Scarecrow ss-3

by Matthew Reilly

  Book and Mother wasted no time. They bounded off the stairs and took out the three bounty hunters, working perfectly as a pair—Book dropped the man on the left, Mother the one on the right, and both of them nailed the man in the middle, blowing him apart with their guns.

  Rosenthal dropped to the floor.

  Book and Mother raced to his side, scooped him up, draped his arms over their shoulders.

  'You Rosenthal?' Book demanded. 'Benjamin Rosenthal?'

  'Yes . . .'

  'We're here to help you. Shane Schofield sent us.'

  A glint of recognition appeared on Rosenthal's face. 'Schofield. From the list . . .'

  Blam!

  Mother dropped another IG-88 man as he emerged from the next room and saw them.

  'Book!' she yelled. 'No time for chit-chat! We have to keep moving! You can debrief him as we run! Up the stairs! Now!'

  They swept further up the internal staircase, heading for the 40th floor, running past a set of curving picture windows that looked out over London—before the view of the city was abruptly replaced by that of an evil-looking assault helicopter swinging into position, hovering right outside the windows, staring in at Book and Mother and Rosenthal!

  It was a Lynx gunship, the British equivalent of a Huey, equipped with side-mounted TOW missiles and a six-barrelled mini-gun.

  'Go!' Mother yelled, hauling them upward. 'Go-go-go-go-go!'

  The Lynx opened fire.

  There came a cataclysmic shattering of glass as the picture windows encasing the curving staircase collapsed under the weight of the helicopter's fire.

  Glass rained down all around Book and Mother as they scampered up the stairs carrying Rosenthal between them, a whole section of the staircase itself falling away behind them, ripped clear from its mountings by the barrage of fire, just as they dived off it to the safety of the 40th floor.

  Demon Larkham strode through the wreckage of the 39th floor, listening as reports came in over his headset radio.

  '—This is Airborne One. They're up on 40. Two contacts in civilian clothing. They appear to have Rosenthal with them—'

  '—Airborne Two, landing on the roof now. Offloading second unit—'

  '—This is Airborne Three. We're coming round the north-east corner. Heading for 40—'

  '—This is Tech Team. Elevators are locked down. Four elevators are frozen on 38, the fifth is down in the lobby. No-one's going anywhere now—'

  'Gentlemen,' Demon said, 'exterminate these pests. And get me Rosenthal.'

  Seen from a distance, the three IG-88 Lynx choppers buzzing around the peak of the King's Tower looked like flies harassing a picnicker.

  One had landed on the roof, while the other two prowled around the upper floors, peering in through the windows.

  At the sound of the windows being blasted to oblivion, a few local businesses called the police.

  Book II and Mother charged down a hallway on the 40th floor, dragging Benjamin Rosenthal with them.

  'Talk to me!' Book said to Rosenthal as they ran. 'The list. Why are you and Schofield on it?'

  Rosenthal heaved for breath. 'Majestic . . . Majestic-12 put us on it. . . I'm on the list because I know who the members of Majestic-12 are, and I can expose them when they carry out their plan.'

  'And Schofield?'

  'He's different. He's a very special individual. He's one of the few who passed the Cobra tests . . . one of only nine men in the world who can disarm CincLock-VII, the security system on the Chameleon missiles—'

  Just then, a fire stairwell door right next to them burst open, revealing four IG-88 mercenaries brandishing MetalStorm rifles and green laser sights.

  Book and Rosenthal had no time to react, but Mother did.

  She pushed them round a nearby corner, into another corridor,

  while she herself dashed the other way down a long hallway, inches ahead of a wave of hypermachinegun fire.

  Book and Rosenthal ran northward down their corridor, burst into a small office branching off it.

  Dead end.

  'Shit!' Book yelled, racing over to the window and looking out just as a Lynx helicopter shoomed past.

  And then, outside the window, he saw it.

  The four IG-88 bounty hunters who had burst out of the fire stairwell had split into two pairs—two going after Book and Rosenthal, the other pair going after Mother.

  The two commandos pursuing Book and Rosenthal saw them enter the side-office twenty yards down the corridor.

  They approached the office's door, flanked it silently on either side. The door was marked '4009'.

  'Tech Team, this is Sterling Five,' the senior commando whispered into his headset. 'I need a floor schematic. Office number four-zero-zero-niner.'

  The response came back. 'It's a dead end, Sterling Five. They've got nowhere to go.'

  The senior man nodded to the trooper beside him—and the junior trooper kicked open the door, blazing away with his MetalStorm rifle.

  He hit nothing.

  The office was empty.

  Its single floor-to-ceiling window was already shattered, the pouring London rain sweeping in through it.

  No Book.

  No Rosenthal.

  • * *

  The two IG-88 men rushed to the broken window, looked down.

  Nothing. Only the sheer glass side of the tower and a grassy park below.

  Then they looked up—just as a mechanical whirring came to life above them—and they saw the steel underside of a window-washer's platform rising up the side of the building, heading for the roof.

  Book and Rosenthal stood on the window-washer's platform as it rose quickly up the side of King's Tower.

  The long rectangular platform hung from two sturdy winch-cranes that stuck out from the tower's roof.

  Moments before their attackers had stormed the office, Book had blasted open the window, and with Rosenthal in front of him, leapt up and grabbed its catwalk.

  He'd pushed Rosenthal up, and then hauled himself onto the platform, yanking his feet out of view just as the two IG-88 men had burst into the office.

  A wave of hypercharged bullets chased Mother as she dashed westward down her hallway with two IG-88 bounty hunters on her tail.

  Just as the bullets caught up with her, she dived sharply left, into an office—and found herself standing in a beautifully appointed boardroom.

  It had a polished wooden floor, deep leather chairs, and the most gigantic boardroom table she had ever seen. It was easily 30 feet long.

  'Fucking lawyers,' Mother breathed. 'Always overcompensating for their teeny-weeny dicks.'

  It was a corner office, with floor-to-ceiling windows lining one side, providing a breathtaking view of London. The other side backed onto the exterior elevators.

  Mother knew that her Colt pistol didn't stand a chance against the MetalStorm guns of the IG-88 men, so she waited behind the door.

  Bang!

  They kicked it in, rushed inside.

  Mother shot the first man in the side of the head before he even saw her, turned her gun on the second man—

  Click.

  'Fuck!'

  Out of ammo.

  She crashtackled the second man instead, sending the two of them flying onto the boardroom table, the bounty hunter's MetalStorm rifle firing wildly in every direction.

  The floor-to-ceiling windows of the boardroom took the brunt of the gunfire and spontaneously cracked into a million spiderwebs.

  Mother grappled with her attacker on top of the boardroom table. He was a big guy, strong. He unsheathed a knife just as Mother did too and the two blades clashed.

  Then, suddenly, as they fought, Mother caught sight of two shapes in the doorway.

  Men.

  But not IG-88 men.

  Rather, two burly Israelis in suits, with Uzis slung over their shoulders and bloodstains on their shirts.

  Mossad security men.

  The two Israelis saw the fight taking place on the l
ong boardroom table.

  'Bounty hunters!' one of them spat.

  'Come on!' the other yelled, looking back down the hallway. 'They're coming!'

  The first man sneered at Mother and her attacker—then he quickly pulled a high-powered RDX grenade from his pocket, popped the cap and threw it into the boardroom. Then he and his partner dashed off.

  Still fending off her attacker's blows with her knife, Mother saw the grenade fly into the room in a kind of detached slow motion. It bounced on the floor, disappearing underneath the gigantic

  I

  table. Mother heard the unmistakable sound of it clunking against one of the table's tree-trunk-sized legs. And then it detonated.

  The blast was monstrous.

  Despite its solidity, the corridor-end of the massive table just disintegrated, shattering instantly into a thousand splinters.

  As for the rest of the table—still a good 25 feet long—something very different happened.

  The concussive force of the grenade lifted the elongated table clear off the floor and—like a railroad car being shunted forward on its tracks—sent it sliding at considerable speed down the length of the boardroom, toward the bullet-cracked windows at the western end of the room.

  Mother saw it coming an instant before it happened.

  The table exploded through the cracked glass windows, blasting through them like a battering ram, and shot out into the sky, forty

  storeys up.

  Then with a sickening lurch, the table tipped downwards, and Mother suddenly found herself sliding—fast, down the length of the table, rain pounding against her face—toward four hundred feet of empty sky.

  It looked totally bizarre: the elongated boardroom table jutting out from the top floor of the tower.

  The table tilted sharply—passing through 45 degrees, then steeper—with the two tiny figures of Mother and the IG-88 commando sliding down its length.

  Then—completely without warning—the falling table jolted to a

  halt.

  Its uppermost edge had hit the ceiling of the 40th floor and wedged against it, while two of its thick legs had locked against the floor right on the precipice—causing the whole table to stop suddenly, suspended at a vertiginous angle 40 storeys above the ground!

  Mother slid fast, before at the very last moment she jammed her knife deep into the surface of the table—and using the knife's brass fingerholes as a handgrip, swung to a halt, hanging from the embedded knife, her feet dangling off the lower edge of the almost-vertical table.

  Her attacker wasn't as quick-thinking.

  In an attempt to get a handhold, he'd dropped his knife as they'd fallen. As it turned out, he hadn't been able to find a handhold, but luckily for him he'd been above Mother as the table had burst out through the window. As such, he'd fallen into her, his feet slamming into her embedded knife.

  He now hung above her, one foot crushing her knife-hand, smiling.

  Gripping the edges of the table with his hands, he started kicking her fingers, hard.

  Mother clenched her teeth, held on grimly despite his blows, the brass fingerholes of her knife deflecting some of them.

  And then she heard the noise.

  Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump . . .

  The sound of helicopter rotors.

  She glanced around and saw a Lynx chopper hovering right beside her like a giant flying hornet.

  'Oh, fuck . . .' she moaned.

  The IG-88 man above her waved to the chopper pilot, directing him to go down, below them.

  The pilot complied and the chopper swung below Mother, its speed-blurred rotor blades forming a hazy white circle beneath her dangling feet.

  Then the bounty hunter above her resumed his kicking, only harder.

  Crack!

  She heard one of her fingers break.

  'You motherfucker]' she yelled.

  He kicked again.

  The rotor blades roared like a buzzsaw ten feet below Mother's boots.

  Her attacker raised his foot for one last blow. He brought it

  down hard—

  —just as Mother did a most unexpected thing.

  She withdrew the knife from the table, causing both of them to slide quickly downward, off the table's lower edge, toward the blurring blades of the helicopter!

  Her attacker couldn't believe it.

  Without the knife to lean on, he rocketed downward, sliding off the lower edge of the boardroom table!

  They slid off the bottom end of the table together—but unlike her attacker, Mother had been prepared. As she went off the edge, she stabbed her knife into the underside of the table, and swung in underneath it, her fall halted.

  The IG-88 man shot right past her, off the edge of the table and

  out into space . . .

  . . . and the world went slow as Mother watched his horrified face—eyes wide, mouth open—falling, falling, dropping away

  from her.

  Then he hit the rotor blades—splat-choo!—and his entire human shape just disappeared, spontaneously erupting into a star-shaped

  burst of blood.

  A wash of red liquid splattered the windscreen of the chopper and the Lynx peeled away from the building.

  Mother didn't even have time to sigh with relief.

  For just then, as she hung from the downward-pointing boardroom table, pelted by the London rain, the whole table shifted slightly.

  A sudden jolt.

  Downward.

  Mother snapped to look up: saw that the legs pinioning the table

  to the 40th floor were buckling. The table was going to fall. 'Oh, damn it all to fucking hell!' she yelled to the sky. 'I am not

  going to die!'

  She gauged her position.

  She was at the corner of the building—the south-west corner— on the western side.

  Just around the corner, slightly below her, she could see one of the glass elevators, stopped on the 38th floor on the southern face of the building.

  'Okay,' she said to herself. 'Stay calm. What would the Scarecrow do?'

  Maghook, she thought.

  She drew her Maghook, aimed it up at the interior ceiling of the 40th floor, and fired.

  Nothing happened.

  The Maghook didn't fire.

  Its trigger just clicked and its barrel emitted a weak fizzing noise. It was out of gas propellant.

  'Oh, come on!' Mother yelled. 'That never happens to the Scarecrow!'

  Then suddenly the table lurched again, dropped another two feet.

  Mother started unspooling the Maghook manually—with her teeth—muttering as she did so. 'Not fair. Not fair. Not fucking fair . . .'

  The table teetered on the edge of the 40th floor, its legs groaning under the weight, about to snap—

  Mother felt she had enough rope and with her free hand, hurled the Maghook's grappling hook up at the 40th floor.

  It landed on the edge of the shattered windowsill, its claws catching . . .

  . . . just as the table tipped wholly out of the window . . .

  . . . and Mother let go of her knife, swung away from the falling boardroom table . . .

  . . . and the table fell through the rainy sky, all twenty-five feet of it dropping down the side of the building . . .

  . . . while Mother swung on her rope, swooping around the corner of the building, before she slammed into the glass wall of

  the elevator just around the corner, and grabbed hold of its roof

  rim.

  Seven whole seconds later, the gigantic boardroom table of Goldman, Marcus &C Meyer hit the sidewalk and smashed into a billion tiny pieces.

  Book and Rosenthal arrived at the roof on the window-washer's platform.

  They ducked behind an exhaust stack, peered out to see one of Demon Larkham's Lynx helicopters resting on the rooftop helipad, it rotors turning, veiled in the pouring rain.

  'Keep talking,' Book said to Rosenthal. 'This Majestic-12 wrote the list. And they want Schof
ield dead because . . .'

  'Because of the Cobra tests,' Rosenthal said. 'Because he passed the Cobra tests. Although in NATO they were called something else: Motor Neuron Rapidity of Response tests. "Cobra" was the Russian name.'

  'Motor Neuron Rapidity of Response?' Book II said. 'You mean reflexes.'

  'Yes. Exactly,' Rosenthal said. 'It's all about reflexes. Superfast reflexes. The reflexes of the men on that list are the best in the world. They passed the Cobra tests, and only someone who passed the Cobra tests can disarm the CincLock-VII missile security system, and CincLock-VII is at the core of Majestic-12's plan. That's why Majestic-12 needs to eliminate them.'

  'A missile security system . . .'

  'Yes, yes, but don't be fooled. This bounty hunt is but one element of Majestic-12's larger plan.'

  'And what is that plan?'

  'Smashing the existing world order. Creating worldwide warfare. Scorching the earth so that it can regrow afresh,' Rosenthal said. 'Listen, I have a whole file on this downstairs. The Mossad has been debriefing me on it for the last two days. It's a file on this

  bounty hunt, on Majestic-12, its members, and, most importantly, what its overall plan is—'

  Rosenthal's head exploded. Burst like a blood-filled water balloon.

  There was no warning.

  Rosenthal's face was simply ripped to pieces by a lethal 20-round burst from a MetalStorm rifle somewhere behind Book II.

  Book spun—

  —and saw Demon Larkham himself standing in the doorway to the fire stairs, thirty yards away, his MetalStorm rifle pressed against his shoulder.

  Book looked down at Rosenthal, bloodied and broken. The Mossad man would tell no more tales—not without his face.

  And so Book ran.

  For the helicopter parked nearby, his pistol up and firing.

  The glass wall of the elevator shattered and Mother swung inside it.

  She was now on the south face of the tower, on the 38th floor. She saw the other glass elevators sitting silently in position, level with her own.

  If the elevators were numbered l-through-5 going across the face of the building, then Elevators 1, 2, 3 and 5 were stopped on Level 38. A gap existed where the fourth elevator should have been. It must have been on a lower floor. Mother stood in Number 1, on the far left-hand side of the southern face.