Free The Assassins by Gayle Lynds

was, just as Tom á s Lara had said—a paper-thin electronic bug the size of a shirt button.
    He ran back to Lara, loosened the top laces of the unconscious man’s boot, and pried open the lining. Sliding the bug inside, he pressed the lining back against the shoe and tightened the laces again.
    Hustling from corpse to corpse, he looked for the tracker. At last he found it, a small handheld, under one of the fallen guards. Its miniature screen showed the bug as a motionless green dot, with data about longitude, latitude, and altitude. Now Ryder would be able to follow Lara electronically wherever he went.
    Hefting Lara up onto his shoulder, he carried him to the Explorer, opened the rear door, and dumped him inside. He had the urge to beat the shit out of him, but he needed him to be able to talk when the snipers arrived.
    He hunted through the vehicle and found rope under the front seat. He tied Lara’s hands and feet. Checking his watch again, he swore. He had burned through ten minutes.
    Picking up Lara’s phone, he saw it was a disposable cell. He touched the MENU button and went to RECENT CALLS. The most recent had to have been to Eli Eichel, the sniper whom Lara had just phoned.
    There was another number. Ryder dialed it. In moments he heard ringing—from a distant corpse. He ran, snatched the ringing phone from the dead man’s hand, and answered the call. Now he had a line open between the two cells.
    Putting Lara’s cell on speakerphone, he slid it inside Lara’s breast pocket. He held the other cell to his ear and aimed his voice at the one in the pocket.
    He spoke in a normal voice: “One … two … three … four … five.”
    He smiled grimly. He could hear his voice with clarity. Now he should be able to listen to conversations between the snipers and Lara. He put the cell in the front pocket of his jacket where he could quickly access it.
    Swinging on his backpack, Ryder scooped up one of the Uzis. It was not the semiautomatic version but instead its cousin, a far more efficient killer—a fully automatic weapon, illegal in the United States except for police and Class-3 dealers. The magazine was located in the grip assembly. He checked it—all twenty-five rounds were loaded. He grabbed two boxes of ammo from the back of the Explorer and shoved them into his backpack.
    Slinging the Uzi over his shoulder, he gave a last look then sprinted past the limousine, around the line of juniper bushes, and back up into the forest. As he climbed, afternoon shadows spread black across the animal path and ice-covered stream. Winter birds chattered. Reaching the hilltop, he turned and looked back down on the scene of the massacre. For a moment he wondered who the dead women were and felt bad for their families.
    The snipers had still not arrived.
    He took out his Galaxy and dialed Tucker Andersen.
    “What no-good are you up to now?” Tucker grumbled in greeting.
    “Eva’s been doubled, too,” Ryder told him. “She wasn’t at her condo, but there was blood and other evidence of a fight. I found her cell phone and a tracker there. It appeared she’d bugged herself so I could follow, and I did, to a place called the Esti Hunt Club.” He described witnessing the slaughter and discovering prostheses on the woman whom he had thought to be Eva. “There was one survivor. He told me what we suspected—the Padre had planned to force me to reveal how to find the Carnivore. The strange thing is, the Carnivore wasn’t the sniper. It was two other assassins—Eli and Danny Eichel. Apparently Eli Eichel was Kidon.”
    “First it’s the Padre, then it’s the Carnivore.” Tucker’s voice rose in frustration. “Now it’s the Eichel brothers.”
    “Tell me about them.”
    “Eli is the leader. Early in his career, he tracked a key Iraqi scientist to Paris, slit his throat, stabbed him several times in the heart, and then made it look like a robbery gone bad—and the French police believed it. Just before that,