Cries and bootsteps sounded from the corridor. Krysty waited behind the desk, and as the door swung aside, she riddled the sec men coming through, driving them back against the wall, their bodies jerking like mad puppets under the stuttering fusillade of rounds.
They dropped, and she chanced a peek outside. Clear. Heading for the stairs, Krysty shot another man coming out of the torture room, but he was already bleeding freely from the ruin of his face. More evidence of Ryan’s sharpshooting.
Stopping at the window, she mouthed the news the baron was dead. A match flared for a second, showing Ryan’s face. He pointed down and closed his hand into a fist, then raised one, two, three fingers. As the match died, Krysty nodded in understanding and headed for the ground floor.
On the second floor, she found a few more bodies sprawled before an open window, the curtains full of holes. Then a door opened wide, and out came a busty maid with an armload of clean bedsheets. The woman inhaled sharply, preparing for a scream, and Krysty buried a boot in the woman’s gut. The maid dropped her load of linen, gasping for breath.
The redhead moved in close and administered a swift blow to the back of the head with the butt of the Ingram. With a soft moan, the maid dropped. Quickly checking her pulse to make sure the servant was alive, Krysty moved on. The maid would have a headache when she awakened, but unlike the baron, she would survive.
Tiptoeing down the staircase, Krysty paused as the brick wall of the first floor came into view. And so did a cadre of sec men, playing cards and smoking pipes behind a sandbag wall, a muzzle-loading cannon pointed at the front door. She had spotted them as the guards who had dragged her into the building only a few hours earlier. They were big and hard looking, but relaxed, obviously depending upon the security of the external guards way too much.
Staying hidden in the shadows just beyond the bluish light of their alcohol lanterns, Krysty checked over her borrowed weapons. The clip for the MAC-11 was down to two rounds, but the Skorpion was full. Exchanging 9 mm Parabellum rounds from one weapon’s clip to the other, Krysty finished just in time to hear a series of muffled grunts and clatters from the other side of the front door.
“Hey, Lieutenant, what the heck was that?” said a guard, placing aside his cards and going to the door.
The officer stood and reached for his rifle. “Let’s go see. Hannon, you’re on—”
Stepping into the harsh light, Krysty mowed the men down where they stood with the silenced MAC-11, the hissing stream of 9 mm rounds sounding no louder than a tire gently going flat.
Stepping over the tumbled corpses, Krysty opened the door and there was Ryan, SIG-Sauer in hand. The market square was well illuminated with a ring of torches, and she could see the exterior guards sprawled on the ground, weapons and bodies jumbled on top of one another, in the terrible throes of unexpected death.
“Clear?” Ryan whispered.
“Clear,” she said, stepping through and closing the door quietly. “I have the med kit.”
He touched the bloody cheek. “You okay?”
“Nothing a bath won’t cure.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
Chapter Seventeen
Carrying a plastic tray of covered dishes, Leonard walked up the stairs to the third floor. The baron hadn’t asked for his dinner yet, so the youth was bringing it to him. And secreted in his pocket was a piece of stale bread for the female prisoner. It wasn’t much, since the kitchen kept a close tally on the stocks, even for the nobility. Every scrap meant another day. But nobody should be allowed to starve.
When Leonard reached the third floor, the tray dropped from his hands, crashing onto the floor when he saw the bodies scattered along the hallway. The coppery stink of fresh blood filled the air, and red fluid was splashed everywhere, brightly dotted with the shiny spent brass of an autofire blaster.
Feeling stunned, he moved toward the baron’s private office. At the detention room, the door was ajar and he glanced inside. The chains were empty, the prisoner gone, two additional dead sec men sprawled on the floor.