Robert Ludlum's the Lazarus Vendetta

by Robert Ludlum

  Buffeted by this gust, Jon felt himself starting to slide off the ridge of the roof. He gritted his teeth and desperately tightened his grip. A hundred-foot drop beckoned, with nothing below to break his fall but iron-spiked railings, parked cars, and cobblestones. He could feel his pulse hammering in his ears, drowning out the faint sounds drifting up from the city streets far below. Sweating despite the cold, he pressed closer to the roof, waiting until the force of the wind eased just a bit. Then, still shaking slightly, he pushed himself back up and crawled on.

  A minute later, Smith reached the modest shelter afforded by a large brick chimney. Randi and Peter were there ahead of him. They had already rigged an anchor line around the base of the chimney. He clipped on to it with a quiet, grateful sigh and then sat up, breathing heavily—uneasily perched like the others on the sharp ridge of the roof.

  Peter chuckled, looking along the row at his two companions. “So here we sit,” he said quietly. “Looking for all the world like a rather sad and bedraggled band of crows.”

  “Make that two ugly crows and one graceful swan,” Randi corrected him with a slight smile of her own. She clicked the transmit button on her tactical radio. “Anything stirring, Max?” she asked.

  From his concealed post some distance down the rue de Vigny, her subordinate radioed back. “Negative, boss. It’s all real quiet. One light came on a few minutes ago, up on the third floor, but otherwise there’s no sign of anyone coming or going.”

  Satisfied, she nodded to the others. “We’re clear.”

  “Right,” Smith said flatly. “Let’s get this done.”

  One by one, they edged closer to the chimney and prepared their rappelling gear—taking special care to ensure that their ropes, harnesses, and snap and descending links were correctly rigged.

  “Who wants to go first?” Randi asked.

  “I will,” Smith volunteered, looking down at the roof stretching away in front of him. “Tackling this was my bright idea, remember?”

  She nodded. “Sure. Though ‘bright’ isn’t exactly the adjective I would have used.” But then she laid a gloved hand gently on his shoulder. “Just watch yourself, Jon,” she said softly. Her eyes were troubled.

  He flashed her a quick, reassuring grin. “I’ll do my best,” he promised.

  Smith took a couple of deep breaths, steadying his jangled nerves. Then he swung around and slid slowly backward down the slope, carefully controlling his descent with one hand on the rope as it uncoiled. Tiny pieces of broken slate pitter-pattered ahead of him and then fell away into the darkness below.

  Inside Number 18 rue de Vigny, the tall auburn-haired giant called Nones strode out of the third-floor office he had commandeered immediately upon arriving in Paris. Ordinarily reserved for the head of the Movement’s African aid and education programs, it was the largest and the most beautifully furnished in the whole building. But the local activists had known better than to protest his curt decisions or to ask inconvenient questions. After all, Nones carried authorizations from Lazarus himself. For the time being, his word was law. He smiled coldly. Very soon, the Movement’s followers would have cause to regret their unhesitating obedience, but by then it would be far too late.

  Five men from his security detail waited patiently for him on the landing outside the office. Their packs and personal weapons were ready at their feet. They stood up silently at his approach.

  “We have our orders,” he told them. “From Lazarus himself.”

  “The orders you expected?” the short Asian man called Shiro asked calmly.

  The third member of the Horatii nodded. “Down to the last detail.” He drew his pistol, checked it over, and then slid it back into his shoulder holster. His men did the same with their own weapons and then bent down to pick up their packs.

  They split up. Two headed down the main staircase toward the small garage at the rear of the building’s ground floor. The rest followed Nones up the stairs, moving determinedly toward the fifth-floor rooms occupied by the field experiment surveillance team.

  Smith stopped his descent and balanced himself precariously right on the very edge of the roof. Holding the rope tight, he forced himself to lean far back into thin air, taking a good long look at the dormer windows raised above the slope on either side. These windows opened into small attic rooms just below the roof and just as the pictures they had studied earlier had shown—they were securely shuttered.

  Smith nodded to himself. They weren’t going to be able to break through those heavy wooden shutters, at least not without making a hell of a lot of noise. They were going to have to find another way into this building.

  He leaned out farther, now peering down the side of the building below him. Lights glowed in the windows on the fifth floor, and their shutters were open. Moving in short, cautious bounds, he rappelled down the wall. There was very little noise—just the quiet creak of the rope as it slid through the metal descending link on his harness and the soft thud of his boots as he hit the wall and then pushed off again. Twenty feet down, he tightened his grip on the rope, braking himself to a stop right next to one of those lighted windows.

  He glanced up.

  Randi and Peter were there at the edge of the roof, two dark shapes outlined against the black, star-filled sky. They were looking down over their shoulders at him—waiting for his signal that it was safe to come ahead.

  Smith motioned for them to hold where they were. Then he craned his neck, trying to take a good look through the closest window. He had the fleeting impression of a long, narrow room—one that ran at least half the length of this side of the building. Several of the other windows on this floor opened into this large chamber.

  Inside, an assortment of computers, video monitors, radio receivers, and satellite relay systems were stacked on a row of tables pushed up against the opposite wall. Other tables and more equipment were set at right angles, breaking the room up into a series of improvised computer workstations or bays, and power and data transfer cables snaked across a bare hardwood floor. The walls themselves were dingy, stained by centuries of use and roughly daubed with cracked and peeling paint.

  Off in one dark corner Smith could make out a row of six cots. Four of them were occupied. He could see stocking feet protruding out from under coarse woolen blankets.

  But at least two men were awake and hard at work. One, an older man with white hair and a scruffy beard, sat at a computer console, entering keyboard commands with lightning-fast fingers. Images flashed on and off the monitor in front of him at a dizzying pace. The second man wore a headset and sat in a chair next to one of the satellite communications systems. He leaned forward, listening closely to the signals coming through his earphones and occasionally making small adjustments to its controls. He was younger and clean-shaven, and his dark brown eyes and olive-toned skin somehow suggested the sun-drenched lands of southern Europe. Was he a Spaniard? An Italian?

  Jon shrugged. Spaniard, Italian, or someone from the South Bronx. What did it really matter? The Lazarus Movement recruited its activists from around the world. At the moment, only one thing was important. They were not going to be able to enter 18 rue de Vigny unobserved—at least not on this floor. He glanced down, examining the rows of darkened windows below.

  Suddenly, on the very edge of his vision, he caught a flicker of movement inside the room. Smith saw the bearded white-haired man swivel away from his keyboard and stand up. He seemed surprised but not unduly alarmed as four more men filed into the room through a narrow arched doorway.

  Smith watched carefully. These newcomers were hard-faced men dressed in dark clothing, with bulging satchels slung over their shoulders. Two carried drawn pistols. A third held a shotgun cradled in his arms. The fourth man, much taller than the others and evidently the leader, snapped an order to his men. They split up immediately—each moving purposefully toward a different part of the room. The big auburn-haired giant glanced briefly toward the row of windows and then turned away. With a s
inister fluid grace he drew a pistol out of his shoulder holster.

  Jon felt his eyes widen in stunned disbelief. A shiver of superstitious dread ran down his spine. He had seen that same face and those same startling green eyes before—just six days ago. They belonged to the terrorist leader who had nearly killed him in personal combat outside the Teller Institute. This was impossible, he thought desperately. Absolutely impossible. How could a man wholly consumed by nanophages rise from the grave?

  Chapter

  Forty-Two

  Nones turned away from the windows toward Willem Linden. Slowly, he brought his pistol on-target. He flipped the safety off with one huge thumb.

  The white-haired Dutchman stared at the weapon aimed straight at his forehead. He turned pale. “What are you doing?” he stammered.

  “This is your severance package. Your services are no longer required,” Nones told him drily. “But Lazarus thanks you for your efforts on his behalf. Farewell, Herr Linden.”

  The third of the Horatii waited just long enough to watch the horrified understanding enter the other man’s eyes. Then Nones pulled the trigger twice—firing two rounds into Linden’s head at point-blank range. Blood, shards of bone, and bits of brain flew out the back of the Dutchman’s shattered skull and spattered against the wall. The dead man fell away and crumpled to the floor in a heap.

  In that same moment, a shotgun blast echoed from the darkened corner of the room—followed immediately by a second and then a third blast. Nones glanced in that direction. One of his three men had just finished slaughtering the four surveillance team members who had been sleeping. Trapped in their cots, they were easy prey. Fired at a range of less than ten feet, three twelve-gauge rounds filled with buckshot tore them into pitiful shreds of torn flesh and broken bone.

  The big man heard a sudden choked-off cry of fear off to his left. He swiveled that way fast, seeing the youngest member of Linden’s team, the Portuguese signals expert named Vitor Abrantes, staggering to his feet. Abrantes yanked frantically at his headset, but he was still tethered to the satellite transmitter by a twisted length of audio cable.

  Nones fired twice more while moving. The first 9mm round hit the young man high up in the chest. The second tore into his left shoulder and spun him around in a complete circle. White-faced with shock, Abrantes toppled backward against the transmitter. Moaning, he slid to the floor and sat clutching his smashed shoulder.

  Frowning at his own sloppiness, Nones took a step closer to the wounded man, raising his pistol again. This time he would aim with more care and precision. He sighted along the barrel. His finger tightened on the trigger, starting to squeeze it …

  But then the window beside him exploded inward—flying apart in a tinkling cloud of sharp-edged glass shards.

  Still hanging in his rappelling harness just outside the room, Jon Smith saw the wave of cold-blooded butchery begin inside. These bastards were killing their own people, he realized abruptly—clearing away loose ends, evidence, and potential witnesses. Witnesses and evidence he urgently needed. Gripped by a wave of white-hot fury, he reacted instantly, tugging his SIG-Sauer pistol out of the holster on his hip. He aimed at the glass.

  Three rapid shots fired from top to bottom blew open the window, spraying broken glass and bullets through an arc inside the room. Before the last shards stopped falling, he shoved the pistol back into its holster and yanked one of his two flash/bang grenades out of a leg pouch strapped to his left thigh. His gloved right thumb pulled the ring. The grenade’s safety spoon flipped up.

  Smith lobbed the black cylinder in through the shattered window and shoved off hard from the wall with his boots, moving directly away from the opening. He reached the end of his pendulum arc, pushed away again even harder, and began swinging back toward the window, flying even faster now.

  And then the grenade went off—detonating in a rapid-fire burst of blinding flashes and earsplitting explosions intended to stun and disorient anyone caught within its burst radius. A dense cloud of smoke rolled outward, swirling madly in air roiled by the continuing staccato series of bangs.

  Jon came soaring through the window feetfirst. He landed heavily on the floor, folded up, and then rolled prone. Small pieces of glass crunched beneath him. He pulled his SIG-Sauer out again, already searching for targets through the haze and smoke.

  Smith looked first for the big green-eyed man. There were smeared streaks of blood on the hardwood floor where he had been standing when the window exploded in on him, but nothing else. The auburn-haired giant must have dived for cover when the flash/bang grenade went off. The blood trail he had left behind disappeared out through the arched doorway.

  Stumbling footsteps sounded nearby, on the other side of a heavy table.

  Smith reared up and saw one of the other gunmen come reeling out of the rapidly thinning smoke cloud. Though dazed by the grenade’s nerve-shattering burst of noise and dazzling light, the gunman still held his pistol in a two-handed shooting grip. Blinking rapidly to clear his eyes, he caught sight of Jon’s head poking above the table and swung around, trying to draw a bead on him.

  Smith shot him twice, hitting him once in the heart and once in the neck.

  The gunman folded over and fell forward, plainly dead before he hit the floor.

  Jon dropped back behind the table and rolled frantically the other way, rapidly hitting the release on his rappelling harness to detach the climbing rope still trailing in through the window. While he was still hooked to it, the rope would hamper his movements. It would also act as a giant arrow pointing straight at him wherever he went. At last, he managed to tug the length of rope clear and crawled away across the scarred floor, staying low.

  One down. Counting the big man, that left three to go, he thought grimly. Where exactly had the other enemy gunmen been when his grenade came sailing through the window? More important, where were they now?

  He wriggled around the corner of a table and saw the white-haired man sprawled in front of him. Smith grimaced at the sight of the ugly mess seeping out from under the dead man’s shattered skull. That bullet-riddled brain had held information they needed.

  He crawled past the corpse, heading toward the darker corner of the room he had seen being used as makeshift sleeping quarters.

  From somewhere behind him, a pistol barked three times in rapid succession. One round ripped low over his head. Another tore jagged splinters off the solid oak table leg next to his face. The third 9mm round slammed into his back and then tumbled away, deflected by his Kevlar body armor. It was like being kicked by a mule between the shoulder blades.

  Gasping through a searing wave of white-hot pain, trying to suck air into lungs that felt as though they had been hammered flat, Smith threw himself onto his side. Two more shots tore into the floor, right where he had been lying a second before—gouging out huge chunks of wood before they ricocheted away. He curled around, frantically seeking a glimpse of the gunman firing at him.

  There!

  A shape wavered in his pain-filled vision. One of the gunmen knelt behind a table just about twenty feet away, coolly taking aim. Jon shot back wildly with the SIG-Sauer, squeezing the trigger as rapidly as he could. The pistol bucked upward in his hands. Rounds crashed through the table and hammered into the computer equipment piled on top of it. A hail of wood splinters, sparks, and broken pieces of plastic and metal went flying away through the air. Startled, the gunman ducked out of sight.

  Smith rolled away across the floor, trying to find better cover. He stopped about midway down one of the U-shaped bays formed by three joined tables and risked a cautious glance back the way he had come. Nothing.

  Then he looked up at the TV monitor on the table in front of him. He froze suddenly, seeing his own death reflected in its darkened screen.

  The third enemy gunman rose up from the next bay over—already aiming a combat shotgun right at the back of his head.

  Poised on the edge of the roof, Peter and Randi heard the sudden burst
of gunfire, saw the blinding flash of a grenade, and then watched Jon abruptly hurl himself into the building below them. They exchanged appalled glances.

  “Dear me. So much for subtlety and discretion,” Peter murmured. He pulled his Browning Hi-Power clear of his holster and held it ready.

  More gunshots rang out in a rising crescendo, echoing back from the brickwork and stone of the surrounding buildings.

  “Come on!” Randi snarled, already rappelling down the wall in short, fast bounds. Peter came flying down after her, moving with equal speed and longer jumps.

  Knowing it was far too late, knowing that the gunman’s finger was already starting to squeeze the shotgun’s trigger, Smith twisted around desperately, trying to bring his own weapon on-target. The adrenaline pulsing through his system seemed to slow time itself—stretching out the nightmare moment before a hail of twelve-gauge buckshot blasted his head into bloody ruin …

  And then another window exploded inward—torn apart by multiple 9mm rounds fired through it at close range. Hit several times in the chest and neck and head, the enemy gunman staggered to the side and then sagged across one of the tables. The shotgun fell from his lifeless fingers and clattered to the floor.

  First Randi and then Peter swung in through the shattered window and dropped to the floor. Quickly they detached their ropes and took up positions on either side of Jon, scanning the long, narrow room around them for signs of movement.

  Smith smiled weakly, still shaken by his narrow escape. “Glad you could make it,” he whispered. “Thought I’d have to handle this all on my own.”

  “Idiot,” Randi murmured back, but her eyes were warm.