The call went dead, but then Coyle heard more shouting in his earpiece. A snap of gunfire was just audible before whoever it was who was transmitting took their finger off the button.
The Northern Irishman turned around to face the bedroom behind him for the first time, and he saw that his boss had his own pistol out again, sweeping it around like a fucking idiot.
Charlie shouted. “Put it down!”
The stainless semiauto shook at the end of the man’s hand. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
Charlie closed the distance, then pulled the gun from his boss’s clutches and tossed it onto the bed up by the pillows. Angrily, he shouted, “You’re not shootingmetonight!”
Minchev looked up at him, and Charlie suddenly recognized the effects of cocaine or amphetamine or something on his employer’s face, now amplified by the terror in his eyes, and he wondered if the man was going to have a heart attack.
Charlie did nothing to lessen the chances of this when he said, “The American is in the building. He has a gun.”
Wiping sweat from his forehead with the arm of his jacket, Minchev said, “It’s no problem. It’s no problem. I…I have five guys who will—”
“You havefourguys,” Coyle corrected, and then he turned away and headed back into the living room.
Three
Charlie went back to the door, listening for more transmissions in his earpiece, frantic for more clarity on his situation.
The gunfire below had stopped; Charlie knew this could mean the American was dead, or it could mean the attacker was well inside the building now, maybe even in the stairwell or on the elevator.
Minchev was shouting into his mobile phone, but Charlie tuned him out because he couldn’t understand.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! How can this be happening?
From behind him, back in the bedroom, he heard Minchev shout now, “Videv says the American is on the stairs now, coming up.”
“Which stairwell?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Well, feckin’ find out!” Charlie shouted. Minchev began communicating in Bulgarian again, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his junior bodyguard was now screaming orders at him.
A new transmission came through Charlie’s earpiece, but it was garbled. The mic of the transmitting radio stayed open; it sounded like it was in a pocket, the scratching noises of someone moving quickly.
Then the boom of a pair of gunshots, fired in nearly impossible rapid succession.
A wave of terror shot through Charlie Coyle’s central nervous system as he realized what he was hearing. The person with the radio was the attacker. He’d just shot someone, or shot at someone, with the fastest double tap the young Northern Irishman had ever heard in his life, and the attacker also had the presence of mind to hijack the radio network by keeping the handset locked open as he moved through the building.
This bloke was good.
Behind Charlie, Minchev kept talking into his phone, his plaintive, panicking, coked-up tone and cadence only adding to the insanity of the moment.
Charlie Coyle felt a desire to run. To leave his responsibilities behind and just hoof it the fuck out of there.
He didn’t want to die for this criminal in this shit building in this foreign city.
He was only twenty-bloody-four.
His life was a mess, but he had time yet to sort things.
To put things right.
Charlie Coyle’s job was to keep his protectee alive, and he had been telling himself that a man’s word had to stand for something, but right now, he only thought of Ronan, of Deirdre, of getting the fuck out of here, of getting back home to Derry.
The sound of sirens audible outside the window told him the police were arriving en masse, but he had no illusions that the cops would get up here and control the scene before the American made it up the stairs and found the safe room.
