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“One armed subject on the walkway approaching you at a run. One of the Cubans with Lancer is dead, and Lancer is in the apartment with Pace at this time.”
Court didn’t have a fucking clue how Zoya knew any of this, but he told himself he’d ask later. For now he leaned out of the stairwell, his Glock 26 up in front of his face, and he opened fire on a baldheaded man racing in his direction, firing twice into the man’s burly chest. The subject tumbled down hard on his knees and slammed his face into the concrete, and then his pistol clanked up the walkway in front of him, all the way to the open door halfway down from Court’s position.
A fresh exchange of pistol fire inside the third-floor apartment told Court that Pace was engaged with Lancer, so he raced forward as fast as he could.
•••
Zoya watched the action from the laptop in the van, while right next to her, Contreras had his eyes on the pistol barrel pressed hard against his kneecap. He thought he might be able to grab the gun and wrench it free of the American woman, even though she had surprisingly strong-looking arms and shoulders.
She spun her face to his, disrupting his plan.
“Fly into that apartment and crash your drone into Lancer!”
Contreras didn’t move. “Are you crazy? The drone’s less than a kilogram, what’s it going to—”
She put the barrel of the gun to the pilot’s temple now. “Miss him and you die right here!” she screamed, and Contreras lurched for the joystick.
•••
The crawl space above the apartment was ancient, low, and dark. Jim Pace had no idea where he was going, he just scooted laterally to the south, ignoring cobwebs and rat droppings, hoping to make it all the way to, or at least near, the broken service elevator so he could get into the shaft and scale down so he might have a chance to get out of here.
He’d heard shooting outside, and he knew Gentry was on his way.
His eyeglasses had come off on his climb through the ceiling tile, as had his earpiece, and he’d partially broken the tile putting it back, so he had no illusions that Lancer was going to miss the fact that the man who’d been shooting at him thirty seconds earlier had somehow evaporated into thin air, but it was his hope Lancer would first try the back door, and this would buy Gentry some time to get his ass up here to help out.
In the meantime, to increase the speed of his escape, he slipped the Glock pistol in the small of his back, rose to his knees, and moved forward, his back scraping the metal roofing above him as he made his way to the south, foot by arduous foot.
•••
Lancer didn’t know what the gunfire was all about outside on the exterior walkway, but he put it out of his mind as he spun around the doorway into the tiny kitchen, firing his suppressed pistol as he went. When he saw that the room was empty, he ceased fire, ran to the door, put his hand on the latch, and then stopped himself. Looking up, he saw a broken ceiling tile, below which was a table covered with bits of the tile.
He shifted his weapon up and opened fire into the ceiling around the broken tile. After just three rounds his slide locked open, so he dropped the magazine and loaded another from his belt.
Raising his weapon again to dump another mag, he prepared to press the trigger but heard a noise in the apartment through his ringing ears.
He stepped back into the living room with his gun up and found himself face-to-face with a quadcopter zooming through the front door directly at him.
The drone slammed into his gun hand, then skittered to the floor.
Lancer looked down at it, then looked back up, turned, and dove to his right into the kitchen behind a string of gunfire.
He slammed hard onto the filthy floor, tumbled, and came up onto his knees, his weapon pointed back to the living room.
His mind raced at a thousand miles per hour, and his heart pounded like a galloping thoroughbred, because Court fucking Gentry was right fucking here.
•••
Court knew Lancer was in the kitchen, and he pictured the kitchen from the layout of the rest of this shitty apartment, and presumed it to be very small.
But he didn’t dare fire through the wall, because he didn’t know if Jim Pace was still alive, somewhere in his line of fire.
Seconds earlier he’d been right about to jump into the apartment from the walkway when a small quadcopter whizzed by his face like it had been shot out of a cannon, and when he turned into the doorway, he saw that the device had slammed into Lancer before bouncing harmlessly against the living room wall. He now knew Zoya was in control of the pilot, and she had bought him the instant he needed to avoid catching a 10-millimeter round to the brain pan.
But he hadn’t managed to hit Lancer before the killer made it to concealment.
Unsure what to do next, he retreated back out onto the walkway, knelt down behind the brick wall next to the doorway, and called out.
“Kincaid?”
