Cocksucker had made it out, but at least Rutskoi had wounded him. Or the woman. Or both, he thought viciously. Let it be both. Let them be bleeding their fucking hearts out on the street.

When he understood that Drake and the woman had probably made it out of the room, Rutskoi had sprinted to the rooftop and had taken out the helicopter on the opposite roof with ten incendiary rounds, watching with satisfaction as the helicopter exploded and fell in burning pieces through the snow to the street thirty stories below. Just to vent his frustration, Rutskoi had shot the pilot who had come out of a small, warm shed on the rooftop. It had given him immense pleasure to take Drake’s pilot down.

Shit.

No, control. He needed control. He waited a moment, forcing himself to move into the sniper’s mind-set of dispassionate detachment, then descended the stairs.

Rutskoi went back into the empty apartment and calmly broke down his Barrett, placing the pieces in their foam cutouts with steady hands that didn’t in any way betray the turmoil inside.

Drake had escaped. Okay. But the game wasn’t over yet. He was wounded and he hadn’t been able to escape with many resources.

And he was running with a woman he cared for. She would slow him down, force him to make mistakes. Drake was an operator, a clever, ruthless man. He would do what was necessary to survive. But with a woman to drag along behind him and protect, Drake would slip up. And Rutskoi would get him.

Rutskoi knew exactly how to track him down.

Terabyte.

Twenty genius hackers working out of Estonia, who provided around-the-clock services to anyone, for the right price. They could find out anything on anyone. Need dirt on your new boss? In 24 hours, Terabyte will deliver a dossier including video footage of the boss fucking a call girl. Need to know someone’s bank password? Easy. Terabyte can get classified information in a day, top-secret information in a day and a half.

Word had it that one of them had been the NSA’s top cyber expert and could hack into the array of military satellites ringing the globe.

For the right price, they would monitor the entire world for any appearance of Grace Larsen or Viktor Drakovich, in any of his incarnations.

Rutskoi had known Drake long enough, had studied him long enough, to know many of his pseudonyms, which he’d feed to Terabyte, together with a database of the companies Drake owned that he knew of.

It was entirely possible that with Terabyte’s help, he could track Drake to earth very soon.

The woman would slow him down, make him vulnerable. She would be the death of him.

Fifteen

Bed. He was lying on a bed.

It was raining.

Drake opened his eyes briefly, then shut them against the pain in his head. But not before he’d seen a ceiling. Gray, low, cracked. The cracks ran diagonally across the tiny room like a big river with tributaries running off it.

He opened his eyes again, ignoring the sharp pain, taking stock.

Small room, maybe five meters by five meters. Walls painted a dusty tan a long time ago. A small television set high up on a wall bracket, chained to the bracket. A cheap plastic wardrobe missing a handle on one door. A desk, a chair. An open door giving on to a small, white-tiled bathroom.

The mattress under him was as soft as a sponge, guaranteed to provide a restless night’s sleep.

Where were they? In a cheap motel room, obviously, but where?

He turned his head to the bedside table and had to wait for the room to stop spinning before reaching out to the notepad next to the old-fashioned rotary-dial telephone. It took him a couple of tries to coordinate his hand’s movements. Finally, he had the pad in his hand and brought it to his face, trying fiercely to focus.

JORDAN’S MOTOR COURT, he read. WALLIS, SOUTH CARO-LINA.

He’d never heard of Wallis, but he knew where South Carolina was.

Where was Grace? That he was alone in the motel room could be seen at a glance.

He had no memory of how he got here and understood that he must have been out for at least eight hours, probably more. If Grace had stopped, it was because she was too exhausted to go on.

So…where was she?

Drake felt a sharp ache in his chest that had nothing to do with wounds and everything to do with missing her. He would survive his wounds. His body was already knitting itself up, he could feel it. The headache and muscle pains were nothing.

But he needed Grace like he needed water and air. Ferociously.

Where the hell was she?

He rolled over in bed, relishing the small surge of strength he could feel returning to his body, and that was when he saw it.

The trolley, lying by the left-hand bedside table.

Open.

She hadn’t even bothered to close it.

Drake’s heart gave a sharp blow in his chest. Pure, lancing pain, such as none he had ever felt before, exploded inside him.

She’d left him.

Of course.

He was a hunted man. His enemies had almost killed her twice, had killed a dear friend and driven her out of her home and out of her life. She must have thought his enemies would eventually get her, too.

And there was the trolley, full of enough money to support someone like Grace for two lifetimes.

He didn’t even blame her. Any other woman would have done the same. If there was anyone in the world who understood the imperatives of self-preservation, it was Drake. Grace would have to be crazy to stay with him, a hunted man, a criminal. Wounded, perhaps dying, for all she knew.

He understood, completely.

So why did it fucking hurt so much?

It was a pain unlike any he had ever felt before, more than torn tissues and broken bones, much more. Something essential in him felt broken, blown apart—something at the core of his being, something that medicine couldn’t help and that would never heal.

Grace had left him and he felt completely adrift, untethered to the world. Even in his darkest days as a homeless boy on the streets, he had never felt this…hollow. The life force that had sustained him forever had somehow vanished.

He was probably capable of sitting up, even of getting up and walking. He needed stitches and some antibiotics, but he could function. He’d managed to get out of bad situations before in worse shape than this.

He knew what he had to do. Lack of money right now meant nothing. He had his cell phone and could start the process of accessing his funds. It would take a little time and a little trouble, that was all.

Grigori was waiting for him. The plan was a good one. Foolproof, almost.

Grigori would be waiting close by the Gulfstream 4, in a small, private airfield not far from the Tampa airport, which had heavy traffic in cargo flights. Grigori had access to all the flight plans out of Tampa. He’d fly them out at night, within 800 meters of a cargo flight headed for Eastern Europe, keeping directly below the jet blast of the engines with the collision lights off, completely invisible to radar.

They would fly across the Atlantic tailing the cargo flight and no one would ever know. It was standard operating procedure for Drake’s flights.

They’d land in Montenegro, where the deputy premier was one of Drake’s best customers, be carried over by boat to Apulia, the boot heel of Italy, where a car would be waiting to drive them to Rome. Grace had wanted to go to Rome, and by God he wanted to take her there.

That had been his plan—a few days in Rome, showing her the sights, then they would take their jump to the final destination—Sivuatu, a thousand miles from Fiji and a million miles from nowhere.

Even without Grace, the plan was good. He actually needed to go to Rome, where the second-best forger in the world lived. He’d had to run without any documents, and Signor Caselli could get them for him. A Belgian passport, a Maltese passport and perhaps a Croatian one.