“Where?” she asked through a hacking cough.
Noble didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he wheeled her around toward the bridge.
“What about the sniper?” she asked.
“He won’t be able to pick us out of the crowd,” Noble said. After a moment, he added, “I hope.”
They joined the throng. Noble kept his knees bent and his head down. It was a long way to the other side, but the bridge was his only option.
“They probably have people on the other side,” Eliška said, plucking the thoughts right out of Noble’s head.
He nodded but kept moving. There were definitely men behind them. He chanced a peek over his shoulder and saw the two bricks. One was tall enough to see over the crowd. He was a big man with blond hair down past his shoulders and a lantern jaw. His eyes locked on Noble, and he spoke into a lapel mic.
Noble cursed and crouched down just as an angry wasp buzzed past. The lead hornet stung flesh with a meaty thawk! A blood-curdling shriek split the air. It sounded like a woman, but it could have been a man. The sniper had missed and hit an innocent bystander instead—a tourist out enjoying Prague.
Another shot sizzled overhead. This one tore up a chunk of cobblestone. There was a moment of confusion as the crowd looked to see who was screaming. Someone yelled, “She’s been shot!” and confusion gave way to panic. People ran in every direction—some of them turning east, others surging west. Noble moved in a crouch and checked on the heavies. They were less than fifteen meters back with their guns drawn, shoving aside shrieking tourists in their effort to get a clear shot.
Eliška hunkered next to him. Her eyes were wide. She shouted, “What are we going to do?”
Noble edged to the stone railing and poked his head over. He saw the dark, swirling waters of the Vltava and asked, “How deep is this river?”
“Not that deep,” she said.
Lucas knelt atop Mala Strana Tower on the western end of Charles Bridge with the butt of a sniper rifle nestled in his shoulder. The barrel of the 7.62 Dragunov was supported on the crumbling stonework. White smoke billowed up from the opposite tower. Lucas watched the crowd milling about while he looked for the assassin and her new friend. What a mess, Lucas silently berated himself. He knew he had screwed up. He should have killed the Cermákova woman first and dealt with the intelligence officer later, but the newcomer had changed the equation. Lucas had decided to kill Miklos before he could talk. There was always a chance Cermákova and her friend might escape the trap. Lucas didn’t want them leaving with sensitive information. It was a tactical decision made on the spur of the moment. Lucas exhaled through pursed lips as he scanned the mob of pedestrians on the bridge.
Cermákova had narrowly avoided death twice now. Lucas promised himself it wouldn’t happen again. He swept the mass of bodies and spotted a head of short blond hair, but it was a skinny boy of twelve or thirteen.
Stanz was talking in his ear, trying to zero Lucas in on the fleeing targets.
“They’re directly in front of us,” Stanz was saying over the closed circuit. “They’re moving your way.”
Lucas ignored that information. There were a hundred people, maybe more, moving in his direction. He passed his scope over the sea of people, hoping to get lucky, and sighted Cermákova. He instinctively pulled the trigger, but he had only caught a glimpse and she was moving fast. The rifle bucked and the suppressor muffled the shot. The sound of the weapon cycling was louder than the bullet leaving the barrel. The shot missed. A middle-age woman in parka doubled over in pain. Lucas couldn’t hear her scream, but he saw her mouth open wide. He tried to zero back in on Cermákova, but now the crowd was a stampede. People were just colorful blurs his scope. He raised his head for a look over the rifle, sighted a slim blonde crouching amid the chaos and adjusted his aim. Cermákova moved at the last second. It saved her life. Lucas tried to track her and his crosshairs settled on her companion. His finger was tightening on the trigger when the blood in his veins turned to ice.
He was staring at Jake Noble.
How could it be? Lucas felt like someone had just caught him with an uppercut. His mind reeled. He had lost touch with the SF community after going to work for Keiser, but last he heard, Jake Noble was babysitting celebrities. How had he ended up in Prague?
Never mind the how, Lucas told himself. He’s a part of it now, and he needs to be dealt with.
Lucas settled his finger back on the trigger, but he couldn’t bring himself to take the shot. He and Jake had spilled blood together in some of the same sand. Killing a meddlesome Czech intel specialist was one thing—Lucas didn’t know the man and had never served with him. Killing the assassin was just good business. But killing Jake Noble was something altogether different.
While Lucas wrestled with his emotions, Noble caught hold of Cermákova’s sleeve and they both lunged toward the short stone wall. It was a smart move. They had a better chance of surviving a fall than a sniper’s bullet. Lucas shook off the surprise and took up the slack on the trigger. The action cycled and the suppressor coughed out a bullet.
Chapter Forty
Another wasp went buzzing past Noble’s ear. The sniper had spotted them and wouldn’t miss again. Noble had fractions of a second to make his move or die in the middle of the bridge. He grabbed Eliška’s hand and shouted, “Come on!”
They threw themselves over as a bullet winged off the balustrade, spitting chips of rock, and the river leapt up to claim them.
Noble hit with a splash and went under. Numbing cold enveloped his body and a rushing torrent filled his ears. For a brief moment, he felt Eliška thrashing in the water next to him. Then he was alone. He swam for what he thought was the surface, but the water only got colder and darker. Panic started to claw at the edges of his thoughts. He wheeled around, searching for light refracting on the surface, but all he saw was more blackness. His heart was beating painfully hard inside his chest. His lungs were on fire. He couldn’t figure up from down. Noble held his breath as long as he could, but the air finally escaped in a burst. His arms and legs felt like lead. His brain begged for oxygen. He was going to drown and he couldn’t even scream. His world narrowed to a pinprick of consciousness. Then he spotted bubbles racing toward the surface and, with the last of his fading strength, Noble followed.
He exploded from the water, gasping for air and shaking his head. Droplets flung from his shaggy hair. The current had pulled him under the bridge. He turned and spotted Eliška clinging to one of the pillars.
“Are you alright?” she called to him.
“Never better,” Noble managed to say. He had lost the Kimber. It was somewhere at the bottom of the Vltava, but he didn’t tell that to Eliška. He concentrated on treading water and fighting the current at the same time. They hid under the span until they heard sirens. With the police on their way, the sniper would be forced to abandon his perch. At least, that’s what Noble was hoping. As the sirens closed in, Noble let the current take him. They passed under the bridge, emerging on the southern side, and paddled for the east bank. Noble kept expecting to hear bullets impact the water, but they made it to shore and slogged up a slippery embankment under the curious gaze of several onlookers.
“Let’s get out of here,” Eliška muttered.
Noble agreed and followed her up the slope. They had to scramble over a waist-high storm wall of roughhewn stone. Eliška took a narrow alley between buildings, leading Noble away from the river and the chaos on Charles Bridge, then along Anenská Road.
“We need to get off the street,” Noble told her. His fingers and toes were blocks of ice and his teeth chattered in his skull. “Find someplace warm where we can get out of these wet clothes.”
She kept walking, eating up the sidewalk with long, determined strides.
“Hey!” Noble reached for her, but she jerked away from him. Noble said, “Whoever killed your friend Miklos is still out there.”
“Exactly,” Eliška told him without slowing down.
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Noble grabbed her and pinned her against the wall. “You’re not going anywhere.”
She tried to throw him off, but Noble outweighed her by forty pounds. He held her against the bricks. She said, “They know about my father!”
Noble relaxed his grip some. “They know where he lives?
Eliška nodded. “They threatened to kill him if I didn’t take the contract on Fellows. That’s why I had to fake my own death.”
She gave him another shove. This time Noble allowed himself to be pushed. He thought about what he would do if a pack of trained killers were on their way to the Wyndham Arms. He’d move heaven and earth to protect Mom. He softened his tone and said, “If they know about your father, they’ve probably got people sitting on his apartment. They’ll use him to get to you. You can’t go in guns blazing. They’ll be expecting that.”
“He’s my father.” She turned on her heel and stalked away.
Lucas watched as Cermákova and Noble went over the side of the bridge and disappeared into the water. He trained his scope on the other side of the bridge and waited for them to emerge, but they never came up. The distant wail of sirens climbed above the whipping sound of the wind and Lucas knew it was a lost cause. He put the rifle down, took a small can of aerosol bleach from his coat pocket and sprayed the weapon. When that was done, he pulled the watch cap off his head and made his way down the tower. A dead Czech military intelligence specialist on one tower and a Russian sniper rifle on the other should keep investigators busy for a while. Lucas reached the bottom of the steps and mixed with the hurrying mass of people fleeing the bridge.
Cermákova was proving hard to kill. And now she had help. Lucas turned a corner off Mala Strana and made his way south, through a twisting maze of passageways. He had gone two blocks when a Jeep pulled up beside him. Lucas opened the passenger-side door and climbed in next to Veers. The German said, “She’ll run straight to Daddy.”
“Get us there first,” Lucas said.
Eric nodded.
“What happened to the men in the tower?”
“Two are dead,” Veers said. “The other is banged up pretty bad.”
“Will he talk?” Lucas wanted to know. The hardcases in the tower had been Eric’s men. Lucas didn’t know how reliable they were.
“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” Eric assured him.
From the back seat, Stanz asked, “Anyone know who the newcomer is?”
“His name is Jake Noble,” Lucas said. He lit a cigarette and filled the Jeep with smoke. How had Noble gotten mixed up with Cermákova? Was he back working for the CIA? Or was he freelancing? The questions crowded Lucas’s mind. The answers could completely change the mission.
“You know him?” Stanz asked.
“He’s former Special Forces,” Lucas told them. “United States Army.”
Stanz cursed.
What Lucas didn’t tell them was that the CIA had sheep dipped Noble for a Special Operations Group and that he might, even now, be working for the United States government. The less they knew, the better. Jake Noble showing up in the middle of an operation was a bad sign. Lucas reached into his waistband, pulled out a Sig pistol, and did a press check to be sure a round lay in the chamber. He glimpsed brass and said, “We need to find the girl and kill her.”
“What about Noble?” Eric asked.
Lucas hesitated less than a second before saying, “If he gets in our way, then he dies too.”
Eric took the first left, headed for Wenceslas Square. The two men in the back seat checked the action on their weapons. They were both former soldiers in the West German Baader-Mienhof Group, better known as the Red Army Faction. They had fought for the cause and done time in Germany’s notorious Plötzensee Prison. They were no pushovers, but they had no idea what they were walking into. Lucas said, “Everybody, listen up. Noble’s no punk. Don’t screw around with this guy. If you get a shot, take it.”
Chapter Forty-One
“What the hell were you thinking?” Armstrong asked. She paced back and forth behind her desk. Her face was a carefully constructed mask devoid of emotion. A storm was brewing below the surface. Wizard sat across from her with an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips. Armstrong stopped, gripped the back of her chair, and eyed him. “You laid in a covert operation without congressional approval and you lied to me about it. And for what? A counterfeiting operation with a hired killer on their payroll? This is the type of cowboy antics I was hired to put an end to. If this ever came to light, those fools up on the Hill would rake us both over the coals. What’s worse, you put Jake Noble in the field. He hasn’t even passed his psych evals, and you’ve got him chasing down assassins.”
Wizard took the unlit cigarette from his mouth and tapped it on the arm of his chair. “This is just what Jake needed to get his head back in the game.”
Armstrong stopped him with an upraised hand. “I’m not going to argue that. Hopefully you’re right, but has it occurred to you what happens if he fails? We’ll be cutting another star into that wall.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Wizard rasped.
“That’s the least of my worries.” A vein throbbed in Armstrong’s forehead. She dropped into her chair. “Al, you’re probably the best damn Operations Director this agency has seen in decades, but this obsession of yours for this criminal ‘mastermind’ has gone too far. You don’t have any evidence that this guy even exists. You have no proof at all.”
She waved an arm in the direction of his office. “There is no villainous intellect behind all those reports and news clippings tacked to your wall. There’s just a bunch of randomness. You see connections where you want to see them.”
“He exists,” Wizard insisted. “And if you let me keep pulling at this thread, I can prove it.”
Armstrong clicked her tongue. “I’ve got a lot of respect for you, Al, but you’re chasing ghosts. I’m not going to let you waste anymore of my time—or tax-payer dollars—looking for the boogeyman.” She drew her chair up to her desk and woke up her computer with a nudge of the mouse. “Furthermore, I’m recommending you speak with a Company therapist.”
A humorless smile turned up one side of his face. He studied the unlit cigarette in his hand. “I may be losing a step in my old age, but I’m not crazy.”
“Are you sure?” Armstrong asked. “Because you sent a grief-stricken drunk halfway around the globe to track down a hired killer in the hopes he would lead you back to some criminal mastermind directing world affairs from the shadows.”
Wizard sat in stony silence.
“You know what I think this is?” Armstrong said. She leaned back and crossed her arms but spoke in a friendly tone. “I think this is one last hoorah. I think you’re getting old, and you miss the glory days when it was America versus the spymasters in the Kremlin. I think you’re pinning for one last victory against a worthy opponent before you hang up the spurs, cowboy.”
Wizard had been down this road before and knew what Armstrong wanted to hear. Insisting he was right would only convince her that he was crazy. Because crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, do they? That idea nagged at Wizard on long sleepless nights when he had too much time to think. But he wasn’t crazy. He pushed those doubts out of reach and forced a smile on to his face. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am pinning for the glory days.”
“The Cold War is over,” Armstrong said. “It’s not America against the evil Soviet empire anymore. Our enemies are just a collection of nations with different goals. There are no good guys or bad guys—just a bunch of countries with opposing world views.”
“That’s all it ever was,” said Wizard. “Different people with opposing world views. But some of those world views are morally right. Others are morally wrong.”
Armstrong reached for a box of cigars on her desk. “I never took you for a philosopher.”
“I believed in American exceptionalism,” Wizard told her. “Still do.”
She snipp
ed the end from a cigar, clamped it between her teeth, and flicked a lighter. Wizard took the opportunity to light up as well. Armstrong leaned her head back and blew smoke at the ceiling. “Yeah, me too.” She paused a beat and then added, “But I still want you to speak to a therapist.”
He nodded. “Fine. I’ll make an appointment the beginning of next week.”
“Make it first thing tomorrow,” Armstrong said.
“I’d have to cancel my UFO meeting,” he said with a perfectly straight face.
Armstrong didn’t bother to hide her smile. “Don’t crack up on me, Al.”
He stood to leave. “Don’t worry about me, Director. My head is still in the game. Do me one favor?”
She nodded.
“Stay on top of the supernotes,” Wizard said. “My gut says this is more than just a counterfeiting operation.”
“Counterfeiting is a Secret Service problem, but I’ll have them keep me in the loop,” Armstrong said. “If they ask for our help, you’ll be the first to know.”
Wizard let himself out of her office and crossed the hall to his own sanctum sanctorum. He closed the door, leaned his hips against his cluttered desk, and stared at the wall while smoke drifted up in lazy curlicues that gathered around the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Was Armstrong right? Had he been chasing a phantom all these years? Wizard traced the lines of string on the wall, moving from incident to incident. He went over each and every piece in his mind, connecting all the dots. The man, whoever he was, existed. He was real, and Wizard was going to prove it. He was going to find him and expose him.
Too close to give up now, Wizard told himself.
Chapter Forty-Two
Noble hurried after Eliška. She strode along the sidewalk with her head down and her hands stuffed deep in her pockets, leaving a trail of damp shoeprints on the cobblestones. Noble chewed the inside of one cheek and considered his options. If Noble wanted to stop her, he would have to hog-tie her and carry her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Her father was in danger. Eliška was determined to save him. She might be a remorseless killer, but every girl loves her daddy. That was pop psychology 101. His other option was to help.
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