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THERE ARE ONLY three things you can use in a close-quarters fight with two armed human beings:
Your weapon.
Your body.
Your surroundings.
I had no weapon. Which left the other two on the list. As for my body… well, I wasn’t exactly in tip-top shape. All of my muscles were laughably weak. The ground beneath my feet still felt barely firmer than vanilla pudding.
That meant I’d have to lean heavily on my surroundings. But this was the nurses’ break room. What could I do? Subdue them with paper coffee cups and a pair of rubber Crocs?
“You shouldn’t be wandering around by yourself,” said the taller of the two agents. “You could hurt yourself.”
“I heard the alarms,” I said, blinking my eyes as if I were trying to make sense of reality. “I got scared so I went to look for help…”
“Come with us, Miss Bell,” said his partner. “Everything will be okay.”
I pretended to swoon as if I were unsteady and about to collapse onto the floor. (This didn’t take too much pretending, mind you.) The taller one did the chivalrous thing and tried to catch me.
I was wrong about not having a weapon. I was holding it in my hands: the pair of scrub pants that were just my size.
I looped them around the taller agent’s neck and used it to propel his forehead straight into the face of his partner. The crack of hard skull crushing nose cartilage was unmistakable. Both cried out, swearing in German.
I dropped to the ground beneath them, and let me tell you—that felt like dropping three stories to the cold hard sidewalk. Searing pain shot through my entire body and for a moment there I thought I would pass out. This taught me an important lesson: my tolerance to pain, which used to be fairly high, had dropped to near zero. If one of these Interpol agents landed a punch, it’d be all over.
So I had to make sure neither of them got the opportunity.
I spun my body around, sweeping the legs out from under both of them. In two seconds we were a tangle of bodies on the floor of the break room. I still had a slight advantage: they were utterly baffled about what had just happened.
I had four, maybe five more seconds to use said advantage.
Quentin had trained me to take advantage of my size. My arms and legs were long and bony.In close-quarters combat, your knees and elbows will be more useful than your hands, he’d said.
I struck at both agents with a flurry of elbow and knee attacks, aimed directly at their heads. I didn’t want them in pain or temporarily hobbled; I needed them completely unconscious.
Fingers clawed at my face. I hurled an elbow back, hoping to connect with the owner of those fingers. I heard a crack and felt one of the bodies go limp.One down.
But my vision was beginning to fuzz out. I was doing too much, too soon. And the shorter Interpol agent was beginning to untangle himself from me. If he succeeded, this would all be over, and I’d be handcuffed to a hospital bed until the day I died. (Which would be two days from now, more or less.)
“Hey!”
That grabbed his attention. The agent lifted his head, giving me a target: his temple. More precisely, the area behind his eye and alongside the zygomatic bone. I drove the bare heel of my foot into that area as hard as I could.
His eyes fluttered and his body sagged, like someone had just flipped the off switch on a toy robot.
My body threatened to do the same. I dug into the last of my strength to push away from the unconscious agents. Climbed to my feet. Found shoes and a jacket. Stole a clipped pass from the waist of one of the agents. And then, finally, left the hospital.
With every step my body warned me:Never do that again.
I told my body I couldn’t make any promises.
CHAPTER 18
I WALKED THE dark and chilly streets of Berlin without direction. I had been so preoccupied with the task of escaping the hospital that I’d given very little thought to where I’d go once I got out.
My search for the killers ought to have begun back at the hotel, but that was still very much an active crime scene. I didn’t know how I’d manage to get anywhere near the place, let alone upstairs to our honeymoon suite. I was sure Interpol had entire floors sealed off. So where to, then?
A blaring horn snapped me out of my reverie. I heard the screech of tires as headlights washed over me.Oh, no…
