“Come on.”
Puller led her down the hall until they reached a door marked Stairs. He pulled it open and they headed up.
They had heard the door they had initially come through open as the wood Puller had jammed there was broken. The sounds of footsteps had carried across the open lower floor.
Now the footsteps were echoing through the building. The men after them apparently didn’t care if Puller and Knox knew they were coming. That was the confidence gained by superior numbers and firepower.
Puller led Knox up one flight of stairs after another until they reached the roof eight stories up. Puller forced the door and then used his Ka-Bar knife as a wedge on the hinge side of the door to jam it.
“Now what?” asked a perplexed Knox.
“You told me you ran track in college.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Ever practice the long jump?”
“Yes. I was pretty good at it.”
“Glad to hear that.”
“Puller, what the—”
They heard footsteps racing up the steps to the roof.
He grabbed her hand. “Let’s go.”
“What?”
They sprinted flat-out toward the edge of the roof.
Knox’s eyes bulged as she finally saw what his plan was. She started to scream but it died in her throat.
Puller’s hand still clamped around hers, they reached the small ledge, pushed off, and soared over the alley below.
For a long moment it seemed like they were suspended in the air, moving neither forward nor back.
Their momentum carried them over the multistory drop.
They hit the roof of the adjacent building, tucked, and rolled.
Before Knox could even catch her breath, Puller jerked her up and pulled her toward the access door on the building’s rooftop. He busted through it and pulled her inside and closed the door just as the men broke through the door on the roof of the building they had just been in. The armed men raced over the expanse of the roof looking for them.
Meanwhile, in the other building Puller and Knox clattered down the steps. They reached the ground floor and Puller found an exterior door leading to the side opposite the building they’d just leapt from. They pounded down the street.
Puller’s unerring sense of direction led them back to their car about twenty minutes later. They climbed inside and Knox finally let out a deep breath.
He looked at her. She was pale and shaken, her eyes staring straight ahead, as though she were in a trance or on the edge of hysteria and trying desperately to hold it together. Her face was bruised, her arm badly scraped, and her jeans and shirt torn.
“You okay?” he asked anxiously.
She slowly nodded. “Thanks for saving my life.” She paused. “And if you ever do something like that to me again, I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you.”
Chapter
61
PULLER BLINKED AWAKE the next morning. He had slept in his clothes. As he sat up he looked out the window of the motel room on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia.
The sun was starting to rise. The angle of light hit him in the eyes and he turned away.
He heard water running. He sat up and looked around.
Knox was in the bathroom. They had decided to only take one room. There was safety in numbers.
Knox padded out of the bathroom. She had taken her jeans off and the T-shirt was too short to conceal her pale thighs.
“How’s your arm?” asked Puller.
“No, he’s a businessman. He’s not the big force behind all this. That’s my best estimate, anyway. But he is wired into some fairly substantial global business interests, and not all of them are allies of this country.”
“Shepard told us that some of the things Atalanta Group was working on have enormous commercial applications. Billions, maybe trillions.”
“They do. And which Atalanta Group is barred from exploiting. They don’t have the rights to do so.”
“She says it comes down to who holds the patents.”
“Shepard was exactly right. And the person who holds all those