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“We’re coming to you. Hold what you have.”

I turned to Knuckles and said, “Put her between us.”

He did, and I said to Jennifer, “Koko, we’re coming up your stairwell. Don’t shoot us.”

“Roger all. Standing by.”

I turned to Annaka and said, “Get between us and put your hand on my shoulder.”

She did and I said to Knuckles, “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

I entered the den at a run, seeing the security guards backing downthe stairs on the other side of the room, firing up. I ignored them, running to the left stairwell. A grenade went off on the other side, the concussion slapping into me, and I felt the hand leave my shoulder. I turned around, saw Knuckles hoisting Annaka to her feet, and we began running again. I reached the stairwell and made it to the top, finding Jennifer and Nadia crouched in a hallway.

I said, “Annaka, where do we go?”

She took the lead, running down the hallway until she reached the end, the skyline of Mumbai spilling out from a plate glass window. I turned a circle, seeing nothing but an alcove with art, no other hallways or doors. I said, “Where is it?”

She ran to a vase on a pedestal and picked it up, revealing a keypad. She punched in a sequence of numbers and a section of the wall separated, moving back seven inches and then sliding to the right. Behind it was what looked like a single-room apartment.

We ran inside and she punched another sequence on a wall keypad, and the door slid shut. I exhaled and said, “How safe is this place?”

“That door is armored, and we have our own power generator, water, and food. We can stay in here for days.”

She ran to a bank of monitors and began turning them on, then typed on a keyboard until she had the cameras in the den. The battle was still raging, but it appeared that the Black Cats were simply using firepower because they could.

Knuckles said, “I hope they see those explosives before someone tosses a grenade in the living room.”

Jennifer pointed at the upper-left monitor and said, “There’s Jaiden.”

Knuckles pointed to a lower monitor and said, “The Black Cats are chasing him.”

Annaka ran to the keypad and hit some buttons, saying, “I’m locking out the other keypad.”

We watched Jaiden run down our hallway, jumping from monitor to monitor, until he was in the alcove. He ripped up the pedestal and punched the buttons, but nothing happened. He ran to the wall and pushed, staring into the camera he knew was there, shouting in a frenzy we couldn’t hear. Four men appeared in the hallway, each dressed head to toe in combat gear. He went to his knees, his hands in the air. The lead man put his barrel between Jaiden’s eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Nobody said anything for a moment, watching the Black Cats mill about. Eventually, they left, leaving behind Jaiden’s broken body.

Knuckles said, “Should we let them know we’re in here?”

I sat on the bed, running my hands through my hair, the adrenaline seeping out and the exhaustion starting to set in. I said, “No. Let them finish clearing. Let them calm down a bit.”

He said, “That could take a while.” He turned to Annaka and said, “I don’t suppose you stocked this place with any beer, did you?”

Chapter78

The Rock Star bird took off from Mumbai, the interior of the aircraft maxed out with people. We had Mr.Chin bolted to a chair in the back, blindfolded, with noise-canceling earmuffs over his head—and apparently I now owed the pilots about seven cases of beer because I’d made them watch him the entire time we’d been gone.

The rest of the space was occupied by my team and Kerry Bostwick, all headed to New Delhi. Kerry wanted to get us out of the country as soon as possible, before too many questions could be asked. He didn’t even want to delay long enough for Brett and Veep to get proper medical attention in a civilian hospital, saying that the quickie patchwork they’d received from the embassy doctor would do until they were under proper Taskforce care, and that requirement was even more reason to get out sooner rather than later—but first, he had to get Mr.Chin off the plane.

I knew that wasn’t the real reason, but I let it ride because both Brett and Veep were doing fine. No, Kerry was afraid that the longer we waited, the more chances there were that we’d be prevented from leaving the country, with some opposition government types trying to get to the bottom of what had happened in Riva Thakkar’s residence.

We’d stayed inside the safe room for twelve hours, only coming outafter the frenzy of the assault had died down. I couldn’t get a cell signal inside the room because of the thickness of the walls—which was a glaring deficiency in my mind—and tried the landline next to the bed, but it was dead, somehow cut by the fighting outside. I managed to use the Wi-Fi to contact Kerry Bostwick through FaceTime.

He’d been pulling his hair out for the duration of the assault and at first, when he saw my background, he thought I was calling him from a hotel room, hostages secured and everything hunky-dory. I could see he was about to jump for joy and I brought him down to earth, telling him where we were and what the situation was.

I told him we were good for a few days, but he needed to find a way to get us out of there. He contacted the RAW, and when things had calmed down enough, they entered the building—ostensibly looking for intelligence in the aftermath. Kerry and a couple of Caucasian analysts came with them, the RAW letting them in as “CIA partners.”