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“Come on.”
Puller led her down the hall until they reached a door marked Stairs. He pulled it open and they headed up.
They had heard the door they had initially come through open as the wood Puller had jammed there was broken. The sounds of footsteps had carried across the open lower floor.
Now the footsteps were echoing through the building. The men after them apparently didn’t care if Puller and Knox knew they were coming. That was the confidence gained by superior numbers and firepower.
Puller led Knox up one flight of stairs after another until they reached the roof eight stories up. Puller forced the door and then used his Ka-Bar knife as a wedge on the hinge side of the door to jam it.
“Now what?” asked a perplexed Knox.
“You told me you ran track in college.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Ever practice the long jump?”
“Yes. I was pretty good at it.”
“Glad to hear that.”
“Puller, what the—”
They heard footsteps racing up the steps to the roof.
He grabbed her hand. “Let’s go.”
“What?”
They sprinted flat-out toward the edge of the roof.
Knox’s eyes bulged as she finally saw what his plan was. She started to scream but it died in her throat.
Puller’s hand still clamped around hers, they reached the small ledge, pushed off, and soared over the alley below.
For a long moment it seemed like they were suspended in the air, moving neither forward nor back.
Their momentum carried them over the multistory drop.
They hit the roof of the adjacent building, tucked, and rolled.
Before Knox could even catch her breath, Puller jerked her up and pulled her toward the access door on the building’s rooftop. He busted through it and pulled her inside and closed the door just as the men broke through the door on the roof of the building they had just been in. The armed men raced over the expanse of the roof looking for them.
Meanwhile, in the other building Puller and Knox clattered down the steps. They reached the ground floor and Puller found an exterior door leading to the side opposite the building they’d just leapt from. They pounded down the street.
Puller’s unerring sense of direction led them back to their car about twenty minutes later. They climbed inside and Knox finally let out a deep breath.
He looked at her. She was pale and shaken, her eyes staring straight ahead, as though she were in a trance or on the edge of hysteria and trying desperately to hold it together. Her face was bruised, her arm badly scraped, and her jeans and shirt torn.
“You okay?” he asked anxiously.
She slowly nodded. “Thanks for saving my life.” She paused. “And if you ever do something like that to me again, I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you.”
Chapter
61
PULLER BLINKED AWAKE the next morning. He had slept in his clothes. As he sat up he looked out the window of the motel room on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia.
The sun was starting to rise. The angle of light hit him in the eyes and he turned away.
He heard water running. He sat up and looked around.
Knox was in the bathroom. They had decided to only take one room. There was safety in numbers.
Knox padded out of the bathroom. She had taken her jeans off and the T-shirt was too short to conceal her pale thighs.
“How’s your arm?” asked Puller.
“Fine,” she said curtly.
“You feeling sore? We hit pretty hard.”
She didn’t respond.
They had not talked last night. Knox clearly was too angry to do so and Puller couldn’t come up with the words to initiate a productive discussion. He decided to try again, with a universally appealing opening.
“I’m sorry,” said Puller. He paused and added, “I thought if I told you what I was planning you might freak out and not do it. Then we’d be dead.”
She sat down on the corner of the bed and glared at him. “Have more faith in me next time,” she said, though her tone was more conciliatory.
“I will.”
She scooted up next to him and laid her head against the pillow. She closed her eyes and scrunched up her brow as she rubbed her injured arm.
“So they tried to kill Shepard and then tried to kill us. Led us right into a trap.”
“Which tells me they’re worried we’re getting close to the truth.”
“Who do you think those guys were?”
“My guess is mercenaries. They’re a dime a dozen now. Probably brought in from another country. Even if we managed to track them down they could tell us nothing. Money wired to an offshore account from an untraceable source. I’ve seen that enough times.”
“I get that when they’re operating in the Middle East, but here? Hiring killers to come to this country and kill a DoD contractor?”
He glanced at her. “Well, some assholes came to this country and knocked down buildings using planes, right? So in my book anything is possible.”
She sighed. “Right.”
“We need to find Paul. And we need to get to Jericho.”
“We have no idea where he is, and we have nothing on Jericho.”
Before he could answer his phone rang. It was his brother. He put it on speaker and laid the phone between them so Knox could hear.
Puller took a minute to fill his brother in on what had just happened. Robert listened in silence that he let linger for a few moments after Puller was finished speaking.
“Things are coming to a head, John.”
“Yeah, that I get. I just don’t know whose head is going to be left on their shoulders.”
“The guy you saw with Helen Myers is Anton Charpentier.”
“Is he a spy?”
“No, he’s a businessman. He’s not the big force behind all this. That’s my best estimate, anyway. But he is wired into some fairly substantial global business interests, and not all of them are allies of this country.”
“Shepard told us that some of the things Atalanta Group was working on have enormous commercial applications. Billions, maybe trillions.”
“They do. And which Atalanta Group is barred from exploiting. They don’t have the rights to do so.”
“She says it comes down to who holds the patents.”
“Shepard was exactly right. And the person who holds all those
