Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [63]
“Wasn’t,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Hans wasn’t the only one who knows demolitions. Past tense. He’s dead.”
“So he is,” Renaud said. “I’m getting a little tired of everyone trying to correct my English. Get your ass over here or I’ll do what Peter should’ve done.”
She skirted the body sprawled on the ground and began to help haul Harry to his feet. He opened his eyes for a moment, flashed the ghost of his engaging, toothy smile before passing out again.
“Shit,” said Renaud, struggling under Harry’s weight. “I thought he’d be coming out of it by now. I cut back the dosage with him but I hadn’t counted on Hans becoming a problem. It’s hard to tell how much to dose him—he’s got the constitution of an ox. I can give him twice the amount of drugs that would kill a normal man and it barely slows him down.” He shifted Harry’s weight. “Put your shoulder under his arm and let’s get moving. Unless you’d rather stay out here and end up as pixie dust.”
He weighed a ton. They half carried, half dragged him away from the house, moving into the greenery at a snail’s pace.
“Where are we going?” she managed to gasp out.
“It wouldn’t make any difference if I told you,” he wheezed. “A beach on the far side of the island.”
She flashed back to the detailed schematic stored in her mind, and after a moment she remembered the stretch of beach on the opposite side of the island from the villa. Far enough to escape any damage from the explosion, she hoped. It all depended on how ambitious Hans had been.
Not enough to damage Harry’s boat, which was probably back where they’d been dropped off, close to the main house. If they could just get far enough away in time, they should be fine.
The hidden bunker wasn’t too far away from the beach, in case anything went wrong. And she fully expected things to go wrong at this point, the way her luck had been going.
Her bare foot caught on a root, and she went sprawling on the trail, Harry’s heavy body landing on top of her as Renaud let go with a curse.
For a moment she couldn’t breathe—Harry was heavier than he’d appeared, and it was like lying under a horse.
A second later, the weight was removed and replaced by a gun barrel pressed against her temple. “Do that again,” he growled, “and I’m leaving you behind.”
She was going to point out that it hadn’t exactly been her fault, but she kept quiet. She’d been able to fight back with Peter. If she said anything, anything at all, Renaud might very well pull the trigger.
Leaving lawyer brains all over Harry. His cleaning services were going to have a hard enough time getting rid of the dirt and grass stains on his Versace sportswear. Lawyer brains would be almost impossible to get out.
She scrambled to her feet, ignoring her skinned knee, and helped Renaud haul Harry upright again. Harry was marginally more awake—he looked down at Genevieve out of totally stoned-out eyes and murmured something unintelligible.
“Keep going, Harry,” she muttered. “We’re trying to save your life.”
He didn’t seem particularly moved by the notion, but he managed to put a marginal effort into propelling his big, drugged body forward down the narrow path and they moved onward, like a macabre funeral procession with the corpse still alive.
This was always the hardest part, even in the simplest, most straightforward of operations, Peter thought, staring at the island from the deck of the newly refitted SS Seven Sins run by Mannion and a crew of the Committee’s finest. Now called the SS Tough Break—someone’s sense of humor at work. It was bad luck to change the name of a boat—Harry would be rolling in his grave very soon.
He’d checked Hans’s munitions work, and the man had done his usual stellar job. Now it was a simple matter of Hans and Renaud getting Harry’s unconscious body to the house and getting back to the boat before the charges