Near Miss

The server poured, then asked the same of Carly.

“I think I’d like to try the pinot.”

As the last word left her mouth, the room plunged into darkness. Even the emergency lights that should have come on remained unlit. At that same instant, Carly heard the sound of something familiar, but didn’t immediately place it.

Someone grunted and she felt movement next to her. “Stone?” She put a hand where she thought he was, but his chair was empty. “Stone?”

There was no answer. What she did hear was a cacophony of confused voices and the sound of several feet moving across the room.

Here and there flashlights on phones started coming on. Carly pulled her mobile from her clutch and turned on its light. Stone was nowhere to be seen.

She looked around for the Strategic Services bodyguards but didn’t see them anywhere.

“My God!” a woman yelled from the side of the room. “Sir, sir, are you okay?”

Carly swiveled in her chair toward the voice. The woman was crouched over the silhouette of a man on the ground, lying in the exact spot one of the bodyguards had been standing.

Someone else ran up to the woman. “Is he all right?”

“He has a pulse but he’s unconscious.”

Carly quickly glanced to the other places she’d seen Strategic Services personnel and spotted more silhouettes on the ground.

That’s when the identity of the noise she’d heard clicked into place. It had been a spraying sound. The same sound she had heard right before she’d been kidnapped.

She reached under her dress and withdrew the Smith & Wesson Equalizer pistol from her thigh holster and ran.

Chapter 70

A voice said, “We have the package.”

To Stone, it sounded like whoever was speaking was right next to him. Which was odd enough, but even stranger, Stone seemed to be moving, but not by his own power. And then there was the fact that something hard was pressing against his chest.

It took him two tries to open his eyes without feeling dizzy.

He appeared to be in a giant empty room, lit by the moving beams of several flashlights. Only the floor was above him, passing quickly under a pair of feet that couldn’t be his. He could hear other footsteps, too, so there had to be multiple people around him.

When he realized his cheek was bouncing off someone’s torso, it all came back to him. He’d been sitting at the table in the ballroom, talking with Bill Eggers, Herb Fisher, and Carly, when all the lights had gone out. Then some kind of liquid spray had hit him in the head, landing more on his ear than his face, and the next thing he knew, he was here, in what was clearly another, albeit unused, ballroom.

Recalling the spray triggered another memory, distant and foggy. He concentrated and then it came to him. The same knockout spray that had been used on Carly when she’d been kidnapped must have been used on him, only the person doing the spraying’s aim had been off. If Stone had been hit square in the face, no telling how long he would have been unconscious.

“Get the door,” the man carrying him said.

A pair of footsteps ran ahead, and moments later, a door opened.

Stone had no idea where the door led, but he was sure he couldn’t let himself be taken through it.

Marshaling as much strength as he could, he swung his elbow upward into the underside of the man’s jaw.

His kidnapper’s head snapped backward, and the guy yelled in pain.

Stone had expected that much, but he hadn’t expected the crack of a gun that echoed across the room at the exact same moment his blow had landed. The boom was quickly followed by the sound of the door that had opened closing again.

Ignoring both, Stone rolled off the man’s shoulder and fell toward the floor, where he landed awkwardly on his hands and feet, almost but not quite like a cat.

A second bang ripped through the air, and one of the people behind Stone dropped lifeless to the floor, the person’s flashlight smacking against the tile, and spinning around and around until coming to rest, pointing at a wall.

“Stone, stay down!” Carly called out.

A third gunshot was accompanied by a flash that briefly lit up Carly’s position, and another body dropped.

The guy who’d carried Stone had recovered enough to rush to a nearby door. He shoved it open and disappeared through it.

Stone reached for his gun, but it wasn’t there. He’d finally followed Dino’s advice to carry, and someone had taken his weapon. Just his luck.

He started crawling toward one of the people Carly had shot to borrow their weapon when a hand grabbed the collar of his jacket and yanked him back.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Stone twisted out of his jacket, sending the guy who’d grabbed him stumbling backward, and scrambled to the nearest downed man.

His hand landed on the butt of a pistol just as Carly yelled, “Stone! Watch out!”

He whirled around, his fingers gripping the gun. In the dim halo of a flashlight, he saw the guy from a moment before barreling toward him.

Stone raised the pistol and fired; the sound was dampened by the attached silencer.