Nicholas saw her, slumped against a pillar, her hand pressing again her shoulder. Even from fifty feet away he could see Lia was deathly pale.
“Man, this hurts, Mike, a bullet got me right above my Kevlar. I’m—” Lia slid to her right, facedown, and stopped moving.
Nicholas shouted, “I’m coming—”
A fist slammed into his jaw. He heard Mike yell as he staggered back. The same fist got him in the belly, and his momentum took him backward over the edge of the balcony. He clutched the rough stone, heard Mike shouting again. Whoever had hit him was running away. Another shooter.
The local polizia rushed into the square, and behind them, Carabinieri soldiers.
He had to get to Lia. Nicholas started to pull himself up, but the rough edge had scored his hand, the blood making his fingers slip. He dangled a moment before swinging back to grab the ledge. The fall was about thirty feet, certainly far enough to hurt.
He heard a gunshot and jerked his head around to see another shooter fall to the ground below, right off the balcony beside him. This one had been only ten feet away, sneaking up on him.
Someone had just saved his life, and it couldn’t have been either Louisa or Mike.
He felt a hand on his back. “Take my arm,” a voice said. He recognized the soft Scottish burr.
He looked up into Kitsune’s light blue eyes, like chips of ocean glass.
“Kitsune. Fancy meeting you here.”
“Take my arm, or you will fall, Nicholas.”
He let go of the rough stone and grabbed her forearm. The extra leverage had him up and over the balcony in a second. He landed in an ungraceful heap. By the time he got to his feet, he was alone.
Like smoke in a breeze, Kitsune was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Get to Lia,” Nicholas shouted in his comms to Mike. He clattered down the stairs into the piazza, ignoring the people gathering around him, and ran with her to the Doge’s Palace.
“I lost her, I lost Kitsune,” Louisa shouted over the comms.
“Yes, I know. Go back to the hotel, Louisa, right now,” he replied. “Make sure Adam is safe, tell him to hack into the Carabinieri, find a Major Salvadore Russo. To stand us up like this, let us get shot at—they sacrificed us. I want to know why and how deep this goes. Tell him to check who Russo’s been talking to. I have a bad feeling about this. Go.”
Piazza San Marco was chaos, a babble of noise, cries, shouts. People were coming back outside, camera phones and iPads filming everything.
A second later, Nicholas was shoved up against a stone pillar, soldiers surrounding him, guns aimed at his chest, shouting at him in Italian. Nicholas put his hands up.
“American FBI,” Nicholas yelled back in Italian. “My credentials are in my left breast pocket, and one of my teammates is shot. Where the bloody hell were you when we needed you? You were supposed to be here.”
Rapid-fire Italian, and a young lieutenant stepped forward, roughly grabbed the creds from Nicholas’s jacket.
He flipped open the leather case, studied it closely, then handed it back.
“I am Lieutenant Marco Caldoni. We were told the meet wasn’t for another hour. But then we heard the gunfire and came immediately.”
“And I was told by Major Salvadore Russo that he and his men would already be here. Can I put my hands down now?”
At Caldoni
’s nod, Nicholas said, “So where is your bloody major?”
“I don’t know, sir. You and your people have killed many men, and I hope none of them were tourists, or there will be hell to pay. Tell me what happened.”
“We were doing recon of the piazza when we were shot at. We took measures to keep ourselves safe.” He looked up at Mike waving frantically from the balcony. “I have a wounded agent.”
“I see EMS is climbing up the stairs as we speak. Someone called 118 when the shooting began. Is any other agent hurt?”