Deirdre saw the surprised look on Charlie’s face. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t answer her; instead, he pressed the mic button on his radio. “Coyle for Videv?”
On the laptop, his wife said, “Charlie?”
More transmissions in a foreign tongue came through the earpiece, then Charlie again. “Coyle for Videv. What’s happening?”
Now the team leader returned the transmission. His words came out quick and clipped. “Coyle. Come down. Escort boss back to safe room.”
“Copy that. En route.”
Videv added, “Meet us in the back alley, door off kitchen.”
The back alley?
Charlie acknowledged the order without question, then ended his transmission. Looking into the camera, he said, “Darlin’, I have to go collect the protectee, bring him back here.”
“Why don’t they just bring him to—”
From the balcony behind him came the unmistakable sound of a gunshot cracking in the night; the crowd by the swimming pool below his balcony screamed, and Charlie Coyle launched to his feet.
Deirdre lowered the baby quickly. “Was that a bleedin’ gun?”
“Love you both,” he said, and he slammed his laptop shut, grabbed his suit coat, then rushed to the door of the condo. Into his earpiece he shouted, “What’s happenin’, Videv?”
Two
Charlie rushed out into the third-floor hall, fighting with his jacket to get it on his trim frame. This done, he reached for the weapon on his hip. Running for the stairs on the north side of the building, he’d just gripped the Walther in its holster when his earpiece came alive again.
It was Videv. “American is in custody. Boss fired shot in air to scare him. We’re in the alley. Hurry.”
Charlie released his hold on the pistol and began sprinting down the stairs.
—
When he reached the ground floor he raced through the building, passing hotel guests, partygoers, employees of the restaurant. Some were alarmed by the gunfire, but others were oblivious, the EDM in the air, the booze, or the party drugs in their bloodstream masking the noise. He bladed his body through small crowds in the bar off the main lobby, then raced up a narrow hallway past the lavatories, pushing the drunk and the slow and the unmindful to the side as he moved, and finally he pounded his way into the kitchen.
He ignored the cooks and cleaners and servers, pressed on at speed to the back door, then shouldered it open, finding himself on a raisedconcrete platform in an alley between the hotel and an adjacent condo tower.
He pulled up and stopped, saw a half dozen men arrayed in the dimly lit space.
At the center, Sasho Minchev stood over a man in a gray business suit kneeling on the wet ground. The stranger faced away from Charlie; a bright smear of fresh blood on the starched white collar of his shirt shone through messy shoulder-length dark hair.
A stainless steel semiautomatic pistol dangled from Sasho Minchev’s right hand. Charlie had noticed the gun in a shoulder holster under his protectee’s arm the day before, and he’d been concerned about it ever since, because his boss didn’t seem like the type to practice safe gun handling.
Charlie had wondered if the pistol on his boss’s person might be the biggest danger he’d face on this job; he wondered it even more now, because the son of a bitch had just pulled and fired it, and now it hung in his sweaty clutches, his trigger finger twitching inside the trigger guard.
Charlie’s four colleagues stood in various stages of readiness in the alley. Videv, the team leader, had positioned himself directly behind the man on his knees. Big and burly Komitov loomed just to the left, his eyes on the prisoner. Pulev, older and with a mustache that made him look like a Balkan Saddam Hussein, stood a few steps from Charlie by the door, watching the street but not looking particularly alert. Chanev, bright-eyed, swarthy, and a couple of years younger even than Charlie, stood to the kneeling man’s right, his hand on the gun on his belt and his eyes fixed on his boss, waiting for orders.
Minchev said nothing. He just stood there, a sheen of perspiration glowing on his forehead, reflecting the light from the soft white sodium vapor lamps that hung over the alley from the rear of the condo tower; more sweat sparkled through little gaps in his dark beard. His normally slicked-back hair hung down into his eyes, and his chest heaved inside his black suit. His neck rippled with sinews emerging from the collar of his burgundy silk shirt, indicating tension in his shoulders.
Charlie hadn’t seen any cocaine around in the past day, but he now thought it was likely his boss was on something, or else he was just thatdamn stimulated from shooting his gun in the air and threatening the man on his knees in front of him.
Videv’s left hand rested on the prisoner’s shoulder, and he, too, looked to his boss for direction.
It was as if nobody knew what the hell the man in charge had in mind, but they all stood at the ready, prepared to help him do it.
The scene was a shit show in the making, and Charlie’s first inclination was to rush to his protectee, disarm him, and then escort him back up to the safe room and put him to bed.
