Chapter Twelve #2
She lays flat on the roof. Her head hangs off the edge. She looks down. No one is directly below her. She turns her head to the right. Nothing. She looks to the left.
Two black-suited men. They have guns out.
What the hell is going on?
Maggie hears a shuffling noise from behind her.
Someone else has come out on the roof. They’re coming toward her.
No choice now. She pulls down her sleeves, so that the cuffs cover her palms. Makeshift gloves. She jumps on the ladder and starts down it. If her memory and geography are correct, she is over the indoor pool right now.
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 down before 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.
A voice yells out something in Russian.
Probably telling her not to move. She turns and sees the black-suited man aiming the gun at her. Her mind whirs, searching for a solution—but in the midst of the whirring, she notices something interesting.
The black-suited man doesn’t fire right away.
Why? CinderBlock fired. This guy fired too when she was in the glass walkway.
Why isn’t he firing now?
And then the answer comes to her. Oleg Ragoravich loves these cars. They are expensive, worth millions of dollars apiece. The black-suited men probably figure that they have her trapped now. No need to fire and risk harming something so valuable.
That gives Maggie the wiggle room she needs.
She keeps sprinting and ducking behind cars until she reaches the Ferrari.
Two black-suited men follow. She fumbles with the door but manages to slide into the driver’s seat.
One of the men is on her now. He grabs the handle of the door as she starts to close it.
With her left hand, Maggie keeps pulling the door closed.
With her right, she fires up the ignition.
The man keeps his hold on the driver’s-side door.
Maggie tries to hold on, so he can’t get in. It’s a draining game of tug-of-war.
The ignition is on, but the car isn’t an automatic.
It’s an old manual with a stick shift. Maggie hasn’t driven one since she was eighteen.
But her dad had taught her. The man is pulling hard on the door.
He has the leverage now. Another man is coming to join him.
No way Maggie can fight them both off. She holds on with her left hand and tries to shift the car into gear with the right.
It’s not working.
He’s winning the battle. The other guy arrives and grabs the door too.
Maggie waits until they have full pressure on her.
Then she simply lets go. The door flings open.
The men stumble back, lose their balance.
That’s what she’s been counting on. But one of them recovers fast. He reaches out and grabs her by the hair.
He starts dragging her out of the car.
Maggie takes her right hand off the shift. She curls her fingers and delivers a palm strike straight into his groin.
The man’s grip loosens.
Maggie pulls the door back closed. She shifts now, hits the accelerator, drags him a few feet before the man falls away.
The showroom doors haven’t opened enough for her to get through. Again: Doesn’t matter. She slams the Ferrari through whatever opening there is, pushing into the wooden doors and doing Lord-knows-what to the Ferrari’s paint job.
The doors hold for a second before splintering and releasing the car.
Maggie is out.
She feels something akin to euphoria—her plan worked!
—when a bullet shatters the back window.
Maggie ducks. The cold again rushes in. With one hand still on the gearshift, she pulls the steering wheel hard to the left.
Another bullet whizzes above her head, shattering and knocking out the front windshield.
Now what?
Just keep your foot on the gas pedal.
She does. Up ahead she sees another black-suited man aiming his gun at her. She aims the car at him and stays low. He ducks away.
She hears bullets, but nothing hits.
Now what?
She checks her phone.
Are there enough bars?
She hits send again. No reason to look anymore. Just keep hitting the send button and hope for the best.
She can see now that the front gate is closed. Can she ram the car through? She doesn’t think so. The car is old and small. The gate looks foreboding, built for security. A man stands in front of it, gun drawn.
She veers to the right and takes a road up the side of a hill.
A black SUV is following her now.
Shit. Another gun blast.
Her tire explodes.
She swerves, but she keeps her foot on the accelerator. The Ferrari still has enough firepower. She keeps her foot down. The car fishtails up. She has no front windshield anymore. The cold digs deep into her face. She can barely keep her eyes open.
The black SUV chases her, moves alongside. The tire is gone now. She’s driving on the rim. Another bullet rings out.
Maggie feels something tear in her shoulder.
It’s over now. A part of her knows that. There’s nothing she can do to control the car anymore. She takes her foot off the accelerator, tries to hit the brake. But either her foot or the car won’t obey.
The Ferrari veers off the road. Maggie’s eyes are closed now. She feels rather than sees the plummet. She tries again to hit the brake or turn the wheel. But nothing happens. Nothing slows down. The descent continues until the car slams into a tree.
There is no seat belt in the Ferrari. Not that Maggie would have had time to put it on. But there is nothing to keep her in place. Maggie feels her body lift and rocket forward through what remains of the front windshield. Shards of glass slice her skin before she smacks into something hard.
Her body goes slack. Everything leaves her. Everything turns cold, so cold, a deep, hard, bone-crushing cold she’s never experienced before.
And then, mercifully, everything turns black and there is nothing.