Page 15 of France Face-Off
Alex hadn’t moved, a rush of apprehension rippling through her body. “If something’s happening, I want to be with you.”
“Go, now,” her mother insisted. “Get to the pantry, there’s a flash drive and a laptop in the safe. Take them and get out of here.”
“But—”
“We’ve been over this many times when you were a child. You can’t stay. We need you to get that flash drive and the laptop and get out of here.” Her mother crossed to her, cupped her cheek with her hand and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “We love you. Now, go!”
“Hurry,” her father said. “They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming?” Alex asked.
Something crashed against the door. The door frame splintered but held.
“Ally, go!” her mother said, her tone stern, her eyes filling with tears as she took another gun out of the desk drawer and aimed it at their front door.
In the next moment, the door to their home crashed open. Alex turned and ran to the pantry. The sound of gunfire reached her ears through the thick paneling of the pantry door.
Every instinct in her body had told her to go back out and fight for her parents. But what could she have done? She hadn’t had a gun. Though her father had taken her out into the country and taught her how to fire his 9 mm Glock, she hadn’t been comfortable with it.
The gunfire had sounded more like automatic weapons, machine guns. Though it tore her heart apart, she’d pulled hard on the pantry shelf that worked as a hidden doorway. Opening it quickly, she’d stepped inside a dark and narrow stone-lined passageway.
Behind her, the gunfire had ceased. The sound of furniture crashing and glass breaking led Alex to believe that they were looking throughout the house for any others who might be hidden. They must have known to look for her. The safe containing the flash drive, laptop, passports and money had been stored in that passageway. She’d grabbed the flashlight hanging on a hook on the wall and spun the safe’s tumbler. Her fingers had trembled so much that she hadn’t gotten the safe open on the first try. As she’d worked the numbers again, smoke had filtered through the cracks in the wall of the pantry. Before too long, the smoke got too thick. She’d had to leave.
She’d been down that passage many times with her father as he’d schooled her on where to go in the case of someone storming their home. When she’d been younger, it had been a game, like hide and seek. As she’d grown older, it became a way for her to sneak out to meet her friends. It hadn’t mattered how stealthy she’d been, her parents had always known when she’d gone out and had been waiting for her when she returned. They’d never chastised her but hadn’t slept until she was safely back home.
The night they were murdered, she’d run down that passageway that led beneath the street and angled upward through a drainage grate into the garden of a Russian Orthodox church.
From there, she’d crawled up onto a wall and watched as flames filled the night sky from the home she’d known for fifteen years, knowing deep down her parents had not made it out alive.
If they had, they would have followed her along the passageway. The fire had burned through the night until there was nothing left of the house but rubble. The smoke had cleared before sunrise. Alex had covered her mouth and nose with her shirt and felt her way along that passageway back to the safe. By the beam of the flashlight she’d carried with her, she’d rolled the combination lock right then left then right again and opened the safe.
Her parents had always left a backpack beside the safe. That night she’d learned why. She’d filled the backpack with the contents of the safe, zipped it hurriedly, left through the passageway and emerged into the garden.
She’d wandered the streets of Moscow for days, wearing a knit cap, her hair tucked inside, her face down, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. If the people who’d killed her parents had known she was alive, they’d have come after her to finish the job.
Alex had found an abandoned warehouse and set up camp. She’d used internet cafés to catch up on the news. Her parents’ death had been nothing more than a blip on a newscast. Family perishes in a house fire. She’d also used the laptop to tap into the flash drive her mother had been so insistent she safeguard. Through the flash drive, she’d found data stored in the cloud.
At one point, she had thought she should notify the CIA of her parents’ deaths, but if she had then they would’ve known she was still alive. If the CIA knew she hadn’t perished in the house fire, whoever had put the hit out on her family might find out as well. She’d decided it was best that she had died in the fire, for all intents and purposes.
She’d gone through all the information in the backpack. She’d found a US passport with her image on it and set up a plan to get back to the United States. With enough Russian rubles to get her out, she’d caught a train and headed for a port where cruise ships disembarked.
At the port, Alex had found her way into a warehouse containing pallets with supplies for the cruise ships. In the wee hours of the morning, she’d hollowed out one of the pallets to make sufficient room for her to fit inside. The pallet had been staged the night before to go on the next cruise ship. In the morning, a forklift had lifted the pallet and driven it onboard the ship. The tricky part had been getting out with nobody seeing her.
Fortunately, the receiving area had been somewhat chaotic with a multitude of pallets being driven onto the ship, offloaded and set aside. The cruise ship had left Moscow with her on it. Eventually, she’d made it back to the States, bought a used car with cash, stolen a license plate and had driven to the hills of Idaho where she’d begun her training. She never again wanted to feel as helpless as she had the night her parents had died, and she’d vowed to make the people who’d killed them pay.
Tired to the bone, Alex stripped out of the silver dress, stepped into the shower, washed off her makeup and hairspray and let the water run over her face and body, rinsing away the tension of the night. She stepped out of the shower, dried off and slipped into the leggings and T-shirt she preferred to sleep in at night. She slid her feet into the slippers the hotel had provided, liking the feel of warm terry cloth wrapped around her toes.
Just as she was about to open the bathroom door, she heard a noise in the other room. It sounded as if somebody had broken glass. She dimmed the light then opened the door a crack, just enough to see a man reaching his hand through the broken glass to unlock the French doors opening onto the balcony.
Alex didn’t have time to think; she only had time to react. In her slippered feet, she raced across the room.
Just as the man shoved the door wide, Alex plowed into him like an American football player. She slammed into him hard enough that she drove him backward until the backs of his legs hit the railing. He flipped over backward and would have fallen the three stories to the ground, but, at the last minute, his hand grabbed hold of the top of the rail. The gun he’d been carrying clattered to the ground. He hung for a moment by one hand.
Using her fist, Alex pounded those fingers, hoping he would let go. She needed something harder that would hurt him. However, she reasoned that by the time she found something, he would be back up on the balcony after her. The man was big.
Alex knew her limits.
She ran back through the French doors, closed and locked them. It would only slow him down a little, but maybe enough to allow her time to get away. She ran through the room, grabbed her backpack and her shoes and raced out into the corridor. A dining cart with the remains of someone’s meal stood outside one of the rooms. Alex grabbed it and pushed it in front of her door then raced for the stairwell. She could have gone down to the lobby to report that someone had broken into her room, but that would be the first place he’d look for her.
