Chapter 17

Julie anxiously twisted her fingers as the limo pulled up in front of the small hotel set back from a busy street where Lucas had said they were hiding. “This does not look like a cheap hotel.”

On the seat facing her, Nicholas checked his watch. “There is no such thing as a cheap hotel in DC, but they may have found the only two-star on this side of town. It’s safe enough, as these things go. Come on, we need to keep moving.” He climbed out of the limo and opened the front passenger door to talk to the driver. “Sam, drive around the block. Let’s not attract more notice than necessary.”

“Ana prefers Uber,” Zander said tentatively, stepping out and holding out his hand for Julie. “Is that not more private?”

“Nothing is private in this town. But we have no reason to believe anyone is watching us, yet. It’s best not to be noticed, but a limo isn’t completely out of place here.” In his rather expensive-looking cashmere coat over a tailored business suit, Nicholas strode toward the hotel entrance.

Julie had a hard time believing she was part of a clan sophisticated enough to include Nicholas and private limousines. She glanced down at her own bright-pink nylon jacket and wondered if she could ever manage to look as elegant as her older siblings—or if she wanted to. Zander didn’t look much better than she did in an ill-fitting coat he’d borrowed from Nicholas.

The old hotel had only one small elevator. They rode up silently. Heating was evidently not a priority. Julie clenched and unclenched her chilly fingers as the mechanism lurched upward. The elevator smelled of cleaning fluid, although there was an even less appealing odor underlying it.

She was already nervous and feeling antsy when the elevator doors opened.

Loud pinging noises rang out, shattering what was left of her composure.

“Skort!” she cried, tugging Zander’s coat and dropping to the floor the way she’d been taught to do when bullets flew. “Watch out!” she translated uselessly for Nicholas, who now had his back to the elevator wall. Zander crouched in front of her on the opposite side.

The advertising poster on the elevator wall shattered in a cascade of broken glass. Julie bit her lip to keep from screaming.

The elevator doors automatically creaked to close. Julie’s teeth chattered. The door took eternity. Crouching low, Nicholas rolled into the hallway before the doors shut.

“Bladdy hell,” Zander whispered, then jammed the open-door button.

Julie muffled a shriek of protest as the door opened again. To her relief, no more shots rang out. Instead, heavy feet pounded against the thin carpet in the opposite direction. What had happened to Maryam?

Nicholas uttered a curse worse than Zander’s, stood up, and loped off down the hall.

Wanting to see if Maryam was safe, terrified to find out what lurked in shadows, Julie peered around the door. A dark figure fled toward an erratically blinking exit sign on the far end of the corridor with Nick hot on his trail. He could be shot that way!

Zander started to run after Nick, but Julie grabbed his hand and forced him to pull her up from the floor, delaying him. “We must see if Maryam is all right, nè? You have no weapon to fight a gunman.” Did Nick?

Zander scowled but grabbed her arm and tugged her down the corridor, checking door numbers for the one they sought.

At the far end, Nick smacked a fire alarm on the wall, causing glass to tinkle, and a siren to wail. Julie clapped her hands over her ears to block the shriek and glanced around in panic.

Doors popped open all along the corridor and heads peered out, but no one seemed too concerned. With the alarm howling, Julie winced, uncovered her ears, and rapped on the door of Maryam’s room.

At the other end of the hall, Nick misdirected the people spilling into the hall by pointing at the exit near him and shouting, “Fire! We have to go this way!”

Confused, Julie didn’t know if she was supposed to follow his instructions or wait for Maryam. Zander pounded the door louder.

“He’s putting people between us and providing cover so he can run after the gunman. They were shooting at the lock.” He pointed at the shattered key slot and slammed his shoulder against the door to jar it loose. “It’s okay, it’s us,” he shouted as he did so. The door opened—as it would have done for the shooters had they not interrupted.

Inside, Maryam cowered behind a couch. The Tall White Boy—Lucas—to whom Reverend Arden had introduced her, stood with a chair upraised, prepared to bash heads—or a gunman.

“Eish!” Julie cried, dodging out of his reach.

He dropped the chair in relief, apparently recognizing her.

“Lucas is hurt!” Maryam exclaimed, jumping up from her safe place. “We must take him to a hospital.”

“It’s just a flesh wound.” He winced and grabbed his left arm now that the chair was lowered. “Let’s beat it.”

“Don’t be dof.” Julie winced. Her American English apparently escaped her in emergencies, but dumb sounded like dumb in any language. “Zander, find some towels so he does not bleed all over. I’ll take a look at his arm when we are in the car.” Alarmed by the blood seeping through his fingers, Julie looked around for baggage, backpacks, anything.

“We ran without taking anything,” Lucas explained. “Did you see the shooter? Is it safe to leave?”

“Our brother Nicholas set off the alarm,” Julie explained, taking the towels Zander returned with.

“He’s leading the other hotel guests down the far stairs, away from us. There are more stairs closer, beside the elevator. It’s probably not safe to take the elevator if the fire department or alarm might shut it down. Let’s go.” Zander took Maryam’s arm and tugged her toward the door.

Julie tied one of the thin cotton towels around Lucas’s large bicep. “We have a car, if we can reach it.”

“How do we know we’re safe with you?” Lucas asked, sensibly enough, stopping to check the hall before leaving the room. “The shooter arrived after we talked to you.”

“We’ll have to figure out how that happened later.” Julie tried to sound urgent. “Did one of you use your normal phone, for instance?” she asked as he finally followed her out.

“Just to call for pizza,” Maryam said, hurrying with Zander in the direction of the elevator.

Lucas whistled in disgust. “You didn’t use the burner?”

Julie kept looking over her shoulder as they ran, but the other guests must have followed Nick down the far stairs. The hall was empty. Their feet pounding against the cheap carpet couldn’t be heard over the wailing alarm.

“It was just pizza,” Maryam said, a trifle breathlessly as they hit the stairs.

“Your phone may have had a bug in it like mine,” Julie told her. “You couldn’t know. This is all so very vrot. Bad, wrong,” she corrected.

They didn’t waste time arguing once they reached the bottom of the stairwell. Zander peered cautiously into the lobby. “People aren’t going outside. They’re just standing around looking puzzled.”

“Staff should escort them out,” Lucas said in disapproval.

Sirens screamed in the distance. The fire alarm still clamored. Peering from her side of the stairs, Julie didn’t see anyone looking particularly concerned. Surely gunmen wouldn’t open fire in a crowded lobby.

“Bakgat, I see Nick.”

“Awesome,” Julie translated for him, relieved to know she wasn’t the only one who reverted to slang when shaken.

Zander held the door for Maryam and Julie. Lucas checked behind them and in front of them and stayed between Julie, Maryam, and the crowd, guarding them with his greater height. Julie couldn’t decide if this was charming or sexist.

“This way.” Nick arrived to block all of them from the lobby view. He pointed toward the rear of the hotel. “There’s always a rear exit. I couldn’t find the shooter in this mob, but he’s probably lurking out front, waiting for you to come out.”

“Or he ran like the rat he was,” Lucas said. “There are too many people for him to strike again.”

“I like the way you think.” Nick led the way down a dark corridor to a door that opened onto an alley. “This isn’t exactly the Plaza. I told Sam to meet us down the block. This alley is a trap otherwise.”

Lucas had struggled into his bulky coat so his towel bandage wasn’t visible. Julie hoped they looked like tourists fleeing a fire alarm as they ran down the alley past office buildings and hit the sidewalk half a block from the hotel entrance. The limo was already waiting for them.

No one said a word until they were all inside and the car was rolling again. Julie glanced down the street in front of the hotel as the limo cruised by. Fire engines and police cars blocked traffic. Very few people from the hotel had bothered going into the cold. They didn’t seem too concerned by the threat of fire. “Do fire alarms usually go off in the middle of the night here?”

“All the time. Drunks, smokers, kids, people like us with ulterior motives—be glad we only had three flights,” Nick said from the front seat. “Jules, you might want to introduce all of us before our guests panic and leap out the doors.”

“Juliana,” she told him, “Or Julie. Jules is rude.”

He flashed her a provocative grin. “There’s the Magda in you. Julie it is.”

“I’m Alexander Kruger, Juliana’s brother,” Zander said stiffly, preventing Julie from responding to the taunt about their mother. “We are still learning about our new family, but the annoyance in the front seat is our half brother, Nicholas Maximillian, a British diplomat.”

Nick performed a rolling salute as if greeting a pasha.

“And this is Maryam Rathore, my roommate.” Julie continued the introductions as best as she could. “Lucas, I don’t know your last name.”

“Lucas Schmidt, criminal justice drop-out, second-year at JACAD, aiming for a degree as a professional student.” He held his arm as if in pain.

“Just like Julie,” Zander said with brotherly disrespect.

Julie punched her brother’s arm before gesturing at Lucas. “Take off the jacket and let me see your wound. Nicholas, may we stop somewhere to buy bandages and antiseptic? One of the many studies my brother scorns included first aid.”

“The bullet just ricocheted through the shoddy door. It’s nothing,” Lucas protested.

A police siren blasted behind them, and they all jumped.

I shooed EG off to bed after admiring her interestingly painted camel, complete with tattoos of bats and crowns. My phone rang as I made my way up to the attic to kick Tudor out of Graham’s lair.

“I have them,” Nick reported. “We had a minor incident. They called in a pizza order from a bugged phone, and we interrupted a gunman shooting down their door. I thought it best to pull them out rather than call the cops.”

Graham had already sent me the dispatch call of a fire at the hotel. I’d been holding my breath for the past half hour. “I take it you used the fire alarm ploy to escape.”

“Exactly. It seems rather evident the bad guys are after our pair. There are cops as well as the fire department, so someone may have called in the gunshots. Lucas’s name is Schmidt, if you want to look him up. Maryam is a Rathore. I’ll give you more after we’ve all finished sizing each other up. Jules and Zander are hoots, and by the way, don’t call her Jules.”

I laughed as he hung up. I ought to be more worried, but my babes were in good hands. Nick knew all the tricks I did, and Graham’s safe house should be just exactly that—safe.

I continued up the stairs to find Tudor glaring in disgust at a blob of plastic that might have been a tortured Jedi warrior. Or a pig.

“I want that one,” I told him. “The first piece of art by world-renowned Leonardo de Bullfinch. But it needs glittery gold stars.”

“It’s rubbish.”

He started to throw it at a trash can but I caught it. “Mine, I told you. You can work on a better sketch in your room. Superhuman over there has a planet to save or worlds to blow up, and he can’t do it with you watching. No phone booth.”

He shot me a teenage look of disgust and stalked off.

“You have a way with words,” Graham said from his Star Trek console where he manipulated keyboards and monitors better than any spaceship.

“If that means I lie well, thank you. Julie told me I must be honest with family and friends, but honesty isn’t easily defined. Nick has our witnesses and is on the way to your Bat Cave. Someone shot at them.” I came over to stand beside him and watch the flickering screens. I easily identified the hotel with fire engines. “Did you see anyone?”

He brought up the interior lobby view in real time. It was pretty grainy.

He zoomed in on two men in leather jackets slouching in a corner, studying the crowd. “They were some of the first to come down the stairs.”

“Two? That can’t be good. Assassins aren’t cheap. They must be on the clock to hang around this long.” I studied their pale complexions and shaved heads, committing them to memory. “Can we run facial recognition software?”

“I can run it against police files, if they have priors. The software is only as good as the database.” He already had one monitor flipping through a motley collection of mugshots.

“What about against Julie’s videos? Would it help to know if either of these two have been lurking in the good reverend’s park?”

“It won’t identify them, but we can check.” He scrambled a few more screens while I studied the hotel situation.

As the lobby continued to fill with men in uniform, the skinheads displayed increasing nervousness, shifting from foot to foot and edging further into a shadowy corner. DC no longer banned handguns, but concealed carry was still pretty much a no-no. I’d lay wagers they had no permits at all, if these were our shooters.

They muttered to each other, then one drifted toward the front door.

“No way of getting the cops to stop them?” I asked.

“Working on it.” He had blue tooth earphones plugged in as he punched at his keyboards.

I adored watching a geek at work, but I kept my eyes on the clowns in the lobby. “I’m taking a wild guess here to say they’re not pros.”

He was murmuring into his microphone and didn’t answer.

On the screen, the hotel night clerk stopped one of the police officers and pointed out our leather-clad pair. Graham called the night clerk? Enterprising.

The thug edging for the front door increased his speed. The other began to move as well—in the opposite direction.

The cop intercepted Thug Number One, who reached in his jacket, probably for a gun. Always an extremely bad move. He was lucky he only got Tasered in the groin for his efforts. Ow. That would teach him to wear a longer jacket.

Panicking, thug Number Two shoved through the milling crowd. Another man in blue pushed after him.

“Gonna be hard to hold them when there are no witnesses to the shooting,” I commented as a blue-haired lady in a bathrobe screamed in outrage when Thug Two shoved her into a wall.

“Weapon violations, possible probation violation.” He nodded at one of the screens that now showed mugshots for our skinheads. Score! That would take them off the streets for a few days.

A balding old man with a dashing goatee stuck his cane between Two’s legs. Down he went—grabbing at the plastic Christmas tree to catch himself. I winced as silver and gold balls scattered across the tile floor. Cop boots smashed the ornaments into pretty pieces of glass while Thug Two got cuffed.

“The hotel should charge an entertainment fee,” I said as the old man with the cane handed his handkerchief to the weeping blue-haired lady.

Our witnesses were safe for now.

Graham turned off his microphone and removed his headset. “If they don’t, I will.” He yanked me down on his lap, and I went more than willingly.

Finally, we had the place to ourselves and no interruptions anticipated.

Thrilled, I reached for his belt. “Entertainment, am I?”

“The price I have to pay,” he muttered, shoving my skirt higher.