by Sean Ellis
Kismet’s decisive attack had removed the immediate threat, but the element of surprise had been his only advantage, and that was spent. Before he could do or say anything, the driver reached down from his perch and grabbed Kismet by the shoulders. With a single mighty heave, he hauled Kismet through the opening in the canopy and pitched him out ahead of the carriage. The driver then thrust a stubby object through the aperture; Annie recognized it immediately as a sawed-off double-barrel shot gun. “Sit down,” he snarled. “I don’t have to even aim this to splatter you to both to Kingdom Come.”
Higgins released his hold on the pistol and let the man’s hand drop to the floor of the carriage. The driver kept the shotgun trained in their general direction, but half-turned forward and coaxed the horse into motion.
* * *
Kismet hit the ground hard. His wind was knocked from him and for a moment, he could only writhe in agony. The violent throw had left him disoriented, unable for a moment to tell which way was up, but as the turmoil in his inner ear subsided and the world stopped spinning, he realized that he was face to face with one of the coach’s metal-shod wheels.
And then it started to move.
His brain immediately calculated that it would tread across his body, crushing him if he didn't get out of the way. That realization broke the barrier between thought and action. He threw himself sharply to the right, rolling underneath the wagon as it advanced. He reached up and wrapped his right arm around the axle of the rear wheel and was immediately dragged along as the carriage picked up speed.
Although the grass beneath him was relatively soft, the burn of friction quickly reached a feverish intensity. Kismet got his free hand around the axle and hugged it to his chest so that only his feet were in contact with the ground. His boots offered considerably more protection than the fabric of his cargo pants, but the tradeoff was the intense exertion of holding himself up. He struggled simply to remain there for a few seconds longer, gathering his energy for what he knew had to come next.
A glance forward, past the front axle and the flashing hooves, revealed that the driver was making for the Transverse Road. Kismet knew he had only a few seconds left before the discomfort of being scoured by grassy earth turned into something much less pleasant. He let go with his right hand and began probing the underside of the carriage for handholds. His fingers found a metal frame, part of the leaf-spring suspension, and as soon as his grip was secure, he unwrapped his left arm and shifted it to the frame as well.
His situation was only marginally better; he was now a few inches further away from the ground—nowhere near where he needed to be—and his arms were burning with the exertion. From his new position though, he was able to get a better idea of what to do next. Directly above him was a small step, designed to hold bags and other cargo. Gritting his teeth in anticipation, he slowly relaxed his arms, allowing his body to drag once more on the ground, in order to bring the step within reach.
Kismet was dimly aware that, as he made contact once more with the ground, the pistol stashed in his waistband was jarred loose and went skittering away, but he couldn’t worry about that. He twisted around, taking the punishment on his knees, and managed to get his feet under him. He estimated that the carriage wasn’t moving faster than about fifteen miles an hour—maybe less—considerably faster than a walking pace, but not beyond the realm of possibility for a flat out sprint. As soon as the soles of his boots made contact, he started running.
He needed only a few steps to gather his momentum, and for that brief time, he was actually running faster than the horse that pulled the carriage. Yet what he saw in that brief instant as he ran forced him to revise his strategy. He only caught a glimpse of the driver and the shotgun he held trained on the captives in the coach’s front facing seat, but that was enough for him to realize that just climbing onto the step wasn’t going to be good enough.
Kismet ducked down again before the driver could glance back and spy him. He needn’t have worried; the man’s attention was momentarily focused on making the transition from the grassy ground of the Ramble to the hard macadam of the Transverse Drive. He slowed the carriage to a crawl as he neared the concrete curb, and Kismet knew that once on the paved road, his ability to keep pace with the horse would quickly evaporate.
He had noted that the driver was sitting sideways on this elevated bench seat, turned to the right so that he could keep the shotgun trained on the passengers while maintaining a view of the road ahead. As the horse stepped down onto the pavement, Kismet dashed along the left side of the coach, in the driver’s blind spot, and vaulted up onto the driver’s perch.
There was a great deal of risk to his friends—a reflexive trigger squeeze would shred the father and daughter in the back seat, but Kismet was counting on the man to react by trying to bring the gun around to meet the new threat. He was half right.
As soon as the driver realized he had company, he did indeed start to turn, but before he could, Higgins pounced forward, grabbing the short barrel of the gun and thrusting it up into the overhead canopy. The gun thundered in the semi-enclosed space, and a load of double-ought buckshot tore through the fabric. Higgins’ hand went instantly numb from the eruption and the gun barrel slipped from his grasp, but he did not let it slow him down. Even as Kismet drew back to deliver a cross-body punch, Higgins reached through the narrow opening and planted the heel of his left hand in the small of the driver’s back. The blow, delivered at almost exactly the same instant that the front wheels of the carriage dropped down from the curb, pitched the man from his seat. He rebounded off the horse’s hindquarters and bounced like a pinball from the rigging, before crashing onto the pavement. The carriage lurched twice as first the left front wheel and then the rear wheel were lifted a few inches off the pavement. The driverless horse continued out to the shoulder lane and veered to the right, heading east.
Kismet didn’t look back. His attention was focused on gathering in the reins, which the driver had taken with him in his fall, in order to get control of the carriage. He clambered over the raised footboard and cautiously reached a foot down onto the rigging. With his left hand gripping the carriage, he extended his reach as far as possible and managed to snare the trailing strap. A few seconds later, he settled back onto the driver’s seat and pulled back on the reins, bringing the coach to a halt.
He turned and peered into the passenger area. “Are you guys okay?”
“What?” Annie shouted, evidently deafened by the close proximity of the shotgun blast, but Higgins, who was cradling his right hand, just nodded.
Kismet took a deep breath and allowed his mind to process everything that had happened. About fifty yards behind them, the motionless form of the fallen driver was starting to attract the attention of motorists traveling through the park on the Transverse Road. They had to keep moving, but even as Kismet turned to relay this decision to his friends, he saw Annie brace herself against the backrest of her seat and then with both feet, shove the unconscious form of the man who had earlier held them at gunpoint out of the carriage. The gunman crashed unceremoniously onto the pavement, hidden from the view of traffic by the carriage itself. As soon as they moved, he too would become a spectacle, drawing more unwanted attention.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Annie shouted, still unable to gauge an appropriate volume level.
Kismet rolled his eyes at her impulsive action. They needed to abandon the conspicuous carriage and exit the park on foot. But before he could put this decision into words, he heard the hissing sound of a car slamming on its brakes and skidding to a halt beside them. It was a non-descript sedan, marked with a sticker identifying it as a rental car. It might have been just another curious rubbernecker, aghast at the sight of what appeared to be a dead body laying in the road, but somehow Kismet knew they weren’t that lucky. The windows reflected the scenery, denying him a look at the occupants, but he didn’t need to see inside to know that trouble had arrived.
“Leeds!” he
rasped, as if the name was a curse. “Hang on!” He snapped the reins, urging the horse once more into motion even as the doors of the sedan popped open.
The car immediately began rolling forward again, but one of its passengers disembarked and began sprinting after the carriage on foot. Kismet glanced over his shoulder, saw that the runner was cut from the same cloth as the man that had been waiting with MacKay in the Ramble—mercenaries, he thought, unable to keep his face from contorting into a snarl—and then saw Higgins brusquely plant a foot in the man’s face as the latter caught up to the coach. That dealt with the immediate threat, but the sedan represented a problem on a different order of magnitude. Kismet shook the reins again, shouting for the horse to move faster. Grudgingly, it did.
Speed alone, however, would not suffice to save them. Another backward glance showed the sedan charging forward, angling to pull alongside them. Kismet reacted immediately by swerving the carriage toward the center of the road. Traffic flowing the opposite direction was starting to back up, but as soon as Kismet saw a break in the stack, he cut the carriage across the lane. Leeds’ driver did not hesitate to follow but the sedan was not quite as agile as the carriage and in the time it took him to force his way through the gap, the carriage picked up some momentum and stretched their lead by more than a hundred yards.
Still not enough, Kismet thought.
A tunnel loomed ahead. Although the crest of the hill through which it passed was shrouded in trees, Kismet recognized it as the East Drive crossing, part of the great park loop that was inaccessible from the Transverse Road. Or rather, inaccessible to automobiles.
Kismet hauled on the left rein, steering the horse onto the grassy embankment. The gentle slope passed through a scattering of trees, and then opened onto a sidewalk that ran parallel to the road. Behind him, Leeds’ driver did not hesitate to follow. As the carriage completed its ascent, the sedan jumped the curb and started up the hill behind them.
Kismet got a brief glimpse of the sedan sloughing back and forth across the embankment as its tires tore up turf in an effort to find purchase, but then he turned his full attention to driving the carriage. He steered right, pulling into the bike lane on the right hand side of the road, and headed south.
Leeds’ car crested the rise less than a minute later, a minute in which Kismet was able to coax the horse to a fast trot and put almost three hundred yards between them and their pursuer. But the horse was not bred or trained for speed and the bike lane was not exactly carriage friendly. Cyclists and skaters had to be shouted out of the way and most did not go without protest. Although the carriage was probably little more than a speck in the distance to Leeds and his men, the disruption left little question about which way Kismet and the others had gone.
“Bugger!” Higgins stuck his head through the opening. “There’s two of ‘em now. Looks like Leeds got himself an army.”
Although he didn’t doubt the former Gurkha’s word, Kismet looked back to verify that a second sedan had climbed the embankment and joined the chase. Vehicle traffic on East Drive was one-way in the opposite direction, but that didn’t seem to bother the drivers. Both cars pulled onto the bike lane and charged after the fleeing carriage.
“We’ve got to get off the road!” Kismet wasn’t sure if he was shouting to inform his passengers, or to help him decide what to do next, but it was sound advice. Traffic and laws notwithstanding, Leeds’ cars would be able to close in on them in a matter of seconds. The only way to outdistance their pursuers was to find an escape route where the cars could not follow. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. Dense stands of trees lined either side of the road, denying passage not only to automobiles but also to the carriage, and Leeds’ men were too close for them to abandon the horse-drawn vehicle and make a run for it.
The road ahead curved gently to the left and then in a few hundred feet arched back to the right. Just past that vertex of the curve, on the far side of the road, Kismet spied a break in the trees. “That might work,” he muttered.
He cautiously steered the horse into oncoming traffic. Because the speed limit for cars on East Drive was only 25 mph, there was little risk of a collision, but the carriage nevertheless cut a swath of chaos across the road, with cars skidding to a halt, turning sideways or veering into the bike lane. Then, just that quickly, they were through.
Kismet slowed the horse to a walk and guided it toward the gap in the tree line, and then the forest enfolded them, falling like a curtain on the mayhem behind them.
* * *
The carriage emerged from the stand of trees at a point directly opposite the famed Alice in Wonderland statues on the edge of the Conservatory Water. Kismet turned the horse onto the footpath that ran along the edge of the reservoir, once again heading south. He glanced over his shoulder again, half-expecting to see one of the sedans emerge from the trees, and gave a relieved sigh when that did not happen.
Higgins clambered around the frame of the damaged canopy to join him. “I think we lost them. Now what?”
“No pun intended, but I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet. Leeds might just have the resources to watch every exit from the park. I’ll breath easier when we’re out of the park...hell, when we’re out of the city.”
Higgins nodded but said nothing more. Kismet followed to the trail south until it curved toward an intersection with a paved road—Terrace Drive, which exited the park and turned into East 72nd street. Kismet approached the road cautiously, but there was no sign of Leeds’ sedans. He continued east to the junction with Fifth Avenue, and then halted just inside the park’s boundaries. They left the carriage there, the gelding tethered to the wrought iron fence and in plain view, and trekked out to the main thoroughfare. Kismet allowed a few taxis to pass by before hailing one at random. As they got in, he told the driver their destination.
“Rockefeller Center.”
The driver cocked his head sideways, probably wondering who would hire a cab to reach a destination that was within easy walking distance, but then dropped the flag and waited for his chance to pull into traffic. Higgins could just make out the distant shriek of sirens as police cars from all over the surrounding area closed in on the park.
“It’s only a few blocks away,” Kismet explained. “But it’s always busy. We can get lost in the crowd until we figure out what to do next.”
As expected, the ride was short. After Kismet paid the driver, he led his companions through the crowd of tourists milling in the artificial canyon between the glass and concrete towers where the corporate and media empires shaped the future of the world. They drew to a halt on the balcony overlooking an ice skating rink, but Higgins’ gaze was drawn to an enormous statue—a gilded bronze figure in repose.
He hadn’t exactly received a classical education in the Regiment, but Alexander Higgins recognized this image.
Kismet sank wearily onto a vacant bench. “Okay,” he said finally. “Spill it. What in the hell happened back there?”
“They were waiting for us,” Annie said quickly, almost too quickly.
“Yeah, I kind of figured that part out. It’s the ‘how’ that’s still a bit murky. They just abducted you off a crowded New York City sidewalk?”
Higgins felt his daughter’s stare burning into him, but couldn’t seem to tear his own gaze away from the statue. Prometheus, bringing fire to mankind. Coincidence? Not bloody likely.
“He said he just wanted to talk,” she said, after a long pause. “He wanted us to work with him to find...well, you know. It all sounds a bit daft, really.”
“Except he seems to think it’s worth killing for.” Kismet glanced at the still silent Higgins for a moment. “It’s pretty obvious what Leeds is up to: divide and conquer. He must think I’ve told you something. The joke’s on him, since right now, he knows just as much as I do.”
Higgins nodded slowly, but Leeds’ words echoed in his head. How else would you explain your miraculous escape...? He finally met Kismet’s stare. “R
ight. We told him to bugger off. Of course, I hope you do know a bit more, or otherwise we might as well all just go home now.”
A wry smile curled the corners of Kismet’s mouth. “It’s not so much what I know as what I think I know. Joseph King said that Fontaneda—Fortune, rather—‘took the secret with him to the grave.’ He used those specific words. I think that’s a clue, and I think I know what it means.” He briefly outlined what he had discovered in his Internet search for Joseph King. “Unfortunately, if Leeds is half as clever as I think he is, he’ll pick up on this, too.”
“So you’re saying the clock is ticking,” Annie ventured.
Kismet nodded.
Higgins brought his palms down on his thighs with a slap. “Then what are we sitting here for?”
He even managed to smile. But as he followed Kismet and Annie out of the crowded plaza and back toward the street, his mind was six thousand miles away...
And more than twenty years in the past.
INTERLUDE
Deliverance
INTERLUDE
Nasiriyah, Iraq—January1991
Pain.
Higgins floated in and out of consciousness, but it was nearly impossible to distinguish the difference.
His chest was burning. Ribs, he thought in one of his brief lucid moments. Separated, maybe broken. A whimper escaped his lips, but even the breath drawn to replace that agonized exhalation cost him dearly, and he slipped once more into blackness.
Another blossom of torment brought him back, this time not just from his injured torso. His right arm felt like it had been stabbed through with shards of broken glass, and the pain intensified as the limb moved—was moved, without his intention or permission—and then his entire body was wracked with white hot fire.
Abruptly, he felt the ground fall away beneath him. His shoulders screamed as his weight fell against them. The pain in his wounded arm threatened to send him back into oblivion, but the need to gain even the smallest measure of relief anchored him to consciousness. Instinctively, he flexed his left arm, trying to ease some of the burden, but this merely served to further inflame his injured ribs.
