In whose employ?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If the old saw was true in this case, he was far from friendless. But was it true?
The man with the automatic gun, a Russian-made AKS-74, now stood above the parapet, trying to get a better angle on the woman sniper.
“Hey,” Janson called out to him.
The man—Janson was near enough to see his coarse features, close-set eyes, and two days’ growth of beard—grinned at Janson, and turned toward him.
With his gun set at full fire.
As a raking blast hit the roof, Janson dove into a roll, hurtling down the tiled incline. A fragment of stone whipped past his ear as a noisy fusillade swept the area where he had been moments before. His forehead scraped against another piece of masonry, the palm of his hand stung as it pressed against jagged roof tile. Finally, his body slammed against the balustrade. The impact was jarring, debilitating, yet the alternative would have been worse—a plumb drop from the high roof to the pavement.
He heard shouts, from there, and there. His dazed brain strove to process the sounds as they raced and echoed and faded.
What had just happened? The woman had him within her sights. She had him.
Why didn’t she take the shot?
And the other team—who were they? Angus Fielding had mentioned the shadowy enemies Novak had made among corrupt Eastern European oligarchs. Were they a private militia? Everything about them suggested as much.
He was their target. But so was the team from Consular Operations. How could that be?
There was no time. He poked his pistol between the ornamental sandstone balusters and squeezed off two quick shots. The man with the AKS-74 staggered backward, making an odd gurgling sound; one of the bullets had pierced his throat, which exploded in a gush of arterial blood. As he slumped to the tiles, his weapon fell with him, secured by the nylon sling around his shoulders.
That gun could be Janson’s salvation—if he could get to it.
Now Janson stood atop the balustrade and leaped the short distance to the adjoining house. He had an objective. The AKS-74: a crude, chattering, powerful submachine gun. He landed imperfectly, and pain shot like a bolt of electricity up his left ankle. A bullet twanged through the air just inches from his head, and he threw himself down on the tiled peak, a few feet away from the man he had just shot dead. The too-familiar smell of blood wafted toward him. He reached out and wrested the submachine gun from its nylon sling, hastily cutting it free with a pocketknife. Without shifting his position, he craned his head around to situate himself.
The planar geometry of the roofs was, he knew, deceptive. Peaks met peaks at what looked like perpendicular angles, but the angles were not truly perpendicular. Parapets that appeared parallel were not truly parallel. Eaves that appeared level were not truly level. Cornices and balustrades, built and rebuilt over the centuries, settled and shifted in ways that the quick glance would not detect. Janson knew that the human mind had a powerful tendency to abstract away such irregularities. It was a cognitive economy that was usually adaptive. And yet when it came to the trajectory of a bullet, small irregularities could make all the difference in the world. No angles were true; intuition had to be overridden, again and again, with the hard data of range finder and scope.
Now his hands patted down the dead man until he found and retrieved a small device with two angled mirrors attached to a telescoping rod that resembled the antenna of a transistor radio. It was standard equipment for an urban commando. Janson carefully adjusted the mirrors and pulled out the rod. By extending it over the cornice, he would be able to see what threats he still confronted without putting himself in the line of fire.
The weapon that was nestled in Janson’s arms was hardly a precision instrument—it was a fire hose, not a laser.
What he saw was far from encouraging. The deadly brunette was still in position, and though he was currently protected from her by the roofline geometry of the eaves, peaks, and gables, she would be alert to any movement, and he could not reposition himself without exposure.
A bullet thwacked into the chimney, chiseling off a piece of the centuries-old brick. Janson rotated the periscope-like device to see who was responsible. One roof over, standing with an M40 braced against his shoulder, was a former colleague of his from Consular Operations. He recognized the broad nose and quick eyes: an old-school specialist named Stephen Holmes.
Janson moved carefully, sheltering himself from the riflewoman by keeping himself low and behind the projecting brick gable while he snaked himself up the incline of the slate roof. He had to execute his next move perfectly, or he was dead. Now he kept his head down as his hands lifted the muzzle of the AKS-74 over the roofline. He relied on memory, on a fleeting image from the periscope, as he directed a burst of fire toward the long barrel of the rifle. An answering clang—the sound of metal-jacketed bullets striking a long barrel fashioned of a super-hard composite resin—told him he had succeeded.
Now he raised his head over the roofline and directed a second, more targeted burst: the steel-tipped bullets tore into the barrel of Holmes’s M40 until the green-black shaft shattered.
Holmes was now defenseless, and when his eyes met Janson’s it was with the resigned, almost weary look of someone convinced he was about to die.
Janson shook his head disgustedly. Holmes was not his enemy, even if he thought he was. He craned around and, peering through a loophole in the elaborate semicircular pediment, was able to glimpse the brunette diagonally opposite. Would she take him out with one of her trademark double taps? She had seen what had happened, knew that her colleague was out of commission and that she would have to assume responsibility for a larger field. Would she wait until he moved from the protection of the second gable? The slotlike loophole was too narrow and deep to permit a clean shot from a diagonal perch. She would have to wait. Time was a sniper’s best friend—and his mortal foe.
He squinted and brought her face into focus. She was no longer in shooting position—had broken from her spot-weld with the rifle and was staring at her colleague with a look filled with uncertainty. A moment later, Janson saw a flicker of movement behind her, and then something more dramatic: an attic door burst open and a giant of a man loomed suddenly behind the slight brunette. He smashed something over her head—Janson could not quite make it out; it could have been the butt of a long firearm. The brown-haired woman slumped limply to the parapet, evidently unconscious. Now the giant seized her bolt-action rifle and squeezed off one, two, three shots to his right. The strangled cry from the adjoining roof told him that at least one had hit its target: Stephen Holmes.
Janson hazarded a quick look, and what he saw sickened him: the shots seemed casual, but were well aimed. The large-caliber bullets had blown off Holmes’s jaw. From the destroyed lower half of his face, blood drenched down his tunic; a final breath was expelled like noisy gargle, half cough, half feckless scream. Then Holmes toppled off his roof perch and tumbled down the tiled roof until he slammed into the parapet. Through the ornamental stonework, his lifeless brown eyes stared at Janson.
All that Janson knew was that the giant was no savior. He sprayed a long fusillade toward the hulking man who stood where the Cons Op sniper had been—it would force him into a defensive crouch, at least momentarily—then, using the various stone ornaments as handholds, quickly clambered down the side of the mansion, which was safely out of range. He hit the paved surface of the shadowed alley with as little noise as he could manage and, positioning himself behind two metal trash cans, studied the street scene in front of him.
The giant was fast, his agility astonishing for someone of his size. Already he was charging out the front door of the building, dragging the unconscious brunette with him like a sack. The man had a hideous, puckered scar running down his cheek, a grotesque memento of a violent past. His blue eyes were small, piggish but alert.
A second man, attired in similar drab, raced over, and Janson heard them talking. Th
e language was unfamiliar—but not entirely so. Straining, he could make out a fair amount of it. It was Slavic—Serbo-Croatian, in fact. A distant cousin to Czech, but close enough that, by concentrating, he was able to make out the basics.
A small, powerful sedan roared up to them, and after another brief, barked exchange, the two men leaped into the backseat. Police sirens screamed in the distance.
They were leaving the scene because the police were beginning to arrive. Other drab-clad gunmen piled into an SUV and drove off as well.
Battered, bloodied, Janson staggered to the side street where Barry Cooper, sweating and wide-eyed, remained in the driver’s seat of the armored limo.
“You need to go to a hospital,” Cooper said, shaken.
For a moment Janson was silent, and his eyes were closed. Concentrating intensely, he returned to the words he had heard. Korte Prinsengracht … Centraal Station … Westerdok … Oosterdok …
“Get me to Centraal Station,” Janson said.
“We’re going to have half the cops in Amsterdam on our tail.” A light drizzle had begun to fall, and Cooper switched on the window wipers.
“Pedal to the metal.”
Cooper nodded, and set off north on Prinsengracht, the wheels squealing against the slick pavement. By the time they reached the bridge over Brouwersgracht, it was apparent that they had no police pursuers. But were there pursuers of another kind?
“Serbian irregulars,” Janson murmured. “They’re mostly mercenaries these days. But whose?”
“Serbian mercenaries? You’re harshing my groove, man. I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Separating Korte Prinsengracht from the Westerdok, where largely abandoned warehouses stood, was the man-made island on which the Centraal Station was built. But that was not where the giant and his friends were headed. They would be heading toward the vast maintenance buildings to the south of the station, which were sheltered from casual observation. At night, heroin addicts went there to score and shoot up; during the day, however, it was almost entirely abandoned.
“Keep going, straight!” Janson yelled, jerking to full attention.
“I thought you said Centraal Station … .”
“There’s a maintenance building to the right, five hundred yards away. Overlooking the wharves of Oosterdok. Now floor it.”
The limo powered past the parking lot of the train station and bounded down the broken pavement of the derelict yards where, years ago, the business of the wharves had been conducted. Most of the commercial harbors had relocated to North Amsterdam; what remained were phantoms of brick and concrete and corrugated steel.
A gated Cyclone fence suddenly loomed before them. Cooper stopped the car, and Janson got out. The fence was old, the links frosted with oxide. But the knob set, set into a large rectangular metal plate, was bright and shiny, obviously new.
From a distance, he heard shouts.
Frantically, Janson withdrew a small bump key from his pocket and set to work. He positioned the very end of it into the keyway and then, in a sudden, plunging movement, thrust the rest of it into the lock and twisted it in a single continuous motion. The speed of that motion was crucial: the key had to be turned before the lock’s spring pressed the top pin down.
His fingers could feel that the top pin had bounced high enough to fly beyond the shear line, that his twist had taken advantage of the split second in which the pin columns had bounced out of alignment. The gate was open.
He waved Cooper through and gestured for him to park the car about a hundred yards away, behind a rusting, abandoned train car.
Janson himself raced over to the side of a huge steel shed and, flattening himself against it, edged swiftly toward the shouts he had heard.
Finally, he could see through the dim light into the vast interior, and what he made out sickened him.
The woman from Consular Operations was roped to a cement pillar with a thick hawser, her clothes crudely torn off her.
“This shit is getting old fast,” she growled, but the fear beneath the bravado was all too evident.
Before her, the giant with the glossy, puckered scar loomed. He belted her with his hand, and her head snapped back against the concrete. He pulled out a knife and sliced off her undergarments.
“Don’t you touch me, you son of a bitch!” she yelled.
“What are you going to do about it?” The voice was harshly guttural. The giant laughed as he loosened his belt.
“I wouldn’t get Ratko mad if I were you,” said his companion, who held a long thin blade that glinted even in the gloom. “He prefers ’em alive—but he’s not that particular.”
The woman loosed a bloodcurdling shriek. Sheer animal terror? Janson suspected that there was more to it—that she was hoping against hope that somebody might hear.
Yet the wind and the rumble of distant barges drowned out whatever sounds might be made.
In the gloom of the warehouse, he could make out the gleaming shape of the powerful sedan the men had ridden in, the engine ticking as it cooled.
The man slapped her again, and then the slaps became rhythmic. The aim was not interrogation. It was, in fact, part of a sexual ritual, Janson realized to his horror. As the killer’s trousers dropped heavily to the floor, his organ was silhouetted in the gloom: the woman’s death would be preceded by indignity.
Janson froze as he heard a soft Serbian-accented voice from behind him: “Drop the gun.”
Janson whirled around and found himself face-to-face with a slender man who had gold-rimmed glasses perched high on an aquiline nose. The man wore khaki trousers and a white shirt, both neatly pressed. He stood very close to him and, with a casual movement, pressed a revolver against his forehead.
It was a setup.
“Drop the gun,” the man repeated.
Janson let his pistol fall to the concrete. The steady pressure of the man’s gun against his forehead admitted no negotiation. Another piercing scream rent the air, this time with a quaver that signified profound terror or rage.
The man with the gold-rimmed glasses smiled grimly. “The American bitch sings. Ratko likes to fuck them before he kills them. The screams turn him on. What is in store for you, I’m afraid, will be far less enjoyable. As you will learn for yourself. He’ll be finished shortly. And so will she. And so, if you are fortunate, will you.”
“Why? For Christ’s sakes, why?” Janson demanded in a low, urgent voice.
“Such an American question, that,” the man replied. His voice was more cultivated than the giant’s, but equally devoid of emotion. He was probably the operation’s leader. “But we will be the ones asking questions. And if you do not answer them to our satisfaction, you will suffer an excruciatingly painful death before your body disappears in the waters of the Oosterdok.”
“And if I do what you ask?”
“Your death will be merciful and swift. Oh, I’m sorry. Were you hoping for more choices?” The man’s thin lips twitched with contempt. “You Americans always want things that aren’t on the menu, don’t you? You can never have enough choices. Only, I am not an American, Mr. Janson. I offer you one choice. Death with agony—or death without.” His quiet words had the effect of an icy wind.
As the woman released another ear-piercing scream, Janson contorted his face into a look of terror. “Please,” he said, in a half whimper. “I’ll do anything …” Janson reached into a place deep within and began to tremble visibly.
A gratified, sadistic smile came to the man with the gold-rimmed glasses.
Suddenly, Janson’s shaking knees buckled, and he dropped down two feet, remaining perfectly erect as he bent his knees. At the same time, his right hand shot straight up, grabbing the wrist of the man’s outstretched hand.
The man’s smile faded as Janson pulled his arm down in a powerful wrist lock, wrenching it toward his elbow and twisting it at an acute angle. Now the man bellowed in pain as the ligaments in his arm were strained and torn, but Janson was relentle
ss, taking a long step back with his left foot and pulling the attacker to the ground. He yanked on the arm with all his strength and heard a pop as the ball joint was dislocated from the socket. The man roared again, agony mingling with disbelief. Janson fell on him, bringing all his weight down on his right knee, driving it into the man’s rib cage. He could hear at least two ribs break. The man gasped, and behind the gold-rimmed glasses, tears rushed to his eyes. The broken ribs would make simply breathing exquisitely painful.
Roused by the nearby footfalls of his companions, the man tried to free his gun arm, despite his dislocated joint, but Janson had it pinned between his chest and left knee. Janson turned his right hand into a claw and clamped it around the man’s throat, lifting and slamming his head against the ground until his body was limp. Moments later, when Janson reared up, he had a gun in both hands—
And squeezed off two shots—one at a rough-hewn man rushing toward him with an automatic pistol, a second at a bearded man several feet behind him, with a submachine gun held at his side. Both slumped to the ground.
Janson strode toward where the man they called Ratko stood, only to find the raking fire of an AKS-74 pocking the concrete floor in a storm of sparks and micro-explosions. It had to be directed by a man on a catwalk high above, and it created an impassable zone between Janson and Ratko—who had hastily hiked up his trousers and was turning to face him. A .45 handgun looked small in the Serb giant’s enormous hand.
Now Janson ducked behind a concrete pillar. As he expected, the man with the submachine gun overhead repositioned himself to gain an angle on Janson. But in doing so he had exposed himself. Peering around the corner, Janson caught a fleeting glimpse of a short, stocky moonfaced man who held the AKS-74 as if it were part of him. A brief fusillade tore into the pillar he hid behind. Janson snaked a hand around it and squeezed off a blind shot. He heard it twang against steel-pipe railing and knew he had missed. Sudden footsteps on the steel catwalk helped him locate the man in space, however, and he squeezed off three more shots.
Each one missed. Damn—what had he expected? And yet he could not visually locate the man with the assault weapon without exposing himself to his deadly fire.
Robert Ludlum - [Paul Janson 01] Page 35
