Brooker was injured, no doubt, but still not down.
Weapon? the calm voice said again.
Sampson reached to get the small nine-millimeter Ruger he kept in his ankle holster just as Brooker attacked, exploding from his protective crouch and slashing the air with the knife. Sampson jumped back, the blade just missing him.
He landed on his heels, off balance, and almost went down. Brooker saw it and charged forward with the blade tip leading.
Left forearm.
Throat.
Sampson did something then that the assassin did not expect. Instead of trying to stay away from the blade or grabbing the man’s wrist, he ignored the knife, found his balance, and stepped forward with his entire weight, holding his bent right arm at chin height.
He felt the stab like a gut punch at the same time the ulnar bone of his forearm smashed hard into Brooker’s throat, almost crushing his larynx; they crashed off the sidewalk and onto a neighbor’s lawn. Sampson felt the wind go out of him on impact. He knew the knife was in him and that he’d been wounded badly.
Brooker struggled beneath him. Sampson pushed himself up and off the knife and straddled Brooker’s hips.
Though wild-eyed and gasping for air, Brooker stabbed Sampson in the thigh. Sampson howled with pain but heard that calm voice in his head again.
Weapon? Target?
He knew both answers and trusted them.
Sampson raised both fists as one and hammered them down on Brooker’s solar plexus, just below the center of his rib cage. Brooker doubled up in pain but did not let go of the knife. He yanked it from Sampson’s thigh and pulled back to stab him once more. Sampson smashed his right fist into Brooker’s solar plexus and his left into his broken rib, again and again, and then he put his hands around the man’s throat and finished crushing his larynx.
Brooker began to suffocate. His hand let go of the knife finally and his eyes lost all their ruthlessness before he lay still.
“John!” Jannie screamed. Sampson, dazed, looked back at his house and saw Alex’s daughter running at him with Willow, hysterical, behind her.
Sampson started to hyperventilate and shake from the shock of being stabbed twice and all the adrenaline from the fight.
“Call 911,” he gasped at Jannie before keeling over next to the man M had sent to kill him.
Chapter
32
Paris
Bree steeled herself as she walked toward the lion’s den—a glass-faced high-rise in La Défense, France’s big financial and business district, some three kilometers west of Paris’s official border.
For the occasion, she wore a black pantsuit, a black silk blouse, low black pumps, and the single strand of Tahitian pearls around her neck.
Glancing at her reflection as she went to the building’s main entrance, Bree told herself she certainly looked the part of a woman on the edge of business respectability. But she was about to deal with Philippe Abelmar, self-made billionaire, a man sophisticated in the ways of both business and finance.
Being married to Alex and being friends with Ned Mahoney, Bree knew a lot about shell corporations and how they were structured and interlocked. Still, as she entered the lobby and crossed to the security desk, she feared being unable to prove her capabilities, despite Marianne Le Tour’s assurances earlier in the morning that her cover in Saint Martin was well documented and rock solid.
After inspecting her Saint Martin’s passport, the guards made a copy and told her that she was expected and that a Monsieur L’Argent would be down to escort her to her meetings. Then they put her bag through a scanner, which made her glad that she had left the pistol in the hotel room’s safe.
“Madame St. Lucie?” a man called after she’d gone through a metal detector.
It was the same big, muscular guy from Le Canard, the one who enjoyed sopping up garlic butter with the fresh bread, only now he was wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit and moving toward her with total confidence.
“We never had the pleasure of meeting properly,” he said, making a half bow. “I am Luc L’Argent, personal security director to Monsieur Abelmar.”
Bree smiled. “Enchanté. It’s nice to meet properly.”
“Very much so,” he said and gestured toward the elevator. “I understand you are from Saint Martin and here talking with clients.”
“Potential clients,” she said.
They boarded the elevator. He pushed the button for the forty-ninth floor. “Monsieur Abelmar says you are in the shell-company business.”
“We help people organize them and put them together with local banks,” she said as they began to rise. “The Caribbean is an attractive place for people with money. Not far from the U.S. and, of course, beautiful.”