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“Just peachy, lad. Why would you ask?”
Court handed the Glock 26 to Fitzroy. “Here’s the deal. I’m gonna have to make a run for better weapons. Out on the balcony, and over the side.”
“You’re jumping off the balcony?”
“There’s a pool down there. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Stop bleeding, preferably,” Court said. “And get something out of Tudor.”
“Right.”
Court turned away and kissed Zoya. She went to the window, looked outside and then up into the night sky. “I’m clear.”
Zoya opened the window, looked out, and then kicked her legs over, lowering herself down into the smoke, while Court cracked the door back open, taking in the scene in front of him.
The fire outside had grown; the glowing made its way through the black smoke that rolled into the room through the opening in the door.
He didn’t hear footfalls from the ground vehicle, and he thought it likely it was still back by the stairs, scanning the entire area for targets.
Still, stepping out into the great room, surrounded by scalding flames and impenetrable smoke, and potentially into view of a robotic weapon, was a tough ask for his body to comply with.
He forced himself out the door, and then he lowered to his knees and crawled quickly to the right, in the direction of the flames. He got as close as he could before the heat forced him to stop; he imagined he was no more than ten feet away from the raging fire that now continued down the draperies covering the entire length of the eastern floor-to-ceiling windows of the room.
He moved forward, parallel to the flames, in the direction of where he’d last seen the robot targeting him, hoping like hell his assumption that he’d be invisible to infrared cameras in front of a wall of fire was accurate.
He figured he was still easily thirty feet away from the stairs when he stopped his crawl; the heat on his right was almost more than he could bear, but he had to try to find a place in the curtains where the fire had either burned out or dissipated enough for him to run through on his way out to the balcony.
He rose and moved forward a little more. The crackling noise of the flames masked his own footfalls as he stepped on broken glass, and this told him the window had been shattered here by the drone, and though the fire still raged next to him, he thought he could use this area to breach.
He would run through the flames, keep running, and then leap onto the railing and off the back porch, hoping to get at least ten feet away from the balcony so that he’d hit the pool and not the concrete around it.
Just as Court faced the flames and adopted the low stance of a sprinter, through the crackling blaze he was able to make out the buzzing of a large drone outside, somewhere over the balcony.
Fuck, he thought. Another kamikaze. The drone noise drifted off after a few seconds; he thought it went over the roof of the mansion, but he didn’t know if it was going to just hover there and wait for a target or if it was heading to the courtyard to dive-bomb Zoya.
Just then, he heard a booming gunshot on the ground floor, and this told him Zoya was engaged or engaging, and he had to get down there, get a shotgun, and then go help her.
With an inhalation of a lungful of smoky air, he bolted directly into the raging fire.
THIRTY-FOUR
Forty-five seconds earlier, Zoya Zakharova had dropped into black smoke and landed on the tile below the library window. Immediately she felt pain in both her knees, and she knew she’d banged them on the stairs earlier as the explosion ripped through the great room.
She ignored her body and began moving, knowing she had no time to waste.
The swirling smoke outside here in the courtyard wasn’t as bad as it was inside the great room, but it was heavy nonetheless, and she had to pick her way forward.
With her pistol out in front of her even though she could barely see and had no confidence that a handgun round would seriously impact her adversaries, she made it to the veranda heading east and west and then dropped flat. The dead sentry lay on his back ten feet in front of her, his legs splayed and blood splattering the tile behind his head. A hallway ran off to the right just at his feet, and this was the hall the limping robot had traveled down earlier, so she approached the body carefully.
Lying in the dead man’s blood, she reached over his body, took the pistol-grip pump shotgun slung around his neck, and tried to pull it off over his head. Lifting his ruined skull and limp shoulders off the tile, she began scooting the sling out from under the man, but doing this caused the lower torso of the body to move.
Without any warning, an unbearably loud gunshot boomed out of the hall, and the dead man’s right foot and ankle were blown off by a high-caliber rifle.
His left leg was hit, as well, and it snapped and shattered the bone there, bits of meat spraying in all directions.
Zoya lurched back, knowing she was out of the line of fire, but only by a couple of feet.
