Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

The American they were flanking was clearly such a man. A soldier. A warrior. A survivor. They could see it and smell it and practically feel the vibe coming off his skin. Matei had unloaded on him, worked him over like they had never before seen him do to anyone. It was a miracle that he was conscious and alert, let alone able to stand upright. But neither of them was taking any chances with somebody like him. He had a tightly wrapped menace about him. A ferocious aura. It oozed from his skin, his pores, his glands. Like from a tiger in a cage.

In Bela’s mind, he even looked like a tiger or some sort of predatory cat with that weird right eye. He had trained Pakistani forces on the Line of Control and seen his share of them stalking the high mountain wilds of Kashmir. Though they were supposed to be extinct there, he’d seen them. And he could tell this dude was his own fucking species of rare and dangerous beast. One could not let one’s guard down with him for a minute.

The two guards had lifted him off the floor, heaving and hauling him upright, then dragging him back toward the middle of the Great Hall so he was within a foot or two of the dead girl’s sprawled, bloody body. Meanwhile, Lazlo had stayed up on the balcony like a sniper on a perch. He was a Chechen, and all Chechens were half-crazy.

Both Bela and Agoston would have admitted what Lazlo did to the girl was over the line. Excessive and distasteful as hell. They understood why he’d put a bullet in her head: she was useless to them alive, and who knew what she had seen in the castle...or what the loose-lipped Zolcu might have revealed to her? Also, if you wanted somebody like the American to talk, you had to send a shock to his system, hit him where it hurt. They got that. No criticism of Lazlo there.

But beating her, doing all that unnecessary damage, it was way out of bounds. Sure, the girl was only one of a thousand pretty young women from Cluj, a short skirt and hot pair of legs who sought the thrill of rubbing up to a member of the vampiri elite, saw it as a possible ticket out of her monotonous, ordinary life. But the two bodyguards really didn’t appreciate how Lazlo’s actions reflected on their own professionalism. It went beyond his being a Chechen hothead. He seemed to have flown completely off the handle.

And the truth was they weren’t too sure about Matei right now.

They stood behind the American, Bela holding his left arm, Agoston his right. Broad and hulking, Matei towered in front of him, getting right up in his face.

“There were half a dozen of you in the castle,” he said. “Two armored trucks. Ten to twenty men between them, yes? And a stealth delivery aircraft. I want to know what you’re all doing in Satu Mare.”

Carmody stared at him. He tasted copper and salt. Blood was seeping into his mouth from the inside of his cheeks.

“We’re talent scouts,” he said. “Casting for big, bald, and ugly.”

Matei just stood there looking baleful.

“Again,” he said. “Why did you fucking come here?”

Carmody forced a smile onto his lips. It hurt like hell. They were split and misshapen from the pounding he’d taken.

“Somebody gave me your name,” he said. “Can you sing or dance?”

Matei wound up, pulling his arm back to its full extension like a javelin thrower, then swinging it forward and slapping him hard and openhanded across the face. Carmody’s jaw snapped sideways. He felt the plates of his skull joggle and shift. His stomach heaved with nausea. It was like getting whacked with the flat end of an oar.

“Motherfucker.” The giant’s voice was a harsh rattle. “I’ll crack open your head and piss on your brains.”

Carmody didn’t think that was hyperbole. Matei was a brute, an anabolic-steroid user from the looks of him, and he was in an eruptive rage.

He balled his hand into a fist, loaded up again. And was about to strike his blow when the motorcycle came hurtling through the wicket gate.

Kali thundered into the castle at fifty miles an hour—fast, but not so fast she couldn’t quickly bring the machine under control.

She throttled back, taking in the scene inside the hall at a glance. Carmody was a few yards to her left, his back more or less turned toward her. Two uniformed guards were positioned behind him like bookends, gripping his arms, their backs also turned. A third towered in front of Carmody, facing him, his fist clenched as if he was about to strike a massive blow. Above them at a right angle, on a projecting balcony, a fourth.

A woman was sprawled on the floor under the balcony in a pool of red. Kali could guess who she was and what had happened to her.

She swung around toward the group of men. They had heard the roar of the motorcycle and turned their heads in her direction and were looking at her. All of them, including Carmody, looking at her with varying degrees of surprise.

Like Carmody, she had recognized the giant immediately. Drajan’s man. The one she’d brought down to the pavement outside Club Energie.

The two guards behind Carmody had let go of him to raise their weapons. But the second it took them to react made all the difference, and she sped toward them before they even got the rifles out in front of them.

Agoston was already firing, but his aim was off. His bullets chittering harmlessly past her ear, she kept hurtling forward on the bike. He had backed away from Carmody when he turned to face her, only a step or two, but it gave her another opening. She went straight at him, no hesitation.

He tried jumping away at the last instant, but it was too late. Kali struck him in his center of mass, knocking him into the air. The impact sent him flying for several feet before he hit the marble floor with a flat, thudding crash.

Then the hiss of gunfire. From above her. The man on the balcony had angled his rifle down over the rail and was trying to pick her off.

Meanwhile, Carmody hadn’t stood still. As the guards released him, he had seen his chance and moved in on Bela, close in, all with one large stride. His right hand under the front of Bela’s gun barrel, he drove it back, back, back with the heel of his palm, pushing its business end up into the air.

Bela was a seasoned operative. But his astonishment at the motorcycle’s unexpected appearance slowed him down a little, and Carmody had leverage working in his favor. He moved in even closer, reaching out his left hand to grab hold of the butt stock. Both hands locked around the weapon, he twisted and pulled and wrenched it free of Bela’s grip.

Then he turned it on him.

Bela stood there empty-handed, looking confused. The gun had been taken with such swift, sudden ease it might as well have vanished into thin air. Except it hadn’t vanished. The American was holding it on him. All in a split second, their situations had reversed.

He instantly knew what was coming. He had killed a lot of men in his life and knew he was going to die and wondered how it would be.

He stared up the length of the barrel. Staring back, his face a bruised, pounded red mask, Carmody put three bullets into him. The freelancer’s look of bafflement deepened, blood brewing from his chest. Then he fell dead on the spot.

A burst of semiautomatic fire sizzled past Carmody’s ear before the operative’s body hit the floor. It came from the balcony to his left even as he saw the giant charging him from a few feet away to the right. He’d picked up one of the primitive weapons that lined the Great Hall—a morningstar mace, its head a spiked metal ball, the wooden shaft bound in rawhide. He raised it over his head, brandishing it like a medieval warrior.

In that same beat of time, Carmody heard the loud throb of Kali’s motorcycle from the far end of the hall and glanced toward the sound. The space was expansive and bare, free of obstacles to the moving bike. She had made a wide clockwise loop of it without decreasing speed.