The Invisible City (A Tom Wagner Adventure Book 3)

by M. C. Roberts

  “Good. Get going. I’ll find another way out.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and ran back into the castle.

  51

  Sheremetev Castle, Yurino

  Tom did not go far. Once his friends had disappeared into the darkness, he switched to the guards’ radio channel—and not a second too soon.

  “Who the fuck is running around in my castle? Bring the bastard to me!” Berlin Brice’s voice bawled in Tom’s ear. That could mean only one thing, Tom thought. They’d found the bodies in the tower, and now every available man was looking for him. He had to come up with something, but even as he realized this, he almost ran straight into a guard at the cellar entrance. Just in time, he ducked behind a corner, drew his silenced Glock, and waited.

  The man had not seen him. With his back to Tom, he stood and looked around. Tom moved fast. He stepped out of his hiding place and in a low voice commanded, “Gun on the floor, hands in the air, and get on your knees!” The guard did as he was told. Any false move would mean death, he knew, and he wasn’t paid well enough for that. Slowly, he laid his machine pistol on the stone floor, laced his fingers behind his head, and lowered himself to his knees.

  “Where’s Brice keeping the priest’s casket?” Tom tapped the back of the man’s head with his pistol. “Talk!”

  The man squeezed his eyes shut. When he spoke, his voice shook. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I was just doing my rounds.”

  “Does he have an office or something?”

  “Yeah. Second floor. On the right at the top of the stairs.”

  “How many men are inside?” The guard hesitated, and but Tom gave him another nudge with the barrel of the pistol.

  “Five, plus the strange bald guy, the Kahle. The rest are outside. That’s all I know. Please don’t—” The butt of Tom’s Glock sent the man to sleep.

  He needed a distraction. He couldn’t just wander around the castle and shoot everyone he met. Then a crazy idea occurred to him.

  Two minutes later, he ran upstairs to the ground floor, his P-90 at the ready. The castle was mostly dark, with only emergency lamps lighting the corridors. In the lobby, Tom found an open fireplace as tall as he was. His mind returned to Hellen’s history lesson about the castle, in particular that there were many of these huge fireplaces in the castle. In one of the salons there was once an extraordinary fireplace, she’d said: two statues, an atlas and a caryatid, had supported the stone mantelpiece surmounting the fireplace, which had been discovered during excavations at Pompeii and moved to the castle. But during the Soviet era the castle had been plundered; the fireplace was torn out of the wall and carried away. Today, in its place, there was just a roughly-built fireplace lined with tiles from Pompeii.

  Tom dashed inside the deep fireplace and waited. Moments later, a massive explosion rocked the castle. The floor shuddered and a cloud of dust billowed up the stairs from the cellar. Two minutes earlier, Tom had placed one of his remaining grenades back at the tunnel entrance. With the help of the aqua regia and the grenade pin, he had improvised a timer. It was enough for a distraction, and the explosion would ideally have been enough to collapse the tunnel entrance, too, preventing anyone from following Hellen and the others. He heard shouting and running feet.

  “Go! See what the fuck’s going on down there!” The Welshman’s bellowing voice rang through the castle. Four men came running from upstairs, straight past Tom and on into the cellar. Tom went the other way, upstairs. At the top, he stopped and peered cautiously around the corner. He saw the Welshman conferring with one of his men. Tom broke cover and—pop, pop—the henchman went down. Taken by surprise, but unperturbed, Brice looked down at his blood-spattered suit.

  “Where’s the casket?” Tom needed no answer. After a question like that, almost everybody’s eyes betrayed them. Without fail, they turned toward the hiding place. “Go! In there.” Tom jabbed his chin toward the door the Welshman had glanced at.

  “Wagner, right?” They moved into Brice’s temporary office and Tom quickly looked around.

  “Sit. Hands behind your back,” Tom ordered, and he tied the Welshman to the chair. The elaborate casket was lying on a plain wooden table.

  “You don’t seriously think you’re going to get out of here alive, do you?”

  Tom ignored him. He grabbed a backpack lying in a corner of the room, stowed the box inside it, and slipped his arms through the straps.

  “Work with me, Wagner. Let’s find the city together. I can make you a rich man, richer than your friend Cloutard ever was.”

  “You should try shutting the fuck up for a change.” Tom plucked the handkerchief from Brice’s breast pocket and stuffed it into his mouth. Then he switched the radio back to his friends’ channel and left the office.

  “François? Come in. I need your help.”

  Once he’d outlined his plan to Cloutard, he ran up the stairs to the top floor, where he climbed out onto the green-painted metal roof and made his way to the large glass dome that spanned the conservatory. Peering up into the night sky, he failed to notice the Kahle, who had crept onto the roof from the south terrace.

  52

  Sheremetev Castle, Yurino

  Tom was in trouble. The Kahle had taken him by surprise. Now he had Tom by the throat and was pushing him back against a low wall at his back. Tom had a grip on his hands, which at least was stopping the man from throttling him. Then, in the distance over Baldy’s shoulder, Tom saw his way out.

  You get crazier ideas every day, he thought. All he had to do was get free for a moment.

  He let go of Baldy and smacked him hard on both ears with the palms of his hands. The searing pain caused by the sudden compression in the man’s ears gave Tom his opportunity.

  Baldy’s grip slackened, and with a sharp upward thrust with both arms Tom broke his grip on his throat and kicked him away. The Kahle crashed back hard against the glass dome, and an ugly crack appeared in the glass. Tom snatched a grenade from his vest, pulled the pin and dropped it onto the sloping rooftop. The grenade rolled in the direction of the Kahle, still stunned, who looked first at the roof under his feet and then back at Tom.

  “That’s for the lives you took in Rome,” Tom said, but he could have sworn he saw incomprehension in the man’s eyes, as if he had no idea know what Tom was talking about. Tom turned and jumped onto the low wall, then leaped into empty space . . . or not. Because just at that moment, the gyrocopter came roaring over the glass dome and Tom grabbed hold of the rope that Cloutard had tossed out of the cockpit.

  The Kahle made a final hopeless attempt to run, but he was too late. The explosion sent him flying back through the glass dome in a blast of lethal shrapnel. He plunged into the depths, landing on the Italian stone floor of the conservatory thirty feet below. His dead eyes stared unmoving into the clear night sky as shards of the dome rained down.

  Three hundred yards away, a second hairless man lay atop the roof of an SUV, peering through the sights of a sniper rifle. Just as in Rome, he had Tom in his crosshairs. All he had to do was pull the trigger. He’d already done exactly that more times than he could remember, and not once had he hesitated. Until today.

  For the first time in his life, his hand trembled, for he had just watched as Tom took his brother’s life.

  53

  1989, East Berlin

  Heinrich was crying bitterly when he and his brother got home from school. The housekeeper, Martha, hugged him and consoled him, only to earn a reproving frown from the boys’ father.

  “Ignore him, Martha. How are the boys ever supposed to become men if one of them is always blubbering?”

  Johann von Falkenhain grabbed little Heinrich by the arm and dragged him into the living room, which was furnished very nicely by East German standards. Heinrich’s twin brother, Friedrich, followed silently. He too was close to tears, because he knew what their father had in store for them.

  “Before I give you the punishment you seem so sorely to need, I would like to know wh
at happened this time.”

  Johann was a tall, wiry man with crew-cut hair and a face too lined for his age. He stood as stiff and straight as a soldier on parade and glared disdainfully at his sons, who were no more than an ongoing disappointment for him.

  “They made fun of me in school again. They call me ugly because I don’t have any hair. They call me ‘egghead’ and say I look like a monster because I don’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes,” little Heinrich said, wiping the tears from his eyes.

  Friedrich, his own eyes brimming, looked at his brother sympathetically. The two boys were as alike as two eggs. For years, they had suffered mockery and bullying, and at the same time received no support whatsoever from their father, let alone actual love. Their father was a strict and self-righteous man whose harshness had only multiplied after their mother died. Neither of them could remember their mother very well, but they missed the warmth and security she had given them.

  Johann looked down at the two boys. Yes, they were freaks. And he could never forgive his dead wife for giving birth to sons like them: sniveling, whiny mama’s boys who had nothing of the pride and strength that, for Johann, characterized the typical, German—and yes, Aryan—man. The only hope he saw for change was to punish them, to harden them with pain. One day they would have to stop bawling and develop the kind of manliness sons of his should have.

  The two boys instinctively recoiled when they saw their father slip the belt out of his trousers, getting ready to dole out yet another of his innumerable lessons.

  But this time, things would be different. Heinrich and Friedrich had talked about it many times, jokingly at first, but then more and more seriously. Friedrich, who at first followed his father’s command to turn around, suddenly spun back and screamed at his father: “Leave us alone! We hate you!”

  Johann, taken by surprise by his son’s reaction, stood as if frozen in place. His lips trembled and he looked down at his son with a mixture of confusion, respect, and disgust.

  What he did not notice was that Heinrich had reached into his schoolbag and now held a large carving knife in his hand, stolen from the kitchen days before. Heinrich did not hesitate for a second—he rammed the knife up to the hilt in his father’s thigh. His father screamed and fell backward onto the floor. Friedrich, meanwhile, had fetched the hammer from his schoolbag. Like his brother, he was ready to do whatever it took, and one second later, the hammer came down on his father’s head. The sound of the splintering skull pierced the boys to their core.

  Heinrich had yanked the knife out of his father’s leg and now stabbed him in the chest with all his might. Friedrich and Heinrich looked at each other, and from one second to the next the world was a different place. Their determination turned to frenzy. Like wild animals, they beat and stabbed their father, the man who had made their lives a living hell. Until now.

  They did not stop for several minutes. Then they looked at each other again, exhausted, and both knew one thing: they had found their calling. Neither needed to say a word to know that what had just happened transcended anything that had ever mattered to them before. No one would ever again make fun of them. No one would ever again persecute them. The tables had turned. The hunted had become the hunters.

  “My Lord!” cried Martha, who entered the room just then and saw the blood-covered body of Johann von Falkenhain and, beside him, his two sons, also soaked from head to foot with blood. Seconds later, Martha’s life also came to an end.

  54

  Sheremetev Castle, Yurino

  “Perfect timing!” Tom shouted as he clung to the rope Cloutard had tossed out of the cockpit.

  Tom signaled to Cloutard to circle the hole in the castle roof. Below him, he could see the killer’s twisted and shrapnel-perforated body. Suddenly, three guards charged out onto the roof and immediately opened fire on the gyrocopter. The bullets missed Tom, but the copter was not as lucky. Several shots struck the engine, which began to sputter and smoke.

  Cloutard instantly swung the machine away to the east.

  “Merde! My friends, we have a little problem,” Cloutard said into his radio.

  “Don’t worry, we can see you,” Hellen’s voice replied. “We watched your stunt from here and we’re on our way.”

  Behind the small patch of woods that bordered the castle estate was a narrow road that followed the shoreline of the Volga River.

  “Look down,” Hellen said. Directly beneath Cloutard and Tom, the massive, six-wheeled pickup truck raced along the dusty gravel road. Arthur waved quickly, then pointed behind them.

  Tom, still swinging underneath the small aircraft, looked around. Some distance behind, he saw that two black SUVs had taken up the chase. This is going to be close, he thought. Tongues of flame were already leaping from the engine cowling and trailing black smoke through the night sky. The old gyrocopter would not be able to stay in the air much longer, that much was clear. And the SUVs were gaining ground quickly.

  “We don’t have much time. Go lower,” Tom shouted to Cloutard, pointing down.

  Cloutard brought the sputtering gyrocopter low over the truck. He tried to hold his speed and heading as well as he could, and Tom released the rope, landing hard but safely in the bed of the pickup. The car swerved momentarily as Hellen glanced back over her shoulder. Tom gave her a thumbs up, then drew his pistol and fired at the pursuing SUVs. He waved up to Cloutard.

  “Your turn!”

  Cloutard shook his head. “Are you insane? How is that supposed to work?” he shouted.

  “You open the door and jump,” Tom yelled, squeezing off another shot at their pursuers. The bullet hit the windscreen of the leading SUV but simply ricocheted away.

  “Bulletproof? Seriously?” Enough messing around. Tom pulled the pin on his last grenade and hurled it at the SUVs. The blast missed, but one of them, swerving to dodge the grenade, lost control and crashed, rolling over several times.

  “One down, one to go,” Tom shouted, pleased with his handiwork. “Come on, François, you can do it.”

  They all had to concentrate now. Hellen drove as straight and steady as she could and Cloutard brought the copter even lower. Tom grabbed the dangling rope and pulled. Then everything happened fast. Cloutard opened the door, hesitated for a moment, and jumped. He knocked Tom over as he landed, and Tom immediately let go of the rope. Hellen pushed the gas pedal to the floor.

  Tom and Cloutard looked up in time to admire the spectacle behind them. Like a homing missile, the gyrocopter slammed into the ground in front of the second SUV and burst into flames. The SUV had no time to dodge. It hurtled into the wreckage, and the driver lost control and crashed. The SUV ended up on its roof.

  “Nothing but net!” Tom shouted and looked gleefully at Cloutard.

  “Mon Dieu,” Cloutard sighed. “Gagarin is going to kill me. That was a vintage machine, very rare.” There were relieved smiles all round as Tom and Cloutard climbed into the cab. Hellen continued along the road beside the river and after another mile she turned north. They passed a house, luxurious-looking for the area, then drove on toward an arm of the Volga. There was no bridge, only a narrow causeway on which the road continued.

  “It’s about time we—” But Tom did not get to finish his sentence. A tremendous explosion sent the pickup flying.

  55

  The woods close to Sheremetev Castle

  “For Heinrich,” he murmured, and squeezed the trigger. The blast from the grenade tore away one of the pickup’s rear axles, and the powerful shockwave hurled the truck with Wagner inside end over end before it rolled down the embankment on the far side of the causeway, out of Friedrich’s line of sight.

  Minutes before, Friedrich had stared as if frozen through the sights of his sniper rifle and witnessed Tom Wagner kill his twin brother.

  As often in the past, the two brothers had accepted contracts independent of one another, jobs that took them to the remote corners of the world. Friedrich had not expected at all to find Heinrich here, in the
middle of nowhere in Russia. He had been surprised, even briefly amused at the coincidence—and also at the fact that this Tom Wagner probably thought he was fighting him, Friedrich. He had watched the fight for a few moments. It had looked at the start as if his brother was going to win, but the tables had soon turned. Wagner had managed to free himself from Heinrich’s grasp and had jumped from the roof. At first, Friedrich hadn’t understand what had happened, but then he saw the gyrocopter and the rope with Tom clinging to it.

  Through the rifle’s sights, he had seen the panic in his brother’s eyes. But there was nothing Friedrich could do, and a second later a fireball had engulfed his brother, killing him.

  Emotions had welled up inside him in that instant. Fury, disbelief, hatred. Had his hesitation cost his brother his life? What had happened? Wagner had killed Heinrich. And for that he would pay.

  Friedrich had watched as the little aircraft roared over his position in the forest before flying alongside the Volga, moving east. He leaped down from the roof of his SUV, threw the sniper rifle on the back seat and raced after the copter. He had driven like a madman through the woods, following a fire trail parallel to the Volga. Wagner had already escaped him twice and surprised him again now, taking out the two SUVs chasing him—the first with a grenade and the second with the gyrocopter itself. Friedrich had to get his hands on the bastard once and for all. Then he would kill him. Slowly. His contract meant little to him now. Wagner had made this personal. He had to die, here and now. So Friedrich, consumed by anger and grief, kept the gas pedal to the floor as he flew along the bumpy fire trail.

  Suddenly, he swung the steering wheel hard—lost in thought, he had almost driven straight off the road and into a side arm of the Volga. He turned to the left, trying to stay out of sight of the pickup, and drove alongside the river, keeping one eye on the lights of the pickup with Wagner inside. But the landscape seemed to be trying to thwart him, and the next obstacle in his path soon appeared. The road he was following took another left turn; straight ahead was water. He came to an abrupt halt, picked up the binoculars on the passenger seat, and followed the pickup’s progress.