“I count four hostiles,” Perry whispered. “Automatic weapons… maybe something heavier under their jackets.”
“We can circle around, avoid this gallery, and get to the Sully Wing through the next passageway.”
Just then, two of the armed men moved toward them at the command of another man. Perry pulled Emily back, and they looked for their chance. The men turned the corner, unaware of their presence, and Perry tackled one, while Emily dispatched the other, as soon as they cleared any possible line of sight from the Mona Lisa gallery. She had merely jabbed a finger into the artery pulsing under her man’s ear, and when he twisted to escape, she kicked out his knee from behind and seized his throat with one hand, bent him back, and brought a fist down hammer-style across the bridge of his nose.
Perry’s man managed to get to his feet, and pulled a long knife from under his jacket. When he lunged, Perry seized the hand and yanked up sharply, and kicked him in the groin. Emily had already stripped the weapons off the other man, and stepped over to deliver a final blow with the butt of a rifle.
“Hey, that’s a Mini-14,” Perry said. “You know, like we saw the French police carrying.”
“I thought you said it was a proprietary design.” She handed him the rifle, and he turned it over to look for any identifying markings. “You know, only the police can get them.”
“Yup, it’s definitely one of theirs, a Mousqueton AMD. It’s stamped right here, G.I.G.N., which is one of their heavily armed divisions.”
“What the hell is going on here? This can’t be a police unit… can it?”
Perry tore the mask off one of the unconscious men – or perhaps he was dead, there wasn’t really time to check – and examined his bearded face. “I don’t know… he could be French, but he doesn’t really look like a cop.”
Emily handed him the radio she’d stripped off the other man. “What do you make of this?”
Perry listened through the earpiece for a moment. “I can’t quite make it out. Could be Pashtu.” Emily stared at him blankly. “It’s what they speak in Afghanistan, some of ‘em. I can’t say for sure, but it doesn’t sound like French to me, or even Arabic.”
“We need to move if we’re going to find Andie.”
Perry pulled an adapter off the end of the barrel, and examined the magazine from the Mini-14. “You were right. This is a BFA. They were shooting blanks. That’s why he didn’t try to fire it at me.”
Emily rolled the man over and pulled another magazine off his belt. “Here, these are live rounds.”
He looked it over closely and nodded. “What the hell are these guys up to?”
“No time to figure it out now. Let’s get going.”
The structure of the Denon Wing – two sets of long galleries connected by crosswise passages, one set for French painting and the other, much longer one, for Italian and Spanish painting – meant that they could run parallel to the French galleries more or less unnoticed until they reached the final cross passage leading to the Sully Wing. Or they could cross over sooner, though that would seem to bring them into direct contact with the terrorists, whoever they might be.
At each cross passage, Emily paused to check for hostiles on the lookout, and at the third one, she noticed an odd procession. A smaller man wearing a hooded, black robe was led along the opposite gallery by three armed men. At one point, he stumbled, and they pulled him up.
“Is that the leader?” Perry asked from over her shoulder.
“… or maybe the primary victim? Did you see how they’re holding him?”
“Oh, crap. This looks bad. We have to do something.”
Emily handed him the rifle and live magazines she’d taken off the men they’d left back at the other end of the first Italian gallery. “I’m going for Andie. See what you can do to gum up the works here. I may be able to approach from another direction after I get her someplace safe.”
“Wait. You need one of the rifles, too.”
Emily considered his proposition. Ordinarily, she’d say something to the effect that she could move faster without a weapon. But the thought of trying to secure Andie gave her some pause, and she reached out to take it. “Okay, fine. We have three live mags each, that’s a hundred twenty rounds. Let’s just hope the barrels aren’t too fouled from the blanks.”
“These guys mean business. There’s a three-round burst option.” Perry pointed to the selector. “We probably want to avoid a prolonged fire fight, what with all the priceless art around here.”
“Just hit what you aim at, cowboy,” Emily said, with a smirk, before dashing down the rest of the Spanish gallery and ducking into the final cross passage. There weren’t any hostiles, and the smoke had dissipated, though the alarms were still going off. A quick right turn at the end of the passage and she was in the first gallery of the Sully Wing, which looked to be empty. She also noticed that the security cameras appeared to be operational here. A sign fifty yards ahead indicated a rest room, and she dashed toward it. But there was no one there, and no sign of Andie.
The door to one of the stalls in the ladies room had been knocked off its hinges, and a paper towel dispenser dangled crookedly from one screw. Signs of a struggle… but why bother, if they were just herding tourists to the other wing with flash-bangs and blank rounds? There must be a couple thousand visitors here at any one moment, and most of them probably got out at the first sign of trouble. Why fuss over a few strays hiding out in a ladies room? It didn’t make sense.
Emily heard gunfire coming from the direction of the Denon Wing. If Perry had made his move, this might be the moment to circle back there. The key would be to avoid stumbling into his field of fire. But she couldn’t just assume Andie had found her way to safety, which created a quandary. In the back of the ladies room stall, she noticed a smashed mobile phone, and the design on the case looked like Andie’s. She stooped to pick it up, and noticed some pieces had slipped behind the toilet fixture. She gathered all of it up and put it in a pocket – more evidence of a struggle, but maybe something else as well. If she could get it to Michael, he might be able to make something of it.
Before she could commit to backing Perry’s move, she had to look through the Sully Wing, which was smaller than the other wings, and wouldn’t take so long. A loop through each floor, running as quickly as she dared, took only a few minutes, consulting the floor plan in each stairwell. She called out Andie’s name when it seemed safe, but saw no sign of her.
At the far end of the second floor, she noticed a reflected glow in a display case, and skidded to a halt on the smooth floor. Security gates had come down at the main passage leading to the Richelieu Wing, with the effect of sealing off a security contingent, and they were using some sort of torch to cut through it. But if they spotted her, and had a line of fire, they could well take her for a hostile, especially with a rifle slung over her shoulder. She’d make an easy target.
The closed gate also meant Andie had either made it across to safety, or she was still in the Denon Wing. Either way, the only path forward now was to engage the main body of terrorists, in the hope of finding her among the hostages, or confirming that she’d gotten away. She doubled back to enter the Daru staircase, where just a brief hour earlier, Stone had been sketching the Winged Victory in peace and quiet.
Boom-boom-boom.
Chapter 8
A Firefight
“Man, that thing is loud,” Emily thought, as she crouched against the granite balustrade, a few yards from the Winged Victory. Of course, the hardscape of an enormous staircase was bound to amplify the sound, and it occurred to her that it might work to her advantage.
From her position, she could see Perry, kneeling behind a pillar on a landing above the left-hand flight of stairs, and below his position were several men in the dark clothes and masks they’d spied earlier. He’d just perforated two of them, who lay splayed out across several steps, a few yards away, a pair of large holes in the torso of one and a small red spot in the startl
ed forehead of the other. A dark puddle expanded beneath his head, no doubt leaking from a much larger exit wound, as his compatriots scrambled for cover further up.
She also saw that there were more hostiles than they’d originally thought, a lot more – a quick count and she estimated there were sixteen men visible in the Salle Daru, as well as at least a hundred hostages. Her view was not unobstructed, but she could see much more clearly now the smoke had largely dissipated. Altogether, including the two they’d dispatched earlier, and these two, the hostiles probably numbered twenty or more. That’s a hell of a lot of men for a suicide mission.
And still no French security or gendarmes on the scene. Surely they’ll get through the Richelieu gate in another moment or two.
With a series of gestures, Emily caught Perry’s eye and indicated her intention to descend to the floor below in order to come up behind the main force. He laid down covering fire – boom-boom-boom, over and over until he’d emptied a magazine – and she dashed down three flights of stairs, and sprinted the length of the Roman sculpture gallery on the ground floor.
A row of Caesars, held out their right hands to address long dead crowds of Roman subjects – these were of no interest to her, as she ran past under the vaulted granite ceilings. There was the Winged Nemesis she’d argued with Perry about earlier. The marble goddess clutched a wheel in her left hand, and he’d been convinced it was a chariot wheel, or maybe some sort of torture device appropriate to a demon of vengeance. She’d taken offense at his suggestion, though she tried to conceal it, since she didn’t care to think of herself as an avenging demon, and for some reason she identified with this goddess. She preferred to think it was the wheel of fortune, and saw Nemesis as a spirit of justice, though one who cannot always overcome chance in the way she balances crimes and punishments.
She tightened her grip on the rifle and sprinted past more gods and heroes, but these stirred nothing. Only the statue of Venus in Arms had any influence on her heart. Plump white marble hands slung the sword across her shoulder, its leather strap pulled between her breasts, and a cherubic, winged Cupid standing by her side, playing with a helmet much too large for his head. Perry might never understand why this image spoke so deeply to her. The goddess’s placid face tilted slightly to one side; it wasn’t the expression of a lover who fights to protect her own – though at the present moment, she was fully prepared to do just this – but something deeper, darker… stranger.
Love and war are not simply opposites. As Emily knew from painful experience, hatred isn’t the only intimate passion uniting combatants. All too often, ushering her enemies into the next world had brought them as close to her as any lover. She shivered at the thought, and charged up the next staircase, taking it two and three steps at a time, and perhaps too quickly to check for hostiles on the upper landing.
As luck would have it – “Nemesis is having a good day,” she muttered – this far outpost was unguarded and the Salle Daru was empty. In the distance, the booming of Mini-14s sounded more like the rat-tat-tat typical of a longer barrel, and she knew that meant Perry was fully engaged. He’d have moved back into the Italian Gallery to avoid an assault on his initial position. But the terrorists had enough men to send a second team around to flank him through a different cross-passage. They would have moved the hostages into the smaller Mona Lisa cross-gallery in order to control them more efficiently, or – much worse thought – to concentrate the force of the blast from the explosive vest she assumed had been forced onto the hooded man they’d seen earlier.
Whichever it was, Emily had no time, and dashed through a cross passage to the far end of the Italian gallery, from where she could outflank the second team, and buy Perry a few precious seconds. The first task was to take the flanking team’s attention off him. Circling to the far wall, and moving at speed, she fired two bursts, trading accuracy for noise. Marksmanship wasn’t her strong suit anyway, and it wasn’t worth sacrificing mobility for a static post. Three men turned in surprise, and Perry was able to cut two of them down, before pivoting back to fire on the first team.
The third man still posed a threat, and turned back to her before she’d fully closed the gap. A hornet sizzled the hair by her ear, though his rifle seemed almost silent, and the barrel bucked from the recoil. Her heart beat loudly in her ears, and a final step and leap brought her close enough to jam her rifle barrel into his ribs and put three rounds through him before he could fire again. Once the pounding of her heart relented, she seized a knife hanging from the dead man’s belt and slit the throats of the other two, just to make sure they, too, were dead – the masks made this easier to stomach.
The gunfire died down at the other end, and she looked to find Perry, who’d shifted position to get a line of fire into the cross-passage nearest him. She retrieved a pair of M84 stun grenades from the dead men, and flashed four fingers twice to Perry.
On a four count, she slid both grenades into the Mona Lisa gallery, looked away, and covered her ears. A few seconds later, two blasts, one second apart, roared through the passageway, rattling a few frames off the walls and nearly toppling a bust from its pedestal. She entered from one end a moment before Perry charged in from the other. A few bursts and six masked men lay on the floor. This was what a SEAL is trained to do: identify targets and neutralize them in a hurry. The hooded man lay curled up in a far corner, against the plexiglass partition surrounding the Mona Lisa, which looked on these events with the same obscure smile playing on her lips as ever. The man held both hands out, which Emily now saw were bound with zip-ties. He raised them above his head, and cried, “Tirez pas, tirez pas!”
Perry tilted his head, then nodded to Emily. “It looks like you were right.”
He turned to check the dead, removing weapons and masks, and Emily scanned the crowd of hostages for Andie, but she was nowhere to be seen. A quick glance around the ceiling revealed that the security cameras had been disabled in this gallery, as they had been in the Spanish and Italian galleries. There must be a method to this, and Emily covered her eyes for a moment to consider what it might be.
“There’s not enough,” she called to Perry. “It’s not enough bodies.”
Perry glanced around the room. “Check him. I think there’s at least four unaccounted for.” A blast and a chorus of distant shouting registered through one end of the gallery, and he directed the crowd of disoriented, blinking hostages toward the east end of the gallery. “I think that must be the gendarmes… finally.”
“Look at this.” Emily stood back from the man in the corner, who she’d somehow persuaded to roll onto his belly. She’d lifted the robe, exposing a vest with pockets for twelve plastic pouches, each with a wire protruding from the top. More shouting, now recognizable as French, reached their ears, over the confused urgency of the crowd’s effort to put some distance between themselves and the now quiet dead. The sound of the gendarmes should have meant safety to them, even if the ringing in their ears hindered the cooperation necessary to squeeze efficiently through a narrow defile.
“Aidez-moi,” the hooded man cried out, his voice trembling.
Perry examined the wiring, while Emily pulled the hood from the man’s face, and they recognized each other immediately.
“C’est toi, mademoiselle! Help me, please,” he pleaded, switching to English. It was the waiter from the Moroccan restaurant.
“C4 and a remote switch,” Perry said. “We have to pull the fuses before someone triggers it.”
“Can you do that without setting it off?” Emily asked.
“It looks like a simple circuit. With his hands bound, he couldn’t have reached back to disarm it, so no fancy wiring would be needed.”
“What are you doing here?” Emily used the knife to cut his bonds. “We don’t even know your name.”
“Alhamdulillah… thank you, mademoiselle.”
“Have you seen my mother? Tall, blonde…”
“Don’t move,” Perry growled. “I don’t want to set th
is off.”
“Haven’t you disarmed it yet?” Emily asked. “Let’s get this rig off him.”
“I disconnected the radio, but unless I pull the individual fuses… there could be a secondary receiver…”
What’s your name?” Emily began to undo the straps on the vest, cutting where necessary, unfastening where possible. “How did you get into this situation?”
“I am called Nassim.” He gulped for air, eyes still wide as saucers, staring at the miraculous appearance of his deliverers. “Three men attacked me… on the way home from work last night, pulled me into a van. They bound me and beat me… I thought maybe they wanted my money, or my carte d’identité to gain access… but they had their own way in.”
“There… done,” Perry announced, and pulled the vest over Nassim’s head. The crowd had made much more progress, and the room was almost clear. Gendarmes could be heard just in the next gallery, trying to manage the crush of terrified tourists. “Lose the rifle,” he whispered, “… and the knife.”
“Let’s get him out of here,” Emily said. “They’ll take him for one of the terrorists.”
“Get him out… how?”
“I know a way,” Nassim said. “Downstairs, in the sculpture hall. Follow me.”
“No,” Perry said. “We’re probably on every security camera. We have to stay, or we’ll be hunted down in the street.”
“You’re right,” Emily said, and kicked the rifles and knife across the room. “Can you get out without the cameras seeing you, Nassim?”
“Yes, if I hug the walls downstairs. I can use the same route the others used to get out.”
“The others?”
“Yes, the ones who gave commands. They took the blonde haired lady, and the other woman and her two little boys.”
Girl Stalks the Ruins Page 9