Gina couldn’t say a word because her heart was jammed so tightly in her throat. What she could do, and she did, was bring his hand to her lips and kiss him. His fingers, his palm. He cupped her cheek, and when she looked up at him, he had so much love in his eyes, it took her breath away.
Love, plus heat. Desire.
It embarrassed him a little, or maybe he thought it was inappropriate, because although he smiled, it was rueful and he looked away.
“You know, I love it when you look at me like that,” she whispered.
He met her eyes again and . . . Oh, yeah, it was definitely time to find a room. With a door. The bed was entirely optional.
Except . . .
“Oh, shoot,” Gina said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
But she didn’t get a chance, because the light from the security camera monitors flickered and then faded completely away.
“It’s the generator,” Jones reported, speaking softly because his wife was still sleeping in the other room. “We’re out of gas.”
He could see that Gina was relieved that this wasn’t something the army outside had attempted—some simultaneous attack on all of the security cameras at the exact same moment, in advance of some other far more violent and catastrophic nighttime assault.
“I don’t think they even knew we had security cameras.” Max used the binoculars to look out the second-story window at the army camped at the edge of the square.
Making a run for it under cover of darkness.
That was the most viable of the many options and suggestions they’d come up with today as they’d brainstormed ways either to escape, or get noticed by friends or allies.
Some of the ideas were silly, thanks to Molly, who, despite being upset with Jones was still trying to keep the mood upbeat.
They had boxes and boxes of copy paper. They could make thousands of paper airplanes with the message, “Help!” written on them and fly them out the windows.
Could they try to blast their way out of the tunnel? Maybe dig an alternative route to the surface? It seemed a long shot, worth going back in there and taking a look at the construction—which Jones had done only to come back out, thumbs down.
Two of them could create a diversion, while the other two took the Impala and crashed their way out of the garage.
At which point the Impala—and everyone in it—would be hit by hundreds of bullets.
That one—along with taking their chances with the far fewer number of soldiers lying in wait at the end of the escape tunnel—went into the bad idea file.
Molly had thought that they could sing karaoke. Emilio had a Best of Whitney Houston karaoke CD. Their renditions of
I Will Always Love You,
she insisted, would cause the troops to break rank and run away screaming.
Except the karaoke machine was powered by electricity, which they were trying to use only for the computer and the security monitors, considering—at the time—that the generator was almost out of gasoline.
Yeah,
that
was why it was a silly idea.
It did, however, generate a lot of desperately needed laughter.
At that point, Gina had suggested using some of their firepower to try to get attention. If they kept firing their weapons—either into the air or down into the street—maybe someone would come to investigate. Or mention to someone in the nearest American Embassy that a full-scale battle appeared to be taking place on Pulau Meda.
Or—better yet—they could fire their weapons in a rhythmic pattern.
Gina apparently had a friend who was a SEAL who’d set off explosives to blow in the pattern of “Shave and a Haircut”—bump bah-dah bump bump—in hopes that some of his buddies would hear it and find him.
They could do something here, she’d suggested, that would be undeniably identifiable as American. Such as “Take Me out to the Ball Game,” or “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” It would be like taking part in the world’s most violent percussion section.
Of course, SOS in Morse Code had less flair, but that could work, too.
Or maybe, Max had said, when the colonel arrived, they could surrender the disk with the info on the impending Jakarta American Embassy attack. He’d used the computer to insert a “we are here” message on the disk. With luck, it would get into the right hands.
But luck hadn’t been on their side so far, Jones pointed out. They were going to have to start thinking about ways to use him as a bargaining chip.
Molly had jumped on top of that, assuming he’d meant that Max should start thinking about surrendering Jones to the colonel. It was an option she wanted Max to promise he’d never consider.
Of course, Max wasn’t about to make any promises he couldn’t keep, so Molly had made her second dramatic exit of the day.
Jones had followed.
Furious with him, Molly had refused to talk. She had, however, taken him to bed where the sight of that bandage over her biopsy stitches put an additional weird spin on things.
Afterwards, she’d cried, which damn near broke his heart.
She’d fallen asleep just before sundown, holding tightly to him as if she were never going to let him go.
But now it was dark, and their most viable option—making a run for it under cover of darkness—was no longer a possibility.
Because someone out there was on top of the situation, and there was no darkness. Three jeeps had been moved into the square. Engines running, the vehicles’ bright headlights were aimed at the front of the house. They had their fog lights lit, too, which meant that shooting out the lights would require not just six well-aimed bullets, but twelve. Which was a crying shame.
Max had been keeping an eye on the security monitors, and he told Jones that someone down at the end of the escape tunnel had done something similar, although it had been hard to see if there was more than one jeep down there.
And as far as the security cameras went . . .
Now that they were gone, he and Max were going to have to use the old-fashioned method of keeping an eye on the army that had them surrounded.
“You want to take the first watch, or should I?” Jones asked him now.
Max was holding the binoculars, but he wasn’t looking through them anymore. He was staring at the wall, frowning slightly.
Okay. It was possible the man was starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep, so Jones decided for him. “I’ll take it first,” he said. “I’m not that tired.” He looked at Gina. “Make sure he really sleeps.”
But Max didn’t relinquish the binoculars. “Wait,” he said. “Whoa. I think I know how to get us out of here.” He looked at Gina. “All of us.”
Max turned back to Jones. And it was clear he wasn’t losing it. He may have been tired, but he was alert and completely, solidly there. “I need to get the commander back on the walkie-talkie,” he said. “Help me wake him up.”
“Molly. Mol.”
She awoke to find Gina gently shaking her, light from a candle making shadows dance around the room and across her somber face. Molly clutched the sheet to her, aware with a flash of fear that Jones was no longer beside her in the bed. “What’s wrong? Where’s Grady?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Gina reassured her. “He and Max are going to stir things up by shooting some of our guns. I didn’t want you to wake up to that sound and think we were under attack.”
Her relief was short-lived as the ripping sound of automatic gunfire exploded around them. Even though Molly was expecting it, it made her jump. And it still made her crazily anxious. What a terrible noise. She grabbed for Gina’s hand, and they sat there, just holding onto each other, trying not to flinch.
She knew that Gina hated the sound, too.
But Max and Grady were sending an SOS—she recognized the pattern.
Gina caught her questioning look and nodded. “Two birds with one stone,” she shouted over the racket.
There was silence then. Just for a moment, and then Max and Jones repeated the entire sequence.
Molly could only imagine how loud it would have been with the door open.
“What’s going on?” she asked Gina when, once again, the sudden silence seemed to ring around them.
“Max is going to try to negotiate again with the commanding officer,” Gina told her. “You know that information he found on Emilio’s backup disks about the attack on the embassy?”
The American embassy. In Jakarta. Molly nodded.
“He’s not going to hand over the information on disk,” Gina told her, “and pray it gets into the hands of someone who’ll be able to decode his ‘send help’ message. Instead, he’s simply telling the CO that we have information about an impending terrorist attack. If the commander wants the details, he’s going to have to bring in American authorities to help negotiate our little standoff here.”
Dear Lord.
“Once we get the Americans involved, then hopefully this shoot-on- sight-even-if-we-surrender thing disappears,” Gina continued. “Grady’ll be arrested, sure, but he’ll be in American custody. Which is way better than dead.”
Molly nodded. It was.
“Basically, Max is giving this CO a choice,” Gina told her. “If he hands Grady over to the Americans, Nusantara and his mystery colonel are going to be pissed, right? But if he sits on this info about a terrorist attack and the embassy is hit . . .”
“Innocent people could die,” Molly said. She
hated
this.
“Yeah,” Gina agreed. “That’s what Max wants him to be thinking. As well as the fact that his knowing about it in advance, yet doing nothing,
will
get out. The interpreter will know, as well as his aides . . . People will find out, and fingers’ll be pointed. They always are. And they could well point at the colonel and Nusantara, too. That’s what Max is telling this guy, right now—to contact Nusantara and tell him this. As far as damage control goes, he’s going to have to make a choice. What could hurt Nusantara’s political career more? Accusations of murder from a nonrepu-table felon or the fact that his private agenda kept him from stopping a terrorist attack?”
Nonreputable felon.
Gina had always been good at reading Molly’s mind. “You know that I don’t think that’s what Jones is, right?” she said. “I’m just trying to make it sound as if—”
As if on cue, Jones stuck his head in the door. “We’re too late,” he said flatly. “The attack on the embassy went down yesterday.”
“There’s gas in the Impala,” Jones pointed out.
Molly looked at him. “But who’s going into the garage to get it?”
“Look, Mol—”
“Don’t ‘Look, Mol,’ me!” she shot back at him. “You told me yourself that the garage isn’t reinforced. It’s dangerous just to open that door. If someone goes out there . . .”
“Guys,” Max said mildly, as he ran the binoculars over the surrounding army. They were settling back in, going back to sleep.
“I was just saying,” Jones said. “There’s gas in the Impala, and we need gas to power up the generator . . .”
They were all up in the second-story front room, down on the floor, out of range of the window. All except for Max, who was standing off to the side, over by the door.
During the last negotiation session, Jones had gone into the bathroom and taken the mirror off the medicine cabinet. He’d managed to set it up so they could use it to see out the window—while sitting safely out of range of a sniper’s bullets.
“If we could get the computer up and running,” Jones continued now, “maybe we’ll find something else on one of those disks.”
“Maybe I should be the one to get the gas,” Molly said.
Damn. If Max had four perpetrators completely surrounded, he wouldn’t be sitting back and taking a nap.
He’d have them on the radio, talking. He’d be keeping them awake and jumpy. Keeping the noise level up to a pretty continuous racket, either by blasting cacophonic music or other jarring sounds through loudspeakers, or with repeated and random small arms fire.
This mutual slumber time was ridiculous.
Unless, of course, there really
was
a tank on its way.
“What,
you’re
going to siphon the gas from the car . . . ?” Jones asked.
“I do know how to do it.” Molly sounded insulted that he should think otherwise.
Max looked at the jeeps, with their headlights blazing. He judged the distance, tried to do the math. Twelve lights. How long would it take, from the moment of that very first shot? Twelve shots, divided by two shooters . . .
“We can help, you know,” Molly implored Jones, and Max as well. “Gina and I. It’s not as if we’re . . . we’re . . . sacks of potatoes, just sitting here waiting to be rescued by the menfolk. We have skills, too. I happen to have been taught to siphon gas in a third-world country by a nun with a lot of rage issues after losing funding. She could probably even teach
you
a thing or two about black market scamming.”
But what if they had three shooters . . .
“How are you at target shooting?” Max interrupted her.
Molly blinked at him. “You mean, with a gun?”
“With a rifle,” he said.
She shook her head. “Use of killing-sticks is not one of my skills. I
am
really good, though, at popping balloons with a dart. Oh, yes, and annoying my husband. I’m
really
good at that.”
“Gina?” Max asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Sorry,” Gina said.
“You don’t annoy me,” Jones told Molly. “You terrify me. Come on, you need to go back to bed. You’re practically falling over. How can you make jokes when . . .”
As Jones and Molly argued their way out of the room, Gina inched closer. She sat on the floor beneath the windows, her back against the wall.
Using her foot, she dragged over the pillow that Max had been using earlier, putting it beside her—a silent invitation to come and sit. “What are you thinking?”
Max shook his head. “That we could shoot out the lights, but it won’t work. There’s too many of them. I’m good, but I’m no Alyssa Locke.” He glanced down at her. “She’s a sharpshooter. Did you know that?”
Of course she did. Alyssa had helped with the takedown of the hijacked plane. She was one of the snipers who took out the terrorists in the cockpit, where Gina was being held.