Rogue Angel 53: Bathed in Blood (18 page)

31

As Radecki approached the door to the medical ward, he keyed the microphone on his headset.

“Talk to me, Gregor. Are they still inside the ward?”

The microphone gave the guard’s voice a tinny cast but Radecki had no problem hearing him. “Yes. Creed just forced Owens to remove the transfusion gear from one of the patients, and now they’re putting her in a wheelchair.”

Radecki gritted his teeth. Not only was Creed planning to escape, she was trying to steal one of their subjects.

There was only one logical way to do that.

“Are the cameras in the garage operational?” he asked Gregor.

“Yes.”

In an instant, Radecki decided to get there ahead of them. He explained as much to Gregor, adding, “Keep following them with the cameras. If they’re headed in a different direction, let me know immediately.”

“Understood.”

With a signal to his companion, Radecki turned and headed back the way they had come, taking the staircase at the end of the hall down three floors to the garage.

If Creed expected to find a huge garage—with plenty of vehicles to choose from—she was about to be disappointed. The highly sensitive nature of the work being doing here meant that those involved with the project, with the exception of Stone, Radecki and one or two others, were housed in the complex. As a result, there was no need for an extensive garage.

Stone and Radecki parked their personal vehicles in the garage, and Radecki and his team maintained three Suburbans for the collection work they had to do periodically.

The keys were routinely left in the ignitions, so Radecki sent Chovensky to collect all of them. Then both men stepped into the small office to the left of the elevator, leaving the lights off and the room shrouded in darkness, to watch for Creed’s arrival.

* * *

T
HE
GARAGE
WAS
rectangular, with the elevator at one end and the exit ramp at the other. Parking spaces ran down either side of the room, with the center open for travel. There was space for ten, maybe twelve vehicles, but at the moment there were only five—three dark-colored Suburbans, a deep crimson-colored Mercedes and a silver Land Cruiser. All five were parked next to one another close to the elevator.

Almost there, she thought. Just a few minutes more and they would be free. Then Annja could get on with the business of making Stone and her colleagues pay for what they’d done. Annja couldn’t wait to see the look on the woman’s face when the authorities came to take her away.

Of course, there was the little issue of not knowing who she could trust among the local authorities. If men like Tamás and Petrova were in on the conspiracy, it stood to reason that others were, as well. If she went to the police, she’d be putting herself and Csilla at risk until she knew just who those “others” were.

First things first, she reminded herself. Get Csilla out of here and then worry about bringing the law down on Stone’s head.

The fastest way of getting out of here would be to steal one of the automobiles, preferably one of the SUVs as there’d be room for Csilla to lie down in the back. Unlike the Mercedes or the Land Cruiser, which looked like personal vehicles, the SUVs, with their identical configuration and color, seemed like corporate vehicles. If they were, the keys would probably be around here somewhere, as the company would want to make it easy for its employees to gain access.

Television shows might make hot-wiring a car look easy, but this was the real world and Annja certainly hadn’t mastered that particular skill. She needed those keys.

Owens was apparently thinking the same thing, because he looked back at Annja and said, “The security team usually just leaves the keys in the ignition.”

Annja smiled; that was the first bit of good news she’d had all day.

“Lead on, then, Theo, lead on.”

Owens headed for the trio of SUVS, pushing the wheelchair ahead of him. When he reached the first one, he parked the wheelchair behind it and walked over to try the driver’s door.

Anxious to be out of there, Annja did the same with the second one in line.

She found the driver’s door locked, so she bent down, using her hands to keep the glare out of her eyes, and peered in through the window.

She couldn’t see the keys.

Damn!

She straightened, and in that instant her instincts kicked in. Annja jerked her head to one side, and the punch that had been intended for the back of her head glanced off the side of her skull.

It was enough to spin her around so that she ended up with her back to the SUV.

She put out a hand to steady herself against the side of the vehicle, shaking her head to try to clear it.

Her opponent came into focus even as he rushed toward her in another attack. He was a big Slavic-looking individual with close-cropped hair and arms that looked as big around as Annja’s thigh. Annja recognized him as one of the guards who’d accompanied Radecki to her cell.

The man threw a whopping left haymaker that would have done some serious damage if it connected, but Annja was alert now and she saw the blow coming. She waited until the last second and then jerked her head to the side.

The guard’s fist shot past the edge of her cheek and hammered into the car window, shattering it into fragments.

Annja didn’t hesitate, but went on the offensive. She spun forty-five degrees toward her opponent and delivered a punishing strike to the thug’s kidney, then followed that up with a heel stomp to the top of his foot.

The guard howled in pain but didn’t go down. He turned to her with rage in his eyes.

Annja expected him to lash out with his fists, and she prepared herself to block, only to have the man move in on her instead. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her in a big bear hug, lifting her up off the ground.

Then he started to squeeze.

Annja knew she was in trouble the minute he wrapped those meaty arms around her. His biceps were like cords of steel, easily able to crush her ribs if given the opportunity, and with her feet off the ground there was no way for her to get the leverage she needed to break his hold.

He squeezed tighter, forcing the air out of her lungs, and grinned down at her as if to say,
I’ve got you now.

She reared her head back and then snapped it forward, smashing her forehead into the guard’s nose with all the force she could muster.

There was an audible crack as his nose broke.

He let go, his hands going to his face, and Annja took advantage of the opportunity to drive a knee up toward his groin.

That blow never landed, however, for he brought his own leg up, blocking the strike and taking the knee against his thigh. It still hurt, she knew that, but it wasn’t the debilitating blow she’d hoped for.

He made that clear seconds later when he began hammering her with his fists, throwing face strikes and body shots with remarkable alacrity, moving at a speed that was unexpected given his large size.

Annja blocked the majority of them, her forearms and hands moving as fast as her opponent’s, but the few that got through told her she wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever. Her blows were doing less damage than his, and that differential would eventually hand the confrontation to him. She needed to end this quickly if she wanted anything left in the tank for what was to come.

No sooner had the notion occurred to her than he managed to slip a punch past her defenses and she took a fist high on the right side of her face, snapping her head around and sending her to the floor.

Dazed by the blow, Annja was just pushing herself up off the cement floor, trying to get back to her feet, when the first kick caught her on the left side of her rib cage. She felt one of her ribs snap beneath the force of the blow. The kick lifted her up and bounced her off the SUV’s tire before she dropped back on the floor.

If she stayed there she was going to get kicked to death.

Move, girl, move!

She scrambled back to her hands and knees, only to take another kick to the stomach. Her breath left her in a great rush, and when she tried to inhale again, she found she couldn’t; he’d hit her solar plexus dead-on with the toe of his boot, temporarily paralyzing her diaphragm.

She fought to inhale, her entire being focused on getting that next breath and filling her lungs with air. Distantly she was aware of the guard continuing to kick away, but with all her attention focused on not suffocating she could barely summon the strength to defend herself.

Breathe! Come on, breathe!

Another kick slammed into her, and then all of a sudden her lungs were inflating as her body finally decided to listen to her brain. She sucked life-giving air into her system.

She could sense her opponent pulling back his leg, getting ready to deliver another blow.

Not this time.

As the kick came in, she spun around and grabbed his leg, trapping it against her torso, and pulled backward, yanking him off his feet.

He hit the floor hard, and she threw herself atop his body, pinning him to the ground with her knees. As he reached for her neck, Annja reared up over him, her hands held together over her head.

When she thrust her hands downward a second later, they were no longer empty.

The sword plunged into the middle of his chest, only stopping when it struck the cement floor on the other side. The guard stared up at her with surprised eyes and then died, alive one minute and gone the next.

32

Annja let her sword vanish back into the otherwhere and then climbed slowly off the dead man. She was bruised and battered but alive.

The sound of running feet caught her attention and she stumbled around to the back of the SUV to see that Owens had abandoned Csilla’s wheelchair and was now making a run for the elevator.

Oh, no, you don’t!

She started after him, only to catch sight of Radecki coming out of a door she hadn’t noticed earlier, a few feet from the elevator. He was pointing something in her direction.

Annja threw herself behind the SUV just as the rear window exploded, sending glass flying.

“You’re not getting out of here, Creed,” Radecki yelled, “so why make this difficult?”

His voice echoed in the confined space of the garage. If she hadn’t seen him, Annja would have been hard-pressed to know where the sound was coming from.

“You should have just gone home when Tamás told you to, you know? That would have saved a number of people, yourself included, a lot of trouble. But that would have been too easy, huh?”

Annja rose to a crouch and cautiously tried to look through the SUV’s window, but the tint was so dark she couldn’t see anything.

“No, you had to stick your nose where it didn’t belong, and so here we are.”

Yeah, and you sound all broken up over it, too, she thought as she got down on her hands and knees to look underneath the car.

She couldn’t see much of Radecki, just his shoes, but that was enough to pinpoint his location. As she looked on, he began slowly walking toward the SUVs.

Annja didn’t think he was coming to wish her well.

As he approached, she slowly backed away from him, moving around the side of the vehicle to keep herself out of his sight. When he stopped near the side of the vehicle, Annja got the sense he was about to stoop and look under it, so she moved to crouch behind the tire.

Annja needed to act quickly. She couldn’t stay where she was—Radecki was coming around the front of the vehicle, headed in her direction. She couldn’t circle around the back, because that would expose her to Owens. With nowhere else to go, she slid beneath the SUV next to her, pushing herself sideways with hands and feet until she came out again on the opposite side.

That put her behind the very last vehicle in the row, out of sight of both men for the moment. She crouched there below the window, her feet hidden from view by the rear tire.

She heard Radecki call out to Owens. “Where did she go?”

“She’s around the other side. Between the first two vehicles!”

Wrong.

But that was fine with her. She listened closely, heard Radecki moving between the first and second vehicles, heading for the rear. She waited until he reached the SUV’s bumper and then moved to the far front corner of her own.

A glance beneath the cars showed Radecki moving toward her, and she knew it was time. Her heart was racing and her hands itched for her sword, but she didn’t draw it out. She wanted to get the gun away from him and take control of the situation, but she didn’t want to kill him.

She was going to have to do this the hard way.

Radecki slowed as he got close to the front of the SUV, raised his gun and then spun quickly around the corner, expecting to see Annja hiding in front of the second vehicle.

Except she wasn’t there.

Annja was already surging toward him. As he turned and brought his gun up, her foot lashed out in a perfectly timed crescent kick that struck the inside of his wrist, knocking the gun aside even as he pulled the trigger.

The shot went wide, ricocheting off the Suburban beside her, but Annja barely noticed as the bullet swept past. She planted her foot as it came down, using it as a fulcrum to spin her body the rest of the way through the arc and delivering a smashing elbow strike to Radecki’s jaw.

The blow drove Radecki against the front of the SUV, and Annja moved in on him, pinning him in place. She grabbed his right hand and slammed it against the grille of the car—once, twice, three times—until his fingers went numb and he had no choice but to drop the gun.

Annja kicked it under the SUV.

Radecki was disarmed, but not out of the fight. He reversed Annja’s grip on his wrist and caught hers instead, spinning her around and locking his other arm around her throat, pulling her back against his chest in the process.

“I’m going to make you pay for that,” he said in her ear as he pulled his arm tighter, choking her.

Annja’s lungs started to burn seconds after he grabbed hold of her. She was already exhausted from her fight with the guard, and she couldn’t take much more of this abuse. She needed to get out of his grip and she needed to do it quickly, or she’d be unconscious and completely at his mercy.

She couldn’t pry his arm free, not with the way he had it locked up against his other one, so she didn’t even bother trying. Instead, she reached into the otherwhere, wrapped her hands around the hilt of her sword and dragged it into the real world.

The blade flashed into existence, the hilt clasped tightly between her two hands, and Annja drove it backward, running the flat of the blade against the edge of her body as a guide, hoping to skewer her assailant where he stood.

Fortunately for Radecki, Annja’s aim was a little off. The position of her body and the growing dimness in front of her eyes as the air was choked out of her caused the blade to shift to the left. Instead of running through the center of his gut, the blade simply slashed through the fatty tissue on the outside of his torso.

It hurt—hurt a lot, no doubt—but it wasn’t fatal.

The strike did accomplish her objective, though. Radecki loosened his chokehold, and that was enough to allow her to break his grip entirely.

She spun away from him, bringing the sword up and around in a whistling arc, then slashing downward in the kind of blow designed to split a man in two.

Except the man in question was no longer where he’d been a moment before. Radecki had dived to the right, and instead of cleaving him in half, her sword slashed into the hood of the vehicle with the shriek of tearing steel.

Radecki turned his dive into a rolling somersault and came up on his feet, facing Annja. He was bleeding from the wound in his side, but it didn’t look bad enough to take him out, an observation he proved when he charged her as soon as he was back on his feet.

Her sword was embedded in the SUV’s hood, and she tried to tug it free.

It wouldn’t move.

It was stuck, good and fast.

Radecki had already closed half the distance between them. She had only seconds to act.

Annja was about to order the sword to vanish, thereby freeing it from its metal trap, but decided against it. She had a better idea.

As Radecki charged toward her, arms ready to grab her again, Annja waited until the very last second and then leaped up into the air, using the sword as a fulcrum to support her weight. At the top of her arc, she kicked outward with one foot.

The toe of her boot struck Radecki right on the temple.

He crashed into the front of the vehicle and went down without a sound as Annja landed.

Radecki lay there on the floor of the garage, unmoving.

Finish him now before he can do more harm.

For a moment, Annja considered doing just that. She let go of the sword, and as she did it flashed out of existence and then popped back into her hand, ready to deliver the fatal blow.

Radecki had helped kidnap and murder dozens of women. He had shown no remorse and would certainly continue doing so if Annja couldn’t stop him.

In Annja’s view, Radecki certainly deserved to die for his actions.

But Annja was not judge, jury and especially not executioner.

As near as she could tell, she’d been called to bear the sword as a representative of justice, truth and righteousness. Killing Radecki—no, murdering him—would be a violation of all the sword and its original bearer stood for and of her own tacit agreement to continue that tradition.

However much she might want to do so, killing him now while he lay defenseless would be wrong.

She turned away, and in doing so caught sight of Owens frantically pushing the elevator call button while looking back at her with frightened eyes.

Annja knew Owens would sound the alarm, but it would take time to coordinate a response. She intended to be long gone by that point.

It was time to get out of here.

She ran over to Csilla’s wheelchair, grabbed the handles and began pushing it as fast as it would go as she ran for the gate and the ramp to freedom that lay just beyond.

Thirty feet...

Twenty feet...

Ten feet...

Almost there.

Something punched her hard in the leg, knocking her feet out from under her. She fell forward, unbalancing the wheelchair in the process and sending it crashing to the floor. Annja could only watch in dismay as Csilla toppled to the ground.

After a moment, Annja was finally able to identify the sound echoing in her ears—a gunshot.