Free The Pandora Key by Lynne Heitman Page B

catching up to him. Since he was Bosnian, I suspected he had fought the Serbs as a soldier or part of a militia and probably killed more than his share. He had a soldier’s reverence for duty, and he lived by a strict code of honor. Even if he hadn’t liked Harvey, he would have considered it bad form to kidnap a man in a wheelchair.
    He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat next to me. He turned to the back and reported in to his two colleagues, um…Employees? Accomplices? I never knew who the men were that he brought along. I was sure Timon and Radik were as strong and fast and skilled at the task that lay ahead as the usual crew he brought.
    Bo spoke to his guys in either Bosnian or Croat or Serbian. I had asked him one time which he spoke. He said everyone in his country spoke all three, sometimes at the same time. When he was done, he turned to brief me.
    “All three are in the kitchen. They just brought food, so they’re eating together. No one is standing post.” He shook his head. “Stupid.”
    “Did you see Harvey? Is he in there?”
    “He is in a back room on the floor. I saw him through the window.”
    “Is he alive?”
    “I do not believe that three men with an arsenal would be guarding a corpse.”
    The reference to Harvey as a corpse was disturbing, but, as usual, he had a point. I had to calm down or at least find a way to channel the energy. I looked through the dark toward the house. Knowing Harvey was in there got me mentally mobilized. My body followed suit. Everything sped up—pulse, respiration, knuckle cracking.
    “What’s the plan?”
    “We take them.”
    I looked at Bo. “Take them how?”
    “Shoot the guards. Find Harvey. Bring him out.”
    Shoot. Find. Bring. It sounded so simple. “Why do we have to shoot them? Maybe we should just try to—”
    “Hit them over the head and render them unconscious?”
    I had been about to say “subdue them,” but that worked, too. I felt the ridiculousness of that idea, the complete, television-informed naïveté. But Bo didn’t treat me as ridiculous. It was one of the things I liked about him.
    “To subdue them,” he said, “would require that we get close enough to be killed ourselves. Or it might give them the chance to kill Harvey before we can get to him.”
    “But we don’t even know who they are or why they took him. What if they’re, I don’t know, police? Or some other good guys?”
    “They are not the good guys. This much I know.” He angled his head and studied me. “You have killed before, killed with your hands.”
    “The only person I ever killed was trying hard to kill me back.”
    He nodded sagely. “Then you will have no problem. These men will kill you if you do not kill them first.”
    “I think I have to know that for sure, Bo. I think we have to give them a warning.”
    He sighed deeply. I knew he was the expert, but I didn’t want him to count on me to shoot a man in cold blood if I didn’t think I could.
    “We will give them a chance,” he said. “It will be up to them. Only if they shoot at us will we shoot back.”
    “Yeah, but you have to tell them they have a choice.”
    “Don’t worry.” He turned and said something to Timon and Radik. Of course, he could have been saying, “Bust in and blow their fucking heads off,” for all I knew. I didn’t know what else to do. The situation was what it was.
    He laid out his plan, first in English for me, then for the guys in back. It didn’t seem to take as much explaining for them.
    “What about the noise?” I said. “There are people in these other buildings.”
    “The police will not show up in this neighborhood unless called, and no one will call them over a few gunshots.”
    He reached back, and Radik passed him a black gym bag. I could tell it was the weapons bag from the heavy, metallic clank it made when Bo set it on the seat between us. He unzipped it, plunged in, and came out with what I knew were a couple of clean