by Alex Archer
One of them knelt beside the door window that was now empty of glass. The mask over the man’s face shifted and his eyes crinkled, giving Roux the distinct impression he was grinning beneath it.
“Hello, gramps,” he mocked in English with an American accent. “Hang on a sec. We’ll get you right out of there.” He reached into the car with his free hand.
Roux finally managed to curl his fingers around his walking stick. He ripped the sheath free as the man fisted his shirt roughly. Roux twisted and drove the sword cane with both hands. The point pierced the man’s unprotected throat, then—because of the angle he was at—slid down into his chest cavity and pierced his lungs, as well. Blood spurted from the man’s mouth through the mask as Roux pulled the blade free again. Sputtering, the man dropped to his knees, blocking the man behind him from reaching the window. Desperately, the man held on to his gushing throat with his free hand and trained the pistol on Roux.
Constrained by the car, Roux barely managed to thrust the sword against the man’s forearm to knock the pistol aside. The detonation of the gunshot was deafening inside the vehicle, almost rendering Roux senseless.
Releasing his hold on the sword, Roux gripped the man’s hand, broke his thumb and two of his fingers and freed the pistol from the man’s grip. Roux fisted the weapon, then used his sharp blade to saw through the seat belt in one quick slice. He dropped heavily to what had been the top of the Rolls-Royce just as someone squatted down at the opposite window. Roux raised his pistol, as the other man pointed his.
Two quick gunshots erupted inside the car, but these didn’t sound as loud because he was still partially deaf from the previous one. In the shattered window, the masked man suddenly sat back on his haunches. The ski mask served to hold together the fragments of the man’s face and skull left by the passage of two bullets.
But Roux hadn’t fired yet. He glanced over his shoulder.
Pistol gripped in her fist, Honeysuckle hung upside down from the driver’s seat. A cut over her left eye dripped up her forehead toward her hairline.
Roux flicked the sword across her seat belt and the material parted instantly. On the other side of the spiderwebbed windshield, three men walked toward the overturned vehicle.
Honeysuckle put a hand on Roux’s shoulder and shoved. “Get out!”
Although it didn’t sound like it through the thick cotton in his ears, Honeysuckle’s face was contorted like she was shouting as she threw herself along what had been the car’s overhead and into the backseat. The cut over her eye had reversed direction, running into her eyebrow.
On his belly, Roux managed to slither through the window, knocking free more glass fragments that fell around him. Once out of the car, he pushed himself to his feet, already feeling the twinges and aches that would settle in after the horrific collision. He turned to check on Honeysuckle’s progress only to receive a thrust to his chest that almost bowled him over.
She lifted her weapon and aimed at one of the men on the other side of the Rolls-Royce. A bullet cut a strand of hair from her head and the red lock drifted toward the ground, then caught in the blowback from the pistol she fired.
Her bullet caught one of the masked men in the chest and caused him to stumble and fall. The other two trailing after him dove for cover as she swept her weapon toward them.
Spinning, Honeysuckle stiff-armed Roux again. “Move!”
Roux ran, smiling in spite of the danger. Honeysuckle was quite the woman. He would be sad to see her move on, but he knew she would. She would tire of his secrets because he would not share with her who he was and what he did. Women, he’d found, were like that. They weren’t content to settle for part of a man’s life.
Even Annja got frustrated with him over his secrets. And those secrets were only part of what had set him and Garin apart.
Traffic had stalled in the intersection, blocked by the wrecked Rolls-Royce and the sanitation truck. The truck had continued to roll after striking the car, finally coming to a rest against a musical instrument shop just past the intersection where it had partly crushed through a display window and scattered guitars and horns across the sidewalk. Other drivers recovered from being stunned by the wreck and realized that it had turned into a gunfight. They tried to back away, running into other vehicles in the process, or simply abandoned their cars.
Reaching the secondhand clothing store on the other side of the intersection, Roux plunged inside. The circular racks just inside the store were heavy with winter wear, which he hoped would help block bullets.
He navigated through the narrow aisles toward the back door. He burst into the stockroom, where two young clerks, one male and one female, had hidden. They had cell phones in their hands and were texting as they stared at him with wide, frightened eyes.
Roux grabbed the back door, but it was locked. He whirled on the two clerks and asked in French, “Do you have the key?”
Blankly, they continued to stare at him. The female lifted her cell and took Roux’s picture. He snatched it from her and threw it on the floor, then smashed it to pieces.
“Hey! You can’t do that!” She gawked at the cell in disbelief.
“It’s done. Do you have a key?”
“It’s in the register.”
Snarling an oath, Roux leveled his pistol at the lock. “Step back.”
The two fled.
Roux fired, shattering the lock. Kicking the door open, he shot into an alley and headed left, away from the intersection.
Honeysuckle lagged behind him, covering their retreat. “Do you know who those people are?”
“Not for certain, no.” Roux ran for the end of the alley. “But I’ve got a good idea why they’re here. Garin stumbled across something that’s going to make life difficult for us for a time, I’m afraid.”
“Who’s Garin?”
“I’ll explain later.” But he wouldn’t. The number of people who knew about him and Garin was small. “We need to find a phone.”
“The police are already on their way.”
He listened for the shrill sirens of the police vehicles. Heard them.
“We can find somewhere to hide until they arrive,” she suggested.
“I’d rather not talk to the police. That’s what I hire lawyers for. I’ve got more important things to do.”
At the end of the alley, Roux stopped and scanned the street. A quick glance behind assured him their pursuers hadn’t yet gotten through the secondhand clothing store, either. He shoved the pistol under his belt at the small of his back, straightened his disheveled clothing, then walked to the right down the sidewalk.
It was irritating that public phones were no longer readily available, but four doors down on the left, a small electronics boutique advertised Disposable Mobiles. He crossed the street and headed for the shop.
* * *
MELINA CLOSED AND locked the hotel door behind her, throwing the dead bolt and the security chain. She didn’t expect either would keep out someone determined to get into the room, but it would slow them and at least alert her that they were about to have company.
The demolitions team sent by her grandfather ignored the outer room and went to the bedroom. According to the blueprints, the safe would be there.
Instead of following them, Melina walked through the outer room, trying to get some sense of the man who had so explosively destroyed her attempt to claim the clockwork butterfly. Although she had read through Garin Braden’s records, what there were of them, she knew the true man was hidden from those files.
Everything the computer search had turned up on Garin Braden was false. A public face he wore, though she supposed some of it was based on truth. The man lived a reclusive life for the most part, but he had gotten into trouble on several continents. Those troubles had been covered up by lawyers. Investigators could never quite fi
gure out exactly what the man had been doing.
Melina felt certain she knew, based on the knowledge her grandfather had of the man. She believed that the clockwork her grandfather searched so diligently for was only a small fraction of what lay out there for someone to find. If only they knew where to look.
During her twenty-eight years, she had seen many impossible, wondrous things, and she had known a lot of men. Most of them had been deadly and violent, men whose lives hung in the balance at any given moment, depending on how fast they could move or kill, and how quickly they could think. A few times, those men had nearly killed her.
Garin’s suite was immaculate. Five newspapers lay neatly folded on the desk. Two were in English, one was in French, one was in Italian and one was in German. By the smudged fingerprints, she could tell the papers had been thumbed through.
She was impressed. It was one thing to be able to speak a language, and quite another to read it. She used her phone to capture images of the papers. She’d review them later and try to figure out what Garin Braden had been so interested in.
Moving quickly, aware that the man was even now closing in on them—because her grandfather had told her he’d killed the mercenaries she’d brought with her to retrieve him, proving that he was more dangerous than expected—Melina entered the bedroom.
The demolitions team had set up in front of the floor safe. The vault was built into the floor. The men had removed flooring and were placing charges around the safe door.
Melina had to restrain herself from pointing out how delicate the clockwork might be. Her grandfather would have impressed that upon them already.
She stepped into the bathroom, still trying to puzzle out the man who stayed here. If someone was going to make a mess, it would be in the bathroom. Instead, the toiletries were carefully put away. The used towels had been left in the tub. There was no hair in the sink.
But are you neat? Or just careful not to leave any DNA behind? She wondered what his relationship to the old man was. They did not look like father and son.
“Ms. Andrianou.”
Melina returned to the bedroom. The three demolitions men stood in the doorway to the outer room.
“The charges are set. We’re ready.”
Nodding, Melina stepped past them into the outer room.
Just then something slammed into the door from the hallway.
Melina tightened her grip on her pistol and slid to the wall to cover the entrance. In her peripheral vision she saw two of her grandfather’s team draw their weapons and spread out around the room.
“Blow the safe.” Melina never took her eyes from the door as the handle jerked and twisted. For the moment, the dead bolt held.
After a muffled explosion in the bedroom, smoke boiled from the room.
The attempted break-in at the door halted. Melina waited, not giving in to the temptation to go see what was happening out in the hallway.
Behind her, the man at the bedroom door went to check on the safe. Melina held her pistol steady.
Inside the bedroom, the man cursed, then a loud boom! swallowed his voice and deafened Melina as a concussive wave hammered her against the wall and knocked her forward. Her senses swam as she fought to keep from striking the floor face-first.
“Melina! Melina!” Her grandfather spoke in her ear, barely audible even right there inside her head. “What is going on?”
Struggling, Melina forced herself up, glancing at the bedroom in disbelief.
The wall separating the two rooms hung in tatters. Flames broke out in curling twists even as Melina stared in shock. The charges used to break the safe couldn’t have done that much damage. Even as she was thinking that, the sprinkler system gushed to life, deluging the suite in artificial rain.
The man who had been inside the bedroom now lay scattered in bloody chunks around the suite. The large windows in the bedroom gaped open and wind sucked the smoke out, stoking the flames to life. Fractures lined one of the windows across from Melina. As she pushed herself to her feet, the fractures gave way, glinting in the sunlight briefly as the pieces fell. The outside air chilled her down to her bones.
She checked the room’s door, but it remained intact.
“Melina.”
“I’m all right.”
“What about the clockwork?”
“I don’t know. There was another explosive rigged to the safe.” Melina strode toward the bedroom on shaky legs. Her ears rang so loudly she could scarcely hear herself think.
Only one of the men in what had been the outer room moved. The other was dead, impaled by a shard of wood.
“Two of the demolitions team are dead.” Cautiously, Melina walked toward the hole in the floor where the safe had been. She couldn’t believe Garin Braden would have destroyed the object he’d killed over only that morning.
“Is the clockwork still there?”
Melina peered at the floor. Instead of a burned, twisted mass of safe as she’d expected, a hole opened to the floor below. Debris lay scattered across the bed on that floor. Through the smoke she could just make out the cylindrical shape of the safe canted to one side, but otherwise undamaged.
“He rigged the safe—which your so-called demolitions experts didn’t notice. When we attempted to open it, we set off a second explosion that took out the floor and dropped it down one level. Who is in that room?”
“We’ve lost access to the hotel records. It doesn’t matter. Recover the clockwork.”
Melina didn’t point out that accomplishing that task was going to be difficult with two-thirds of the demolitions team dead. Her grandfather wanted results, not excuses. Judging from the circumference of the hole left in the floor, she thought she could get through.
She stepped forward, threw her arms over her head and dropped.
14
Outside room 1136, Emil Klotz stood on guard. A wheeled luggage carrier sat beside him. A bright red fire extinguisher sat in the middle of the carrier alongside a canvas bag.
Garin crossed the hallway and joined the man.
Klotz produced the room card, slotting it quickly. “This is turning out to be an interesting day.”
“I prefer them to boring days, Emil, but this is getting to be too much of a good thing.”
“Do you know who the woman is?”
“Not entirely. Amalia is working on it.”
Klotz handed Garin the fire extinguisher. “You’ll probably need this. And the safe will be hot.” He passed over a pair of asbestos gloves, as well.
Garin took the extinguisher and gloves, then pushed the door open and went inside. The suite was set up exactly as the room above it. He’d taken both rooms as a precaution. It was always better to have a planned withdrawal route.
Pulling the luggage carrier after him, Klotz followed.
Smoke streamed from the bedroom. Garin holstered his pistol and pulled the fire extinguisher’s pin, readying the device. He hoped he could still open the safe because that would make leaving with the clockwork much easier, but he doubted it would be so simple. Melina Andrianou had complicated his life a lot in a short time. That made her even more interesting.
Small flames darted and twisted across the bed, growing larger as Garin watched. Through a gaping hole in the ceiling water streamed in from the sprinkler system above. He peered at the hole, but nothing seemed to be moving up there.
Aiming the fire extinguisher at the bed, Garin depressed the trigger and smothered most of the flames—as far as he could tell through the resulting thick smoke. Just as he was about to put the extinguisher aside, a lithe figure dropped through the hole and landed on the bed in a crouch.
Melina Andrianou lifted a pistol and aimed point-blank from six feet away.
Garin quickly raised the fire extinguisher and covered the woma
n’s face, temporarily blinding her. She fired, anyway. Four shots dug into the wall behind where Garin had been standing. She was starting to adjust, fighting the uncertain footing of the bed, when Klotz opened fire from the doorway.
Crumpling under the bullets, the woman rolled off the bed and onto the floor.
Garin started to go after her, but an arm appeared through the hole in the ceiling and a man started blasting away. Ducking to one side, Garin pressed himself up against the wall. Klotz traded shots with the man for a moment, but there wasn’t much of a target and their opponent was firing an MP5 submachine gun. Garin threw the fire extinguisher aside and pulled on the asbestos gloves.
When the weapon cycled dry, Garin darted forward, grabbed the floor safe in both hands and manhandled it to the luggage carrier Klotz had brought with him. The floor safe thudded onto the carrier just as the MP5 wielder thrust his weapon back into the room and opened fire again.
Cursing, Garin shoved the luggage carrier ahead of him and raced for the door. Klotz had wedged it open so it was a straight run to the hallway.
Outside the room, Garin kept pushing the carrier ahead of him. The safe teetered precariously, but the remaining corners of the mortise work prevented it from rolling off the carrier. He reached the elevator and stopped.
“You did a good job on the safe, Emil.” Garin waited while Klotz shoved a knife into the slot between the elevator doors and created a gap he could dig his fingers into.
“Didn’t kill enough of them, though, did it? That woman lived through it.”
“I’m betting there were others who didn’t.”
Klotz shoved the elevator door open and held it.
Picking up the safe, Garin leaned over and peered down the elevator shaft. “Do you think you killed her?”
“I don’t know. That fire extinguisher fogged up the room a lot. Couldn’t tell for sure what I was hitting.”
“She went down quick enough.”
