11. Sloane
SLOANE
The first gunshot is so striking and loud that for one stupid second, I think something on the aircraft has exploded.
Then the window of the nearest SUV bursts inward. Glass sprays across the tarmac, one of the men beside the vehicle drops behind the hood, and somebody shouts in Russian from somewhere to my left.
Vadim doesn’t move immediately.
That frightens me almost as much as the shooting.
He stands three yards away from me, staring toward the far edge of the private terminal as though the attack has violated some fundamental rule he can’t quite reconcile with what he’s seeing. The confusion lasts less than a second, but I see it because I’m looking directly at him when it happens.
“Sloane, down.”
He’s moving before I understand the command. His hand catches the back of my coat and drags me toward the aircraft stairs just as another shot cracks across the tarmac. Something strikes metal behind us with a violent ping, and I stumble hard enough that one knee nearly hits the ground.
People are suddenly everywhere.
Anton has drawn a gun from beneath his jacket and is firing toward a row of service vehicles parked beside the hangar.
Marek is crouched behind one of the SUVs, shouting instructions to the security men on the ground while returning fire with a handgun that seems to have appeared in his hand from nowhere.
Two members of the ground crew have thrown themselves flat beside the luggage cart.
Iosef is standing beside the aircraft stairs. Just standing there. His leather portfolio is still in one hand.
“Iosef!” Anton roars. “Get down!”
Iosef blinks as though the suggestion has only just occurred to him and drops behind the wheel of a baggage trolley just as another burst of gunfire tears across the open space.
My brain can’t keep up. Ten minutes ago, I was standing at the bottom of the stairs thinking about whether Vadim and I would ever see each other again.
Now men are shooting at us.
Vadim pushes me behind the thick support beneath the aircraft door and turns his body toward the gunfire.
“What are you doing?” I grab his sleeve. “Get down.”
“Stay here.” He reaches beneath his jacket.
Of course he has a gun.
I should be shocked, but I’m rapidly running out of capacity for shock.
He checks the weapon with a smooth movement that tells me he has done this far too many times, then leans out just enough to look toward the perimeter.
Another shot rings out.
Vadim fires back. The sound is deafening at this distance.
I clamp one hand over my ear. “What the fuck is happening?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Vadim.”
“Later.”
A man comes stumbling out of the aircraft behind us.
Captain Hale.
For a moment I can’t understand why he’s loose.
Then I realize someone must have removed the restraints during the evacuation or when security came aboard.
His face is swollen from Vadim’s beating, blood dried beneath his nose, and he’s moving with the frantic desperation of an animal that has spotted an open cage.
He looks at the gunfire.
Then at Vadim.
Then at the terminal.
And he runs.
“Stop!” somebody shouts.
Hale doesn’t stop. He sprints across the open tarmac with his head down, apparently deciding that anywhere is safer than remaining near Vadim.
He makes it perhaps fifteen yards.
The first bullet catches him in the side. His body twists. For one terrible instant he remains upright, as though momentum is carrying him despite what has happened.
Then another shot hits him, and he goes down hard.
I stare.
Everything inside me goes silent.
The man who had his hand over my mouth less than an hour ago lies motionless beneath the white floodlights.
I expect relief, but I don’t feel it.
I don’t know what I feel.
Vadim’s hand closes around the back of my neck. “Don’t look.”
I tear my gaze away.
The sound of gunfire intensifies from the far end of the tarmac. Marek is yelling something I can’t understand. Anton answers. One of Vadim’s security men runs from behind the damaged SUV to another vehicle and nearly loses his footing on the wet pavement.
Vadim suddenly shoves me lower.
A shot cracks.
He jerks. I feel it through the hand still holding me.
“Vadim?”
He says nothing, his face tightening.
Then I see the blood. It spreads rapidly through the fabric high on his left side, just beneath his ribs.
My stomach drops. “You’ve been shot.”
“It grazed me.”
“That is blood.”
“I’m familiar with blood.” He tries to turn back toward the gunfire.
I catch his arm. “Are you insane?”
“Sloane.”
“No.”
His eyes flash. “This is not the time.”
“You are bleeding through your shirt.”
Another shot strikes the ground near us, close enough to throw a small chip of concrete against my ankle. Vadim curses and pulls me tighter behind the stair support.
I hear shouting from the terminal now, and the sounds of engine roaring. There are more vehicles approaching.
Vadim glances toward the road leading into the private airfield, his attention shifting for half a second. That’s when another burst comes from our right.
I see the movement near the service hangar before he does.
A man raising something long and black.
A rifle.
“Vadim.”
He turns.
I don’t think. I throw myself over him. My arms go around his shoulders and I press my body against his, trying to cover as much of him as I can.
He swears violently. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Shut up.”
“Sloane, get down.”
“I’m down.”
“Behind me.”
“No.”
His hand catches my waist, trying to pull me aside, but I just cling harder.
The irony should be funny. He carried me away from Hale as though I weighed nothing, and now I’m attempting to use my body as a shield for a man nearly twice my size.
I can feel his heart pounding beneath my cheek.
Another shot goes off.
Vadim twists, trying to turn us so his body covers mine instead.
“Stop moving,” I snap.
His expression is almost incredulous. “You are ordering me?”
“You’re injured.”
“And you are apparently suicidal.”
“I’m not letting you get shot again.”
Something strange passes through his face. There is absolutely no reason for him to look at me like that while bullets are flying over our heads.
Yet he does.
Then the sound of engines grows louder. Three black vehicles tear through the security gate at the far end of the private terminal and race toward us. Doors open before they fully stop, and men pour out.
Armed men. A lot of them.
For several chaotic seconds, the tarmac becomes a wall of sound. Vadim’s reinforcements spread behind the vehicles and return fire toward the hangars. Anton shouts directions, pointing toward the eastern perimeter, while Marek moves around the rear of the damaged SUV to join them.
Vadim keeps one arm locked around me.
The shooting begins to retreat. The bursts become farther apart.
Then someone yells that the east gate is secure.
Another man shouts that two vehicles have fled.
Within minutes, the entire atmosphere changes. Vadim’s men begin advancing instead of hiding. The remaining attackers either disappear beyond the service buildings or are pinned down before they can reach the perimeter.
Silence doesn’t return all at once. It comes gradually, broken by shouted orders, running footsteps, vehicle engines, and the ringing in my ears.
I realize I’m still lying partly across Vadim.
He looks down at me. “Are you finished?”
I sit back. “You’re welcome.”
His mouth twitches despite the blood soaking his shirt. “You covered me with your body.”
“You were already shot.”
“You are considerably smaller than I am.”
“I noticed.”
“That was idiotic.”
“I have had a difficult day.”
For one absurd moment, he looks like he might laugh, but then his face tightens as he shifts.
I remember the blood. “Oh my God.”
“I told you it is superficial.”
“You have no idea.”
“I have been shot before.”
“That is not comforting.”
Anton reaches us first. His suit jacket is gone and there’s blood on one sleeve, though I can’t tell whether it belongs to him.
He takes one look at Vadim’s side. “How bad?”
“It just grazed me, I think. It shouldn’t be lodged inside,” Vadim says.
They’re talking so normally it’s like they’re discussing the fricking weather.
Anton crouches and pulls the fabric away from the wound. Vadim doesn’t flinch, but his jaw locks.
Marek arrives seconds later, breathing hard, his gun still in his hand. “You’re bleeding.”
“So everyone keeps telling me.”
“Because you are.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Marek looks at me. “Was he this irritating before he got shot?”
“Yes.”
“Good. No brain damage, then.”
I nearly laugh.
Almost.
Then Iosef appears. He has lost the leather portfolio somewhere, his glasses are slightly crooked, and for the first time since I met him, he looks genuinely rattled. His face is pale.
Anton rises. “You could have gotten us killed.”
Iosef stares at him. “What?”
“You stood there.”
“I didn’t know where they were shooting from.”
“You didn’t even draw your weapon.”
Iosef’s expression changes from shaken to offended. “I don’t have a weapon.”
Anton looks at him as though he has just admitted he doesn’t understand how doors work. “You travel with Vadim Chernovar and you don’t carry a gun?”
“I’m a mathematician, Anton, not a fucking sharpshooter.”
Anton rolls his eyes.
“Enough,” Vadim says.
They both stop.
I look back at his side. The blood has slowed, but it hasn’t stopped. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
Vadim looks at me. “No.”
That response is so immediate that I almost believe I misheard him.
“No?”
“It is unnecessary.”
“You were shot.”
“Grazed.”
“By a bullet.” I stare at him. “You are going to a hospital.”
“I’m not.”
“Vadim.”
“Sloane.”
Anton wisely steps back.
Marek looks fascinated.
I point at the blood on Vadim’s shirt. “You don’t know if the bullet fractured a rib, damaged muscle, carried debris into the wound, or did anything else you can’t see while standing on a tarmac pretending you are indestructible.”
“It didn’t.”
“Wonderful. Then a doctor can confirm that.”
“I have doctors.”
“Are any of them standing here?”
“No.”
“Then get in the car.”
He looks at me for a very long moment. I expect another argument. Instead, something almost resigned enters his expression.
“Fine.”
Marek makes a choking sound.
Vadim looks at him. “Say nothing.”
“I said nothing.”
“You were about to.”
“I was thinking very loudly.”
Anton opens the rear door of one of the undamaged SUVs.
Vadim stands carefully. I hover close enough to catch him if he sways, which is ridiculous because he still looks capable of carrying me again if necessary.
He notices. “I can walk.”
“So could I earlier.”
His eyes narrow. “That was different.”
“Of course it was.”
Camille had been pulled behind one of the ground vehicles by a security man, white-faced but unharmed, and when our eyes meet she gives me a quick nod that tells me she’s all right. I don’t get the chance to go to her before Vadim’s men close around us and start moving everyone toward the cars.
We get into the SUV. I end up beside Vadim in the rear seat, with Anton in front and Marek squeezed into the row opposite us. Iosef is directed into another vehicle, apparently because Anton has not forgiven him for failing to transform into an action hero during the firefight.
The convoy moves almost immediately. Only when we leave the private airfield do I finally see where we are.
Bucharest. The name was on my assignment sheet, but until now it existed only as an airport code, a hotel note, and a city I knew almost nothing about.
Outside the tinted windows, Bucharest stretches beneath the night in long avenues of amber streetlights, broad boulevards lined with a strange mixture of elegant old buildings and severe concrete blocks.
We pass shuttered shops, glowing pharmacies, late-night cafés still crowded despite the hour, and rows of apartment buildings rising beyond trees black against the sky.
The city looks both beautiful and bruised. Old facades stand beside glass towers. Ornate balconies overlook streets filled with modern cars. Orthodox church domes appear unexpectedly between office buildings, their crosses catching the lights as we pass.
Under different circumstances, I would be pressing my face to the glass.
Instead, I’m holding a folded cloth against a bullet wound in Vadim Chernovar’s side.
He looks mildly irritated by the entire situation.
I look at him. “Who were those people?”
His gaze remains on the window. “Men who shouldn’t have been there.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I currently have.”
“Were they trying to kill you?”
He turns his head. “Yes.”
The bluntness makes me pause.
Marek watches us but doesn’t interfere.
“Why?”
Vadim’s expression closes slightly. “A dispute.”
I stare at him. “A dispute?”
“Yes.”
“People don’t normally bring rifles to disagreements over contracts.”
“In my experience, that depends on the contract.”
I almost tell him not to be ridiculous. Then I remember Captain Hale lying dead on the runway, and the humor leaves me.
Vadim notices. His voice changes slightly. “The important question is not who they were.”
“What is?”
“How they knew where we were.”
Anton looks back from the front passenger seat.
Vadim continues, his gaze turning toward the dark city outside. “They were not supposed to know where we were landing.”
Marek’s expression hardens. “Nobody was.”
Something about the sentence catches in my mind. I lower the cloth slightly. Vadim takes it from me and presses it back against his side.
“I knew we were landing in Bucharest,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “But did they give any more details?”
I think about the assignment, then realize that I had ignored all the obvious signs. I could have been very well trafficked. Well, the probability of that happening still hasn’t passed, I think belatedly, watching the dangerous men around me. They’re all on it, I think.
Vadim is waiting for an answer. “No,” I say finally.
He finally exhales. “Well, that’s one worry off my mind. My men didn’t fuck up the details. So someone must have.”
“So you’re saying that nobody on or off the plane was supposed to know where we were landing?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because some very bad people are after me.” That’s all he gives me.
Despite my best intentions, I replay everything that happened on the tarmac. The speed with which Anton and Marek moved when the attack began.
The fact that Vadim knew exactly how to handle a weapon.
The way he beat Hale.
The way everyone obeys him.
I look at the blood on his shirt. Then at his face. “You’re not just a businessman, are you?”
The car becomes very quiet.
Marek glances toward Vadim.
Anton stares straight ahead.
Vadim holds my gaze. There is no attempt to charm me, no carefully constructed lie, and no explanation designed to make whatever he is sound more respectable.
“No,” he says. “I’m not.”