Read Online The Assassins by Gayle Lynds - Free Book Online

is?”
    The man frowned, puzzled. “No, se ñ or .”
    “It buys freedom from a blackmailer, and it’s the secret to millions of dollars.”
    The chauffeur’s dark eyes grew as large as the bells of San Sebastian’s Good Shepherd Cathedral. “So much for a rock?”
    The Padre chuckled and returned it to its pouch. He did not mention he had only three pieces and needed to acquire the rest of the tablet to win.
    Suddenly he felt restless. He looked across the circular drive. The woman stood motionless in the window, a statue of misery.
    He gestured at her. “Bring her out. I am weary of waiting for Ryder. Seeing her will inspire him to come more quickly.”
    As the chauffeur trotted away, the Padre checked his iPhone, but there was no message from Tucker Andersen. Disappointed, he sat back again to survey his secluded haven. Whenever he’d had business in North America, he had treated himself to a visit here, indulging his love of fishing and hunting. All of that was before Catalina, before his new life with her. She filled the void his many activities had filled before.
    As he watched her bend over to scoop up snow, her wide smile and childlike delight, he thought again about his mother, Esti. He had named this place for her—the Esti Hunt Club. He sighed deeply.
    Gazing up, he saw his man bringing the woman from the cabin. The Padre opened his limo door and stepped out into the crisp air. Stretching, he studied the hillsides. He wanted Ryder. Now.
    Turning to the chauffeur, he pounded his fist once into his palm. The signal told him to hit the woman. That would bring Ryder tearing down the slope.
    Puzzled, worried, she peered first at the Padre, then at his four men, and finally at his young wife. But Catalina had laid down on her back on the snowbank beside the limo and was swinging her arms and legs, making a snow angel.
    The chauffeur nodded, faced the terrified woman, and pulled back his fist. The Padre did not see what happened next. Instead, he felt one excruciating nanosecond of pain, and then he felt nothing. A sniper bullet had exploded his skull. The rest of the sniper rounds fell like a deadly rain on his wife, his men, and the woman who looked like Eva Blake.

 
    15
    By the time the last shot was fired, Ryder knew the source was one of two snipers working in concert among the trees at the top of the hill to the north. Although they were at least a half mile from their targets, their accuracy was pinpoint. The tally—five males, two females. So fast it was over before any of the armed victims had a chance to aim and return fire, not that they could have seen the shooters. Not that their Uzi rounds could have reached that far. There had been nothing any of them could have done. Nothing Ryder could have done.
    I couldn’t save Eva. I couldn’t save her.
    Ryder plunged down the wooded slope, his boots sinking into the snow, his heart aching. A black crow shrieked and flapped low across tamped animal tracks, a narrow trail. Ryder jumped onto it, running and sliding and falling and running again. The trail followed an ice-coated creek that streamed down through the forest.
    Almost out of the trees, Ryder saw a man leave one of the lodges and dropped to watch. Like the others, the man was dressed in hunting clothes and carried an Uzi. A sixth man. A survivor. He must have been indoors the entire time. Without a glance around, he went from one victim to another, kicking away weapons, testing for vital signs. He showed no shock, not a moment of remorse, no surprise.
    Moving quietly downhill another twenty feet, Ryder hid behind a hedge of juniper bushes then crab-walked along it to an opening where he was behind the man. When the man closed in on two male corpses near the Explorer, Ryder sprinted to the rear of the limo. Dropping low, he waited. The man moved to the last two victims. The more distant was a teenaged woman, lying on her back in a snowbank. She had been making a snow angel and died smiling, a