by Gayle Lynds
Sam in the lead, they hurried toward the rear entrance of the tall building. She strode carefully, avoiding vehicles close on either side, and as she did she had an abrupt sense of what it'd been like to be blind. How this would've been impossible—avoiding the steel withers and flanks that were just inches from her hips. How adjusting to the next path between cars would've been time-consuming and probably futile, even with her proprioceptors and facial sense in high gear. There were just some things the blind couldn't do without help, and weaving efficiently among cars in a packed lot was one.
As they approached the apartment house, she felt the wintry air turn listless against her cheeks. The gusty wind had died. She adjusted Sam's leather jacket close over his pistol.
Sam was striding alongside her. He had a loose, lanky gait that announced his presence but at the same time seemed ready to ward off danger. She liked that about him. Without her sight, she would've missed a lot that she liked about him.
As she contemplated how different everything was for her now, her eyes felt drawn to the shadows that deepened into impenetrable black close to the apartment building.
For some reason, the building and dark parking lot reminded her of the alley beside Brice's mansion, where Maya Stern had hidden in the shadows of the ivy that climbed the garden wall. Why hadn't she felt Stern sooner? It might've been because she'd shut down her special senses as she usually did before a concert. After all, she'd been terrified and absolutely focused on escape—
Why had she thought about all that?
Abruptly she concentrated on her facial sense. On her proprioceptors. On smell and texture and hearing—
It seemed as if her blood vessels expanded, and awareness flooded her. She felt a small explosion of joy and confidence and. . . information assaulted her brain, but none of it seemed relevant, except—
There was tiny warmth on her cheeks. Like a periscope, her face tried to find the source. They were less than ten feet from the building entrance. People were capable of detecting temperature changes as small as two-tenths of a degree, and her other-sense seeing usually kicked in before ten feet, and—
Her proprioceptors were literally screaming—
It was body heat, two people, but so low to the ground she—
She froze only five feet from the building and grabbed Keeline's arm. He turned, his face puzzled.
Before he could speak, she whispered low, trying to be calm, "Are there steps down to a basement entrance back here for your building?"
"Yeah. Over to the left."
"Then someone's down there waiting—"
Sam didn't hesitate. With a sweep of his arm he knocked her down and fell on top of her as two shadows rose from the base of the building and hurtled toward them.
29
"Keeline!" Julia's voice was strangled and furious beneath him. His heart thudded against her chest, and she felt warmth spread through her that had nothing to do with her outrage at being knocked to the ground.
He said nothing. His face was hard. Two events happened almost instantly: He grabbed his Browning from her hand, and bullets exploded next to them, kicking up blacktop and dirt in hard, icy fragments.
A man's voice ordered, "Keeline! Hold it right there. We—"
Swiftly Sam rolled off Julia, aimed the Browning, and fired. One. Two. A single shot into each attacker, because he'd probably never get a second chance.
The two shadows froze in their tracks as if they'd slammed into a wall. Almost in slow motion they flew up and back in grotesque imitations of swimmers laid out in a back dive. Only these dives went limp before they were complete, and the two shadows struck the building's strip of lawn like shattered dolls.
Sam jumped to his feet, eyes hard, breathing fast and shallow. He braced his legs apart, one slightly before the other. He extended the Browning in both hands, pointing at the two motionless shapes on the dim blacktop. He vibrated with adrenaline. His reflexes were still there. He felt like exulting.
From the ground, Julia watched it all with shock and a sick feeling in her chest. Keeline stood so taut he quivered. His extended pistol was like the fang of some alien predator. He looked as if he might throw back his head and howl his triumph into the night. A wave of violence surged from him, and she felt an instant of fear.
Then his shoulder relaxed a fraction. He padded cautiously toward the fallen attackers. He was like an animal on the tundra—stealthy, confident—and Julia wondered how he could be the same kind man who'd treated and bandaged her hands. Who'd draped his jacket over her shoulders to keep her warm.
As Sam moved warily toward the two fallen attackers and their pistols, he remembered how he'd once prized his ability to react instantly. How he'd enjoyed his exceptional karate and weaponry skills. But all that had died with Irini and his mistake in not being with her in East Berlin. When he'd tangled with Maya Stern on Seventieth Street, he'd been slow, hesitant, and allowed her to outwit and outfight him.
But now it was obvious all his old reflexes and training had kicked in because he knew what he was fighting against—Maya Stern. Either of these two attackers could've been Stern, and that meant only seconds would determine who died, and he didn't intend for it to be Austrian or himself.
Then why had these two missed? Why had they hesitated?
He crouched down over them. They were dressed identically in skintight black jeans, black turtlenecks, and black jackets of the lightest thermal material for speed and invisibility. And he again recognized one—another former Company assassin. He had a broad face, a long, Slavic nose, and a black stubble that ran up the sides of his cheeks into his black buzz haircut.
The night's chill cut through Sam's shirt as he crouched beside the killers, but he ignored it. There was a mawing wound on the dark turtleneck of the man he recognized. A white, steamy haze hung like an apparition above the hot blood. The man had been in Berlin back then, too, working against the Stasi. Now Sam saw no movement in his broad face—not a flexed muscle, not a vein throbbing faintly. Still, the Company trained its killers to feign death expertly.
With one hand, Sam jammed the muzzle of his gun against the guy's nose, and with the other he felt for the carotid artery.
"Is he alive?" Julia stood over him. The metallic odor of the fresh blood flashed her back to London and the taxicab filled with her mother's suffering. Her heart seemed to catch in her throat, but she pushed the horrible memories away. Instead she studied the two men on the ground and gazed up worriedly as lights appeared in the windows of Sam's apartment building above them.
"Get back to the car!" Sam felt no pulse. "He's dead."
He moved to the other man. As with the first, there was a bloody, gaping wound above his heart. He also had a stubbly beard, but streaked with gray. His dark eyes stared blankly out at the sky from a face that had a long knife scar down the left cheek.
"What about this one?" Again Julia stood behind him, but this time beneath the zippered folds of his jacket she'd hidden the pistol of the first killer. It'd been lying on the ground, and she'd picked it up when Keeline had walked away. The barrel was still hot from the bullets that had exploded through it.
Sam growled, "He's dead, too. My aim's as wonderful as ever." There was a bitter edge to his voice. For ten years he'd tried to forget Berlin, Irini, and the necessities of field ops. He was sick and tired of death. He especially didn't want to be a killing machine. He—
Julia's voice accused, "You never gave them a chance."
He jumped up as if from an electric shock. "A chance? What chance did you want me to give them? To kill you? To kill us both?" He grabbed her arm and pulled her back toward the parking lot and the Durango.
She tried to wrench away. "They wanted to talk. I heard one of them say that—"
"Talk? Listen to me, Austrian. I recognized one. He is—or was—a Company assassin. Just like Maya Stern. When the Company officially shut down its assassination program, a lot of assassins quit. Some banded together and called themselves t
he Janitors. But it was no social group. They're misfits and sociopaths, and they 'privatized' themselves so they could go on working. They offer their skills to anyone who can pay their price."
As they neared the Durango, she tried to break loose again. "But I heard one of them shout your name, and—"
"So did I, but it could've been a ploy to make me vulnerable. The Janitors kill as surely as a hot blade cuts through snow. All the Janitors are technicians—mechanics—in the most fatal sense of the word, and as long as they're conscious they'll hobble, crawl, or slither on their bellies to kill. On top of that, they have a bloodlust I never understood, no matter what it looks like to you."
They reached the Durango, and Sam released his grip. Her arm felt bruised, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her rub it. "If they're such professionals, why didn't they shoot immediately? Why expose themselves by jumping out from the shadows? That doesn't sound as if they were going to kill us!"
His voice was tight. "Okay, and while you're accusing me, you forgot another objection. If they were experts, how did they manage to miss us with their first shots from such short range even if they were running and we were down?"
"I want to know that, too. Maybe you killed them for no reason. How could you shoot them so easily without knowing for certain they were here to murder me?"
"It looked easy to you?" Worry pounded through him as he scrutinized all around for more danger. He quickly unlocked the Durango's door.
Guiltily, Julia remembered how desperate she'd been in London to kill the woman who'd just taken her mother's life. Murder her with her bare hands. Strangle her until her breath was gone and her face was purple with pain. She wanted to take back her harsh accusation, but Sam was already talking again.
He yanked open her car door. "I don't know for sure why they missed, or why they didn't shoot from ambush. For that matter, I don't know why Maya Stern didn't shoot you in that alley before I arrived. When I got there, she still had time, but instead she just threatened you and ran. I don't understand any of it, but I know one thing—whatever the Janitors do has purpose. So all that makes sense is that their employer wants at least one of us alive. Get in."
She climbed into the car, the reassuring pistol hidden inside her waistband under Sam's jacket. He ran around and climbed into the driver's side.
As he closed his door, she said, "We should've searched them. Got their driver's licenses. Maybe some kind of evidence to tell us who'd sent them."
"You don't get it." He started the car. "In the Janitors, no one has a real name, a real occupation, or a real life. If they have families, they're completely separate from their work. Compartmentalized. If they carry IDs, they're false. If they stay in the game long enough, they almost forget who they are. As individuals, they've successfully murdered maybe a hundred people." He breathed harshly. "We need to be really clear about this: I had to kill them while I could."
His words rang in her head. "Are you saying both were Janitors?"
Police sirens screamed in the distance, hurrying toward them. Sam slammed the Durango into gear and gunned away. "Must be. None of them partners with anyone not in the organization."
Abruptly another siren's yelping cry sounded directly ahead. A second cruiser was closing in. Then a third. Surrounding them.
"Hang on."
Sam spun the wheel and skidded out of the lot, along the alley, and down a dark street. He listened in the night, then turned the wheel and dove the big car into the back streets of Alexandria away from the converging sirens. He glanced at Julia and saw she was deep inside herself, trying to come to grips with the new life that had abruptly taken her over. Trying to figure out what had happened and what was going to happen. Her lovely face was pinched, and her fine white teeth gripped her lower lip.
Inwardly he nodded grimly. She didn't know whom she could trust. But she was strong, and if she kept her head, if she kept her confidence, maybe she had a chance.
He had an idea. "I think you're right. They wanted to talk. To capture us not kill us, at least for the moment. Normally none of the Janitors would take such a job. It means they must've been paid a fortune and have a lot of respect for their employer. My guess is they planned to grab us inside, but you spotted them too soon. How'd you know they were there? I didn't see or hear a damn thing in those shadows."
With relief, she tore her mind from all the deaths. She told him about her facial sense and proprioceptors. "I call it other-sense seeing."
"That's remarkable."
"Everyone has the ability, but most people never develop it because sight gives more information than all the other senses combined." Inside the darkness of the big car she tried to quiet her fears. Right now his presence wasn't calming. It felt like a threat. Inwardly she shook her head. Sternly she reminded herself that if he was right, he'd saved her life yet again. "If they're all Janitors, whoever's paying them has to be someone with the connections and money to put it all together. Someone so powerful and in the know he—or she—could call upon one of the most secret groups of paid killers in the world."
"You have anyone in mind?"
She did—the Redmonds—but she didn't want to believe that. What possible reason could they have?
She quickly changed the subject. "Where are we going now?"
He'd turned the Durango onto a ramp that led to the Shirley Memorial Highway, heading north. "I'd planned to hide you at a friend of mine's place. He's gone to Long Island to visit his sister, but I have a key. But if the Janitors knew to stake out my apartment, they'll also be hanging around my friends and family." He looked at her soberly. "And probably around your friends and family, too. That means not only we aren't safe, they're not."
She sighed nervously, feeling the gun in her waistband. "It appears we have only each other."
And then she looked at him. He turned just as she did.
They stared across the car's darkness into each other's eyes. It was an unguarded moment, and a wave of uneasy understanding passed between them. Her pulse seemed to quicken. Their gazes lingered, and she suddenly felt a flush of desire rise to her face.
He said quietly, "Do you mind that?" He realized he didn't. He liked this fine pianist and her wounded heart. He admired people who fought for what they believed against great odds and with no real basis on which to believe they could win. And, too, there was the part of him that had to admit he found her more than a little desirable.
"No. I guess I don't mind."
She had a strange sense about him—that his complexity was going to cause her problems. But right now she didn't care. Right now he was the only island in a black, tortured sea of violence, and he seemed to embody both it and intelligence, deadly expertise and kindness. In the end, she supposed she found that odd mix not only dangerous but interesting. And in any case, she had no one else to turn to.
Inside his jacket, she hugged the stolen pistol close. "I guess we could hide in a motel. Do you have money?" The thought of a motel with him made her warm in her belly again. She felt almost naked.
"The heiress is without funds? Okay, I have money, but I don't want to stop on the usual route between here and New York. The NYPD or the people who hired the Janitors could easily arrange to have the hotels and motels checked."
"Then where can we go?"
"I've got an idea. Remember how I told you my Russian grandfather was the one who got me interested in the Amber Room? My mother inherited his old theater in Baltimore. It's where she grew up. We'll go there."
2:45 AM, SUNDAY
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Exhausted, Sam and Julia drove off highway 395 past downtown Baltimore's dark towers of glass, brick, and concrete that announced how lucratively the city's business pulse beat. Above the serrated skyline, gray clouds had crept across the starry night sky. Julia had a nervous sense that time was too short. She wondered where Maya Stern was. What she was doing, and what was in the minds of her employers.
Sam told her in a qui
et voice, "This is East Baltimore. Those turn-of-the-century buildings were union halls, stores, and warehouses. The row houses you see used to be sweatshops and tenements."
The street was dim with shabby buildings and broken streetlamps. Graffiti marred walls, and waste had blown into the gutters, where liquor bottles had taken up residence for what looked like years.
She said, "This is where your grandfather settled after he emigrated from the Soviet Union?"
Sam turned off Lombard Street. "It was Russia then, and he was escaping the Bolsheviks. This was the Russian section—Jews, White Russians, and a few Italians. Most were garment workers."
"You think we'll be safe here?" The battered street threatened more violence.
"The Company has no connection between me and this place. No one does. I haven't brought anyone here since I was in college back before my grandfather died."
He paused the Durango and leaned across to look out her window at a three-story, rococo building with a tall marquee. The glass cases where movie posters had once hung were boarded over, and plywood sheets were nailed across the ticket booth.
He said, "This is it."
Julia studied the old movie house. "It must've been a showplace once."
He smiled and nodded. "It played mostly Russian-language pictures. My grandfather built it on the money from two jewels he smuggled out. It was all he could save of the family fortune, but he never complained, and he never looked back. 'America is land of great opportunity,' he used to say, and that's the way he lived."
As he continued to lean over, his spicy scent filled her head. His lean, muscled body hovered just above hers. She found herself staring at him, at the strong nose and deep-set gray eyes. At the pale blond hair that was tousled and enticing. She tore her gaze away and forced herself to study the movie house. That's when she saw the name above the marquee—THE ROMANOV THEATRE.
"He was a Romanov?"
"A cousin of the last czar. He used to spend summers at the Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg. That's when he fell in love with the Amber Room, and that's why he passed on everything he knew to me. When he died, he willed the theater to my mother. But she and my father had already retired to Sarasota. So Florida's their permanent address, which means it's the one in the Company's file about me."
