Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

“I knew you’d come,” he said. “Like a dog to its own stink.” He lifted the handgun and pulled the trigger.

Annika, in shadow, was already moving. The bullet whizzed by her ear. Then she kicked out with her right boot, connecting with the point of Xhafa’s chin. The chair tumbled over backward. Reaching out, she plucked the Sig Sauer from him and pulled the chair back onto its feet. Xhafa sat dazed, blood drooling from a corner of his mouth.

“Sure I came back,” she said. “You’re the dog, you’re the stink.”

That’s when the barking of the dogs rang through the house.

Xhafa smiled through his pain. “Bang, bang,” he said. “You’re dead.”

THIRTY-ONE

THEY WERE pounding up the safehouse stairs when Alli felt a breeze on her cheek, cold enough to make her shiver.

“They’re coming.”

It was Emma. Alli fought down a certain terror. Emma spoke to Jack only when he was near death or in dire straits. Was it the same with her?

“Prepare yourself, Alli.”

“Company,” Alli said to Thatë.

—Emma, stay with me.

Two men appeared on the second-floor landing. The moment they saw Alli and Thatë, they opened fire with AK-50s.

“I guess our cover’s blown,” Alli said as she scrambled out of the way.

Thatë opened fire with his assault rifle and the two men scattered. He advanced upward, Alli in his wake. She saw one of the men above them prone on the landing, aiming his weapon at Thatë, and she shot him. Her hands were firm, her mind unclouded. These were the lessons Jack had taught her, even before he’d brought her to the firing range for the first time. A firecracker could have gone off next to her and her concentration wouldn’t have wavered. Jack was a zen master when it came to concentration. For him, it was a necessity. In order to function more or less normally in the world took enormous amounts of concentration on his part. Anything flat with letters on it looked like a pinwheel or the inside of a lava lamp.

They were almost at the landing. Where was the other Albanian? As they reached the second floor, Thatë indicated that she go left while he went right. To the left, the banister ran along the second floor for about fifteen feet before arching upward on the flight to the third floor. Just before she reached the landing, Alli swung onto the banister. Here her smallness and light weight were a distinct advantage. Hooking her ankles through the uprights, she inched her way along. Behind her, she heard a spray of bullets and, turning, saw Thatë coming toward her. He was pointing upward; he had nailed the other Albanian.

They launched themselves up the staircase. Alli checked her watch. Less than four minutes until Vasily started his diversion.

They were only partway up, when a commanding voice called from behind them. “Stop where you are! Lay down your weapons and kneel with your hands behind your head!”

JACK COULD see Annika in the shadows, heard her speaking, presumably to Xhafa, when the barking of the attack dogs announced their entry into the house. He turned and, in a half-crouch, prepared to defend their position.

The first of the dogs appeared, its claws skittering on the wooden floor. Jack got off a shot just after it saw him. He hit a flank, but that hardly stopped the animal. It merely bared its teeth and came on. He shot it in the chest, but he was distracted by the sight in his peripheral vision of the second dog. The first dog was hardly slowed down by the two bullets and was barely two feet from Jack when he shot it in the head. It dropped in front of him, but now the second dog was upon him, its long claws extended, its jaws snapping as if it were rabid.

The sheer weight of it bowled him over. He jammed the barrel of the AK-50 between its jaws to keep it at bay, but its claws were tearing through his jacket as it if were made of tissue. He cracked his elbow into the side of the dog’s head, but that only made it angrier. The dog had hold of the AK-50 and wasn’t going to let go. He twisted it so hard, he heard the animal’s neck vertebrae click. In that moment, he let go of the weapon and used his crooked arms to jerk the dog’s neck even farther. The vertebrae cracked like a gunshot, the light went out of the animal’s eyes, and its weight slumped on top of him.

He took a deep breath and was about to retrieve the assault rifle from the dog’s clamped jaws when a voice said, “I’ll take that.”

He found himself staring up into the face of one of the guards.

ALLI TURNED to see the man with one green eye, the other blue; monstrous eyes, revealing a pitiless and relentless soul. She shivered and even Emma, beside her, seemed to quail.

“He’ll kill you, Alli. Give him the chance and he’ll kill you.”

Thatë made the mistake of trying to reason with him. “I work for Arian Xhafa. We’re here for Liridona. We have no quarrel with you.”

“The blood you’ve spilled is quarrel enough.” One eye seemed to speak while the other was deep in scheming. He was addressing Thatë but seemed to impale Alli with his implacable gaze. “No one leaves my safehouse.”

“Yours?” Thatë shook his head. “This safehouse belongs to Arian Xhafa.”

“Arian Xhafa belongs to me.”

The Syrian lifted a pearl-handled M1911 but before anyone could react, a ferociously hot fireball raced up the stairs with a massive lightning crack. The Syrian turned. Thatë shot him in the shoulder, but the Syrian, seemingly unperturbed, fired the .45. The full-metal-jacket bullet buried itself in Thatë’s chest, throwing him back against the stairs. From that semiprone position, he fired again and again, forcing the Syrian back into a room on the second floor.

“Thatë!” Alli cried, bending down to see to his wound.

But he thrust her roughly away. “Upstairs. Find Liridona and get out of here. I’ll keep this fucker out of your way.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Don’t be stupid.” He glanced up at her. “This is what I’ve trained for, this is my life. Now leave me to it.”

He began to fire again.

“Thatë—”

He shoved her hard. “Go!”

“Run, Alli.”

Tears running down her face, she turned and bolted up the stairs.

ANNIKA IGNORED the shots and the animal growling that came from the room behind her. This appeared to surprise Xhafa, until he said, “You’re not alone.”

Without a word, she hauled him out of the chair and, spinning him around, slammed him down on the floor.

“You’ll always be mine, you know,” he said. “Whatever you do, until the day you die.”

Annika straddled him. Taking a huge bowie knife out of her backpack, she proceeded to strip off his clothes, baring his back. The muscles rippled in anticipation.

Pressing the blade point to his skin, Annika proceeded to score seven concentric circles into his back, carving each circle deep into the muscles. Blood flowed, Xhafa screamed and kept on screaming.

CAROLINE WAS sitting in the passenger seat of the Syrian’s car, cradling her laptop, when she heard the volleys of gunshots. The car was parked a block away from the safehouse but the cracks sounded much closer. She turned to look out the side window just as Taroq pulled the door open.

She got out and Taroq embraced her. For all the emotion inside her, she might have been embraced by a boxcar.

“You had no trouble following us?”

He shook his head. “None at all.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

He pointed off to their left. “My car is this way.”

At his side, she walked quickly away from the Syrian’s car and never looked back.