Марк Грини - One Minute Out

She was certain they were taking her someplace to torture her for information, and then to kill her.

And wherever the hell Harry had run to, his promises to protect her rang hollow now. Still, she didn’t blame him. She’d panicked at the window: a lifelong fear of heights, a fear of most everything that had to do with danger, was to blame. If she’d just trusted the American, she wouldn’t be moments away from death now.

Her teeth chattered and her mind raced, and she fought a wave of nausea as she continued down the steps.

• • •

I’m hauling ass two blocks and two passageways to the left of and parallel to where Talyssa and the men in black are descending. I had to wait for them to pass my position before running here to the east, behind Talyssa’s building, past the window she climbed out of, and then I turned to my right to begin my own descent. Now I’m thirty or forty seconds behind the group, but I feel sure I’m making up for it with my speed.

As I run I speak again to Talyssa, still softly, because this medieval neighborhood feels like one damn echo chamber. “Walk as slowly as you can. You have to slow them down.”

I hear her speak to the men around her in English, her voice halting. “Please. Slow down. I can’t walk this fast.”

A man snaps at her in a heavy accent. “No talking. Walk faster.”

“I . . . I hurt my ankle when you knocked me down.”

I can hear frustration in the man’s voice now as he speaks to the others in a foreign tongue that I think may be Albanian. When Talyssa says, “Thank you,” I know they are complying with her request and slowing.

I run faster. At each little narrow intersection I glance to my right, hoping to see the group so I know I am getting in front of them. I’m having a hard time coming up with a cogent plan, but I’m definitely preparing for a confrontation. Taking on eight goons at the same time in an outdoor stone stairwell barely eight feet across seems like a bad course of action, but I don’t know that I have any choice.

I consider letting them just take her and then following them to see where they go, but I see the flaw in that plan. If I lose Talyssa, then she’s dead. If the Consortium runs the chief of police of this town, if they have the juice to get a bevy of cops for a surveillance operation, then I don’t see why they would pull the cops and send in an Albanian gang to grab the woman if they plan on simply interrogating and intimidating her.

No. They could have used dirty cops for that. The fact that they didn’t kill her immediately tells me they need to take her to a secondary location, perhaps with plans to torture information out of her, and the fact that they brought in a foreign criminal gang to snatch her tells me they then plan on killing her.

Either way, right now I’m Talyssa Corbu’s only hope.

• • •

Just as I sprint through the next intersection, doing my best to stay as far from the streetlamps as possible, I gaze to my right again, expecting another narrow east-west street. But instead I see I’ve run out into the northwestern edge of a large triangle-shaped open-air area, two blocks wide. The entourage is just entering the square on the southeastern side, and though I’m forty yards away, in low light, and in front of them, there is no way they can miss a man running at top speed.

I hear immediate shouts, both echoing around me and through my earpiece from Talyssa’s microphone and, just as I disappear from their view, I see two of the eight men peel off and come my way. They are a minute out if they move along the square at a careful pace, but less than half that if they run.

I figure they’ll run, because they won’t know for sure I’m with Talyssa and won’t immediately move in a defensive posture. They find me curious enough to send a couple guys to check, and I’m sure someone has told them to be on the lookout for a lone male operator in all this, but they aren’t going to just open fire.

I don’t think.

And I won’t open fire on them. I have no qualms about killing a couple of kidnappers, but I want to avoid a direct confrontation, if possible, while there are so many guns around the girl. At the same time, however, I don’t want to go into full retreat, where I’ll likely lose my chance to get her back.

Looking towards the sky as I run to the north, I make my decision.

I’m going up.

To my left a copper drain spout climbs the side of the three-story building, all the way to the roof. I adjust my backpack and start heading up, moving as quickly as possible, hoping like hell I can get over the lip of the tiled roof before the two Albanians make it onto my little stairway passage. For a brief moment I consider pulling my pistol and firing a couple of rounds into the cobblestones to slow their approach, but instead I just concentrate on climbing as fast as I can.

My knuckles scrape against the ancient walls behind the drainpipe as I struggle for handholds, and the toes of my boots dig for purchase as I climb. Quickly I realize I’m not going to make it all the way before the men arrive below me, but I chose a pipe out of the illumination of the streetlamps, so I do have another way to remain undetected. On the second floor I swing away from the pipe and step onto the ledge of a darkened window. I squat down, positioning my body totally within the window’s frame, next to a planter with a small orange tree in it, and then I freeze.

Below me two men run into view, pistols swinging low in their hands, and they continue down the eight-foot-wide staircase towards the main street of the Old Town, still several blocks away.

Since I’m in my black clothing and squatting in front of the black window, twenty feet above their heads and in dim light, they don’t see me. Once they travel another block down, I reach back out to the drainpipe, carefully take hold, and swing my body off the window ledge. Quickly I continue my ascent up to the roof.

Getting up the overhang is tricky, but the drainpipe helps as I dangle off it and climb out, hand over hand, until I can pull myself up onto the tiles.

The building I’ve chosen is on the opposite side of the street from Talyssa and her captors, and this puts me farther away from her, with two narrow north-south passages between us. I run along the angled roof and see that there is one more connected building before the next east-west street, so I leap down to it, its roof a few feet lower than the one I climbed onto.

Rushing again through the dark, I tell myself I can make the leap across the narrow alley to the next roof, one story lower because it’s farther down the hill that descends to the center of the Old Town. I pick up my pace, pull my backpack off my back, and swing it in my arm as hard as I can. I let it go, and it flies through the air in front of me over the street. While it sails on, I time my footfalls so my last one will land right at the roof’s edge, and then I leap, giving it everything I have.

I sail over clotheslines full of drying laundry, my feet and arms flailing.

I make it over the narrow street and land tumbling onto the roof, using my forward momentum to keep from rolling off the steep tiles. The Glock on my hip bites into me when I bang it on the hard surface, but I’m up on my feet with the momentum of my roll and I lean down and snatch my pack as I climb, sliding it over my shoulders.

I’m well behind Talyssa and the others now, still two blocks west of me, and I don’t yet have a plan as to what I’ll do if I manage to catch up.

But I keep going. If I don’t reach her before they get her piled into a van and out of here, or I don’t get to my vehicle to tail them, then I won’t get another chance.

Almost out of breath, I speak softly for Talyssa’s earpiece as I run on. “Slow them down. You have to slow them down.”