by Dave Stern
And a shadow passed over her.
The gun flew from her hand.
Someone took hold of the back of her head and slammed her face first into the desk in front of her. Lara’s head rang and she tasted blood.
She felt a gun at her throat and at the same instant, her right arm being yanked up behind her back.
“I’ve had your best, Lara,” a voice whispered in her ear. “Now I’m looking forward to giving you mine.”
Reiss’s man—the one she’d coldcocked before. So he’d been playing possum after all.
“That was hardly my best,” she said. “Lackeys don’t get my best.”
He yanked hard on her arm and Lara grunted in pain.
This one could be rattled. She filed that information away in her mind and as she did so, a question that had been tumbling around in the back of her head marched front and center.
Where was Terry? And how had Reiss managed to get past him?
The doctor leaned over her and brought his face close to hers.
“Lady Croft. Lara. We meet in person, at last. Needless to say, you’ve already made quite an impression on me.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Lara said.
“I doubt it, but it’s nice of you to say so. And I see you and Sean here have had a chance to get acquainted, as well. Wonderful.”
“The pleasure’s been all mine,” the man holding her down—Sean—said. “Too bad it’s going to be ending so soon.”
The gun barrel pressing on her at her neck disappeared then, and Lara felt the point of a knife on her throat.
“Ah,” Reiss said. “Not just yet, Sean. Not until we’re sure the NEC here has done its job, and that we will have no further need of Lady Croft’s expertise.”
Lara turned her head and looked at the monitor.
Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .976
Time to Scan Completion: 0:04:13
Less than five minutes and Reiss would have Pandora’s location.
She couldn’t allow that to happen.
She had to do something—stall for time, hope that Terry would arrive, hope that Bryce and Hillary could get MI6 to their location…talk Reiss’s ear off, perhaps?
“I’m curious, doctor,” she said. “How does a man go from Nobel Prize winner to terrorist?”
“Terrorist? Please, Lara—I’d ask you not to use that word. It conjures up some very unfortunate images. Lice-ridden, religious fanatics in dirty robes—ugh.” Reiss shuddered. “I remain what I have always been—a scientist, working for the greater good of humanity.”
“I’d be very interested in hearing how Pandora ties into that vision, doctor.”
“I should think that obvious,” Reiss said. “Pandora is—”
Reiss’s phone rang.
“Excuse me a moment.” He flipped open the sat phone. “Jonathan Reiss. Ah. Madame Gillespie. Yes. I appreciate your concern, but we are now back on schedule. I’ll have the item for you by the close of business tomorrow.”
Lara stretched her neck, trying to see past Reiss to the monitor, to gauge how much longer she had.
Sean slammed her head back down on the table.
“It’s not going to be pleasant, Lara.” He leaned closer. “I can promise you that.”
“And it’s been such fun so far,” Lara said.
Reiss finished his call and put the phone back in his pocket.
“That’s all of them, isn’t it?” Sean asked.
“Yes it is. Madame Gillespie was the last.” He crooked a finger at the man he’d entered the lab with and pointed him toward a row of display screens on the other side of the room. “Check the network computers, if you would. I’d like to confirm the financials.”
“You were saying,” Lara prompted. “About Pandora.”
“Yes. Pandora.” Reiss folded his hands behind his back and began pacing. “In a way, it’s been my lifelong inspiration. You see, when I was seven we moved to Calcutta. Filthy place. It was there I heard the local legend of a box that purged Alexander of half his army. I filed it away in the back of my mind.”
“Planning ahead?”
“Hardly.” The doctor laughed. “I just thought it fascinating—ironic—that a tiny germ, invisible to the naked eye, could succeed where the armies of the world had failed. That a disease could defeat Alexander the Great.”
“Pandora isn’t a disease,” Lara said sharply.
“No,” Reiss agreed. “Pandora is something altogether different. But I didn’t know that then, did I? In any case—” he shrugged “—the story of that box started me thinking. About the function of disease—how in nature, it acts as a curb, a balance if you will, on the too-rampant spread of life. The ultimate predator. Certainly the only one that man still fears.” He looked her in the eye. “I’m not boring you with all this, am I?”
“Not at all. It’s rare I get a close-up glimpse of such depravity.”
“And here I thought I was making your last few moments on earth pleasant ones.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.” Lara shook her head. “You really believe you’ll be able to control what’s in the box. Make it another of your weapons?”
Reiss stared at her a moment and shook his head.
“Really, Lara. Now you do disappoint me.”
She frowned, suddenly lost. What on earth was Reiss driving at?
“Excuse me, sir.” The doctor’s man—the one he’d sent to check on the network—had returned.
“Go on,” Reiss said. “Have we received payment from all the buyers?”
“Just confirmed, sir. As you can see on the monitor.”
Reiss’s gaze went to one of the display screens on the far wall. Lara’s followed. The screen showed a map of the world, with five blinking green lights—one on each of the major continents. Lara supposed those lights represented Reiss’s buyers. So despite his crack about terrorists—Reiss’s clientele spanned the globe. And so would Pandora, once it was released. If the legends were true, it would indeed act like the ultimate predator Reiss had referred to. There would be no stopping it.
A sudden chill went down her spine.
“You don’t want to control it,” she said.
Reiss turned to her and smiled. “Ah. Well done.”
“You’re using the buyers…they release what you give them, thinking it’s just another weapon…and the world blames them for what happens.”
“What’s left of the world blames them.” Reiss moved closer to her. “Politics bore me. One side killing another over some god or some resource like oil. Trivial compared to the real challenge we, as a species, face. Look around and you’ll see it, Lara. The human race is growing weak. As a species, we are failing.”
His eyes glinted and Lara found herself wondering when the change had happened, when the Nobel Prize winner had become a madman.
“I grew up on a farm,” Reiss continued. “On a farm, when the herd is at risk from disease or has simply grown too fat and frail for its own good, you thin the herd. That’s what the box is for. To weed out our weak, our feeble. Those races which would have expired but for our ludicrous notion that all men are created equal—that we should help our weaker members to survive. Every organism has a state of balance. Mankind is out of ours. Properly thinned, we’ll evolve and grow.”
Sean’s grip eased for a moment. Lara was able to twist her head just enough to see the other monitor again—the one displaying the laser’s progress.
Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .994
Time to Scan Completion: 0:00:41
“You’re insane. To think you can control something like Pandora.”
“Not at all. Once I have it in my grasp—before I open the box—I’ll make enough antiserum to spare the best and brightest. Heads of corporations, heads of state. Life will go on.”
Reiss leaned closer.
“Are you telling me you haven’t looked around and thought, the world would be better off without some of these people? Come now, Lara—the tr
uth.”
Lara looked up at him. “Well, I can think of a few I could do without.”
A soft chime sounded.
Lara looked up at the monitor again.
Scan complete
Translation in progress
Reiss stood up. She heard footsteps—lots of them—entering the room. Reinforcements.
Which perhaps explained what had happened to Terry.
“I’m sorry to kill you, Lara. You would have been welcome in my world.” He turned to the man who’d delivered the news about the financials.
“Take no chances. Shoot her right between the eyes.”
“Damn,” Sean whispered in her ear. “Looks like we aren’t going to get to play after all.”
He lifted Lara roughly to her feet and pinned her in front of him, his grip so tight that she couldn’t begin to think of moving.
The man before them raised his weapon and pressed his gun right up to her forehead.
The barrel was cool against her skin.
Lara tensed and waited for the click of the trigger.
Seventeen
A gun fired.
The guard toppled over backward and fell to the floor, crimson spreading across his chest.
A gun went off again and a bullet whizzed just past her shoulder, and Sean let go of her and dove, for the floor. Reiss dove, too, and it was only then that Lara realized what was happening.
The cavalry had just arrived.
Terry—somewhere up ahead, hidden in the shadows, in perfect sniper position. He’d gunned down Lara’s would-be killer before that man could shoot her and was now spraying covering fire all over the room, pinning down Sean and Reiss and what looked to be a half-dozen newcomers, as well, providing Lara with a chance to escape. Which she fully intended to take advantage of—once she’d attended to two minor details.
Number one, Reiss’s translation of the Orb.
She snatched her gun off the floor and shot out the last NEC.
Reiss roared out a series of curses totally out of character with the polished, urbane image he’d been so careful to project.
Lara somersaulted clear across the room and snatched detail number two—the Orb itself—out of its robotic cradle. She placed it carefully into her backpack.
“Good luck with the farm animals,” she shouted to Reiss and turned to run.
One of the newcomers popped up from behind the desk in front of her and took aim.
She dodged and a bullet took him square in the shoulder—courtesy of the unseen Mr. Sheridan.
Lara jumped over the man’s body and ran back the way she had come.
Two rooms down, she saw half a dozen more reinforcements heading straight toward her.
No good, she thought, and turned to her left. There was another glass wall directly in front of her.
She charged at it full speed, and at the last possible second, fired at it.
The wall exploded and she ran straight through.
A second wall loomed before her, and then a third, and she did the same thing—shot them out and ran through. Turning around, she saw Terry backpedaling right along with her, laying down covering fire as he ran.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t coming!” Lara called out.
“Would I forget about you, Croft?” he shouted back.
Lara was about to respond when she looked up and saw a final glass wall straight ahead—final because just beyond it she could glimpse the mall concourse itself, sublevel eight, and directly ahead of them, the elevator bank.
She raised her gun as she ran, intending to blast away that last wall.
Click. Out of bullets.
Terry was catching up to her, still firing. Reiss’s men were getting closer. Bullets ricocheted off the floor and zinged past.
Lara didn’t slow down for a second.
She shouted out a war cry and jumped straight for the wall, covering her face with her arms, aware that if she’d misjudged her companion, something very, very embarrassing was about to happen.
But she hadn’t.
Terry blew out the glass a split second before she smashed into it.
Lara went sailing through the air and landed on the tiled floor of the mall beyond.
A second later, Terry was running right along with her.
“The elevators!” he shouted, pointing straight ahead.
Lara shot him a glance. Elevators did not sound like the best plan to her.
“Trust me,” Terry said, seeing her look. “Escape Plan A.”
They dashed into a waiting car. At that exact moment, Reiss’s man Sean—followed by at least half a dozen guards—raced out of the lab’s main entrance.
Terry hit the button for the top floor.
“A hundred and ten?” Lara couldn’t keep the uncertainty from her voice.
“Trust me,” Terry repeated.
She shrugged. Not as if she had much choice.
Terry opened the elevator panel and pulled the emergency button. Smart, Lara thought. Now the car wouldn’t stop anywhere else. They were on an express route to…
Well, wherever.
The doors began to close. Sean and his men were running full out toward them.
But they’d never make it.
Lara waved good-bye.
Inches away from shutting, a little hand poked in between the elevator doors and they popped open again.
Lara looked down at a little Chinese boy—the same boy, she realized, who’d scooted aboard Reiss’s elevator earlier.
“Kay-bee,” the boy asked. “Toys ‘R’ Us?”
Lara looked up and saw Sean, twenty feet away.
She pushed the little boy firmly out the door.
“Not this car, sonny,” she said.
Terry slammed the door close button and the car rose upward. It—like the walls of Reiss’s lab, like the walls of the skyscraper housing the mall—was made of glass, giving them an incredible view of first the New Century mall, and then Hong Kong itself, as they rose up along the side of the skyscraper.
Lara looked down and touched Terry’s elbow.
“Look,” she said.
Two other elevators were rising right along with them. Each filled with Reiss’s men.
“You know we’re not going to be able to get back down,” she said. “They’ll have men covering the stairwells.”
“We’ll get down,” Terry said. “Don’t worry.”
The car pinged to a stop then and the doors slid open. Terry raced out, Lara a step behind.
“There.” He pointed to a staircase labeled in Mandarin, Portugese, and English: Rooftop Access.
He shot out the knob, and they jogged up a small flight of stairs onto the roof itself.
The naked sunshine, after so much dim, artificial light, was dazzling,
The rooftop was empty.
Terry spun about wildly.
“This is Escape Plan A then, is it?” Lara asked, folding her arms across her chest.
“Yes.”
“What about B? Is there a B?”
“No,” he snapped. “No Plan B.”
Lara opened her pack. She was going to have to destroy the Orb. A fall of one-hundred-ten stories, she judged, ought to do it.
Perhaps she would accompany the object on the way down. That would be a relatively quick, relatively painless way to go. As opposed to what Reiss—and in particular, Sean—might have in mind for her.
“Ah.”
She looked up and saw Terry running for the edge of the roof. Seconds later, he’d dragged two backpacks out from underneath the ledge and begun pulling out swaths of colored nylon from within one of them.
Lara smiled. “Parachutes.”
“Not exactly.” Terry tossed her one of the packs. “Something a tad faster.”
She began to pull out the contents of the pack and soon saw what he meant.
Reiss paced back and forth in the lab, willing himself to remain calm.
“Excuse me, sir.”
He loo
ked up and saw Holliday, knelt over the last of the NECs Croft had shot out. She was shaking her head.
“I’m afraid the data is compromised. It will take approximately eighteen hours to reconstruct.”
Reiss shut his eyes a moment. This was not happening. He’d been within seconds of Pandora’s location. Now Croft was going to beat him to it.
“Croft,” he said, opening his eyes.
“Sir?” Holliday asked.
He drew his pistol and shot her.
“If you’d stayed in position,” he said, standing over her corpse, “instead of running, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.”
He dropped the gun to the floor then, as angry with himself as anyone. This was his fault, for not shooting Croft himself when he had her helpless. Never again.
His phone rang.
“Team A in position.” It was Sean. “Teams B and C are flanking.”
“English please,” Reiss said. “I’m in no mood for paramilitary acronyms.”
“We’re ready to storm the roof. We have the stairwells leading down blocked and surrounding rooftops manned, as well.”
“Excellent. Proceed—but Sean.”
“Yes, doctor?”
“The Orb is paramount. Croft and Sheridan are secondary.”
“Yes sir. Understood. The pack is our target.”
“Good work. Notify me when you have it.”
Reiss snapped the phone shut.
The guards in the room shifted position and eyed him nervously.
“What do we have to reach?” Lara asked.
She and Terry stood on the roof ledge, looking out over Hong Kong, back toward the mainland.
“That ship.” Terry pointed due west of the Kowloon harbor. Lara was barely able to pick out a spec on the horizon.
“Great,” Lara said—and at that second, the door to the rooftop behind them burst open.
Sean and his men stepped out, rifles raised.
“Hands up!” he shouted. “Throw down the pack, Croft. And I’ll make it quick.”
“That’s sweet of you!” She looked down and saw more of Reiss’s men coming into firing range, on the roofs of the buildings nearby.
This was going to be harder than it looked.
