Читать книгу Secret Agent Secretary - Melissa Cutler - Страница 12

Chapter 3

Ryan had to hand it to Avery. For a dolled-up chick in high heels and a tight dress, the lady could book it. He paced her at a jog, the soles of his shoes crunching over debris and crumbled stucco on the dingy, dusty staircase.

“Oh, my God. We were shot at, weren’t we? Oh. My. God.” Maintaining a litany of exclamations and curses, she skidded around the second turn in the staircase and slammed her side into the wall.

Arms flailing for balance, she barely slowed down until, somewhere above them, a stairwell door opened with an echoing boom. Her speed faltered before cranking up another notch, until she was virtually flying around the final corner.

The stairwell bottomed out on a dim, concrete-floored landing with a door leading, Ryan hoped, to the hotel’s underground parking garage. He sped past Avery before she had a chance to dart through the door. He wasn’t a big fan of running scared, which meant it was time for him to neutralize the threat.

He snagged her around the ribs and tossed her into the shadowed space beneath the stairs, in front of a second door he hadn’t noticed earlier that had the look of a supply closet. Her eyes locked on his gun for the first time and she squeaked, dropping her purse. After flashing his fiercest warning glare, she clammed up. Last thing Ryan needed was her giving away their position. Then again, if she did, he’d have his answer about who her allegiance belonged to.

At least two sets of men’s shoes thumped along the stairs in descent.

He pulled back into the shadow, smushing Avery’s body into the corner behind him. Assuming a defensive position, he aimed at the turn in the stairs, his finger on the trigger. Avery’s shallow, quiet breathing fanned over his neck. From her stomach to her chest, her body quivered against his back, as though she was trying so hard not to move that her muscles spasmed with fatigue.

Too late, it dawned on him that if she was the double agent, she might be armed. He had no idea where she’d stash a weapon in that dress, and her purse was on the ground between their legs, but nevertheless, it was a stupid move to have his back to her.

Torn between protecting her from Chiara’s men and protecting himself from her, he decided to go with his gut—however unreliable that’d proved tonight. After all, hesitation, not double-crossing secretaries, was the number one killer of people in his line of work. The debate fled his mind as a man’s legs materialized on the steps.

Avery’s body quivered more violently.

Three men took the steps two at a time, their eyes on the door to the parking garage. Ryan recognized none of them, which told him Chiara had an even deeper reservoir of attack dogs than he’d been aware of.

Two men, Ryan could’ve neutralized before they knew what was happening, but the third man changed the odds. He’d have time to react while Ryan felled the first two, putting both Ryan and Avery in serious danger.

Close combat was his only viable option.

As the men descended, their focus on the door, time slowed. The world went silent.

Ryan felt the rush of adrenaline through his veins, a hot, dark burn of power and purpose. His favorite feeling in the world. All his years of experience had taught him to harness its potential, syncing the strength of his body to the strength of his will. He released an exhale in a slow stream through his nose and prepared to attack.

The tallest man put his hand on the door’s push bar.

Ryan took a deep breath and lunged, squeezing the trigger as he flew.

* * *

Avery watched with crippling fear as Ryan charged their assailants. Every bang of his gun made her heart squeeze and froze her body further, until she couldn’t even flinch away from the violence. Cowering against the far wall, the long-forgotten paper clip chain cutting into the skin of her back, she could barely breathe or blink.

One of the three assailants fell to the ground almost instantly, an angry hole gaping in his torn and bloody shirt. She’d never seen a real gunshot wound before. It didn’t look anything like in the movies.

Ryan latched onto the back of the nearest man still standing and foisted him into the taller of the two as he continued to fire. She caught a glimpse of a black-ink tattoo of a cross between the shorter man’s shoulder blades before Ryan’s right arm hooked around the man’s neck. A crack like a bone breaking made Avery blanch.

Ryan dropped the shorter man. Tucking his gun into his jacket, he stepped over the body to seize the wrist of the remaining man’s gun hand. He slammed it into the door over and over until the gun clattered to the ground near their feet.

The other man caught him with a punch to the cheek.

His face a cold mask, Ryan threw his fist into the assailant’s neck, then his gut. The blows continued from both men, their arms moving so quickly Avery couldn’t tell who was winning. The two fell to the ground and rolled toward the stairs.

When they came to a stop, Ryan had the other man’s neck balanced against the edge of the bottom stair, his palm against his chin, locking him in place.

The man gasped, his legs kicking beneath Ryan’s weight. Before Avery’s eyes, Ryan’s mask of cool control morphed into a look of fierceness as lethal as his skills had proved. She was so fixated on his face, she didn’t notice the other man’s knee coming up until it made impact with Ryan’s groin.

With a guttural sound of pain, Ryan’s grip eased and the other man pounced on the opportunity to counterattack. He flipped on top of Ryan and wedged his head between the stair and the bar of the rail.

Ryan let out a wheezing breath that shook Avery from her fear-frozen state. Anger and irritation bubbled in her throat like acid. How dare those shooters threaten her and her coworker. And on New Year’s Eve, no less. She was supposed to be partying with her friends to celebrate the end of a crappy year that included catching her boyfriend in bed with another woman, not running for her life or watching her office crush get the snot beat out of him.

Trembling with rage, she rose to her full height. She couldn’t die yet. Not when she hadn’t crossed a single thing off her bucket list. And she couldn’t let Agent Reitano die either, even if he barely noticed she existed.

She reached back and grabbed hold of the paper clip chain, yanking as hard as she could. It snapped free of her dress, popping the zipper off with it. Whatever. The damn thing wasn’t even wrinkle resistant. Rushing forward, she wrapped the chain around her palms and held it taut between her hands.

She hurled herself onto the bad guy’s back and dropped the chain around his throat. Tucking her elbows, she pulled the chain with all her strength. Caught unaware, the man let out a strangling noise. Avery rose to a crouch, straddling his legs, and pulled harder, until she felt the paper clips bending and giving way.

Time to give this guy a taste of his own medicine. Maintaining her hold on the paper clips, she jammed the toe of her shoe into his crotch and twisted. He reared back, howling, then keeled sideways onto the stairs. She kicked him onto his back and ground her spiked heel into his crotch. His eyes rolled back in his head.

That’s right, buddy. No one messes with Avery Meadows’s bucket list.

With a nod of satisfaction, she swung the chain out and grabbed hold of a single paper clip that had pulled straight. Without giving it a second thought, she jammed the paper clip into the assailant’s shoulder. She heard his shriek of pain as if from a distance and pushed the metal in deeper as the image popped into her head of Zach in bed with that two-faced pole-dancing instructor.

A hand on her arm shook her out of her trance. She whirled around, wielding the paper clips.

It was Agent Reitano. He eased the chain out of her hand, his eyes huge, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d witnessed.

“Avery, stop screaming.”

Screaming?

He put a finger on her chin and pushed her mouth closed.

Confused, she met Agent Reitano’s eyes with a look of challenge. “I wasn’t screaming. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Amusement flashed in his eyes. It was the first time that night he’d looked at her without accusation. “My bad. You were as stealthy as a ninja.”

She smoothed her dress. Cold air nipped at her back, where the dress now gaped with a broken zipper, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to care. Power and energy like she’d never experienced buzzed through her system, pushed along by her pounding heart.

She chanced a look at the assailant. He’d passed out cold. Good. “Any chance that guy was a criminal mastermind?”

“Not quite. More like a hired gun. Anyhow, thank you for coming to my rescue.”

Looking over her shoulder, she studied the limp form of the man more closely. Then reality crashed over her. “Oh, my God. I saved you, didn’t I? I kicked that bad guy’s butt. Wow.”

Ryan retrieved Cross Tattoo Man’s gun from the floor, popped it open and inspected the inside, then put it back together and stuffed it into his jacket. “More like ground his nuts to a paste, but yeah, you saved my bacon.”

“I saved your bacon,” she echoed in a whisper of disbelief as a bone-jarring shiver racked her body, bringing with it a hefty dose of nausea. Desperate for a distraction so she didn’t give up her butt-kicking status by spewing her martini all over Agent Reitano, she paced to one end of the landing and back, trying to calm down.

He glanced up from where he was sifting through the pockets of the man with the broken neck. “Avery, take some deep breaths.”

She stepped over the men’s legs, rubbing her jittery arms. “Trying. Not working.”

The next moment, his hands clapped onto her shoulders, his thumbs stroking the straps of her dress. “Your adrenaline’s crashing. Totally normal. It’ll fade soon.”

She dropped her forehead onto his shirt and concentrated on the rise and fall of his solid chest to distract her from her queasiness. His hands slipped from her shoulders to her head. He smoothed her hair in slow, easy strokes.

All the years she’d dreamed of gadgets and high-speed chases, clever riddles to solve and fake identities to assume, she’d never once stopped to think what it would actually look like to watch someone die. Nor what it would feel like to listen to a man scream in pain that she was causing.

Her mom would say no human being deserved to be the victim of violence, no matter how repugnant his crime. Avery knew, logically, that her mom was wrong, that some men were evil and had to be stopped by whatever means necessary when there were no other options.

But growing up the child of two grassroots pacifist leaders, she’d come to understand that believing in the occasional necessity of violence and letting go of the guilt about feeling that way were two entirely different issues. She’d wrestled with both for most of her life, but that struggle hadn’t prepared her for the way she felt tonight.

Watching Agent Reitano battle the bad guys had certainly frightened and shocked her, but what she’d felt when she joined in the fray was a hundred times more potent. She’d liked the way it had felt to wield power. It had given her satisfaction to do harm to another person. The realization scared her to her core.

“Maybe I should stick to being a secretary.”

Against her forehead, she felt the rumble of his chuckle.

She pulled back, annoyed. “Are you mocking me?”

His smile fell. “No, I... Absolutely not.” He rubbed his neck, his expression turning guarded again. “I’m going to finish searching these guys, and then we’ll get out of here. I’m going to let go of you. Don’t fall.”

“I won’t.”

He set her away from him, holding her shoulders until she found her legs again.

“Thanks, Agent Reitano.”

He frowned down at her. “Just Ryan, okay?”

Nodding, her gaze slid to the fallen men.

Ryan squatted over the man she’d felled and patted down his pockets. Then he rolled him onto his stomach and continued the search.

“Are you looking for ID?” she asked.

Shrugging at her question, he lifted the flap of the man’s sports coat and removed the gun hidden there. “Not really. These guys aren’t going to tell us anything I don’t already know.”

He pocketed the gun, then tried the doorknob of the employee locker room she’d stood in front of during the attack. It was locked. “Here’s the plan. We’re going to make a break for it through the parking garage, so I’m going to get my gun out and load it with a fresh magazine, okay? Don’t freak.”

Avery drew herself up, giving him her best indignant glare. “Oh, please. I’m not going to go nuts at the sight of a gun. I see guns every day at the office.” Holstered, of course. But still...

He straightened his tie, smoothed a hand over his hair, then removed a big black gun from his jacket and positioned himself against the wall next to the parking garage door.

Despite her words to the contrary, Avery drew a sharp breath and her heart skipped a beat. But her reaction was purely reserved for the man holding the weapon. She followed the line of his shoulder to the bunched muscles of his biceps beneath his pricey-looking, perfectly tailored jacket, then farther, to the large, steady hand holding the gun. With that suit, the gun and his devastatingly handsome face, he looked like the most dashing and sophisticated secret agent the world had ever known.

He looked like James Bond.

A hot flush crept over her cheeks. No doubt about it, Agent Reitano—Ryan—hit every one of her buttons in just the right way.

Without seeming to notice her perusal, he said, “Stand behind me, out of sight.”

Avery complied, flattening herself against the wall, her bare arm brushing his sleeve. “You’re going to make sure the garage is free of bad guys, right?”

“Definitely.” He opened the door a crack and listened. Avery held her breath. He opened the door wider and stuck his head and gun through. Then he closed it again and lowered the gun. “The door’s at a bad angle, so I couldn’t see much, but it’s too quiet in there. No cars moving, no people’s voices. Totally silent.”

“It’s New Year’s Eve and the hotel is crawling with people,” Avery said. “The parking garage should be packed. Can’t we call someone to help us get out of here? Director Tau or Agent Mickle, maybe Agent Lucey?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Avery, you’re going to have to trust me that we’re on our own. I’m hoping the silence is a random coincidence because I’m not crazy about going back upstairs. Let me think for a sec about the exit locations in the parking garage from the hotel blueprints I went over this morning.”

That, Avery could handle. She closed her eyes, visualizing the blueprints. “Except for the employee locker room on the other side of that door—” eyes still closed, she gestured her head toward where she’d been standing moments before “—the parking garage takes up the entire underground level beneath the hotel. The only car exit ramp will be on our right, approximately fifty yards away. It exits on Fifth and J Street. There are four emergency exit stairwells in the garage. The nearest one is three rows past the first pillar on the west side. It exits to Fourth along an alley.”

She opened her eyes to find Ryan staring at her with an inscrutable expression.

“Did you memorize the blueprints?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “I didn’t try to memorize them.”

Cocking his head, he looked like he was about to speak when a door opened somewhere in the stairwell above them. Footsteps moving fast, growing louder. Before Avery knew what was happening, Ryan had pulled her into the parking garage.

The door shut behind them with a clatter that garnered the attention of four machine-gun-toting men standing near the valet parking booth. In a flash, all four guns trained on them.

Avery gasped, then clamped her mouth shut and bit her tongue. It hurt like mad, but she couldn’t get her jaw to open again to stop the pain.

Ryan’s expression was unreadable as he raised his hands.

The men with guns looked to be in their mid-thirties or early forties and were dressed in jeans, sweatshirts and ball caps. And they each had huge, nasty guns that looked capable of firing a million rounds a minute with the slightest depression of the trigger.

They sprinted in Avery and Ryan’s direction, with the burliest of them shouting in a heavy Eastern European accent, “Drop the gun! On your knees or we kill the girl.”

Avery’s arms shot in the air of their own will. She maneuvered to her knees awkwardly, her movement hindered by her dress. Ryan followed suit, placing his gun on the ground a few feet in front of him.

Behind them, the stairwell door opened again, but Avery didn’t dare look. Ryan did though. Whoever it was, he kept his arms raised and his expression stony. Guess the police or a random team of navy SEALs hadn’t charged in to save them.

One of the men nabbed Ryan’s gun and stuck it in his sweatshirt pocket; another went through Ryan’s jacket and withdrew two more guns, a cell phone and a knife. A third man circled them, calling something in another language to whoever had come through the stairway door.

Orange cones had been placed across the car entrance ramp, along with a sign that read Lot Closed. The thug at the valet booth, dressed as hotel security, was arguing with an unarmed man in a bellboy uniform.

As subtly as she could, Avery swung her eyes toward the emergency stairways. They were unmanned, but she bet they’d been rigged to stay locked. It looked like whoever these guys were—probably Vincenzo Chiara’s men, she’d hazard to guess—they wanted some privacy for whatever nefarious activities they planned to perform tonight. She’d also bet that the crew of valet parkers were either dead or had been strong-armed into taking an extended coffee break all at once, like she’d seen in a movie one time.

Ryan nudged her leg with his shoe. “The locker room,” he said under his breath. “Where in the hotel does it come out at?”

A man rushed at Ryan and speared him in the gut with the nose of his rifle. “Shut up!”

Grunting loudly, Ryan crumbled into a fetal position.

Avery held her breath lest she erupt with the scream building inside her. It was unbearable, watching him be hurt again.

“Where?” he whispered without moving.

Avery forced herself to move, though fear had once again nearly paralyzed her. She leaned over him as though to comfort him. “Behind the lobby reception desk,” she breathed. The question baffled her. How would they access it if it were locked?

“Back on your feet!” one of the men barked. “Move it!”

It was a whole new round of awkwardness, returning to her feet in the dress, though she wasn’t sure why she gave a whit about modesty anymore. She stalled on her knees, wondering how to manage it, when Ryan offered her a hand. His other hand slid against her skin at the gape in her dress where the zipper had popped off.

It was work, keeping the utter shock off her face as his hand, warm and sure, dipped below the broken zipper. His fingertips breached the top of the Spanx. Quite the terrible timing to get fresh with her, even if he clearly knew his way around a woman’s body. He helped her up gradually, and as she straightened her back, cold metal replaced the feel of his fingers. Avery nearly choked on her own spit.

The metal was heavy. It felt like...

No.

Did he actually drop a weapon into her Spanx? She wiggled and a metal finger wedged into the cleft of her backside. Yep. That was a gun.

Holy smokes.

She turned to him, her mouth agape. His eyes narrowed in warning; then he looked straight ahead. With her blood pressure skyrocketing, she glanced over her shoulder. A lone woman, dressed in a hotel employee uniform, held a small handgun aimed at Ryan’s back while two men dragged the bodies from the stairwell into the garage.

Avery whipped her face forward, her eyes counting the number of guns pointed at them. If she and Ryan made it out of this night without being shot, it was going to be a miracle of epic proportions.

They were shuffled across the garage to an old brown Chevy Malibu. The woman jogged ahead of them and opened the trunk.

No way. Everybody knew you should never let the bad guys lure you into a trunk. She tugged Ryan’s sleeve. “What do we do?”

“Chill. I’ve got this,” he whispered.

“Chill?” she hissed. Sure thing. She’d get right on that after she stopped freaking out that they were being bullied into a car trunk by a bunch of angry men with huge guns who knew they’d killed two of their angry friends on the stairs.

When they reached the trunk, the man in the valet uniform hollered something in another language that grabbed everyone’s attention. Leaving the woman and an armed man to guard Avery and Ryan, the rest of the men jogged to the top of the entrance ramp, where a black limo idled. The limo driver’s window rolled down. The bearded driver and the valet began an animated discussion.

Avery darn near jumped out of her skin in surprise when Ryan’s hand settled onto her bare back once more.

The man and woman who’d been left to stand guard were distracted by the presence of the limo. Even Avery knew this was the perfect window of time to act. But she was scared witless about it. All she could do was hope Ryan didn’t expect her to pull off any moves like she had in the stairwell. She’d used up all her allotted spy powers for the day.

In one fluid motion, he pulled the gun from her Spanx, shoved her to the ground alongside the car and pivoted toward the man with the machine gun. The man went down with a single shot.

Next Ryan lunged at the woman, who fired in his general direction but missed, obviously flustered by the turn of events. He paid her gunfire no mind as he took hold of her blouse and pulled her into the open trunk.

Avery scrambled to her knees. She couldn’t see much but knew there was no way the men talking to the limo driver had failed to hear the gunfire. Sure enough, as Ryan slammed the trunk closed, someone opened fire in a continual staccato of shots.

Ryan dived to the ground near Avery. “Let’s jam,” he said, cool as a cucumber.

He gestured with his gun toward the rear of the garage. Avery kicked her shoes off and followed after him, threading in a crouched position between car bumpers and the wall.

Bullets flew in all directions, crumbling car windows and the concrete wall and ceiling. Avery ran as quickly as she could. License plates tore chunks of her dress off and slashed at her legs, but she never slowed more than an arm’s length from Ryan’s back. Every so often, he’d pause and return fire, buying time for them to dart across empty parking spaces.

Finally, he ground to a halt behind the passenger door of the last car. Avery fell to her hands and knees beside him. The dress, now ripped to shreds, no longer impeded her movement.

“What’s the plan?” she asked between breaths. Her voice sounded muffled to her ears, damaged as they were by machine-gun fire.

Ryan glanced at the stairwell door, then lifted his pant leg, exposing an ankle holster where an extra magazine rested against the inside of his calf. That must’ve been where he’d had the gun he stashed in her underwear, she reasoned.

As she caught her breath, he exchanged the empty magazine for the fresh one. “I’m going to cover you while you run for the door.” He flashed a set of keys. “I lifted these from that woman. Hopefully one opens the door to the locker room.”

She had to play his words over in her mind twice to make sure she’d heard him right. “You want me to run? Out in the open?”

“Yes. Are you ready?”

Avery gauged the distance from their hiding place to the door and estimated it to be at least fifteen feet. “No,” she answered honestly.

He blinked at her; then his eyes turned soft and his lips twitched like he was contemplating a smile. He looked playful. Boyish. Like they were back on the employee softball team last November when one of the other agents was razzing him about a missed catch. Like in the next few seconds they weren’t going to risk their lives all over again.

“I’m not ready for you to make that run, either. But it’s our only option.”

He pulled the tail of his shirt free of his pants. Strapped to his waist over his undershirt and above his belted pants was a black canvas belt with lots of pockets and zippers. Reaching near the small of his back, he withdrew two small canisters.

“What’re those?”

“A decoy grenade and smoke screen.”

She gaped at the objects in his hand. Unreal. Then she looked into his deep brown eyes, intense but for the slightest touch of amusement, and tried her best not to swoon. Sure, the thrill of the battle was starting to course through her system again like a bizarro happy drug she couldn’t control, but still, they were cornered in an underground garage while being fired at by machine guns.

Her fingers danced over the decoy grenade as she shot him a sidelong gaze. “You carry gadgets on your belt?”

She couldn’t help it. She swooned a little anyway. Mr. Tall, Dark and Droolworthy just got even more intriguing.