The Pharaoh's Secret (10 page)

A third thrust almost brought the roof down on them.

“Kensington!” Kurt said, looking at the man.

Kensington’s face was mangled, his nose broken, his lips and teeth smashed. The end of the boom had caught him flush. He didn’t respond but seemed to be breathing.

Kurt laid him on the ground and noticed the crumpled note in his hand. He grabbed it just as Joe shouted a warning.

“Get down!”

The boom was swinging to the side. Kurt covered Kensington and lay as flat as he could while the attackers took out another wall.

This time, the boom got caught on the stonework beneath the window. A halfhearted attempt was made to free it and then it stopped altogether.

Kurt dashed to the gaping hole in the wall. He saw a man in the cab of the small crane desperately working the controls while another man stood by, armed with a submachine gun.

Spotting Kurt, the gunman raised his weapon and fired a quick burst. Kurt pulled back as the bullets hit near the opening but failed to find the mark.

By now, Joe was on the phone, calling for help. He was still requesting assistance when there was more gunfire.

Kurt could tell that these shots had been aimed in a different direction. He looked back outside. The attackers were running, shooting above a crowd to get the people out of their way.

“Stay with Kensington,” Kurt said. “I’m going after them.”

Before Joe could protest, Kurt climbed through what was left of the window and began scrambling down the boom of the crane.

Kurt crawled down the length of the crane using the circular holes in the steel beam as handholds. He saw three men with guns running across the street toward a microvan parked on the far side. He hopped off the boom when he was close enough to the ground and discovered several workmen had been shot to access the crane.

Across the street, the lights of the van came on and the engine roared to life.

Kurt looked around for something to chase them with. The only real option was a tiny Citroën dump truck. It had a narrow wheelbase and a tall profile that gave it an odd look, by American standards, but was a far better fit for the constricted roads of a small island.

He raced over to it, climbed in, found the keys in the ignition. As the engine turned over, he jammed the truck into gear and accelerated across the plaza on a diagonal, driving down the steps and trying desperately to cut off the microvan.

The little van was too nimble to be stopped. It swerved around him, drove up on the sidewalk for a hundred feet and then careened back onto the road.

Kurt threw the transmission into reverse, backed up and worked the wheel around until the dump truck was pointed in the right direction.

He was about to hit the gas when a familiar face appeared in front of the museum.

“Get in!” he shouted.

Joe piled into the truck’s cab as Kurt stepped on the gas pedal.

“Couldn’t you rent anything smaller?” Joe asked.

“Free upgrade,” Kurt said. “Membership has its privileges.”

“What happens when the cops decide those privileges don’t include stealing dump trucks from the scene of a crime?”

“Depends,” Kurt said.

“On what?”

“On whether we’ve caught the bad guys by then or not.”

Despite the roar of the dump truck’s engine, that prospect didn’t seem likely. The microvan was no horsepower champion, but it was spry and maneuverable and was quickly outdistancing them. By comparison, the dump truck felt slow and ponderous.

An area of congestion evened the playing field for a moment, but the little van was soon swerving through the traffic. Kurt didn’t have that option. He switched on all the lights and leaned on the horn with reckless abandon.

In response to the oncoming truck, drivers with any sense got
out of the way, but several vehicles parked on the side of the road were not so lucky. Kurt couldn’t help but sideswipe them, taking out five consecutive mirrors.

“I think you missed one,” Joe said.

“We’ll hit it on the way back.”

With his foot to the floor, Kurt kept the truck accelerating. “I thought I told you to stay with Kensington,” he said.

“I did,” Joe said.

“I meant, until help arrived.”

“Be more specific next time.”

They were gaining on the van now, picking up speed, as the road opened up and dropped down to the waterfront, where it curved along the harbor’s edge past million-dollar yachts and small fishing boats. Someone in the van didn’t seem happy with that idea. He shot out the back window and began blazing away at the dump truck following them.

Kurt instinctively ducked as the front window was peppered with shells. At the same time, he swerved to the right, up onto a side road that angled inland, taking them away from the harbor.

“Now we’re going the wrong way,” Joe noted.

Kurt had the pedal mashed to the floor. He manhandled the truck into a lower gear, keeping up the revs and the horsepower.

“And now we’re going the wrong way even faster,” Joe added.

“We’re taking a shortcut,” Kurt said. “The coastline here is like a bunch of fingers sticking out into the harbor. While they follow the outline of those fingers, we’re going to cut across the palm.”

“Or get lost,” Joe added. “Since we have no map.”

“All we have to do is keep the harbor to the left of us,” he said.

“And hope they don’t turn around.”

The harbor was easy to keep track of since all the forts and
important buildings surrounding it were lit up by floodlights. From higher ground it was even possible to see the lower road.

“There,” Joe said, pointing.

Kurt saw it too. The little microvan was continuing on. Speeding as it had before. Apparently, the driver had no interest in blending in.

The dump truck rumbled onto the descending grade and began to pick up speed. It shook and shuddered and the load of broken concrete and rebar in the back jumped around, creating a jarring racket.

They angled toward the intersection.

“What are you going to do?” Joe asked.

“Like the Romans, I’m going to ram them.”

Joe hastily looked for seat belts and found none.

“Hang on!”

They hit the merge, shot out onto the road and missed. Picking up so much speed on the downslope had thrown Kurt’s timing off. They’d taken the lead.

“We’re now in front of the van we’re supposed to be chasing,” Joe said.

“So do something about it.”

Joe did the only rational thing he could think of. He shoved the lever for the hydraulics in the dump bed upward. The bed tilted and thousands of pounds of broken concrete, twisted metal and other construction debris went sliding out.

The load of debris tumbled toward the speeding van, slamming into it like a minor avalanche. The grille and radiator caved in from the first impact. The windshield shattered from bouncing fist-sized chunks of concrete and the van careened out of control, heading off the road and tipping over.

Kurt slammed on the brakes and the dump truck skidded to a
halt. He jumped out and began running for the overturned van. Joe followed, grabbing a crowbar for a weapon.

They reached the van to find steam pouring from the radiator and every piece of sheet metal dented and mangled. The scent of gasoline wafted through the air.

A quick check told them the man in the passenger seat was dead. A chunk of rubble had come through the window and caught him in the head. But he was the only one inside.

“Where are the others?” Joe asked.

Bodies were often thrown from vehicles in rollover accidents, but, looking around, Kurt saw no one. Then, in the distance, he spotted two figures running across the rocks, heading for the lights of Fort Saint Angelo.

“Hope you brought your running shoes,” he said, taking off after them. “We’re not done yet.”

Dr. Hagen ran headlong for the fort in the distance, propelled forward by a sense of shock and fear. Things were going from bad to worse. He’d listened in with a bug as Kensington almost told the men from NUMA what he was after. He’d panicked and demanded that the men from Osiris kill the museum curator before he could expose them, which he was fairly certain they had accomplished. But everything since had been a disaster: the pursuit, the crash, losing their guns in the rollover.

“We need help,” Hagen shouted. “Call for assistance.”

Fortunately, the other hit man still had a radio clipped to his belt. He pulled it free, pressed the talk button and kept running.

“Shadow, this is Talon,” he said. “We need extraction.”

“What happened, Talon?” The voice sounded agitated.

“Kensington met with the Americans. He was going to expose us. We had to kill him. Now they’re chasing us.”

“So kill them.”

“We can’t,” he said. “They’re armed.” This was a lie, but the extraction team didn’t need to know that. “We’ve been injured. One man dead. We need to be pulled out.”

Fort Saint Angelo loomed up ahead, its imposing walls lit up a blinding orange by a bank of powerful spotlights. The closer they got to the fort, the brighter the ground around them became. It was like running through Times Square. But they had no choice, safety lay on the other side.

“Well?” Hagen shouted. “What did he say?”

“Shadow, do you copy?”

Silence lingered before the voice came on the line again. “The boat will be in the channel. Deal with your pursuers and then swim for it. Do not fail us. You know what’ll happen if you do.”

Hagen overheard the reply. It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear, but it was better than nothing. He slowed going up the ramp toward the fort. Talon, the man who was supposed to assist him, ran on without waiting. He was in better shape than Hagen. And he didn’t seem to care if Hagen was caught.

Kurt and Joe were making up ground on the two assassins, but the men had a large lead and they reached the fort and vanished.

Kurt rushed on, heading up the ramp. Joe was right behind him.

Kurt went from a sprint to a jog. The glare from the orange lights and the shadows where those lights were blocked made it difficult to see. He swung wide, not interested in being jumped by someone hiding in a dark nook or alley.

Even from this angle, the fort was an imposing structure. Built on a spit of land that stuck out into Valletta Harbor, it was shaped like a multilayered wedding cake, but the walls of each new level canted at a different angle so that an attacking ship would be unable to find a spot to safely fire from.

Kurt slowed down. The wall of the fort was on his right, the waters of the harbor on his left. He passed a locked gate and then came to a stairwell that cut into the wall like a narrow canyon. A similar gate was in place, but a quick look told Kurt the men had turned in there.

“They broke the lock,” he said, pushing the gate open.

After a glance upward, Kurt began to climb. He stuck close to the wall but was ambushed at the top as a limping man jumped out at him with a sword in his hand.

Kurt managed to dive away from the blade, hitting the ground, rolling and popping up just as Joe appeared. The man with the sword stepped back, his gaze pivoting to Joe, and the crowbar he held, to Kurt and then back again.

Kurt noticed a suit of armor displayed as part of the fort’s illustrious history. A gauntlet lay on the ground. The sword had been ripped from it.

The man pointed the sword from one of them to the other. Kurt recognized him.

“You must be Hagen,” Kurt said. “The cowardly doctor who fled a dying island.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Hagen grunted.

“We know you have an antidote for what happened to the people of Lampedusa. If you tell us, it might just keep you from the gas chamber.”

“Shut up,” Hagen shouted. He feinted toward Kurt and then swung at Joe, whipping the sword through a long arc.

The old blade whistled as it cut through the night, but Joe stepped back with the reflexes of a mongoose and deflected the killing blow with a swift jerk of the crowbar. Sparks lit out into the dark accompanied by the metal clang of the weapons coming together.

“This whole situation has turned positively medieval,” Joe said.

Hagen lunged forward again. He swung at Joe several times, trying to drive him back to the stairs, perhaps hoping he would fall, but each attack was deflected until after a last swing Joe knocked the tip of Hagen’s sword off and then kicked him in the chest all in one swift move. Hagen fell back and readied himself for another round.

“You’re pretty handy with that thing,” Kurt said.

“I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies multiple times,” Joe replied proudly.

“So you’ve got this one under control?”

“Absolutely,” Joe said. “Go get his partner. By the time you get back, I’ll have this guy gift-wrapped and placed in your stocking.”

As Kurt took off, Joe faced his enemy directly. After sizing him up, he switched from holding the crowbar like a sword to wielding it with a two-handed grip like a battle staff.

Hagen swiped at Joe once more, but Joe blocked him with one end of the crowbar and jabbed at him with the other, hitting him in the face and giving him a bloody nose.

“You know how you doctors like to say, ‘This won’t hurt a bit’?” Joe asked.
“
I don’t think that applies in this case. It’s probably going to be quite painful.”

Hagen stepped forward and began to swing wildly. He fought with desperation, shouting and even spitting at Joe.

Joe was all balance and poise. He moved with the quickness of a trained fighter. His footwork smooth and precise. Each lunge or hack from the sword was easily dealt with, each swing blocked or avoided.

He counterattacked with ease, feinting with one end of the crowbar and then swinging with the other. “Not only have I seen
all the Star Wars movies,” he warned, “I’m a big fan of Errol Flynn.”

“Who’s Errol Flynn?” Hagen said.

“You’re kidding me.”

Hagen did not reply and Joe moved into attack mode. He jabbed at the doctor and forced him back with one end of the crowbar and then swung the other end around and down. A sickening crack came from Hagen’s shoulder and the doctor let out a painful cry.

“I’m pretty sure that was your
humorous
bone,” Joe said, “though I’m betting it wasn’t very funny.”

Hagen grunted. “It was my clavicle, you idiot.” He was tilted over now like a bird with a broken wing.

“Okay, let me try again,” Joe said, raising the crowbar for another strike.

“Stop,” he said, throwing the sword to the ground. “I give up. Just stop hitting me.”

Hagen dropped to his knees, grasping his broken collarbone and wincing in agony, but as Joe stepped forward, the doctor played one last trick. He pulled a syringe from his pocket and tried to plunge it into Joe’s leg. Joe saw it just in time and blocked it downward, where it went into Hagen’s own thigh.

Whatever was in the needle, it worked almost instantly. Hagen’s eyes rolled up and he fell sideways onto his injured shoulder without the slightest bit of protest.

“Great,” Joe said. “Now I have to carry you.”

Joe bent down beside him and felt for a pulse. Thankfully, he found one. He pulled the syringe out and broke off the needle before slipping it into his pocket. He thought it might be wise to find out what had been inside.

—

As Joe figured out
what to do with the unconscious doctor, Kurt moved with deliberate caution in search of the second fugitive. He figured the man was either out of ammunition or had lost his weapon because he hadn’t fired any more shots, but that didn’t mean another ambush wasn’t in the works.

As he moved forward, he heard the sound of footsteps on loose gravel from another stairwell. Kurt pressed himself against the wall and peered around the corner. The stairway was curved back in on itself in a spiral as it went up to the next level of the battlements. It wasn’t a long ascent, but the stone wall made it impossible to see more than a few steps at a time.

Kurt held perfectly still, listening. For several seconds, there was no sound at all. Then, suddenly, the muted echo of someone running and clearing the last few steps.

Kurt ducked onto the stairwell and charged upward. Thirty tight curving steps, carved for men in the eighteen hundreds who had shorter strides and smaller frames. It was a tight fit, but Kurt moved quickly and came out the top in time to see a man running across the flat space of the gunnery deck.

He was headed for the far side, where a row of ancient cannon pointed their muzzles toward the sea. Kurt sprinted after him, hopping over a short wall and cutting across the courtyard at an angle. He was closing in when his quarry scrambled over the ramparts at the far end and dropped eight feet to the deck below.

Kurt reached the wall, palmed it as he went over and dropped to the next level as well. Flexing his legs to absorb the impact, he stayed upright, but the assassin was already forty feet away and leaping over the next wall.

Kurt followed and discovered that this drop was closer to ten feet. “Figures I end up chasing the guy who’s half mountain goat.”

Kurt eyed the drop to a sloping ramp. He jumped, hit the stone ramp and continued the chase.

The target was out ahead, still running, heading for yet another wall. This one was at the very front of the fort, where it jutted out into the harbor. So far, they’d gone up to the top and come down two levels of the wedding cake. Kurt figured this was the end of the line. They were on the lower tier of the fort now and the drop on the other side of the wall was seventy, perhaps eighty feet, with nothing at the bottom but rocks.

The man seemed to realize this, hitting the brakes before he got to the wall and looking back at Kurt. After a slight hesitation, he took off again, raced for the wall at a dead run and launched himself off of its precipice. It was a suicide leap if ever he’d seen one.

Kurt reached the edge and looked over, expecting to find a hopelessly smashed body lying on the rocks below. Instead, he saw a narrow rectangular cut carved into the stone like a canal. Not only was the man who’d jumped alive, he was swimming like an Olympic champion out toward a waiting motorboat.

There was nothing he could do but watch in grudging admiration as the swimmer was hauled aboard the boat, which sped off and disappeared into the night.

“What happened?” a voice shouted from one level above him.

Kurt looked back to see Joe holding Dr. Hagen up by the scruff of the neck.

“He got away,” Kurt said. “Have to hand it to him, he earned it.”

“At least we have this one,” Joe replied.

As Joe spoke, a sharp crack rang out and the prisoner sagged to his knees and then fell sideways. Both Kurt and Joe dove for cover, but no additional shots came forth.

From his spot behind the ramparts of the wall, Kurt looked around. Both he and Joe were smart enough to stay down, shouting to each other from behind the safety of the stone walls.

“Joe,” Kurt called out. “Tell me you’re all right.”

“I’m okay,” Joe called back, sounding glum. “But our prisoner is dead.”

Kurt could have guessed. “Damn,” he muttered. “All this for nothing.”

“Any idea where the shot came from?”

Considering Joe’s position on the upper level and the way the sound echoed off the walls, the shot had to have come from somewhere across the water. “The other side of the harbor,” Kurt guessed.

He risked a glance in that direction. The speedboat was gone, but that was no platform to shoot from anyway. On the far shore were other structures, including the fortifications and flat gunnery plaza of another fort.

“That’s at least a thousand feet,” Joe said.

“In the dark, with a slight wind,” Kurt said. “Heck of a shot.”

“Especially on the first try,” Joe added. “Without correcting.”

It wasn’t morbidity that led them to talk this way. They were trying to determine the nature of their enemy. “And they took out their own guy instead of us,” Kurt added.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Joe asked. “That these guys are professionals?”

“Heavy hitters,” Kurt said. “Hagen was just a dupe.”

By now, police units were racing down the road to the fort. Flashing red and blue lights on a powerboat cruising toward them from the inner harbor showed the police were out there as well. Too late, Kurt thought. The culprits were dead or gone.

Keeping his head down in case the sniper was still in place, he
pulled the note Kensington had been trying to write from his pocket. It was covered in blood, but part of it was readable. It seemed to be a name.
Sophie C. . . .

It rang no bells. But, then, nothing seemed to make sense at the moment. He hid the note, waited for the police to arrive and wondered when their luck was going to turn.

—

Across the river,
on ruins every bit as old and auspicious as those of Fort Saint Angelo, another figure was convinced that his luck had done just that. He stood, gazing at the aftermath of his shot.

He’d sighted the enemy, adjusted for the wind and fought off a sudden blurring of his vison, forcing a double image back into one and pulling the trigger. The vision problems went along with the slowly healing blisters and sores on his face.

Number four wore those scars with pride. He’d survived the death march back to the checkpoint and he’d been given a second chance to serve Osiris. With a single shot, he’d proven his worth.

He disassembled a long-barreled sniper’s rifle, perused the electronic photo of the killing shot he’d taken and wondered briefly if he should have killed the Americans instead. But there was only time for one clean shot and Hagen had to be silenced. He’d made the right choice. He’d kill the Americans next time.

With the rifle stowed, he carefully wrapped a scarf around his damaged face, making sure to conceal a length of gauze soaked in antibiotic healing ointment that covered the back of his neck. Then he stepped away and vanished into the night.