and began moving down the jungle hill, some forty yards away and obscured by trees from the driveway on his left.
* * *
• • •
At the bottom of the driveway, three men and a woman were on their knees with their hands behind their heads. Thor guarded over them with his rifle as Hades appeared out of the darkness behind the prisoners. He wore a large shemagh bandana around his neck, and this he pulled up to cover the lower half of his face as he stepped in front of them.
Looking at the four, he instantly took the woman in the dark skirt as the one in charge due to the fact that she was older than the men and possessed an air of authority. He said, “English?”
“Yes,” she replied, her face straight ahead and her fingers still laced together behind her head.
“Who are you?”
“SEBIN. Venezuelan intelligence.” She looked up to the man now. Unafraid. “Who are you?”
Hades didn’t answer. “Which one of you killed my man?”
The woman shook her head. “These are bodyguards. They were disarmed, and we were all drugged. We didn’t shoot anybody.”
Hades cocked his head. “Who disarmed you? Who drugged you?”
One of the young security men said, “He was fast. He was alone. He