Page 121 of Fatal Pattern

Barclay and Wells scrambled for the far side of the room, using the support pillars for cover. Blade reached his Glock, scooped it, came up behind a pillar of his own.

A gun barrel pressed against his temple from the other side of the concrete.

Lock.

He’d forgotten about Lock.

Pure instinct. Blade’s left hand shot up, fingers finding the slide, ripping it backward and off the frame in one motion. The pieces hit the floor. Slide one direction, frame the other.

Lock stared at the disassembled weapon for a fraction of a second.

The knife came out.

Blade still had his Glock, but the space between them was nothing. Two feet, maybe less. Lock knew it. A knife at this range beat a drawn pistol every time, and the way he moved forward said he knew exactly how to do that math.

Blade backed off the trigger, shifted his grip, used the Glock’s frame as a blocking tool on the first slash. The second got through, raking across his forearm. He dropped the gun without meaning to, fingers going slick.

Now they were even.

Lock pressed forward, every step cutting off Blade’s angles. He was fresh. Blade was bleeding from three places, his knee threatening to buckle every time he pivoted, the beach wound screaming across his ribs with each breath.

He caught a thrust on his forearm, deflected it wide, drove a palm strike into Lock’s nose. Felt it give.

Lock’s eyes watered but he didn’t slow. An elbow strike caught Blade’s jaw. He tasted blood. Another drove into his collarbone, and his shoulder went briefly dead. Lock pivoted behind him, and the forearm locked across his throat.

Blade clawed at it. Drove his elbow back into Lock’s ribs. Once. Twice. The grip didn’t change.

His vision began to gray at the edges. Across the room through the narrowing tunnel of it he could see Tori. Wells had her pinned from the left, Barclay had worked around from the right, and she had nowhere to move without leaving Stryker exposed. Her Glock tracked between them, buying seconds she didn’t have.

She couldn’t see everything at once.

Nobody could.

Wells fired. She ducked left. Barclay fired. She ducked right. Back and forth, walking her into a corner one shot at a time. They weren’t trying to hit her yet. They were herding her. The moment she ran out of bullets, it was over.

She needed someone to pull one of them off her.

Blade was that someone. He’d always been that someone.

His fingers found Lock’s forearm and couldn’t move it.

The gray closed in, sounds going hollow and distant, his body slacking.

He was going to die here, listening to the gunshot that killed her.

33

Muzzle flashes strobed through the dust. The air tasted like pulverized concrete. She had two of them working her from each side. Wells from the left, Barclay cutting off the right with the pistol Wells had tossed him. Rock peppered her shoulder like hail as another round bit into the concrete.

She was pinned. Where was Blade?

Wells and Barclay had a pattern. Controlled bursts on the left, Barclay covering the gaps on the right, walking her into a corner one shot at a time. One magazine against two shooters with an unconscious man at her back.

This wasn’t working.

Across the room, she saw Wells’s agent drop Blade’s body like a sack of sand. The sound hit Tori in the center of her chest. For a second, she wasn’t sure if he was alive, but then Blade’s foot twitched. His hand slid under his back, fingers searching for a weapon.

A chunk of concrete popped under her boot. More were scattered around her feet. One the size of a golf ball. One a softball. In the Kingdom parking lot, Stryker had spent an afternoon trying to teach her to pitch. She’d nearly taken out his side mirror. He’d laughed and told her she had the arm of a pitcher and the aim of a blind man. The memory pressed against the back of her throat, and she pushed it down hard. Stryker was three feet behind her in a wheelchair. Her turn to save him.