by E. E. Knight
Fighting dizziness, Frys clawed the white mass of the air bag down, saw blurred images of men getting out of the sedan and roadster. One coming around his side of the car carried a tire iron … or perhaps a gun. It was impossible to tell without his specs.
There was still a way out.
He shifted the car into reverse, ignored the horrible squealing from the left front tire, and floored it. Bang! He jumped, unsure if the noise had been a gunshot or a tire exploding. But the car was still moving, and he was still alive … He held the steering wheel purposefully straight, directing the Merkur across the road and off the steep mountainside.
Life does save its best jokes for last, Professor Stephen Frys (emeritus) thought again as the car began to slide down the hill to the discordant tune of the suspension tearing itself to bits. Then it tipped and rolled over backwards and began to tumble. It occurred to him that he hadn’t gripped his attaché case to his chest, and he groped for it blindly. But then a hard whump, like a cricket bat striking the back of his head, brought the oblivion he’d rejected only moments before, back in the garage.
2
Lara Croft rose out of the water with her guns up and ready. She wore her usual shoreline training gear: a torso-covering dry suit, surf shoes, her two-gun rig, and a radio-mike headset that allowed short-range communication in three ounces of ear-fitted plastic.
With one addition.
A hard plastic shell clung around her hips like an oversized black fanny pack. Two short crablike arms with socket ends extended forward from the shell to her hip points.
The December Irish Sea air hit her like a slap. She inhaled; the seawater in the tide pool she’d swum through had left an iron taste, almost bloodlike, in her mouth, thanks to the wash from all the rusting metal lying about the pierside. Gantries and loaders dating back to before the Great War loomed all around this coastal piece of postindustrial Lancashire.
She squelched through the mud under barnacle-encrusted pilings, lost her footing, recovered, spotted a plastic keg with a large “4” spray-painted on it.
The Heckler & Koch USP Match pistol muzzles angled in toward the number, blasted out their .45-caliber staccato.
The ejected cartridge cases hissed as they struck the wet mud. The fléchette shells did their job, fragmenting into a dozen lethal slivers on impact. Plastic splinters flew out the rear of the keg.
“Four down,” she said into the radio mike as she holstered her guns.
She made for a wooden ladder, climbed it. She peered over the top, studied the abandoned wharf. Well, not quite abandoned. The Special Air Service and the Royal Marines used it for training. Sometimes they let her breathe some of its Irish Sea air for weapons training. Lady Croft was a generous giver to funds that supplemented the income of the relatives of men who never came home from missions that could never be publicly acknowledged.
A rusted corrugated shed sat atop a pallet in the middle of the wharf. A “5” the height of a surfboard was painted on its side, facing her.
No challenge doing it the easy way. Using the strength in her inner thighs, she let go and hung on to the ladder by main force, pressing her knees outward against the sides of the ladder. She unholstered her guns.
“VADS: double nitro,” she said into the mike.
The new voice-activated, variable ammunition delivery system on her back recognized it was being addressed and responded. As it should: she’d spent enough hours patiently “training” it. It clicked softly as the tops of new magazines appeared in the arm sockets. She pressed the ambidextrous magazine release levers, ejected the empty fléchette magazines, and lowered her guns to her hip points where the fresh magazines waited in the crab arms. The fresh magazines slammed into the USP grips with a satisfying tschuck.
She aimed her custom guns, though if the shells did what Djbril promised, aiming wasn’t that critical. She squeezed the triggers.
The shells hit, exploding on impact, blowing fist-sized holes in the shed. She kept firing, enjoying the thunderous sound of the explosions magnified by the interior of the shed. When the military-only twelve-round magazines were empty, there was nothing left of the shed but its roof, resting in the torn metal nailed to the pallet.
“Five down,” she said into her headset.
“Was that a chuffin’ rush, or what?” crackled Djbril’s voice in reply.
“No comment. We’re not done yet.”
“Into the rabbit hole, Alice.”
An old warehouse stood at the other end of the pier. She holstered her guns and trotted along the wharf toward it.
It was dark inside.
“VADS: left lumen.” VADS didn’t care if she used Latin or Swahili; it was all the same to the computer … as long as Lara Croft was the one doing the talking. A magazine popped out at her left hip point. She slammed the gun down on it. Brought the H&K back up, released the safety with her trigger finger—one of the reasons she loved this pistol was its custom functionality, the right/left operation of both the safety and magazine eject without a change in grip—and did a scan of the junk-filled warehouse from catwalk to rat traps.
She got out of the door frame fast, checked three and nine o’clock. The old windows were boarded over and covered with tarps that the SAS put up and took down to simulate a variety of lighting conditions.
“Long way off yet, Croft.”
She fired the illumination rounds into the darker nooks and crannies of the unlighted warehouse, jumped to the side as something whizzed past, and leapt over a pile of scrap, still firing.
Basically chemical paintballs, the illumination rounds splattered phosphorescent dye where they hit. Looking for suspicious outlines, she sprinted across the cracked concrete.
Lara slid under a stack of rusting oil drums just as a second rubber bullet fired from somewhere on the catwalk hit where she had stood an instant before.
“Nice try,” she said.
“Keeping you on your toes, Croft.”
She looked through a hole in the oil drum shielding her, saw a pile of loading pallets with an old rag painted with a “6” taped to it.
Four more illumination shells went up into the catwalk. Djbril probably had hid himself somewhere up there; it was both too obvious and too good a place to watch her from.
“VADS: right pyro, left rubber.”
The magazines popped out, ready for loading into her pistols. She slid on her back, working herself behind a pile of scrap metal, the smooth, hard plastic of the harness gliding over the floor.
Rubber bullets bounced off the wall behind her.
“If I can see you, I can kill you, Croft.”
She rolled behind an old stripped forklift up on blocks, fired her right pistol into the pallets. Phosphorus glowed bright in the bullet holes, and the pallets began to burn. She removed the VADS, wiggled under the forklift.
“Okay, Croft,” Djbril whispered over the radio. “You got it. Draw.”
She waited. Smoke billowed up. She brought her head and left arm out from under the forklift. She heard a cough from the catwalk. It came from an old rug and a portable radio. The three glowing red points of the tritium TRU-DOTs on her USP Match sights floated over the fabric. She fired rubber bullets into a suspicious, foot-shaped bulge.
“Bugger!” the voice in her ear said. “Lay off, luv.”
“What was that about a draw?”
“Yuh got me, pilgrim,” came the mock—John Wayne drawl.
“I respect your confidence in your workmanship. But supposing this contraption had put armor-piercing in?”
“I’d need a new ankle.”
Her strictly-off-the-books armorer threw the top of the rug off his body, unloaded his rifle, slung it over his shoulder, and slid down the access ladder sailor style, using his feet to slow himself.
“Thought for sure you’d go up the ladder first to get a look around,” he said, pulling back a navy blue balaclava and taking off his long-sleeved gloves. “I could have had you in the doorway, you know.”
“Knowing exactly when and where your target’s going to show helps,” she said, crawling out from under the forklift and getting to her feet.
“You could have found another entrance. The roof is full of them.”
“I’m on a schedule today.”
“Oh, yeah. The lecture. Sorry to keep you waiting, professor.”
It had been a long day. Djbril had started before dawn with a detailed briefing on the new gun system, how the VADS held and distinguished a dozen clips with whatever mix of ammunition she chose. He showed her how to open the “turtle shell” to replace the magazines in their racks that led to the crab-arm “feeders” and the control unit, a tiny pocket PC built into the buckle-cover at the front of the harness. Wireless technology linked the microphone headset to the control unit. He had created VADS almost from scratch, with a little assistance from some college engineering students and a twelve-thousand-pound check from Lady Croft.
The bullets themselves came in six flavors: armor-piercing for hard targets, fléchette for soft targets you wished to turn into sausage stuffing, pure explosive, incendiary, illumination, and less-lethal rubber bullets. For maximum destruction, he recommended a mix of armor-piercing, explosive, and incendiary. “A killer cocktail,” he’d said that morning, demonstrating it on a mannequin in body armor placed within an upright freezer.
The mannequin had gone into the defunct appliance looking like a stud from one of those American reality shows set on a beach resort, complete with suntan and impossibly white teeth. After twenty-four rounds, it had come out in charcoal-colored chunks.
Then he’d let Lara try out the different loads in her personal, custom-made H&K .45s. The ammunition impressed her.
At nine she took a break from gunsmithing to check her voice mail. Calls to her London office from everyone from her accountants to a retired Scottish archaeologist named Frys, who claimed to have known Von Croy, had to be answered. She had no luck reaching Dr. Frys, but got the day’s other business out of the way while Djbril filled some magazines with his special ammunition.
Then Djbril had talked her into trying the VADS auto-reloader. After ninety rather repetitious—and therefore tiresome—minutes mapping the software to her voice, she had tried the system out on the course.
Now she was sold.
“Wish I’d had this behind the green door.”
Djbril raised an eyebrow. “What, a copper door in some vault that you—”
“Czechoslovakia. The Strahov Fortress. A biological facility.”
He waited for her to say more. She didn’t, so he let it drop, changing the subject.
“Well, what do you think? Will the Ministry of Defense, or better yet, the Americans, buy it? We can adapt it for battle rifles, scout-snipers—”
“Visions of defense contracts dancing in your head already?” she said, leafing through the documentation.
“It started out as a bit of a lark and a giggle, yeah, but if there’s money to be made…”
“Think again. You’ll run into a lot of ‘airplanes have no military purpose or value’ types, you know. Try it on your mates in the regiment. Maybe you can get someone’s ear that way.” She rubbed her right shoulder. She’d fired over two hundred rounds, one-handed at that, and the ache was setting in.
“You can keep the prototype,” he told her. “It’s the least we can do after you funded our beta. Plus, we made it to your measurements.”
“And where did you get my vital statistics, I wonder? I don’t post them on my CV.”
Djbril brought his heel down hard enough on the concrete for Lara to feel it. He set his eyes straight forward, gave a formal salute. “Sir! Sworn to secrecy on sources and methods. Sir!”
Lara rolled her eyes. She loved military men the way she loved dogs and horses: They were noble, reliable, and very comforting to have around at times, but they had their limitations.
“I’ll take the prototype, seeing as how you went to so much trouble. Wrap it up and send it to Winston at the house, would you? The documentation, too. Now I’ve got to run. My lecture’s at seven.”
He followed her to her motorcycle, a Triumph Speed Triple. It glittered silver and black in the afternoon sun, 955 cc’s of warp speed.
“London in two and a half hours? That’s going to be some ride, even on that.”
“Two. I need to stop and wash the cordite off.”
“It’s your license.”
She unbuckled her holsters and handed them over. Djbril looked at the scratches on the all-weather coating and the dent in the left trigger guard and clicked his tongue in disapproval. “I’ll put new O-rings in while I’m at it. They don’t make this variant anymore; you should take better care of them.”
She needed to get out of the training rig. “You think I’d use my field pistols on experimental ammunition? That pair is safe at home.”
“Good. We in the regiment would hate to see anything happen to your pair, Lara.” He puckered his lips, flirting like a disco swain.
“He ‘who dares’ gets slapped in the face sometimes, you know.”
Djbril smiled at the play on the regimental motto, Who dares, wins. Taken, of course, from a much older Empire’s qui audet vincit.
***
“Lara Croft?” the crackling voice said over the bad connection.
“We verified it with Frys’s phone,” Tisdale said. He felt a migraine coming on. He stood at the Heathrow airport phone, worried at his teeth with the edge of the plastic calling card, utterly drained from the botched Frys job in Scotland.
“Lara Croft.” The Prime’s voice was the same monotone it had been upon hearing about the death of Professor Frys.
“Well, Croft Foundation offices,” Tisdale replied.
“Same thing. Wait a moment, would you?”
Tisdale waited, looked at the cracked cell phone. The contents of Frys’s briefcase were now nestled in the carry-on of a courier and would be in Peru in twenty-four hours. The Merkur had tossed both phone and briefcase onto the hillside as it rolled. He and Dohan in the roadster had stayed to investigate the wreck and phone the police to report the accident while the sedan limped off with the others. Dohan, a Scot, handled the officers smoothly while Tisdale stood silently beside him, sweating at the thought of Frys’s property in the boot. When the police, having recorded all the particulars, sent them on their way, Tisdale had barely been able to light his pipe at the thought of how close he’d been to using the needle. He was a chartered accountant, albeit one with a peculiar set of interests, not some hardened drug lord used to being questioned by the police.
Moving, and occasionally hiding, money was Tisdale’s forte, not car wrecks and bodies.
The Prime came back on: “You’re in luck, Twenty-eight. She’s in London tonight. If you move quickly, you can catch her off her guard.”
The blood pounded at the back of his eyes as the headache hit full force. “What—tonight?”
“Talk to Sixty. He’ll get you men.”
Sixty. Egorov. The driver of the sedan. More surveillance, stolen cars, pistols, danger—and headaches. Tisdale briefly considered declining, but to do so would forfeit a position built up with years of quiet, devoted service. “How do you want her handled?” he asked.
“Alive would be better,” the Prime replied. “But she can’t get so much as a hint of our existence. Not until the Awakening. Then it won’t matter.”
Mention of the goal straightened Tisdale’s spine. “I’ll handle it, sir. No worries. It’ll make up for the death of—”
“Forget about it. Just think about Croft. Your future position depends on how you handle her.”
“Sir … sir?”
“Yes?” The tone suggested that the conversation should be over by now. But Tisdale had to let him know, ask for understanding.
“I’ve had my dreams.”
“Fantastic!” More interest in the voice now. “What were they?”
“Murky. Floating. I swam, swam in and out of
tunnels. Smooth-sided tunnels.” Tisdale warmed to the subject; he had to pass on the vision, pure and powerful and as breath-taking as a glassful of vodka, neat. “Reminded me of one of those documentaries about the circulatory system, where they put a fiber-optic camera up someone’s leg.”
“Congratulations. You’ve taken your first step toward immortality.”
“Were they like that for you?”
“Goodbye, Twenty-eight. We’ll talk more after you get Croft. I don’t want a call saying you’ve failed. Understand?”
“I understand.”
Tisdale replaced the phone on its hook with a trembling hand and pocketed Frys’s cell phone. His head hurt worse than ever.
3
Lara Croft’s King’s College lectures were always well attended. The departments closest to her area of expertise, history and classics, would have nothing to do with her—the feeling was mutual—but oddly enough, the geography department was happy to sponsor her whenever she had the time and inclination to give a talk.
The late autumn rain steamed off her hot Triumph Speed Triple as she detached her hard-shell carryall from the back of the bike and hurried onto the Strand Campus. The carryall held a change of clothes and her computer.
She strode past the two Greek statues, their marble eyes seeming to look with disapproval upon her wet biking attire as she went to the information booth to verify her room number.
She was late. A tight-mouthed woman who introduced herself as Miss Wallesley reminded her of that fact. Lara apologized as best as she could, then asked if there was a place that she could change clothes.
“Hmphf. I should hope so. Follow me, please.”
The women’s WC outside the theater gave her room to change and warm up her computer while Miss Wallesley stood with crossed arms outside. Lara reorganized her hair before putting on a blouse and did her best to smooth out the wrinkles in the lightweight sports jacket she unrolled.