The sirens got louder.
“Time to go,” I said.
“My information was right,” Rinaldo said as he pointed to the front part of the trailer. “There’s my caviar.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be here,” I said. “I was in all the discussions about tonight—there was never any mention of caviar. How did you know it would be here?”
“My new man,” he said. “He had a contact in the Russian group—someone high up.”
My mind went back to the argument between Andrey and Rurik, focusing on Rurik’s glee when he talked himself out of being here tonight. He had to be the informant. He wasn’t working for Rinaldo—I was sure of that—but using him to get back at Andrey and Gavino.
“I might know what happened,” I said, “but we have to get out of here now.”
“Agreed. And you need to hurry.”
“He has Lia?”
“I don’t know,” Rinaldo said. “He said he knew right where you were hiding, and that’s where he was headed when we came here. You better take my car—the keys are in the ignition.”
I turned and started off, then looked back briefly.
“Who is he?” I asked over my shoulder. “What’s the guy’s name?”
“Kyle Davies.”
The name gave me a bit of a start. It wasn’t someone I knew, but the name was so close to the private who bummed a cigarette off of me a few days before we were ambushed—Keith Davies. He was the third person in the video when the reporter was executed and the one whose information told the insurgents where to find us all. He nearly faced court-martial when we returned because they were convinced he had given the information willingly. It didn’t happen, but he was ultimately disgraced and ended up leaving the Marines as a result.
Coincidence, I told myself as I climbed into Rinaldo’s car and screeched out of the parking area.
All other thoughts were pushed from my head as I focused all of my energy on getting to Lia as quickly as possible. If this Davies guy touched her, I wasn’t sure what I would do. Just the thought of something happening to her was causing my heart to thump audibly in my chest and a cold sweat to form on my palms.
I dumped the car in front of the apartment without even bothering to turn off the ignition. I pulled my Beretta out as I raced up the stairs to the second story unit, which was where my blood went ice cold.
The door was smashed in.
Nothing could have terrified me more.
Chapter 19—Incredible Loss
“Lia!” I screeched as I rushed to the door.
There was no answer.
Inside was a disaster with all evidence pointing toward a struggle. The end table was upended, and the lamp that had been sitting on it was smashed against the floor. The bags Lia had neatly packed had been opened, and their contents strewn about the floor. As I looked around, it appeared as though everything we had planned to take with us was dumped out. My eyes moved toward the next room.
“Fuck...no, no, no…”
Blood.
It was on the floor near a pile of things from one of the suitcases—a long streak of dark red, leading back into the bedroom. I couldn’t breathe as I approached the door. The adrenalin in my veins moved my muscles quickly, but my mind couldn’t catch up. Several possibilities were running through my head at top speed, and none of them were good.
If anything, the bedroom was worse than the living room.
I looked around and tried to keep myself from hyperventilating by forcing air in and out of my nose, but I still couldn’t think straight. Every drawer had been pulled out, its contents dumped and strewn about the floor. Another table and lamp were knocked over, and the blankets and sheets on the bed were a mess. I couldn’t even tell what everything on the floor was—it was all a big blur of mess.
A barely audible whine came from the floor behind the bed, the exact location marked by the trail of blood.
Odin.