“Sir?” He never exposed his identity, his first rule. When he’d audited Black and Swan field operations, certain people might have suspected who he was or what he did, but he also had CPA training and conducted a genuine financial exam. When he left the airport, he would run a real fare into the city. Truth and anonymity were his best disguises.
“You will drive them.”
“Of course, sir.” Once these men marked him, he was a dead man driving. Unless Wardsen dispatched all five.
In which case, the shit would roll uphill. He’d be blamed, and Jane would be dead.
* * *
Theresa marveled at how candlelight smoothed the rough edges off Wulf’s cliff-top fortress and transformed a late dinner in Montebelli’s Great Hall into a storybook illustration. The dancing flames reflected off a half dozen silver centerpieces, gleamed on the dark mahogany banquet table and highlighted the polished swords and axes hung along the walls.
From the seat next to her, Wulf offered a spoonful of dessert. “Lorenzo left cherry-almond tortoni.”
“I can’t. I’ll pop.” She recrossed her legs, aware of how high on her thigh the black dress had risen. After two days wrapped in his attention as they toured vineyards and olive groves, she’d become comfortable showing this much skin. It always led to the chance to show more.
His gaze lingered on her bare leg until he began refilling her glass. “This wine’s been made from our own grapes since—”
He dropped the dark green bottle, and it knocked over the crystal goblet, dumping ruby liquid across the table linen. Wulf sprang to his feet and yanked her out of her chair. “Move!”
“What?” Stumbling down the room’s length, she registered a flashing red light over the door to the bedroom wing. “What is it?”
“Security breach.” He pushed her shoulders toward the floor and shoved her under a console table. “Someone’s in the castle.”
A tapestry draped over the front enclosed her in a trunk-size space bounded by the stone wall at the back and X-shaped table legs barely visible in the dark. Her legs and arms tangled into a shaking knot as she twisted to face outward, and then a table leg scraped her shoulder blade through the lace dress. Surprisingly sharp, the hurt forced her to hold still and breathe deeply. The fabric covering her hiding spot twitched, and she jerked in time to avoid being bonked by the antique-looking pistol Wulf thrust at her.
“Two shots, not accurate, but it’s got stopping power close-up if anyone reaches in.”
Not again! Fighting the return of the terror she’d felt in the sewer, she bit into her inner lip while she tried to steady her hands enough to accept the pistol. Blood, metallic and foul after the evening’s fruity wine, hit her tongue, reminding her that this wasn’t a dream.
“Don’t move—got that?”
Before she could reply, the cloth dropped into place, leaving her encased in darkness.
* * *
Wulf didn’t know when or where the silent alarm had triggered, but anyone who could scale the cliffs or walls was a professional who wouldn’t waste time. Intruders would arrive; whether it was two minutes or two seconds, they were coming. He’d make his stand in the Great Hall with weapons that had served him for centuries. He snatched a Colt .44 pistol from a display cabinet and grabbed a custom Beretta over-under shotgun from a wall rack, then slammed into a niche next to the massive stone mantel, aware that somewhere in his castle a man—or men—hunted him.
Seconds later the bone-penetrating noise and light of a flash-bang grenade signaled the intruders’ arrival, but flash-bangs didn’t disorient him longer than a blink, so they were screwed if they expected him to be blinded or incapacitated.
Boom. His buckshot tore enough holes in the first man to do the job. He brought the shotgun around to a second attacker crouched behind a Louis-whatever chair.
Boom. The fool staggered to his feet with half a face, half a shoulder and a lot of Ivar’s French furniture embedded in him. With three men left, shooting him again would be a waste of ammo, so Wulf lined up his Colt sights on someone else.
A minute later, after French-chair guy lurched into a sideboard filled with lit candles, Wulf knew his calculation had been wrong. He hadn’t foreseen the tapers toppling onto the couch pillows, the velvet bursting into yellow flames faster than a fire log or the stupid ineffectiveness of shooting into a body already burning. Impervious to bullets, fire would outmaneuver him. And far worse, he couldn’t hide Theresa from flames.
He dropped his weapon to rip a wool tapestry from the wall. Next to the cloth, the Crusher hung from pegs. The heft and grip of his flanged mace were still as familiar in his hand as taking a piss.
Uzi ta-ta-ta-ing, a third man popped from the floor, but flying lead didn’t matter while adrenaline flushed Wulf’s body. The roar of his blood and the roar of his battle call united as, running straight at the camo-painted face, he swung the Crusher. The arm-vibrating thwack, the thud of a limp mess dropping—way more fucking satisfying than a trigger pull. Wulf’s chest heaved, demanding oxygen, as he dropped the mace and beat at the flaming couch.
* * *
During the shooting and crashing and yelling, Theresa had obeyed Wulf’s order to stay hidden. Through the first whiffs of smoke, she had cowered under the table like a puppy. But by the time the odor coated her tongue and made her scrunch her eyes, she couldn’t continue hiding.
Don’t think about the burns you see after explosions.
Wulf wouldn’t abandon her—she believed in him to her core—but a lifetime of relying on herself didn’t stop because her lover had ordered her to stay put. She had to judge the fire situation for herself, so she lifted the corner of the concealing cloth. On her right Wulf beat at a flaming couch. To the left a man held a candle to a dark-tinted painting of the Madonna until flames licked the Holy Child’s feet. No question, she’d better move her butt.
She crawled the rest of the way out from under the table with the pistol gripped tightly in her hand, until, standing, she could cradle her right wrist with her left hand as she’d been trained.
None of the men noticed her. Her target moved to a painting of The Last Supper like the one hanging in her mother’s dining room.
Bringing her elbows tight to her sides, she pointed both barrels of the heavy pistol at his center of mass and squeezed.
Bamm. This pistol fired at a different stage of the trigger pull than her army Beretta, the whole contraption launching from her hand like a car going seventy into a turnpike pothole.
Her shot missed. She aimed again, but only sent another wild round into a wall somewhere.
“Theresa!” Wulf shouted. “Run, dammit! Run!”
Dropping his candle, the man came at her.
The third trigger squeeze had no result. Don’t panic, she told herself, just pull harder. Then she remembered Wulf’s words—two shots.
Okay, now panic.
She threw the gun at the man and whirled away. But Wulf fought on her right, with vicious moves she didn’t want to approach, and the man was on her left. The long dining table in front of her led to double doors, another way out. After springing to a chair, then to the tabletop, she scattered dishes as she ran.
The fire starter skidded and turned to parallel her, his handgun raised as he ran, but the high-back chairs interrupted his field of fire while she sped for the end of the table.
He got there first. With flames reflecting off the whites of the eyes showing in his balaclava mask, he steadied his weapon and bared his teeth like a horror-movie goaltender.
The creep didn’t know how much she liked charging goalies. She spotted a silver fruit bowl on the tabletop, went for the kick and connected as solidly as she had with anything she’d ever booted in college. The weapon bucked in his hand, and she heard the shot, but the bowl must have distracted him. He missed and then raised his forear
ms to block her missile. That left his gut unprotected. Sweeping a silver epergne out of her way, she went into a slide like she hadn’t done in a decade, her right knee tucked under and her left foot leading, a spike she’d rocked dozens of times in college.
Thuukk. She connected with his soft lower stomach and the organs at tabletop height. The impact vibrated from her sole through her shin, knee and hip, all the way to her spine, while the man staggered and folded onto himself. Momentum took her off the table, into him and dropped both of them in a tangle to the floor.
He fumbled for her leg even while clutching his balls with one hand and writhing.
“No!” She twisted until her kneecap threatened to pop, but she couldn’t jerk free. “Let go!” On the floor next to her hand, the tall centerpiece beckoned. She cracked it on his arm and rolled away, dragging her throbbing foot and knee, but he clawed after her.
This time she half rolled, half sat and swung the silver club with both hands. She couldn’t hear the hit over Wulf’s shouts, but she saw one of the pointed curlicues decorating the central column embed deep in the man’s eye socket. A fist-size piece of his skull squished inward exactly like a jam-filled doughnut. His grip on her leg went slack.
Her fight finished, she slumped and closed her eyes. Her soft leather flats weren’t soccer cleats, and now her foot and ankle hurt so badly that she wanted to moan. But within two breaths she realized the smoke had thickened.
Embrace the suck, her army buds always said. There was still a fire to extinguish.
* * *
Next time he wanted Theresa to stay put, Wulf vowed to rely on rope, but first he had to save her and the castle. He pounded the tapestry on the smoldering couch as she fired a second time.
She missed.
A single round from a Lancaster .577 could take down a charging hussar, and she’d missed? The man stopper only had two shots. “Theresa! Run, dammit! Run!”
Another fighter popped over the back of a padded chair, thick-barreled handgun aimed at his chest.
He dove and rolled, but no rounds banged into him or near him. Instead a single long projectile hung quivering from a charred cushion. The orange tail stabilizer couldn’t have been more visible. A tranquilizer dart. He whirled the tapestry, bullfighter style, to intercept more surprises of the syringe kind while rushing his opponent. The woolen length weighed enough that its spinning velocity knocked aside the dart gun, and they were left fighting man-to-man.
The other guy was fast and well trained. Wulf blocked a throat thrust with his forearm, but missed his follow-up kick because his opponent had spun toward a rack of spears.
Springing toward the wall to grab a broadsword, Wulf circled. His adversary’s unfamiliarity with the pike showed in his grip—a mix of a high jumper’s hold on a pole and infantry bayonet training. Wulf loosened his wrist with a test swing, and then the thrill of a fight like he hadn’t faced in three centuries was upon him.
Seconds later, a glint crossed the corner of his vision as his high-speed, low-drag doc kicked a silver bowl at an invader’s head. He parried another pike thrust and glanced back at her in time to see her slide tackle her man in the balls. That Valkyrie was his, by the gods, his.
“No!” he heard her yell. “Let go!”
Pain exploded in his temple and knocked him to his knees. Shouldn’t have taken my eyes off my opponent. Rolling away before his foe impaled him, Wulf popped to one knee and swung his blade upward to flip the pike out of the other man’s grasp.
At the same moment, the attacker stepped forward to stab with the barbed end, his arm moving on a collision course with Wulf’s sword edge.
The severed arm landed two feet away from its owner, whose momentum carried him to Wulf’s feet. The answers Wulf needed spread across the floor with the man’s lifeblood.
“Doc!” he yelled, and he grabbed a table runner, stuffing cloth on the arm stump as fast as blood soaked through. “Need some help here.”
“Me...too.” Her answer sounded like two croaks.
“Medical help.” He kept pressure on the wad of cloth while he unbuckled his belt one-handed. “Got one dying.”
“I...do not...care...” Her voice trailed off as she crawled into his sight line. “Damn.” She scrambled to shove her hands alongside his. “Your belt—tourniquet.”
As soon as he had it out of the loops, she ordered him to call an ambulance.
“Are you serious?”
“Want him to live?” Her face scrunched with concentration. “He needs blood.”
“Too late.” Wulf sat on his heels and stared at the guy’s fixed pupils. He’d never find out how these men had discovered Montebelli. “He’s zipped in.”
* * *
Leaving rather than waiting for the mercenaries to return had been about survival, but ninety minutes after Draycott had dropped them at the trail leading to the beach below Wardsen’s hideaway, his phone hadn’t rung with a call for pick up. Nada, nothing, zip. Thanks to Wardsen, the South Africans weren’t looking for the last name on tonight’s kill list. Instead, they’d punched out. The sergeant would never know, but he’d done Draycott a big favor.
This wasn’t the moment to celebrate. Jane wasn’t answering, and the one person he could trust to pass the signal that she had to run hadn’t called back. If Em couldn’t reach her mother first, if, God forbid, Em was gone, then evading the Director was time-wasting futility, not worth even as much as the bald tires on his crappy van.
Jane and Em. Mother and daughter. Smiles so alike they could be mistaken for each other in photos.
He pushed the minibus to its tottering top speed, which had already brought him one hundred and twenty miles closer to the French-Italian border. Either he still had far to go tonight, or he had nothing at all. Except payback.
* * *
Despite showering after he’d tucked Theresa and an ice pack for her foot into the most secure tower room, Wulf couldn’t eradicate the smell of smoke from his skin. Whiffs clung as tenaciously as the cold fear in his gut. They’d stay at Montebelli until morning, when he could have more confidence that the roads were safe for them to move on. Until then, the papal tower where Ivar had once retreated from an eleven-week siege would have to shelter Theresa too.
One task remained before he joined Lorenzo to restore the Great Room: calling his brother. New York City was six hours earlier, so Ivar would be awake. Although he and his brother had spent centuries fighting back-to-back from Denmark to Samarkand, they’d drifted so far apart that Wulf had to calculate how long had passed since they’d been in the same place at the same time. Maybe three years. He liked to stop in Manhattan when his sibling was in Italy or at his island, and he visited Italy when Ivar was in New York. Keeping an ocean between them had become a habit during the Cold War, one that hadn’t fallen with the Berlin Wall.
No matter how long he rubbed a towel across his chest, the phone squatted conveniently on a hall table near the bathroom door. Its taupe handset and curled cord were twenty-five years out-of-date, but change came slowly at the fortezza.
Ivar picked up in the middle of the second ring.
“I’m at Montebelli.” No point in gilding the conversation. “The shit’s hit the fire. Literally.”
“How did you not understand the message I gave Lorenzo? Have you never met a woman who didn’t take you for everything?”
With one question, Ivar had pissed him off. Two questions took him back a thousand years to that morning in Chang’an when he’d had to explain to his big brother why he’d lent a prostitute their Silk Road profit. Ivar never had appreciated that the girl wanted to buy her sister a respectable position as a Buddhist nun, or that their earnings were only money, something they had time to acquire again. Helping others was a connection. Ivar couldn’t understand how much Wulf needed to be around normal people. His brother preferre
d to bond with money.
Tonight he wouldn’t feel guilty about defying his big brother. He’d spit it out and not argue. “The good news is, all the men who invaded are dead and the damage to the Great Hall isn’t structural. The bad news is, one of your French chairs has gone to meet its maker.”
“You joke as if you don’t know what you’ve unleashed.” Deliberately precise, Ivar’s voice conveyed more than disapproval. “You don’t, do you? Because you’ve always led with your fists or your prick, not your head. Nothing changes.”
No, nothing ever did, certainly not his brother’s ability to send him to the flash point with a handful of sentences. “Tell me, if you’re playing Odin Allfather, what have I unleashed?”
“You would know that answer if you’d researched Black and Swan.”
“Why should I? You’re dying to share.” Wulf felt the hammer poised above his head.
“It’s a closely held private company registered in the Caribbean.”
Always, his brother had been agonizingly slow to make a point. The slower he was, the worse the point.
“Cayman records aren’t easy to pry open, but after Lorenzo alerted me, I acquired the names of the three shareholders. You may recall them from a prior engagement, if you can think about something other than your libido. Francis Bannister. Uziah Gruble.”
That second, uncommon name meant Wulf didn’t need to hear more to be engulfed with the enormity of his mistake. But of course his brother told him.
“And Baird Durfey.”
While Ivar had guided the Continental Congress through financial negotiations with the French, Wulf’s militia had chased those three and their men across the colonies, too often arriving too late to save the women and children in their path.
“You’ve been playing games with Unferth.” Baird Durfey. The bard, Unferth. The singer-skald at Hrothgar’s court had been accustomed to controlling from behind the old king’s throne, and he’d resented Beowulf’s success and popularity. He’d never agreed with the dictate to remain anonymous and conceal their abilities from mortals. Gradually Unferth’s disputes with Ivar had shifted to a quest for power, a vendetta fought through the proxy of human wars. Using the same aliases they’d employed to rampage through the colonies to double as shareholders for Black and Swan, a company that supplied the modern American military, undoubtedly amused the cast-outs.
First to Burn Page 22
