Chapter Five
Port de Sóller
Mallorca, Spain
Caspian’s eyes locked onto the woman aiming a pistol at his head. The wind tugged at her dark hair, whipping loose strands around her face, but she didn’t seem the least bit distracted by it. Her grip remained steady and her stance balanced.
This isn’t the first time she’s held someone at gunpoint.
“Drop the gun,” she said, taking two steps in his direction.
Caspian noted that she had her finger on the trigger, and though he couldn’t be sure, he believed she had already taken up the slack on her trigger.
“All right,” he said. “I’m putting it down.”
Since the man he had neutralized lay unconscious behind him, with his hands flex-cuffed and a dirty white sock stuffed deep in his mouth, there was no point in Caspian claiming this was a misunderstanding. The woman knew exactly what had happened.
At least her finger is no longer on the trigger but on the trigger guard.
Caspian quickly assessed his options. The woman was eight feet away from him.
Dropping low and rushing her gave him at best a fifty-fifty chance of getting to her before she pulled the trigger.
He’d taken worse odds before, but he couldn’t afford a gunshot as the sound would carry over the water and alert whoever was on board.
Not a good thing since his objective was to reach the Azimut undetected.
“Who the hell are you?” the woman asked, keeping her eyes on him while she pulled a phone out of her shorts pocket.
Caspian didn’t think she’d get a signal, but in case she did, he couldn’t risk her warning anyone of his presence, so he slowly raised his hands and took a step toward her.
It did the trick. She dropped her phone back into her pocket and returned to a two-hand grip on the pistol.
“Take one more step, and I swear it will be your last,” she said, her finger returning to the actual trigger.
Caspian had been in dicey situations before, and he knew he had to take control. But violence wasn’t the play here. At least not yet.
“You know the only reason you’re still standing is because I haven’t given the order, right?” Caspian asked, his voice calm, deliberate, as if he had all the time in the world.
The woman’s expression didn’t change, but he saw the faintest flicker of doubt in her eyes. “Nice bluff,” she said.
“You sure?” Caspian’s lips curled slightly. “I’ve got a colleague with a rifle trained on you right now. The second you squeeze that trigger, he’ll put one through the base of your skull.”
She didn’t flinch, but her grip tightened on the gun. “If that was true, I’d already be dead.”
Caspian made the decision to go all in.
“You’ve got this all wrong, lady,” he said, forcing a smile.
“You’re just a cog in a big machine. The only reason you aren’t dead is because I haven’t authorized anyone to die yet.
You see, I have more than one friend. There’s another team inbound as we speak.
Once they reach the yacht, they’re extracting Paul Hobb, and they’ll kill every soul aboard whose name isn’t Hobb. ”
The woman swallowed hard.
“You can stop this from getting worse, but that window’s closing fast,” Caspian continued.
“A team? You expect me to believe that?”
“You don’t have to believe anything,” Caspian replied. “But you should ask yourself, why am I still talking? If I was alone, don’t you think I would have rushed you already? Instead, I’m standing here, waiting. I’m giving you a chance to make a decision that won’t get you killed.”
The woman’s nostrils flared slightly, and he knew her mind was working through the possibility that he was telling the truth.
That’s good. Doubt’s creeping in. And doubt leads to hesitation. I just need a little more.
“Again, ask yourself why I didn’t kill your partner,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“I’ll make it simple,” Caspian continued. “You shoot me, and you die a heartbeat later. My colleague will drop you before my body has even hit the ground. One squeeze of your trigger, and it’s the end of your story. You prepared for that?”
Her shoulders stiffened ever so slightly. Her confidence was slipping.
Caspian shrugged.
“Maybe you are,” he said, letting his tone shift, as if he was conceding a point. “Maybe you’re ready to die.”
He made a show of looking over her shoulder, as if someone was standing a few steps behind her. Then her grip faltered. It was minor, so small that an untrained eye might have missed it. But Caspian caught it. And then he saw the opening he had been waiting for.
The woman’s eyes flicked away from him. Not for long, just the briefest glance over her shoulder, as if she needed to confirm she wasn’t in someone’s crosshairs.
But for a trained assassin like Elias, it was enough.
In a sudden burst of motion, Caspian closed the gap.
His left hand deflected the pistol, guiding it away from him, while his right hand chopped sharply at the woman’s right wrist with the rigid edge of his palm.
The woman screamed as Caspian, who now had his two hands on the gun, easily twisted it out of her grasp.
Before she could react, Caspian’s right leg sliced out in a savage sweep that caught her ankles and ripped her legs from beneath her.
She fell hard, her spine connecting against the edge of a pointy rock.
The impact jolted her body, but Caspian didn’t give her time to recover.
He spun her onto her stomach, then twisted her arms behind her back before he straddled her, keeping her arms bent in place with his legs.
“Why did you abduct Hobb? What do you want with him?” he growled, pressing the tip of the pistol against her left cheek.
“Who the fuck’s Hobb?”
Caspian had no time for this, so he whipped the pistol against the back of the woman’s head, knocking her out.
Caspian checked the pistol had a round in the chamber, then tucked it into his waistband.
“You were right, I was bluffing,” he said, though he knew she didn’t hear a word. “Next time, trust your gut.”