LITMIR.BIZ

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get antsy and start firing.

      Then his back touched the double doors. Another step and he pushed them open, nudging Otets along with him with a shove from the Beretta’s barrel.

      Before the doors swung shut again, Otets growled at his men. “He does not leave here alive!”

      Then they closed, and the pair of them were in the next room, the wine-making room, with bottles clinking and the sweet smell of grapes. As soon as they were through, Reid whipped around, the Glock aimed at chest level—still keeping the Beretta trained on Otets.

      A bottling and corking machine was running, but it was mostly automated. The only person in the entire wide room was a single tired-looking Russian woman wearing a green headscarf. At the sight of the gun, and Reid, and Otets, her weary eyes went wide in terror and she threw both hands up.

      “Turn those off,” Reid said in Russian. “Do you understand?”

      She nodded vigorously and threw two levers on the control panel. The machines whirred down, slowing to a halt.

      “Go,” he told her. She gulped and backed away slowly toward the exit door. “Quickly!” he shouted harshly. “Get out!”

      “Da,” she murmured. The woman scurried to the heavy steel exit, threw it open, and dashed out into the night. The door slammed shut again with a resonant boom.

      “Now what, Agent?” Otets grunted in English. “What is your plan of escape?”

      “Shut up.” Reid leveled the gun at the double doors to the next room. Why hadn’t they come through yet? He couldn’t very well keep going without knowing where they were. If there was a back door to the facility, they might be outside waiting for him. If they followed, there was no way he could get Otets into the SUV and drive away without getting shot. In here there was no threat of explosives; they could take a shot if they had it. Would they risk killing Otets to get to him? Jangled nerves and a gun were not an ideal combination for anyone, even their boss.

      Before he could decide on his next move, the powerful fluorescent lights overhead went out. In an instant they were plunged into darkness.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      Reid couldn’t see a thing. There were no windows in the facility. The workers in the other room must have thrown some breakers, because even the sounds of the machinery in the next room faded and fell silent.

      He quickly reached out for the place he knew Otets to be and grabbed onto the Russian’s collar before he could make a run for it. Otets made a small choking sound as Reid yanked him backward. In the same moment, a red emergency light came on, just a bare bulb jutting from the wall just over the door. It bathed the room in a soft, eerie glow.

      “These men are not fools,” Otets said quietly. “You will not make it out of this alive.”

      His mind raced. He needed to know where they were—or better yet, he needed them to come to him.

      But how?

      It’s simple. You know what to do. Stop fighting it.

      Reid took a deep breath through his nose, and then he did the only thing that made sense in the moment.

      He shot Otets.

      The sharp report of the Beretta echoed in the otherwise silent room. Otets screamed in pain. Both hands flew to hold his left thigh—the bullet had only grazed him, but it bled liberally. He spat a long, angry slur of Russian curses.

      Reid grabbed onto Otets’s collar again and yanked him backward, nearly off his feet, and forced him down behind the bottling conveyor. He waited. If the men were still inside, they would have definitely heard the shot and would come running. If no one came, they were outside somewhere, lying in wait.

      He got his answer a few seconds later. The swinging double doors were kicked open from the other side hard enough to smack against the wall behind them. The first through was the man with the AK, tracking the barrel left and right quickly in a wide sweep. Two others were right behind him, both armed with pistols.

      Otets groaned in pain and gripped his leg tightly. His people heard it; they came around the corner of the bottling machine with their weapons raised to find Otets sitting on the floor, hissing through his teeth with his wounded leg prostrate.

      Reid, however, was not there.

      He stole quickly around the other side of the machine, staying in a crouch. He pocketed the Beretta and grabbed an empty bottle from the conveyor. Before they could even turn, he smashed the bottle over the head of the nearest worker, a Middle Eastern man, and then jammed the jagged bottleneck into the throat of the second. Warm blood ran over his hand as the man sputtered and fell.

      One.

      The African with the AK-47 spun, but not fast enough. Reid used his forearm to shove the barrel aside, even as a fusillade of bullets ripped through the air. He stepped forward with the Glock, pressed it beneath the man’s chin, and pulled the trigger.

      Two.

      One more shot finished off the first terrorist—since clearly that’s what he was dealing with, he decided—still lying unconscious on the floor.

      Three.

      Reid breathed hard, trying to will his heart into slowing down. He didn’t have time to be horrified by what he had just done, nor did he really want to think about it. It was as if Professor Lawson had gone into shock, and the other part had taken over completely.

      Movement. To the right.

      Otets crawled from behind the machine and made a grab for the AK. Reid turned quickly and kicked him in the stomach. The force of it sent the Russian rolling over, holding his side and groaning.

      Reid took up the AK. How many rounds were fired? Five? Six. It was a thirty-two-round magazine. If the clip was full, he still had twenty-six rounds.

      “Stay put,” he told Otets. Then, much to the Russian’s surprise, Reid left him there and went back through the double doors to the other side of the facility.

      The bomb-making room was bathed in a similar red glow from an emergency light. Reid kicked open the door and immediately dropped to one knee—in case anyone had a gun trained on the entrance—and swept left and right. There was no one there, which meant there had to be a back door. He found it quickly, a steel security door between the stairs and the southern-facing wall. Likely it only opened from the inside.

      The other three were out there somewhere. It was a gamble—he had no way to tell if they were waiting for him right on the other side of the door, or if they had tried to circle around to the front of the building. He needed a way to hedge his bet.

      This is, after all, a bomb-making facility…

      In the far corner on the opposite side, past the conveyor, he found a long wooden crate roughly the size of a coffin and filled with packing peanuts. He sifted through them until he felt something solid and hauled it out. It was a black matte plastic case, and he already knew what was inside it.

      He set it on the melamine table carefully and opened it. More to his chagrin than surprise, he recognized it immediately as a suitcase bomb, set with a timer but able to be bypassed by a dead man’s switch as a fail-safe.

      Sweat beaded on his forehead. Am I really going to do this?

      New visions flashed across his mind—Afghani bomb-makers missing fingers and entire limbs from poorly built incendiaries. Buildings going up in smoke from one wrong move, a single misconnected wire.

      What choice do you have? It’s either this, or get shot.

      The dead man’s switch was a small green rectangle about the size of a pocketknife with a lever on one side. He picked it up in his left hand and held his breath.

      Then he squeezed it.

      Nothing happened. That was a good sign.

      He made sure to hold the lever closed in his fist (releasing it would immediately detonate the bomb) and he set the suitcase’s timer for twenty minutes—he

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