Jake took his finger off the trigger, just in time to refocus on Quentin. Quentin had used pure survival reflex to keep moving himself. He was now close enough that Jake could reach out and grab Quentin’s arm, pulling him up to safety.
* * *
Kate was about to draw the attention of the guards when they stopped, turned around, and walked back toward her. She ducked behind the corner of the bat house as the men passed. She could hear an animated conversation, in German, being conducted over their radios.
“They’re leaving,” Kate whispered. “I don’t get it.”
When they were gone, she came out and ran down the pathway to the polar bear exhibit. Quentin was lying on the ground, soaking wet and breathing like he’d just set a personal best in the marathon. Jake was unwinding his line from the rail posts.
“Where’s Nick?” she asked.
“Top deck,” Jake said. “He might have taken a swipe to the leg, but otherwise he’s in one piece.”
Kate ran around to the back of the exhibit, up the stairs to the top deck. Nick was still stretched out on the concrete platform. His right pant leg was torn and soaked with blood, just above the knee.
She kneeled down next to him. “How bad is it?”
“Hard to say,” Nick said, pushing himself to a seated position. “I’m so cold, I don’t think I have any blood flowing.”
“Can you get up? We need to get out of here, fast. I saw two guards turn around and leave their beat. I have a bad feeling about what’s coming next.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jake and Quentin were waiting for Nick and Kate on the pathway.
“I’m guessing zoo security has been replaced by Red Star security,” Jake said. “If that’s true, they’ll have all of the exits covered.”
Kate nodded. “We’ll need a counterattack. Something that will allow us to get Nick and Quentin out of here.”
“Agreed,” Jake said. “You and Nick go back toward the gate. Quentin and I will see who we can take out here.”
Jake watched Kate and Nick as they headed for the bridge and the southern exit. Then he and Quentin ducked back behind the polar bear exhibit, opened the gate, eased it closed behind them, and climbed up the back stairs.
Two men arrived at the front of the exhibit, spotted Jake’s line wrapped around the rail posts, and looked in at the polar bears. They were both wearing the zoo’s official black windbreakers, but they were carrying semiautomatics with suppressors. The disguise isn’t meant to fool us, Jake thought. It’s a way to slip out undetected after we’re dead and the police start showing up.
Jake could have come over the rail and taken a shot, probably hit one of them. With a lot of luck, maybe both of them, but his gun didn’t have a suppressor, meaning his shots would let everyone else know he was there. That meant everyone else in the zoo, plus whoever was outside the zoo but close enough to hear the noise.
“Get ready,” Jake said to Quentin. “We’re going to have to improvise.”
* * *
As Kate and Nick made their way through the forested area, moving carefully from one tree to the next, Kate’s mind settled on the same problem that had just hit her father. If she fired her Beretta, she would alert the entire palace complex, and God knew who would show up five minutes later.
Nick was still shivering and bleeding from his leg. They spotted a pair of figures moving in the shadows ahead of them, two men coming through the southern gate. Kate steered Nick toward the nearest building.
“You got your lock picks?” she asked him. “Think you can open a door?”
Nick nodded. “In my sleep.”
They went around to the back of the building and found the rear door. Nick shook his hands, blew on them, pulled his lock pick set out of his soggy pants, and got to work.
* * *
There were three entrances to the park. Two men came through each gate, with strict orders to kill anyone else on two feet. It had taken this pair an extra minute to get down to the southern entrance, but now they were on the zoo grounds, each carrying a Heckler & Koch USP Tactical Combat semiautomatic with a Brügger & Thomet suppressor.
The man named Moritz nudged his partner, Oskar, and pointed with his gun to the path that led over the bridge. Something hit their ears, a metallic scraping noise, from somewhere to their left. Oskar aimed his gun in the direction of the sound and was just about to fire when Moritz stopped him.
Oskar and Moritz moved carefully along the edge of the mini-farm, toward the building on the other side of it. The metal gate protecting the front entrance was open. The sign above the entrance read Insectarium. Oskar went in first, turning on his flashlight as he stepped into the dark building. The light flashed off the glass surfaces all around them, reflecting back on both men.
Before Moritz could tell his partner to turn off the flashlight, he was covered with a blanket of something that had been dropped on him from above. The blanket turned into a hundred separate living things, crawling over his head, his face, his neck, into his ears, his nose, his eyes, his mouth. Beside him, Oskar was screaming and started shooting his gun indiscriminately. FWOOMP FWOOMP FWOOMP. Moritz was too busy with all of the insects covering him to do anything about it, until he heard two sets of feet dropping to the floor from somewhere above them.
He tried to aim his weapon, but he had to close his eyes as the horde of roaches continued to crawl over his face. When he cleared his vision, he saw that Oskar’s weapon was now in the hands of a woman, and that the barrel was pointed directly at his chest.
Moritz had a decision to make now, whether to drop his weapon or fire. When a large roach crawled down his shirt, he forgot all about his decision for a moment, just long enough for his gun to be kicked out of his hand. He started tearing off his clothes and got as far as his windbreaker. A closet door was opened and Moritz was pushed inside, landing on top of Oskar.
On the other side of the door, Nick wedged a chair against the knob to keep it shut, at least for a while. When he was done, Kate handed him one of the official black windbreakers.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You’ve just been promoted to Zoo Security.”
* * *
The two men who entered through the northern gate had just reached the center of the zoo when they heard a muffled scream coming from somewhere to the south. They were armed with the same HK USP Tactical semiautomatics and the same suppressors. Neither of these two men was as trigger happy as Oskar, but they held their weapons in a ready-to-fire position as they ran down the pathway.
They slowed down as they came to the trees, recognizing the danger of being out in the open. That was when they saw the movement of two figures stepping into the faint glow of one of the light posts. Black windbreakers. It was Oskar and Moritz. The two men put down their weapons.
But then Oskar and Moritz were suddenly firing on them, FWOOMP FWOOMP FWOOMP FWOOMP, and the last thought running through the mind of each man was that maybe this wasn’t Oskar and Moritz after all.
Both bodies slumped to the ground.
“Is there anything sexier than a woman with a semiautomatic and roaches in her hair?” Nick asked, stepping close to Kate. He picked a roach off her ponytail, threw it over his shoulder, and kissed her.