Chasing the White Lion by James Hannibal (mind reading books .TXT) 📕

Lay down your weapon”—he shrugged, tilting his head and gun—“and I’ll most likely kill you, but I promise the children will live.”

Eddie and his drone were watching. Where was the team? Talia was leaning, trusting. Please, God, she prayed, bending to lay the Glock on the grate. This is in your hands.

Talia straightened, palms open at her side, and Lionel roared, giving voice to her frustration. “Now what?”

“Now nothing. You lose.” Boyd extended his gun. “Game over.”

CHAPTER

SEVENTY-

NINE

GOLDEN TIGER PLAZA

TWIN TIGERS COMPLEX

BANGKOK, THAILAND

THESHOTMADE TALIACRINGE. But there was no pain apart from the shallow nicks on her shoulder and calf. And the sound was all wrong, a boom instead of a crack.

Boyd lowered his gun, eyes wide. He pitched over the rail.

Lionel pounced the moment his body hit the glass.

The boom told Talia all she needed to know. Bazin had survived her first attack. She found him on the third level of the catwalk, bleeding from two wounds on the upper right of his torso. All the same, he had her well covered with the Desert Eagle.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did you kill your boss?”

“He is not boss.” The Russian let out a weary huff. “Also I want shoot him for some time. He was . . . liability.”

“For whom? You?”

“For real boss.”

Talia did not have to ask for clarification.

Archangel. Talia and Tyler had assumed Boyd was Ivanov’s connection to the CIA traitor. After all, Boyd had brokered the failed auction of Ivanov’s hypersonic weapons six months earlier, and Ivanov had told them the whole plan came from a CIA contact. But Boyd and Ivanov were both young. Neither could have worked with Archangel for long. Bazin, however, was a product of the spy world’s post–Cold War bedlam—just like Archangel. Talia should have seen it before.

If Bazin was going to kill her, she wanted answers—the answers she’d been afraid to seek when Tyler first invited her to join the op. “So, Archangel helps you gain the confidence of her marks with the promise of a high-level intelligence contact. In exchange, Archangel gets a few tidbits of criminal intel, enough to make her a shining star at the Agency.”

The Russian refused to play along. His stolid frown neither confirmed nor denied the name Archangel.

Talia didn’t get the chance to press him further.

Rays of blue, alien light washed over the monkeypod boughs. With a tremendous crash, a section of windows exploded. Glass flew everywhere. Lionel bounded for cover.

Outside, a giant quadcopter hovered, with Tyler and Finn kneeling on its open platform, staring down the sights of their submachine guns. Bazin tried to swing the Desert Eagle to meet the new threat, but Tyler and Finn opened fire on full automatic. The big Russian went down under a hail of P3Q rounds, enough to put a horse to sleep for a week.

Both men leaped from the quadcopter into the Atrium. Finn went straight for Talia, while Tyler swept for additional players.

“Bazin was the last,” she shouted, running down the steps. “Except for Lionel.”

Finn met her at the bottom. “Who?” He saw the blood on her shoulder and turned her by the arm. “You’re shot.”

“It’s not a gun wound. It’s a lion scratch.” She nodded at Boyd’s body. “He fared far worse.”

Finn grimaced. “Real lions don’t muck about, do they?” He let his machine gun hang and drew Matilda, aiming the blunderbuss at the trees. “Still out there, is he?”

“Cover me. I need to find Boyd’s phone.”

A search of the foliage near the body yielded no result, so Talia gutted her way through the gruesome task of rolling Boyd to one side. His phone lay beneath him, screen still active. A timer counted down.

0:03

0:02

“No!” Talia couldn’t get a hand on the phone in time.

0:01

DETONATION

Talia, Finn, and Tyler all ducked as fire erupted above. Through the glass ceiling of the Atrium, she saw Boyd’s office burning. And if the device in his office had gone off . . . “The children!” she shouted at Tyler. “Boyd set off an incendiary device in his warehouse and locked it down. They’ll be killed!”

“Go!” Tyler pointed at Mac and the waiting copter. “Take Finn. I’ll get Bazin out of here and help the rangers clear the building.”

The copter looked lower than before. Mac beckoned to them from the cockpit. “Get crackin’, you two! She’s runnin’ outta battery!”

The gap between the shattered windows and the copter’s platform was bad enough, without it sinking as well. Finn seemed to read the fear in Talia’s eyes. “You’ve got this. We go together, okay?”

“Okay.”

He caught her hand, interlocking her fingers with his, and swung her arm in a silent One, two, three!

They jumped. Talia landed well inside and caught the medical gurney with her free hand. Finn had not jumped as far. His heels teetered over empty space. His free arm wheeled. She pulled him in, right into a hard embrace. She held him there as Mac descended, until she felt his chest shaking. Finn was laughing.

Talia pushed him away. “You did that on purpose.” She should have known. Finn had an insane sense of balance.

He bent over the gurney, holding his gut. “Your face. Priceless.”

“I hate you.”

“Really? ’Cause you were hugging me pretty tight, there.”

After defending himself from a flurry of punches, Finn gave her a new earpiece. She put it in as Eddie was reporting on the warehouse.

“. . . location is obvious on my drone’s infrared. I’ve dispatched emergency services. But remember, this is Bangkok. It’ll take them a while to reach the building.”

“Then it’s up to us,” Talia said. “Boyd had guards in the building. We’ll need armed escort.”

“No problem.”

A half second later, she saw a yellow flash and an explosion of glass from the sky bridge on the Grand Bazaar level. Eddie’s swarm of TACRON drones poured into the night to follow the quadcopter—a mother and her babies.

But the mother was running out of juice, descending the whole way. The narrow lanes and low buildings of the warehouse district came up fast.

Mac held the copter off the asphalt