Plan B

Book 2.5 in the Nick Heller series, 2011

There’s nothing more dangerous than stealing a powerful man’s most prized possession.

But I had no choice.

I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an ambulance in a very wealthy neighborhood in Barcelona. It was two in the morning on a moonless night, and since there were no streetlights in this very upscale part of town, we were shrouded in darkness. The ambulance was a boxy white Nissan van whose black vinyl seats were cracked and sprung. The interior stank of stale cigarette smoke. The medical equipment did not inspire confidence. But I wasn’t complaining: The ambulance was borrowed.

“What I don’t get,” said the man behind the wheel, “is why.”

The man was named Benito, and he was a private investigator, formerly an officer with the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía. He was small and scrappy, with dyed black hair and a soul patch and an ugly white scar on his right jaw. He had the small dark button eyes of a rag doll. His teeth were tobacco stained. He smoked almost constantly, but out of deference to me, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over an hour. I’m not one of those antismoking fascists; that’s not why I don’t like being around lighted cigarettes. The problem was that, even though I hadn’t smoked in years, since the army, I was always on the verge of backsliding.

“Why what?” I finally asked.

“Why you do this.”

“I thought I explained.”

“Not what we doing now,” Benito said, “but why.” Benito’s accent was heavy, but his English was almost fluent. His British mother had moved to Barcelona to teach English and ended up marrying a Basque.

“Like I said, a guy hired me.”

“But you don’t need the money. This is risky. Really dangerous. Why would you do this if you don’t have to?”

I didn’t answer. Most people assumed I was loaded because my father was this famous Wall Street financier. “Infamous” was maybe more accurate. The only reason anyone had heard of him was because of all the news stories: how he went fugitive before he was arrested for a massive insider-trading scam, how they caught up with him and put him on trial and locked him up. People assumed he’d left his family a lot of money, hidden somewhere offshore. They didn’t realize that he’d left us with nothing.

“How much this guy pay you, anyway?”

“It’s never enough,” I said. “Not why I do it.”

“Hope it’s good reason, that’s all I say.”

I shrugged. “When it’s a dad trying to get back his daughter, I figure that’s a pretty good reason.”

“Yeah? He must be good friend.”

“I barely know him,” I said.

I’d been hired by a rich Ukrainian I’d met in London. His name was Vadim Kuzma, and he lived in a big white stucco house in South Kensington. He was obviously mega-wealthy. A mutual friend had introduced us at some boring client dinner party at J Sheekey in Covent Garden.

Vadim asked for my card. I told him I didn’t have one, but I gave him my e-mail. A few weeks later he sent me a desperate message that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Svetlana, had been kidnapped in Barcelona. I called him for more details. He was frantic. He never should have let her travel on her own, he said. She was far too young. He’d heard about a big kidnapping case in Boston I’d been involved in, and he offered me a lot of money to get her back, far more than I would have asked for.

“How much is the ransom demand?” I asked.

“I wish this was ransom,” Vadim said, his voice cracking. “Money I can pay.”

“Then what is it?” I asked.

“My intelligence network tells me she’s being held prisoner by José María Soler.”

“I’m sorry to hear this.” José María Soler was one of the wealthiest men in Spain, a billionaire who’d made his fortune in telecommunications. He also owned one of Spain’s most successful football clubs. He was immensely powerful, a man used to getting his own way. A man who probably had half the police in Barcelona on his payroll.

I grabbed the first flight out of Boston.

Benito drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “This thing’s a piece of crap,” he said. He had a friend who ran an ambulance company and had agreed, for a wad of cash, to leave his vehicle yard unsecured for an hour earlier that day.

“If I’m ever hit by a car in Barcelona, remind me to walk to the hospital,” I said. “I think I’d get there faster.”

He looked at his watch. “Let’s just hope we don’t need this ambulance as an ambulance,” he said. “You’re not going to kill nobody, yes?”

“I’m a man of peace.”

“Yeah? You never kill people?”

I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling.

“I was in the Special Forces,” I said.

“I don’t mean in combat.”

“Never.” I paused for a moment. “Hardly ever.”

“Hardly ever,” he repeated, thinking it over.

“Sometimes you have no choice.”

“It’s the, how you say, self-defense.”

“Sometimes.”

“And other than that?”

“Never,” I said. I was staring out the window, but I could feel his doll-button eyes on me. “Hardly ever,” I amended.

“Hardly ever,” he repeated, and snorted.

“It’s always something you want to avoid. If possible.”

Benito grunted. “So it’s a fallback. A Plan B.”

“It’s not going to come to that tonight.”

“You never know what might happen.” Benito was chewing the skin on the side of his left index finger. “The Spanish, they have a saying. ‘Cuando menos piensa el galgo, salta la liebre.’ It means like, just when the hunting dog least expects it, the jackrabbit jumps out.”

“I’m not worried about rabbits,” I said.

“It means-”

“I get what it means. But don’t worry. You and I and the girl are going to get out safe and sound. Anybody gets in the way of that-well, I didn’t bring a Havahart trap.”

He didn’t seem reassured. “We ready?”

“Five minutes,” I said, glancing at my watch. “That’s when the guards’ shift changes.”

Carrer de la Font del Lleó was a narrow street at the foot of a steep, scrubby incline, its sandy soil overgrown with stunted, windswept trees and tangled vines. On one side was a narrow sidewalk bordered by a neatly manicured hedgerow into which were cut driveways fortified by gates and guard booths, the entrances to humbler residences, and the occasional utility pole.

Carved into the steep slope of the Collserola mountain overlooking downtown Barcelona was a vast estate: a sprawling villa with a red barrel-tile roof, an Olympic-size swimming pool and a clay tennis court, a lot of terraces and a manicured lawn and ornamental trees and shrubs and all that.

Between the terrain and the foliage and the high stone wall surrounding the property, you couldn’t see much of the house from the street. But Benito had obtained the architect’s blueprints from the city registry. And for the last two days I’d been conducting surveillance of the house from various vantage points in the area, using a high-powered scope and a good camera with a telephoto lens. I’d borrowed Benito’s Labrador and taken a couple of leisurely strolls around the property. Once I even let him slip the leash and watched him scramble up the slope bordering the southwestern wall. I was a frustrated neighbor with an unruly pet. I followed him through the spiny gorse and the dry, thorny brolla shrubs, nearly losing my footing as the sandy soil gave way, grabbing on to the branch of a gnarled almond tree. Geckos scuttled by.

Soon I knew the make and model of the thirty-six CCTV cameras that ringed the property. I knew that anyone who came within twelve feet of the wall would appear on a monitor inside. I’d noticed the five strands of high-tensile wire atop the eight-foot stone wall through which ten thousand volts pulsed at one-second intervals. If you touched it, you fried. If you tried to cut it, you’d trigger the alarm. Also, I saw the taut steel wire threaded through the anchor posts: an electromechanical anticlimb sensor. Grab it, tug at it, and you’d set off the strain gauge, kicking off the alarm.

Not bad. Not bad at all. But it made for quite a challenge.

As far as perimeter security went, an electric fence was pretty good. Not as ugly as coils of razor wire, and more effective. Of course, any security measure could be defeated, given enough lead time and intelligence and preparation. And Soler’s system wasn’t perfect. A utility pole, for instance, was less than six feet from the southwest corner wall. Theoretically you could climb the pole and vault over the fence, but as long as the electric fence was powered up, you risked hitting the wires on the way down and turning into a churro. Even if you did make it over the wall intact, all of the house’s doors and windows were wired into an alarm system, with video cameras trained on every entrance.

Then there were the armed guards inside the residence. Benito’s police sources had told him that fifteen firearms licenses had been issued for the household security staff, but that didn’t tell us how many guards would be on-site at any one time. My observations told me that while he was in residence, Soler normally had four. I also took note of when the guards’ shift changed. I saw Soler leave the property several times in his armored Maybach limousine, accompanied by a duo of bodyguards.

“Imagine you live in a house like this one?” Benito said.

I was quiet for a moment. “Yeah.”

“Oh, right,” he said, embarrassed. “You did, yes? When you were a kid?”

“It can be like living in a prison.”

“I wouldn’t mind living in a prison like this one.”

“A security system this elaborate is sometimes just as much about keeping people inside as keeping them out.”

“Huh.”

“How solid is your intel on Soler?”

Benito turned to look at me. His eyes blazed: indignation, but also a little defensiveness. “Come on, Nick. I myself saw him get into his Maybach and leave here at four o’clock this afternoon. I followed him to El Prat. His private helicopter filed a flight plan with a five o’clock departure. His chopper left right on time. My guy in Madrid observed him arriving at his flat on Calle de Alcalá at six twenty this evening in one of his other Maybachs. He’s not here.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “Nice work.”

He drummed on the steering wheel some more. “We don’t know how many guards he keeps here when he’s out of town. That’s what I don’t like.”

“Agreed. But if we do this right, it won’t make any difference if he has an entire battalion.”

“If,” Benito said.

“I like to think positive.”

“A guy like this, he always takes measures.”

“Sure.”

“He’s a billionaire. He makes a lot of enemies. He spares nothing for his protection. He gives his guards every weapon he can buy.”

“He’s also not here. Which means his guards aren’t going to be on high alert.”

“I am not so sure,” Benito said. Anxiety had begun to seep into his voice, and I didn’t like that. Anxiety often leads to mistakes. “Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean he doesn’t have something to protect.”

We both knew what he meant: his valuables. His possessions, as he saw it. Which included a fifteen-year-old girl named Svetlana, his latest acquisition, who was being held prisoner inside.

The night she disappeared, her father told me, he got a brief, panicked call from her cell phone. The call was cut short after a few seconds, and she never called back. Nor did she answer his repeated calls and texts.

The next day, Kuzma had hired an attorney in Madrid to put pressure on the Spanish legal authorities. They’d made perfunctory inquiries, Vadim said. Soler not only denied she was there, he denied ever having met the girl. But when I checked with Svetlana’s wireless provider, I was able to confirm that her mobile phone was indeed inside Soler’s house.

So there was really only one way to get her back. Sometimes the best way to deal with criminals is by committing a crime. That’s the only language they understand.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go test his security.”

Benito started up the ambulance and let out the emergency brake, and we drove a few blocks downhill in tense silence. I could tell he was starting to regret getting involved. It had begun to sink in how dangerous this job was. Up until now it had been routine, low-risk stuff: Dig up some background on Spain’s richest man, help me figure out a plan. Borrow an ambulance.

Now he was thinking about the guards with their submachine guns and his eight-year-old son being left without a father.

I said, “I can handle this myself, you know. You don’t have to go with me.”

I really didn’t want to work with someone who was going to go all wobbly on me.

He just stared.

“You don’t need to go through with this,” I said.

He scowled, looked insulted, didn’t reply. He switched on the light bar and the flashers and the red strobe light. He flicked a switch on the dashboard and the siren began to whoop. We looped around a couple of blocks, taking the long way, so it looked as though we’d come up from downtown. By the time we reached the entrance to Soler’s estate on Carrer de la Font del Lleó, we were speeding like an ambulance is supposed to.

Benito shut down the siren and lowered the window, and a voice crackled over the intercom. Benito replied in rapid-fire Spanish. I could make out only “emergencia” and “Soler” and “Consulado Americano.” A video camera hummed and swiveled and looked right at his face.

There was a pause. I assumed the guards were consulting with one another. Soler was not in residence, and they had to make an executive decision.

We were idling in front of a pair of tall, wrought-iron, motor-driven double-swing gates, controlled by an electronic keypad and video intercom and topped with spikes. But the spikes were as ornamental as the ironwork scrolls. Between the anticlimb sensors and the CCTV and the ground-loop vehicle detector embedded in the pavement surface, no one was going to climb over the gate, or the fence, without being noticed.

A minute later the guard’s voice came over the intercom again. Benito said something and the guard replied.

Benito muttered, “This idiot says no one called for an ambulance.”

“Translate for me,” I said. I leaned across him and said out the window, “Look, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care, but the American ambassador himself just got me out of bed because José María Soler demanded an American doctor for some foreign guest he’s got staying in his house. He said it was an emergency.”

I waited for Benito to translate. Then I went on, “Believe me, I’m perfectly happy to turn right around. I don’t mind at all. Fortunately, your boss has video evidence that you denied us entry.” I pointed to the swiveling CCTV. “So whatever happens to this girl, it’s on your head. Not mine. Or the ambassador’s.” I paused a beat for Benito to translate, then I said loudly to him, “Vamos.”

A flurry of Spanish exploded from the intercom. I don’t know much Spanish, but it sounded like the guard had changed his mind. Now he was pleading with us to enter. With a buzz and a mechanical hum, the gates began to swing open.

A tiny smile played on Benito’s lips.

I could see his mental tumblers click into place. Now he understood why I timed this for exactly two in the morning, just after the shift change. When Soler was out of town.

The master of the house was gone, and no one was in charge. A fresh set of guards had taken charge. No one had told them that an English-speaking doctor had been called in. No one had told them that Soler’s American “guest” was ill. No one had told them anything.

And in an information vacuum, they’d default to the safest move.

Calling their boss in Madrid to check would not be a wise idea. Not at two in the morning. No one wanted to wake him up and risk his fury. Yet turning away an ambulance could be a serious misstep. What if something really was wrong with the girl and Soler really had called for an ambulance? Refusing entry to the ambulance would end not only their careers but possibly their lives, too.

Self-preservation. That’s what really makes the world go around. The mass of humanity cares about nothing so much as protecting their paychecks. I’d never forget what some cockney night watchman at a London office building once told me as he refused to admit me after hours even though I claimed I’d left my laptop at my desk. “Sorry, guv,” he’d said. “More’n my job’s worf, it is.”

Benito accelerated along a cobblestone drive lined with cypress trees. It snaked past terraced gardens and the stone columns of a cloister and then ended in a semicircle in front of the mansion. As we pulled up, the wooden front door swung open. It was a massive slab of ancient oak with dark iron escutcheons and knobs and nailheads that looked like it had been salvaged from one of Torquemada’s inquisition chambers.

“Benito,” I said.

For a few seconds he didn’t reply. I heard him swallow. I could sense his nerves. “Yes.”

“You can do this.”

“Of course I can do this. It’s just…”

“Don’t worry,” I said.

“I am not liking this at all.”

“Remember,” I said, “we always have plan B.”

“And what is this plan B?”

“I’ll let you know when the time comes.”

He groaned.

A guard emerged, dressed in navy blue slacks and a long-sleeved light blue shirt with a badge of some sort. A black nylon holster on his right hip. A pistol, I noted. Easily accessible but not quite at the ready.

He hustled out to help us. Meanwhile Benito and I raced around to the back of the ambulance, opened the doors, and pulled a gurney from its rack. We unfolded it and set it up on the cobblestones. Then we took out all the standard equipment, the heavy bags that held the meds and the airway supplies and oxygen. Heaping everything onto the gurney, as we’d rehearsed, we wheeled it, rattling and jangling, over the cobblestones, then lifted it up to the porch. The guard rushed ahead of us and held the door open. We left the gurney on the porch, as per standard protocol, and put the equipment bags on our backs.

“Where is she?” I demanded.

The guard said something in Spanish and pointed toward an immense curving marble staircase. I didn’t need Benito to translate for me. She was upstairs.

But I was surprised at his deferential tone. I heard the word “doctor,” which sounds the same in Spanish and English. Apparently the white coat and tie and the stethoscope dangling from my neck really did lend me an air of authority. It works for real doctors, after all. It didn’t seem to bother him that a doctor was lugging EMT equipment around himself. Maybe he’d never seen an ambulance team in operation. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to spot the anomalies.

We trotted up the stairs as quickly as we could, the guard following right behind. At the top of the stairs he pointed to the left and moved ahead to guide us there. When we’d gone a few feet down the hall, I suddenly said, “The defibrillator.”

“Excuse me, Doctor?” Benito said.

“We’re going to need the defibrillator. Go on ahead without me. I’ll be right back.”

I set down my equipment bags, and Benito quickly translated for the guard. I could see him warily sizing up the situation, trying to figure out what to do. He didn’t want me walking through the house unescorted, but he also didn’t want to leave Benito up here unaccompanied. And he wasn’t going to make us lug the equipment back downstairs.

It didn’t occur to him to question why we didn’t have a cardiac defibrillator with us, nor why I’d suddenly decided we needed one.

Nor why we were willing, in a medical emergency, to keep the patient waiting while I fetched a piece of equipment we might not need. He was a guard, not an MD.

He nodded, and I raced down the staircase.

I returned in a little over two minutes. The hallway was wide and went on forever. A long antique runner, bare in places and probably priceless, slipped underfoot against the highly polished hardwood floor. He stopped at a closed door on the left, knocked once, turned the knob, and opened it. The door wasn’t locked, I was surprised to see. Maybe, with the guards and the electric fence and all, Soler wasn’t worried about Svetlana Kuzma trying to escape.

A muffled female voice from within: “Hey!”

The guard switched on an overhead light, illuminating a spacious bedroom suite. An elaborately carved four-poster bed with barley twist posts and a canopy made out of some kind of antique tapestry. A chaise longue. A mirrored vanity dressing table.

I was half expecting a dank concrete torture chamber out of the movie Hostel. Not a royal suite at Sandringham, which was what this looked like.

“La ambulancia llega,” the guard said. He was being too helpful. I’d expected him to point us upstairs and remain at his post. This was a problem I didn’t anticipate. We’d have to deal with him.

A young girl bolted upright in bed, her hand outstretched as if to shield her eyes from the light.

Svetlana.

She was wearing a white A-shirt, which in politically incorrect circles is sometimes called a “wife beater.” Her eyes were wide with fear. There was panic in her face.

We set down our equipment.

In the photos her father had e-mailed me, she was an exotic, raven-haired beauty. She could have been a supermodel. Up close and personal, she looked much younger and smaller and more fragile, though no less stunning. She didn’t appear to have been beaten or abused. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, I knew. The kind of abuse she’d probably endured wouldn’t be visible.

“Khto vi?” she gasped. “Shcho vi khochetye?”

I don’t speak Ukrainian, if that was what she was speaking. But she sounded desperate.

The guard looked from her to us, suspicion furrowing his brow. He’d just figured out that the girl didn’t seem to be in any medical distress. Benito, quick-thinking, said something to the guard in Spanish. I didn’t understand much of it, but his tone was indignant. The gist seemed to be So what the hell did you call us here for? Or How dare you waste our time! Or something along those lines.

Now the guard was arguing with Benito, and I didn’t need to know Spanish to see that he’d finally tumbled to the realization that no one had called for a doctor. As we say in Boston, light dawns over Marblehead.

He reached for his two-way radio and held it up with his thumb near the transmission button, about to call for backup.

I’d expected this, of course. Actually, I was surprised we’d gotten this far without the other guard, or guards, showing up.

While Benito was diverting the guard with his display of pique, I’d slowly come up behind him, as we’d rehearsed, and pincered his neck in the crook of my elbow, squeezing it hard between my bicep on one side and the bone of my forearm on the other. He gave a sharp yelp. I tightened the vise by grabbing my left hand with my right, compressing both carotid arteries. The good old naked rear choke, beloved of action heroes and teenage boys-but the best thing in a situation like this, and the quickest. He thrashed and shuffled his feet and took a feeble swing at my torso, but he didn’t have much strength left.

Then I stomp-kicked him at the back of his left knee. He lost his balance, fell backward toward me. In less than ten seconds, I felt him go limp, and I eased him to the floor.

The girl, meanwhile, had scrambled out of the bed and leaped to the floor. She screamed, “Dopomozhit’ meni!”

But then she tried to sprint past me. And I understood why she was so terrified.

She didn’t know who we were nor why we were here. She’d seen me subdue a guard; for all she knew, we were stealing her away and taking her someplace even worse. Her mind was probably clouded by the trauma of her captivity. I’d seen it before.

I grabbed her. “Svetlana, it’s okay. You’re safe now.”

“No!” she screamed, trying to wriggle free. “No!”

“Svetlana, listen to me.” I spoke calmly and quietly. “My name is Nick Heller. Your father asked me to come get you out of here.”

“No!” she screamed, even louder and shriller. “Get away from me!” she said in accented English. “Leave me alone!”

She twisted one way, then another, and then raked her nails across my face. It felt like she’d drawn blood. It hurt. I grabbed her by the wrist to prevent a repeat performance. She screamed even louder and went for me with her other hand, this time aiming for my eyes. A tough girl.

“Svetlana,” I said, grabbing that wrist, too. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”

She struggled mightily to free her hands. Her face had gone red, her mouth contorted in an ugly, animal-like snarl. Spittle flew from her mouth. Svetlana Kuzma, poor thing, had obviously lost it. Maybe Soler had drugged her. Maybe her confinement had disoriented her, made her paranoid, afraid of all intruders. Or maybe she’d come to think of Soler’s security guards as her protectors, and anyone else as a threat. Some version of the Stockholm Syndrome. I didn’t know what she thought. I only knew that she was deeply confused.

“Svetlana, please listen to me. We have to move quickly.”

Her eyes searched my face, scanning back and forth. She seemed to have calmed down a bit, so I let go of her wrists.

A mistake. Suddenly she kneed me hard in the crotch. That I wasn’t prepared for. I felt a starburst of pain and expelled a lungful of air. She was tough, wiry, and strong. The girl must have taken self-defense classes.

She was also complicating things considerably. We had expected any number of contingencies except having to fight the girl we’d come to rescue. I gestured to Benito, who grabbed her by the shoulders.

Then I produced a syringe from my pocket, grabbed her right hand, and jabbed the needle into the large vein at the front of her arm. I depressed the plunger, releasing a small quantity of a rapid-onset opioid sedative called remifentanil.

Benito’s mouth gaped. “Why you do this?” he said furiously.

“We didn’t exactly have a choice.”

“This is not our plan! Now we have to carry her out!”

“A lot easier to carry an unconscious body than someone who’s fighting you all the way.”

In a matter of seconds she slumped in Benito’s arms. Together we set her down gently on the carpet.

I grabbed the guard’s pistol, a 9 mm Astra, from the floor. As the two of us dragged his inert body into the suite’s bathroom to get him out of sight, his two-way radio crackled.

“What are they saying?”

“They’re-they’re responding to a panic call,” Benito said, his eyes widening.

“Panic call?”

“It comes from inside this room.”

“But how? He didn’t even have a chance to call for help.” I glanced around, then saw the wireless panic button fob on Svetlana’s bedside table, which I hadn’t noticed before. She must have hit it when she jumped out of bed, calling for help.

Why had Soler provided her with a panic button?

But there wasn’t time to ponder this or anything else: A loud electronic Klaxon had begun to sound in the hall outside the bedroom, and probably throughout the mansion. “They’re on their way,” Benito said, his voice shaking.

“From where?”

“I think they said the east wing.”

I glanced at my watch. “We can make it. I figure we have about a hundred and twenty seconds before they get here.”

He shook his head, his face grim. “Less. It won’t take them that long.”

“It will if they stop to get weapons. Which they will.”

“What do you mean? They all carry guns.”

“No. The heavy-duty stuff. Standard protocol when there’s a major intrusion, I bet.”

“Heavy duty…?”

“Assault rifles. Submachine guns. AR-15s and M-16s.” They were listed on the firearms registration Soler had filed with the Barcelona police. And they were kept in a secure storage cabinet off the butler’s pantry downstairs. Obviously the guards wouldn’t carry submachine guns around, not in a private home. In the event of a major intrusion, they’d grab their weapons from the tactical rack.

“Madre de Dios.” Droplets of sweat had begun to appear on his face. “We have to run. Leave her here! We don’t have time to take her with us.”

“Wrong,” I said. “She’s why we’re here. Come on. We have plenty of time. Grab the equipment. I’ll take her.”

I turned her over on her stomach, then kneeled in front of her head. Her shallow breathing told me she was unconscious but okay. No respiratory distress. I hooked my elbows under her shoulders and hoisted her in a sort of fireman’s carry. She was small and slight and couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. She smelled good: Her hair gave off a sweet, faintly floral, scent. She still had the delicate skin of an innocent young girl. In repose she seemed fragile and vulnerable, which brought out my protective instincts.

Out in the hall the alarm was earsplittingly loud.

We made it downstairs and out the door, got her into the back of the ambulance-we left the gurney on the porch, to save a few precious seconds-and jumped into the front.

Benito, his face now streaming sweat, pulled the ambulance away from the house. We seemed safely on our way out when he yelled something and slammed on the brakes.

Three guards had us surrounded. Two in front and one on the driver’s side. Pointing assault rifles at us. Ready to fire.

Maybe Benito had stopped because he didn’t want to run anyone over. Maybe he stopped because he didn’t want them to fire at us. Whatever his reasoning, he’d just made a serious miscalculation. I would have kept going, force them to get out of my way and thereby hope to mess up their aim.

But there was nothing to be done about that now. I saw that he was panicking, on the verge of giving up.

Each of the guards held a black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a civilian version of a military infantry rifle. This was a reliable and accurate weapon, high velocity, fast handling, with not much recoil. Probably thirty rounds in the magazine. It had a range of almost two thousand feet.

Four very ugly barrels were pointed at us, swaying back and forth. One of the guards was shouting something.

“They want us to get out,” Benito said. “What we do?”

“We get out.”

“You have the gun.”

“Ever hear the expression ‘bringing a knife to a gunfight’?”

“Madre de Dios. They going to kill us. Now what we do?”

“Just watch me,” I said. “And stay calm.”

We got out, hands in the air. The alarm Klaxon was still going, amplified by loudspeakers out here. The front of the house blazed with emergency lights. Another guard yelled something at me, and Benito translated: “He wants our hands on our heads. He wants us to, er, interlock?-interlace-our fingers.”

We obeyed his orders. We had no choice.

The same guard, obviously in charge, shouted something else.

“He sees the pistol tucked into your belt. He says if you lower your hands even a millimeter they will pump you full of lead.”

“Understood,” I said.

Benito translated, but he didn’t have to. They knew I wasn’t stupid enough to reach for my weapon in a situation like this. Not with four semiautomatic rifles pointed at me. The guy in charge barked an order, and another one of the guards strode up to me, the matte black muzzle right in my face. I could see the selector lever, on the left side of the receiver, pointed up to Fire.

I kept the fingers of my hands interlaced on top of my head. Benito was looking at me, eyes wild, trying to communicate without words. A warning, perhaps. Maybe he was afraid I’d do something foolish.

He didn’t know me well enough.

The guard circled around and stopped behind me. The lead guard shouted something, and Benito translated: “Keep your hands on your head. Keep your fingers interlaced.”

The three other guards slowly raised the barrels of their rifles to take aim at my head and chest. I could hear the slight scrape of the guard’s boots on the pavement behind me. Then I felt his hand brush against my side as he reached for the pistol.

But I reached for it first.

What happened next probably took only four seconds, but it seemed to go in slow motion.

I dropped my hands and yanked the Astra from my waistband. I pulled the slide and spun around and pointed the pistol at the guy. He obviously hadn’t expected that-a handgun versus an assault rifle? sheer lunacy-so it took him a beat to raise his rifle into position. I heard the guard in charge shout, “Fuego!” and they all squeezed their triggers almost in unison.

And nothing happened.

They kept trying to squeeze the triggers, but their weapons wouldn’t fire. There were loud, confused shouts, curses. But no gunfire.

Then I shouted, “Hands up! Hold your rifles up over your heads, all of you! Now!”

Benito, stunned, didn’t translate, but he didn’t need to. The guard nearest me squeezed the trigger again, tried to pull back on the charging handle, but that was frozen, too.

Meanwhile, I yanked the second pistol from my belt and tossed it to Benito, who caught it in midair, looking stunned.

“I said, hold your rifles in the air!”

Two of them, understanding their predicament though not exactly how it had happened, raised their rifles in both hands over their heads. Benito racked the slide on the pistol I’d just thrown him, pointed it at each guard in succession. The man I’d identified as the lead guard, quicker-thinking than the others, reached for his sidearm with his right hand. I shouted, “Freeze!”

He kept going for the pistol.

I took aim and fired.

The round hit the target neatly, creasing the outside of the leather holster, sending chunks of leather everywhere. He screamed, jerking his right hand away reflexively. Startled, he dropped his rifle.

The remaining holdout gave up any thought of reaching for his pistol. Instead, he held his rifle up in the air like the others. Benito wagged his gun like some desperado in an old western and shouted at the lead guy, “Arriba las manos!”

“Get the cuffs,” I told Benito. “I’ll cover these guys.”

Swiftly he opened the ambulance driver’s side door with his left hand, reached inside, and grabbed a fistful of flexi-cuffs.

“On your knees!” I yelled to the guards.

They promptly obeyed.

“Cross your feet,” I said. “Keep your rifles above your heads.”

We worked quickly. I kept the Astra trained on the guards, moving it from one to another, while Benito quickly and efficiently cuffed them. He was good at it. He’d done this plenty of times before, in his previous career. He had them slowly place their rifles on the ground and put their hands back up. Both of us had our pistols pointed. When you’re on your knees with your feet crossed, your balance is extremely unsteady. It’s hard to make any sudden moves. He took each guy’s pistol from its holster, making sure their hands remained on top of their heads, fingers interlaced. Then he handcuffed them.

We returned to the ambulance and drove in silence to the front entrance. We could still hear the alarm sounding from the house, but this far away the sound was more muted. As we approached the closed gates, Benito groaned. We were both thinking the same thing: The guards had put Soler’s estate into lockdown, and now here was one more obstacle to getting out of the place alive.

But to our surprise, the gates swung open as we drove up to them. The ground-loop sensor embedded in the pavement, which automatically triggered the gates’ activation, hadn’t been shut off. Maybe the guards were expecting others to arrive and didn’t want to impede access. Or maybe they’d gotten cocky and didn’t think we’d get this far.

Whatever the explanation, we reached the street ten seconds later, the sirens bleating and the flashers going. Benito didn’t speak until we reached the Avinguda Diagonal.

“What happened back there?” he finally asked.

“I took precautions.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We were almost killed!”

“Not even close,” I said. I reached into the pocket of my white doctor’s coat and fished out a handful of metal spindle-like objects. I held open my palm for him to see. Each one was about three or four inches long and looked like a very thick knitting needle but with the flanged head of a pushpin. I jingled them for a few seconds. “These little jackrabbits won’t be spooking any dogs today.”

Slowly he began chuckling, his laugh growing steadily louder. “You bastard,” he said. “You removed the firing pins. When you said you were going to get the ‘defibrillator.’ But wasn’t the weapons cabinet locked?”

“Of course,” I said, and I produced the battery-powered lock pick from my medical bag.

Breaking down a rifle, removing the firing pin, and reassembling it takes a few seconds if you’ve done it before. And I have. Better, I figured, to leave the rifles there but hobbled than to hide them someplace and force the guards to resort to their fully functioning semiautomatic pistols. That way, their hands were occupied holding eight pounds of useless metal.

“You could have told me, you know. When I saw those rifles I almost wet my pants.”

“I would have enjoyed that.”

He squinted his eyes, unamused.

“Actually, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Until it was too late, of course, I saw no reason to tell him. Then I didn’t have the opportunity. “I like to plan for the worst.”

“This is plan B?”

“No,” I said. “Plan A. Turns out we didn’t need plan B.”

“Remind me never to make an enemy out of you.”

“Never a good idea,” I said.

“You didn’t kill no one.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“No. It’s better.”

“But if we’d had to…?”

He was silent for a long time. He looked back at the unconscious or maybe semiconscious girl on the stretcher in the back. “She’s fifteen?”

I nodded.

“It is good thing Soler was not in the house.”

“How so?”

“Any man who can take away the innocence of a fifteen-year-old girl…” I was surprised by the quiet ferocity in his voice. “This is a man who needs killing.”

Benito had hired a private medical evacuation flight, an air ambulance run by a jet charter company in Barcelona. They made all the arrangements, preclearing passports with the Guardia Civil at El Prat Airport, in order to expedite matters. When there’s a medical emergency, the Guardia Civil can be extremely cooperative.

Benito helped us board the converted Learjet 35, which was equipped with a flight stretcher and IV equipment and was staffed by a small medical team, a paramedic and a nurse, even though I didn’t need them. The nurse, a young man, and the paramedic, a young woman, were both Spanish. Benito explained to them that I had the patient stabilized and would supervise her care. They seemed a little put off that their services weren’t required, but they obediently took seats in the aft section of the plane and watched sullenly, with nothing to do, clearly wishing they’d brought something to read or a Sudoku book or a deck of cards or something.

Benito gave me a quick embrace and a backslap. “You have my mobile number,” he said. “If you ever need my help again…”

I nodded and thanked him.

We were airborne twenty-five minutes later, en route to London. I sat next to the stretcher, where Svetlana was strapped in, face up. Her A-shirt had come up, exposing her belly, and I couldn’t help glancing.

What I saw sickened me.

Her abdomen was crisscrossed with raised red welts that looked like they’d been made by a rawhide whip or maybe an electrical cord. I could see that the long welts extended to her lower back, and probably to her buttocks as well.

She’d been beaten, savagely and repeatedly.

But the beatings weren’t recent. Some of the welts were deep red and had begun to fade. Some of them had turned into angry new scars. There were also bruises that had gone yellow and blue and purple, indicating that they were several days old, probably more than a week.

She’d barely been a prisoner at Soler’s house for forty-eight hours. These beatings had been administered long before that.

After a while Svetlana began to stir and make little noises. Her eyes came open briefly, then closed. Her face went through a series of expressions. She wrinkled her nose, frowned. Then she made a heaving, retching sound. I was there just in time with a kidney-shaped vomit bowl and a cool washcloth.

“Hey,” I said softly a few minutes later as I released her from the gurney’s restraining straps. “Feel any better?”

She sat up and glared at me. Her eyes looked a little out of focus.

“That’s probably just a reaction to the sedative,” I said. “I’m sorry we had to do that, but you weren’t exactly cooperating. You were scared. I can’t blame you.”

“Where…where am I?” she asked in English with a strong Ukrainian accent.

I told her my name again. “Your father hired me to get you out of Soler’s house.”

“You say you work for my…father?”

“I don’t work for him. I was hired by him to do this one job. In about two hours we’ll be landing at Gatwick Airport. You’ll be home. Not a prisoner anymore.”

“A prisoner?” she said. “I wasn’t a prisoner. I was finally safe!”

I spoke very softly. “I’m sure that’s what Soler wanted you to think.”

“Goddamn you!” Then she uttered a profanity that I hadn’t heard since the Special Forces. Not something I expected out of the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Was his name Vadim Kuzma?”

I looked at her.

“This man isn’t my father! Vadim Kuzma hired you to kidnap me!”

She must have suddenly gotten self-conscious about her thin cotton A-shirt and her welts and bruises, because she folded her arms across her chest. I handed her my ancient, well-worn commando sweater. Army issue. You couldn’t buy those anymore. Now they were made of acrylic and way too scratchy. She looked at the coarse ribbed wool, the shoulder and elbow patches, with distaste, as if it were some filthy rag I’d picked up off the street, but she pulled it over her head anyway. It pooled around her, made her look like a little girl playing dress-up on the floor of her daddy’s closet.

Except for her face. There was, I now saw, a cynicism, a jadedness in her eyes that she was far too young to have.

It took a good half an hour before I was able to convince her that it was safe to talk. She clearly lived in fear of Kuzma. I assured her that I had friends in the U.S. embassy in London who could arrange for her to return to Ukraine immediately.

“I ran away from home almost two years ago,” she said. “We lived in a village in Ukraine called Povvysoke, my mother and me, but I had to leave. I was…drowning. Suffocating. I found a job in Odessa as a waitress, dancing on tables at a bar, and then a man came one day and said I was beautiful and asked if I wanted to be a model. I could make thousands of pounds a day. What should I say?”

“It was a prostitution ring,” I said. Odessa, Ukraine’s port city, had become one of the world’s hot spots for the international sex trade. The police there were underfunded and overbribed. Organized crime rings dispatched scouts there to recruit vulnerable young girls with bogus offers of glamorous jobs in foreign cities, as dancers or models or actresses, with promises that they could make a fortune. Russian and Ukrainian girls were particularly in demand.

She nodded. “They sell you to rich men in Turkey and Italy and the Emirates. But I was sold to this Ukrainian bastard who lives in London. Because he likes girls from his home country.”

“How much money did you make from the deal?”

She looked down and didn’t answer. After a long moment, she said, “I was his sex slave. Sometimes there are as many as six of us living in his house. But I think I must be his prize possession, because he takes me with him when he traveled to show me off.”

“He trusted you not to run?”

“He kept my passport. So where can I run?”

“He beat you.” A statement, not a question.

Her nostrils flared. Her face flushed. At last she nodded. “Only where others could not see. My back and my stomach and my thighs. I have to wear one-piece swimming suit.”

“Why?”

“Why he beats me?” She fell silent again. Then, in a whisper that was barely audible: “Because he can. Because it excites him.”

I felt something cold and hard in my stomach.

“How did you get to José María Soler?

“Kuzma took me with him to Barcelona. At this party I meet Soler. Later, when Kuzma is talking his business in another room, I give Soler a note. I say I am prisoner and I need to escape and I do anything he wants if he will save me from this monster. Later that night a man comes up to me and takes me out a side door without anyone notice and put me in car and drives me to Soler’s house.”

“And what did you have to do for Soler?”

“Nothing.”

I looked skeptical.

“Nothing at all. For what I should lie about this? Soler was negotiating with the Ukrainian government to get me back home to my mother. He said it would take a week or two.”

“And you think he was telling you the truth?”

“I talked to people from the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid. Soler was not lying to me. And now, you take me back to this monster!”

She looked like she was about to cry. I could see that the vulnerable little girl had just broken through the hard shell. She said in a small voice, “Help me.”

I nodded. Put a hand on her forehead and said, “I will.”

About three hours later I was driving a rented, up-armored Range Rover along Kensington Palace Gardens, talking to Benito on my cell phone. Hands-free, because it’s safer.

“Yes,” Benito said, “I spoke with the consulate in Madrid. It all checks out, what the girl said.”

“Excellent.” I’d come to a traffic light. I glanced down at the Heckler & Koch MP5K on the passenger seat and picked up the long curved magazine. It was full. Thirty rounds.

“So what you gonna do now, my friend?” Benito asked.

I inserted the magazine into its well and slapped the cocking lever forward. Something final about that well-oiled click.

“Plan B,” I said as the light turned green.