President Elect, page 17
A door on the other side of the office opened—Luke guessed it was the bathroom—and three large men sauntered out of it. One man was tall and thin. He was older than the others—fifty-five, maybe even sixty. The other two were well-dressed gorillas in informal outdoor wear—utility pants with numerous pockets, heavy black boots, and form-fitting long-sleeved shirts covered with pocketed vests. When you were playing commando, it was important to have a lot of pockets.
One of the men was black, with thick curly hair that stood up in odd tufts. The other was a white man with a bushy mustache. The three men stood in a rough triangle, guns already drawn. The two assistants trained their barrels directly on Luke. All three guns had big, eight-inch silencers screwed onto them—the men were planning to be quiet.
Luke felt nothing about the men, or their guns. He simply watched them, waiting for the mistake. Either they made one, or he died here in this office.
The older man, the obvious leader of the pack, stepped into the center of the room. His eyes were dead and blank. He smiled.
“Well, Mr. Stone, your reputation precedes you. We saw your friend Mr. Philby earlier today. Came straight here from his place, as a matter of fact.”
Luke felt a twinge of something—fear, terror. There was no time for it now.
“Let’s hope for your sake that he wasn’t hurt.”
The two gunmen giggled like children.
“Hurt?” the black man said. “He was more than hurt.”
The man with the mustache shrugged and smiled. “If he’d been willing to talk, it probably would have gone easier for him.”
“Then again, maybe not,” the black one said.
“I would have thought the legendary Luke Stone would show us a little more skill,” the boss said. “But we’ve been trailing you all day. Maybe your injuries…”
He gestured with his chin at Luke’s mid-section, then shrugged.
“Pain can be a terrible distraction,” Dr. Gottlieb said.
The man turned to Gottlieb. “Did I ask you?”
“No. I just—”
“Then please shut up.”
“I beg your pardon,” Gottlieb said. “This is my office. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you who I—”
For the first time, the man raised his gun. He pointed it at Gottlieb’s head.
Gottlieb raised his hands. “Wait!” His face curled into a grimace.
CLACK.
The gun made exactly the sound Luke assumed it would—like an office stapler punched especially hard. At the last second, the man lowered his shot and put his bullet into Gottlieb’s upper body, just below his neck. Blood and gore sprayed out Gottlieb’s back. He dropped to the carpet as if a hole had opened in the floor beneath him.
“Wait for what?” the leader said. He stared down at Gottlieb for a moment, blood pooling around his body, staining the off-white color of the carpeting. The bright red sank into the gaps between carpet fibers and spread out like tentacles.
“The guy has never stopped talking the whole time we’ve been here.”
That was the mistake.
All three men gazed at Gottlieb a second too long.
Luke’s gun was out of his holster before that second was over.
Too late, all three men tried to raise guns again.
Luke swung his gun around and fired it before the men got off a shot. One shot—he put a bullet right between the boss’s eyes. A red dot of blood appeared on the man’s forehead. He stood still for one second, as if realizing what had happened, then dropped to the floor, dead before he reached the carpet.
Luke’s gun was loud.
LOUD.
He fired three times at the other guys, but they had already dived for cover—behind the couch, behind the desk. He missed all three shots. His ears were ringing.
He ducked back into the hallway.
A second later, a volley of return fire splintered the walls at the threshold. Luke backed away, waited a beat, then wrapped his gun hand around the doorway. He fired three more times into the office.
He took a deep breath. He needed to slow down for a second and think. If these guys called for backup, he was finished. Of course, they were doing exactly that. He could hear them talking in there.
“Throw your guns out and I’ll let you live,” he shouted.
They answered with another volley, tearing up the doorway and the drywall.
It was all on him. They could sit in there and wait him out. He was the one who had to get out of here. He turned to head back down the hall to the door.
He was already too late. The front door to the suite rattled, as if someone on the other side was trying to open it. Suddenly it burst inward, swinging violently and slamming back against the door stop. The shadow of a man’s head appeared behind the smoked glass of the door.
BANG.
Luke shot him right in the Sydney Gottlieb, MD. The glass exploded, taking the man’s head with it.
A new volley of shots came from the office behind him, ripping up the doorway again. Luke moved further up the hall, his gun trained on the shattered glass door. The shooting behind him went on for a long time. Finally, it stopped.
They were coming in. He could feel them there.
He ejected his magazine and slammed a new one in.
As he did, a man burst through the front door and dived behind the receptionist’s desk, out of Luke’s view. Luke didn’t even get a shot off.
He hesitated, but only for a second. He was badly exposed in this hallway. Things could only get worse the longer he hung around. If it was time to go, then it was time to go. He turned back to Gottlieb’s office doorway, squatted, hearing his knees creak as he did, then rolled into the room. He came up on one knee.
The guy with the mustache leaned against the side wall behind the sofa, like he was hiding. Not much cover there. Who were these guys?
BANG! BANG!
Luke put two bullets into his stomach. The guy fell over, holding his guts. He disappeared behind the sofa. Luke fired three more shots through the sofa.
The third guy was not here. Luke bounced to his feet and darted to the sofa. He glanced behind it. The guy he’d shot lay there, still alive, breathing heavily. His chest gave mighty heaves. He was shot through with holes. His shirt was stained with blood. His teeth were gritted. He looked up at Luke
“Listen,” he said, gasping for breath.
“Sorry. No time for that today.”
Luke shot him in the head. The skull popped apart like a cherry tomato.
Now Luke glanced around. He should crouch down and take this guy’s gun, but he didn’t dare do it. He had to finish the job first.
Luke moved through the beautiful office, sleek, gun out, in the shooter’s stance he had learned in the Rangers so long ago.
That guy had to be in the bathroom. Either that, or he had magical powers.
Luke kicked in a bathroom door. Toilet, long stone sink, glass shower. In an office?
No one in here. He moved through it. He recognized how important time was—those guys out in the hall were going to be here any second.
He passed an alcove on his left, almost like a closet.
A gun appeared there. He saw it in his peripheral vision, saw it and didn’t really see it. He spun, too late.
The black man had hidden inside the alcove—a clever spot. It was amazing that he could even wedge himself in there. He put the gun to Luke’s head. Luke reached for it. He was half a second too late.
The man pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing happened.
The guy was a kid, maybe twenty-five years old. At most. His face had barely seen a razor. His eyes were hard, but they were lying eyes.
The kid pulled the trigger again.
Click.
What was this, training day?
Luke shook his head, then pointed his own gun at the kid’s face. The gun’s muzzle was three inches from the kid’s forehead.
The kid dropped his weapon.
“You see what happened here?” Luke said. “You got in a gunfight, but you didn’t count your shots. You lost your head a little bit. So you ran out of bullets, and you didn’t even know it. You’ve had all this time hiding back here while I’ve been out in the hallway, and you could have reloaded. But you didn’t.”
Luke shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing that comes with experience. I’m a little surprised they hired you for this job. To be perfectly frank, you weren’t ready for it.”
The kid smiled. He had some kind of English accent, Luke thought London. “Yeah, but your old friend wasn’t ready for me, was he? He was crying before the end. I made him squeal like a stuck porker, okay?”
Luke pulled the trigger, point-blank range. The kid’s face imploded. Blood and bone sprayed the white wall behind him. The kid’s big body dropped to the floor. The bullet had put a whale of a ragged hole in the drywall.
“No,” Luke said. “Not okay.”
He padded back into the office. He had some breathing room—maybe ten seconds’ worth. He was rusty, but so far he had done okay. Even so, if the kid had been thinking, Luke would be dead now. He was still alive because of luck.
He looked down at the boss, the older guy who had murdered Gottlieb. Sports jacket, slacks, dress shirt, leather loafers. He bent down near the body. He checked the man’s jacket for a badge or some kind of ID. Nothing. Just a half-empty pack of cigarettes. He looked for a wallet in the man’s pants pockets—also nothing.
These men were ghosts. They weren’t government agents—they weren’t anybody.
Luke glanced at the ruined doorway to the office. He removed one of the dead man’s loafers and threw it out into the hall.
Instantly, the hall was sprayed with automatic fire.
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
The walls and floor were shredded out there. White smoke and dust rose from the shattered drywall
There was trouble coming down that hall, and it would be here any minute. He had to get out of here.
Luke stood and went to the window.
Bingo! There was a fire escape outside. He tried to slide open the window—it wouldn’t budge. It had some kind of complicated lock mechanism. It almost seemed like you needed a key to open it, even from the inside. Not much use in a fire.
The reason for it came to him in a split second. The lock kept children from opening the window—children who might want to escape. Luke glanced back at Gottlieb, sprawled on the floor. There was a lake of blood around him, some of it already growing tacky. He had finally gotten what he deserved. It had just taken too long, and when it came, it had happened too fast.
Wrong. Gottlieb was breathing. His breath was a death-rattle, his chest heaving, his lungs gasping for air.
His eyes rolled and found Luke. His face was red and feverish with pain.
He tried to say something.
“What?” Luke said.
Gottlieb gestured with his head at the hallway. “They’re going to kill me.”
Luke thought about it for one second. Of course it was true. Gottlieb was a loose end, and looser than most. From their perspective, he had to be eliminated.
Luke nodded. “Yeah. I’d say that’s right. If you even live long enough for them to get here.”
“I’m afraid… to die.” It seemed an agony for Gottlieb just to get the words out.
“I’m afraid…”
The air hissed out of him. His eyes unfocused, his chest relaxed, settling to the ground. Whatever he knew, the information had died with him.
There was nothing Luke could do about that now.
He picked up Gottlieb’s heavy wheeled office chair, got a good grip on it, and hurled it through the window.
* * *
Just up the street, a chair flew out of a third-story window.
The chair hit the cobblestone street with a loud crash. Glass from the shattered window tinkled down on the brick sidewalk like a rain shower. A woman screamed, as tourists and afternoon shoppers ran for cover.
Ed Newsam’s second beer—an IPA brewed in Tennessee—had just arrived on his table at a sidewalk café. As he watched, Luke Stone climbed out of the demolished window and dropped fast down the fire escape—not clambering down the stairs, but falling to Earth along the outside grillwork like a trapeze artist or a chimpanzee.
For Ed, tracking Luke to this place had been easy enough—he had called Swann and asked where to find him. As far as anyone at Quantico knew, Ed was taking a late lunch, and then had an afternoon joint administrative meeting at the Pentagon. Until a moment ago, that still might have happened—although admin meetings bored him to tears.
Even bare seconds ago, he had been enjoying the historic district while he waited for Stone to reappear from his visit to the psychiatrist. The narrow streets of the Old Town teemed with well-heeled, late-season tourists in lime green and sunflower yellow pullovers, peeking in shop windows or laughing as they stumbled out of the restaurants and pubs.
But now Stone had happened, reappearing in typical Stone fashion and upending any other plans or concerns.
The fire escape ended at the second floor. Luke didn’t bother opening the ladder. He simply dropped the last ten feet and rolled backward onto the sidewalk. Then he was up and running, the opposite direction from Ed.
Three stories up, more men came bursting out that window.
All over the street, men who were shopping or walking or just standing around, suddenly dropped everything and went sprinting after Luke Stone.
A block away, Ed spotted Luke make a right turn, dart across the street, and disappear down a side street, headed for the waterfront.
Ed leapt up, climbed on top of his table, and jumped over the velvet rope that marked off the edge of the café. His table collapsed to the ground, appetizer plate smashing, beer glass shattering, as he landed on the sidewalk. He was running almost before his feet hit the ground.
Instead of following Luke, he went the other way, cutting down the side street just behind him. He barreled through the crowds, knocking people out of his way. People shouted, their terrified eyes wide as saucers, as the giant black man descended on them at full speed. A young couple tried to get out of his way and fell to the cobblestones, but he kept running.
“Move!” he screamed. “Move!”
A sea of people parted, driven ahead of him like frightened cattle, like daredevils running ahead of the bulls at Pamplona.
He blasted downhill, going very fast. He reached the waterfront and looked to his left. Luke was over there, at least ten men chasing him now. Everything was moving over there, people running, people falling, the entire waterfront district flowing away from him.
Ed crossed to the docks, still pushing people out of his way. A handful of boats were tied up. He moved along the wharf, looking for the right one—he would know it when he saw it. And there it was, just up ahead.
A small Seadoo jetboat—a four-seater with a two-stroke inboard engine. It was a piece of junk, a toy, and probably gave its owner nothing but headaches. But if it went at all, it would go very, very fast.
He pulled his hunting knife as he ran. He leapt across the gap to the boat, cut the lines in a couple of swipes, and let it drift. There was no time for anything. He pulled his gun and hammered the ignition box as hard as he could hit it—one time, two times, three. The box cracked apart, revealing the naked ignition mechanism—he ripped out the key slot with his bare hand.
Now there was no key necessary. He reached in with his thumb and forefinger, turned the ignition, and the engine roared into life. A beautiful sound. Music.
He slid into the driver’s seat.
“Go, man!” he shouted at himself. “Go!”
* * *
Luke ran down a wide concrete dock. It was a wrong turn.
There were a couple of very large sailboats tied up down here, sails down. No motorboats. Nothing small. By himself, it would take him twenty minutes to get any of these sailboats out of here. He didn’t have twenty minutes.
He didn’t have twenty seconds.
He stopped and turned. He was breathing very hard, and there was a pain in his gut that did not feel good. It was more than just pain—it felt like he had ripped a couple of his surgical staples out. Even worse—adrenaline was probably masking the real pain.
Not that the pain, or the staples, would matter if he died. Half a dozen men came down onto the dock from the street. Another ten or more were just behind them. The men were no longer running. They walked toward him now.
Tourists, hand-holders, lovers, and strollers of various stripes, flowed along the very edges of the dock back toward the men, squeezing past them, escaping onto the street. The killers weren’t interested in them, and let them pass without a glance. Soon, there was no one on the dock but Luke and them.
Who were these guys? They weren’t going to kill him in public, in broad daylight, were they?
He supposed maybe they were.
He glanced around. There was a large electrical box to his right. He could duck behind that and try to fight from there. But it probably wouldn’t hold up against their guns for long. And once he went behind it, that was it—he was trapped.
He could jump into the water and make a swim for it. But the water was probably very cold this time of year, and they would plug him full of holes before he got far.
He could leap onto one of the big sailboats and try to hold it against them until the police arrived. Surely they must be on their way after everything that just happened. He could duck behind one of the thick mast poles, or climb below decks. The nearest sailboat was all wood, so the bullets would chew it up, but…
It was a long shot, a delaying tactic, but it was the closest thing to a plan he had. If he could hole up, stay safe, even for a few minutes, he might make it. Surely these guys wouldn’t hang around and wait for the cops.
Behind him, and to his right, a speedboat was coming in very fast—much too fast. It was bombing hard, bouncing over the river swells. It caught his eye because the man driving it must be insane. He was going to crash into this concrete dock.
The man driving it…
…was Ed Newsam.
The boat cut hard, throwing a heavy swell at the dock. It barely slowed down as it approached, and Luke didn’t hesitate.
One of the men was black, with thick curly hair that stood up in odd tufts. The other was a white man with a bushy mustache. The three men stood in a rough triangle, guns already drawn. The two assistants trained their barrels directly on Luke. All three guns had big, eight-inch silencers screwed onto them—the men were planning to be quiet.
Luke felt nothing about the men, or their guns. He simply watched them, waiting for the mistake. Either they made one, or he died here in this office.
The older man, the obvious leader of the pack, stepped into the center of the room. His eyes were dead and blank. He smiled.
“Well, Mr. Stone, your reputation precedes you. We saw your friend Mr. Philby earlier today. Came straight here from his place, as a matter of fact.”
Luke felt a twinge of something—fear, terror. There was no time for it now.
“Let’s hope for your sake that he wasn’t hurt.”
The two gunmen giggled like children.
“Hurt?” the black man said. “He was more than hurt.”
The man with the mustache shrugged and smiled. “If he’d been willing to talk, it probably would have gone easier for him.”
“Then again, maybe not,” the black one said.
“I would have thought the legendary Luke Stone would show us a little more skill,” the boss said. “But we’ve been trailing you all day. Maybe your injuries…”
He gestured with his chin at Luke’s mid-section, then shrugged.
“Pain can be a terrible distraction,” Dr. Gottlieb said.
The man turned to Gottlieb. “Did I ask you?”
“No. I just—”
“Then please shut up.”
“I beg your pardon,” Gottlieb said. “This is my office. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you who I—”
For the first time, the man raised his gun. He pointed it at Gottlieb’s head.
Gottlieb raised his hands. “Wait!” His face curled into a grimace.
CLACK.
The gun made exactly the sound Luke assumed it would—like an office stapler punched especially hard. At the last second, the man lowered his shot and put his bullet into Gottlieb’s upper body, just below his neck. Blood and gore sprayed out Gottlieb’s back. He dropped to the carpet as if a hole had opened in the floor beneath him.
“Wait for what?” the leader said. He stared down at Gottlieb for a moment, blood pooling around his body, staining the off-white color of the carpeting. The bright red sank into the gaps between carpet fibers and spread out like tentacles.
“The guy has never stopped talking the whole time we’ve been here.”
That was the mistake.
All three men gazed at Gottlieb a second too long.
Luke’s gun was out of his holster before that second was over.
Too late, all three men tried to raise guns again.
Luke swung his gun around and fired it before the men got off a shot. One shot—he put a bullet right between the boss’s eyes. A red dot of blood appeared on the man’s forehead. He stood still for one second, as if realizing what had happened, then dropped to the floor, dead before he reached the carpet.
Luke’s gun was loud.
LOUD.
He fired three times at the other guys, but they had already dived for cover—behind the couch, behind the desk. He missed all three shots. His ears were ringing.
He ducked back into the hallway.
A second later, a volley of return fire splintered the walls at the threshold. Luke backed away, waited a beat, then wrapped his gun hand around the doorway. He fired three more times into the office.
He took a deep breath. He needed to slow down for a second and think. If these guys called for backup, he was finished. Of course, they were doing exactly that. He could hear them talking in there.
“Throw your guns out and I’ll let you live,” he shouted.
They answered with another volley, tearing up the doorway and the drywall.
It was all on him. They could sit in there and wait him out. He was the one who had to get out of here. He turned to head back down the hall to the door.
He was already too late. The front door to the suite rattled, as if someone on the other side was trying to open it. Suddenly it burst inward, swinging violently and slamming back against the door stop. The shadow of a man’s head appeared behind the smoked glass of the door.
BANG.
Luke shot him right in the Sydney Gottlieb, MD. The glass exploded, taking the man’s head with it.
A new volley of shots came from the office behind him, ripping up the doorway again. Luke moved further up the hall, his gun trained on the shattered glass door. The shooting behind him went on for a long time. Finally, it stopped.
They were coming in. He could feel them there.
He ejected his magazine and slammed a new one in.
As he did, a man burst through the front door and dived behind the receptionist’s desk, out of Luke’s view. Luke didn’t even get a shot off.
He hesitated, but only for a second. He was badly exposed in this hallway. Things could only get worse the longer he hung around. If it was time to go, then it was time to go. He turned back to Gottlieb’s office doorway, squatted, hearing his knees creak as he did, then rolled into the room. He came up on one knee.
The guy with the mustache leaned against the side wall behind the sofa, like he was hiding. Not much cover there. Who were these guys?
BANG! BANG!
Luke put two bullets into his stomach. The guy fell over, holding his guts. He disappeared behind the sofa. Luke fired three more shots through the sofa.
The third guy was not here. Luke bounced to his feet and darted to the sofa. He glanced behind it. The guy he’d shot lay there, still alive, breathing heavily. His chest gave mighty heaves. He was shot through with holes. His shirt was stained with blood. His teeth were gritted. He looked up at Luke
“Listen,” he said, gasping for breath.
“Sorry. No time for that today.”
Luke shot him in the head. The skull popped apart like a cherry tomato.
Now Luke glanced around. He should crouch down and take this guy’s gun, but he didn’t dare do it. He had to finish the job first.
Luke moved through the beautiful office, sleek, gun out, in the shooter’s stance he had learned in the Rangers so long ago.
That guy had to be in the bathroom. Either that, or he had magical powers.
Luke kicked in a bathroom door. Toilet, long stone sink, glass shower. In an office?
No one in here. He moved through it. He recognized how important time was—those guys out in the hall were going to be here any second.
He passed an alcove on his left, almost like a closet.
A gun appeared there. He saw it in his peripheral vision, saw it and didn’t really see it. He spun, too late.
The black man had hidden inside the alcove—a clever spot. It was amazing that he could even wedge himself in there. He put the gun to Luke’s head. Luke reached for it. He was half a second too late.
The man pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing happened.
The guy was a kid, maybe twenty-five years old. At most. His face had barely seen a razor. His eyes were hard, but they were lying eyes.
The kid pulled the trigger again.
Click.
What was this, training day?
Luke shook his head, then pointed his own gun at the kid’s face. The gun’s muzzle was three inches from the kid’s forehead.
The kid dropped his weapon.
“You see what happened here?” Luke said. “You got in a gunfight, but you didn’t count your shots. You lost your head a little bit. So you ran out of bullets, and you didn’t even know it. You’ve had all this time hiding back here while I’ve been out in the hallway, and you could have reloaded. But you didn’t.”
Luke shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing that comes with experience. I’m a little surprised they hired you for this job. To be perfectly frank, you weren’t ready for it.”
The kid smiled. He had some kind of English accent, Luke thought London. “Yeah, but your old friend wasn’t ready for me, was he? He was crying before the end. I made him squeal like a stuck porker, okay?”
Luke pulled the trigger, point-blank range. The kid’s face imploded. Blood and bone sprayed the white wall behind him. The kid’s big body dropped to the floor. The bullet had put a whale of a ragged hole in the drywall.
“No,” Luke said. “Not okay.”
He padded back into the office. He had some breathing room—maybe ten seconds’ worth. He was rusty, but so far he had done okay. Even so, if the kid had been thinking, Luke would be dead now. He was still alive because of luck.
He looked down at the boss, the older guy who had murdered Gottlieb. Sports jacket, slacks, dress shirt, leather loafers. He bent down near the body. He checked the man’s jacket for a badge or some kind of ID. Nothing. Just a half-empty pack of cigarettes. He looked for a wallet in the man’s pants pockets—also nothing.
These men were ghosts. They weren’t government agents—they weren’t anybody.
Luke glanced at the ruined doorway to the office. He removed one of the dead man’s loafers and threw it out into the hall.
Instantly, the hall was sprayed with automatic fire.
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
The walls and floor were shredded out there. White smoke and dust rose from the shattered drywall
There was trouble coming down that hall, and it would be here any minute. He had to get out of here.
Luke stood and went to the window.
Bingo! There was a fire escape outside. He tried to slide open the window—it wouldn’t budge. It had some kind of complicated lock mechanism. It almost seemed like you needed a key to open it, even from the inside. Not much use in a fire.
The reason for it came to him in a split second. The lock kept children from opening the window—children who might want to escape. Luke glanced back at Gottlieb, sprawled on the floor. There was a lake of blood around him, some of it already growing tacky. He had finally gotten what he deserved. It had just taken too long, and when it came, it had happened too fast.
Wrong. Gottlieb was breathing. His breath was a death-rattle, his chest heaving, his lungs gasping for air.
His eyes rolled and found Luke. His face was red and feverish with pain.
He tried to say something.
“What?” Luke said.
Gottlieb gestured with his head at the hallway. “They’re going to kill me.”
Luke thought about it for one second. Of course it was true. Gottlieb was a loose end, and looser than most. From their perspective, he had to be eliminated.
Luke nodded. “Yeah. I’d say that’s right. If you even live long enough for them to get here.”
“I’m afraid… to die.” It seemed an agony for Gottlieb just to get the words out.
“I’m afraid…”
The air hissed out of him. His eyes unfocused, his chest relaxed, settling to the ground. Whatever he knew, the information had died with him.
There was nothing Luke could do about that now.
He picked up Gottlieb’s heavy wheeled office chair, got a good grip on it, and hurled it through the window.
* * *
Just up the street, a chair flew out of a third-story window.
The chair hit the cobblestone street with a loud crash. Glass from the shattered window tinkled down on the brick sidewalk like a rain shower. A woman screamed, as tourists and afternoon shoppers ran for cover.
Ed Newsam’s second beer—an IPA brewed in Tennessee—had just arrived on his table at a sidewalk café. As he watched, Luke Stone climbed out of the demolished window and dropped fast down the fire escape—not clambering down the stairs, but falling to Earth along the outside grillwork like a trapeze artist or a chimpanzee.
For Ed, tracking Luke to this place had been easy enough—he had called Swann and asked where to find him. As far as anyone at Quantico knew, Ed was taking a late lunch, and then had an afternoon joint administrative meeting at the Pentagon. Until a moment ago, that still might have happened—although admin meetings bored him to tears.
Even bare seconds ago, he had been enjoying the historic district while he waited for Stone to reappear from his visit to the psychiatrist. The narrow streets of the Old Town teemed with well-heeled, late-season tourists in lime green and sunflower yellow pullovers, peeking in shop windows or laughing as they stumbled out of the restaurants and pubs.
But now Stone had happened, reappearing in typical Stone fashion and upending any other plans or concerns.
The fire escape ended at the second floor. Luke didn’t bother opening the ladder. He simply dropped the last ten feet and rolled backward onto the sidewalk. Then he was up and running, the opposite direction from Ed.
Three stories up, more men came bursting out that window.
All over the street, men who were shopping or walking or just standing around, suddenly dropped everything and went sprinting after Luke Stone.
A block away, Ed spotted Luke make a right turn, dart across the street, and disappear down a side street, headed for the waterfront.
Ed leapt up, climbed on top of his table, and jumped over the velvet rope that marked off the edge of the café. His table collapsed to the ground, appetizer plate smashing, beer glass shattering, as he landed on the sidewalk. He was running almost before his feet hit the ground.
Instead of following Luke, he went the other way, cutting down the side street just behind him. He barreled through the crowds, knocking people out of his way. People shouted, their terrified eyes wide as saucers, as the giant black man descended on them at full speed. A young couple tried to get out of his way and fell to the cobblestones, but he kept running.
“Move!” he screamed. “Move!”
A sea of people parted, driven ahead of him like frightened cattle, like daredevils running ahead of the bulls at Pamplona.
He blasted downhill, going very fast. He reached the waterfront and looked to his left. Luke was over there, at least ten men chasing him now. Everything was moving over there, people running, people falling, the entire waterfront district flowing away from him.
Ed crossed to the docks, still pushing people out of his way. A handful of boats were tied up. He moved along the wharf, looking for the right one—he would know it when he saw it. And there it was, just up ahead.
A small Seadoo jetboat—a four-seater with a two-stroke inboard engine. It was a piece of junk, a toy, and probably gave its owner nothing but headaches. But if it went at all, it would go very, very fast.
He pulled his hunting knife as he ran. He leapt across the gap to the boat, cut the lines in a couple of swipes, and let it drift. There was no time for anything. He pulled his gun and hammered the ignition box as hard as he could hit it—one time, two times, three. The box cracked apart, revealing the naked ignition mechanism—he ripped out the key slot with his bare hand.
Now there was no key necessary. He reached in with his thumb and forefinger, turned the ignition, and the engine roared into life. A beautiful sound. Music.
He slid into the driver’s seat.
“Go, man!” he shouted at himself. “Go!”
* * *
Luke ran down a wide concrete dock. It was a wrong turn.
There were a couple of very large sailboats tied up down here, sails down. No motorboats. Nothing small. By himself, it would take him twenty minutes to get any of these sailboats out of here. He didn’t have twenty minutes.
He didn’t have twenty seconds.
He stopped and turned. He was breathing very hard, and there was a pain in his gut that did not feel good. It was more than just pain—it felt like he had ripped a couple of his surgical staples out. Even worse—adrenaline was probably masking the real pain.
Not that the pain, or the staples, would matter if he died. Half a dozen men came down onto the dock from the street. Another ten or more were just behind them. The men were no longer running. They walked toward him now.
Tourists, hand-holders, lovers, and strollers of various stripes, flowed along the very edges of the dock back toward the men, squeezing past them, escaping onto the street. The killers weren’t interested in them, and let them pass without a glance. Soon, there was no one on the dock but Luke and them.
Who were these guys? They weren’t going to kill him in public, in broad daylight, were they?
He supposed maybe they were.
He glanced around. There was a large electrical box to his right. He could duck behind that and try to fight from there. But it probably wouldn’t hold up against their guns for long. And once he went behind it, that was it—he was trapped.
He could jump into the water and make a swim for it. But the water was probably very cold this time of year, and they would plug him full of holes before he got far.
He could leap onto one of the big sailboats and try to hold it against them until the police arrived. Surely they must be on their way after everything that just happened. He could duck behind one of the thick mast poles, or climb below decks. The nearest sailboat was all wood, so the bullets would chew it up, but…
It was a long shot, a delaying tactic, but it was the closest thing to a plan he had. If he could hole up, stay safe, even for a few minutes, he might make it. Surely these guys wouldn’t hang around and wait for the cops.
Behind him, and to his right, a speedboat was coming in very fast—much too fast. It was bombing hard, bouncing over the river swells. It caught his eye because the man driving it must be insane. He was going to crash into this concrete dock.
The man driving it…
…was Ed Newsam.
The boat cut hard, throwing a heavy swell at the dock. It barely slowed down as it approached, and Luke didn’t hesitate.
