Page 73 of Gone Before Goodbye

So what’s the plan?

She’d considered working her way back indoors and then finding a place to hide. The palace is huge, with lots of rooms. It could take a long time to find her. But then she remembered that the place was loaded up with CCTV. There is nowhere she can go without being spotted and found.

Including probably this roof.

So the only way is to keep moving.

She still has one idea though. A dumb one. A desperate one. But if the swimming pool is where she thinks it is, then so should be… yes.

The glass walkway is right where she hoped it would be.

She is on the third rung of the ladder when she sees cords of stacked firewood.Good, she thinks. That might help. She climbs farther down the ladder. When she’s halfway down, she looks up.

CinderBlock is staring down at her.

Maggie’s eyes widen as she watches him take out his gun. He points at her. Their eyes meet and Maggie can see in his casual, almost bored expression what’s about to happen.

CinderBlock is going to shoot her.

He isn’t going to shout out a warning. He isn’t going to call for her to halt or freeze or surrender.

He is simply going to pull the trigger.

Maggie sees it coming. By the time she hears the blast, she’s already pushed off the ladder. She falls backward. The bullet whizzes past her leg, clanking a metal rung below her. There was no time to look downbefore she jumped, so she doesn’t know how far the fall is. She tucks her legs in, braces herself, lands hard.

The momentum forces her into a roll through the snow. The cold bites her skin hard and deep, nearly paralyzing her.

Keep moving.

It’s a funny thing. When she first pushed open the bedroom window, she wondered when her military training would kick in. When would the calm descend on her? When would her heartbeat stay under control? When would she be cool and detached and analytical?

Nothing had prepared her for this.

And yet.

And yet the training had kicked in—it just hadn’t announced itself. It is a part of her. No, there is nothing routine or rote here. No, she’d never trained on how to escape an oligarch’s mansion via a window on an icy rooftop. But time has indeed slowed down for her. Here Maggie is, with a man firing shots at her from above, freezing in the snow, and she has something that resembles a strategy and even a plan.

Using the momentum from the fall and roll, she jumps behind the firewood just as the next shot rings out. When you watch someone fire a handgun on television, it seems like a pretty accurate weapon. It is not. The truth is, CinderBlock is now a good forty to fifty feet away from her. The wind is howling in his face. The cold is numbing his shooting hand.

It’s hard to be accurate.

He realizes it too. She can see him grab his phone to call in reinforcements. That gives her a chance to make her next move. She picks up a log from the firewood. It’s frozen solid. Solid enough? She will find out. She sprints at the glass walkway where Ragoravich had led her on his tour. There is a small spiderweb crack in one of the panels. That might help. She rears back with the firewood and hits the window crack as hard as she can.

The glass shatters.

She doesn’t look behind her. She doesn’t look up. A bullet strikes nearby and more glass shatters, raining down on her. She ducks and covers her head and jumps through the shattered window and into the walkway. Then she turns left as another shot rings out. In the corner of her eye, she sees a black-suited man round the corner and sprint toward her. Maggie clocks that he’s there, but that doesn’t change her plan.

She just needs to pick up the pace.

The door to the car showroom is unlocked. She hurries through it, shuts it behind her, throws the deadlock. The room is pitch black. It had been that way when Oleg Ragoravich brought her here. He’d hit the light switch on the left. She does that now. The lights boom immediately on in shade-your-eyes bright. Maggie doesn’t shade her eyes.

There’s no time.

She looks for the switch to open the huge garage door. Her plan is a simple one. Oleg Ragoravich has a car collection. When he offered her a joyride, he showed her that he keeps the keys in a certain car.

So that’s the plan. Get the showroom door open. Get in a vehicle. Drive out.

She finds the switch. The door is two stories high. It grudgingly starts to part like the Red Sea. It makes a lot of noise. It moves too slowly. Maggie stays on the move. She knows that black-suited men will be on her any second.