by Gregg Loomis
Jacob shot him a glance before shouting, “I’m coming, I’m coming!”
The adjacent balcony was too far to simply step over onto it. But a good jump . . . Lang didn’t have a lot of choice. He resisted the urge to close his eyes as he stooped, coiling his leg muscles, and sprang into empty space.
The sole of his shoe slipped on the edge of the concrete and Lang grabbed for the iron railing as he fell. His weight yanked his arms straight with a jerk that felt as though they were tearing from the sockets. For what seemed an eternity, Lang’s fingers grasped for purchase on the cement and he tried not to notice how far away the street looked twelve stories below.
Through the open glass, he could hear voices above. Jacob’s sounded angry. He sensed, rather than heard, footsteps. It hadn’t taken the police long to conclude Lang was no longer in Jacob’s place and search elsewhere.
Like outside.
Finally Lang was able to grasp one of the railing’s uprights. He tugged gently, making sure the slender metal would hold his hundred and ninety pounds. His other hand found a second upright and he slowly began to chin himself up as though on a crossbar.
As his head was coming level with the cement floor of the balcony, he heard something that made him turn his head. On Jacob’s balcony, a pair of shoes were at eye level, the soles and rubber heels unevenly worn. Lang extended his arms, lowering his head below balcony-level and hoping his hands weren’t visible in the growing dusk. He was hanging in a twelve-story void but they would hardly look for him beneath the adjacent balcony. Jacob’s balcony would block out the rest of him unless someone came to the very edge and looked over.
Scuffed toe caps the color of butterscotch turned away and a voice announced, “Bloke’s not ’ere. Sure we ’ave the right flat?”
Lang couldn’t make out the words of the reply but the tone was affirmative.
He heard the glass door to Jacob’s apartment slide shut, and he glanced upward, risking the paleness of his face showing against the dark background if anyone were still outside. He was alone. Once again he chinned up until one hand, then the other, could reach the top of the railing and he could pull himself up, over and onto firm footing.
The drapes on the glass were pulled, so Lang couldn’t tell if there were lights burning inside. He put an ear to the cold surface. No voices, human or electronic. Either the occupants were the rare ones who didn’t watch the BBC news at this time of day or the place was empty. He tugged at the grip. Locked. Who would lock a door on the twelfth floor, he asked himself as he took a credit card from his wallet. Someone seriously paranoid, came the answer as he inserted the card and pressed back the latch.
Thankful that few homeowners in England had firearms, Lang stepped into total darkness.
Guided by a sliver of light under the door to what he surmised was the common hallway, he moved forward, arms outstretched. His hands missed the low coffee table that smacked his shins so painfully he had to bite his lip to suppress a curse.
He was reaching for the door to the hall when shadows moved across the ribbon of light underneath it. The click in the lock nearly immobilized him like headlights are supposed to transfix a deer. As he frantically tried to think of a hiding place in the dark, he remembered his sole experience in the matter, an encounter on a dark road in the Black Forest, had resulted not in an indecisive buck but a badly damaged Volkswagen.
Lang did the only thing he could think of: take a position next to the hinges, a place where the opening door itself would momentarily hide him. Then the lights flashed on, blinding him for an instant. When he could see again, he was looking at a woman carrying a basket, the plastic kind Europeans use for grocery shopping. She saw him as she turned to close the door.
Her eyes opened to a size Lang had thought impossible anywhere except in the comic strips. She made a sound more like a squeak than a scream. It wasn’t loud enough to mask the smashing of glass when the basket slipped from her grip and hit the floor.
Lang smiled the most nonthreatening smile possible as he stepped out from behind the still-open door and into the hallway. “Sorry, wrong flat.” He almost slipped on something that crunched under his foot. “Sounds real fresh. You’ll have to give me the name of your greengrocer.”
She found her voice, as indicated by the scream that followed him as he fled down the hall.
He decided not to use the elevator. No idea how long it would take to get down and the police might very well be responding to the poor frightened woman right now. He made a dash down the stairs. At the lobby, he summoned the stuffy dignity so dear to the English to stroll for the door outside and enter the fresh darkness of early evening.
How the hell had the cops known he was at Jacob’s place, Lang wondered as he walked towards the nearest tube station. He was certain no one had followed him to Jacob’s. And if they had, where did they pick him up? If he had been recognized at Oxford, why hadn’t he been arrested there? Because they had somehow known he was coming here, to Jacob’s.
The thought made Lang shiver more than the chill of the evening. To know he would seek out Jacob, someone would have had to look over his long-closed service record, something the Agency’s pathological penchant for secrecy made unlikely. The London police, Scotland Yard, would have known that, probably wouldn’t have even bothered to ask, assuming they had been aware of his former employment. But he was almost certain he had seen his photo from his service jacket in the tabloid the man on the bench had been reading at the Temple. How did the paper get it? That raised an even more disturbing possibility: Someone had exhumed his record, buried under years of bureaucratic sod, and was supplying the police with the information. They. They who wanted him arrested, imprisoned where They could tend to him in their own sweet time.
Lang’s thoughts were interrupted by the protest of tires under brakes. A sedan, something the British would call a saloon car, ran onto the sidewalk, blocking his path. Two men got out, pistols pointed.
“Mr. Reilly, I believe,” the taller of the two said, holding up a leather folder with a badge on one side, a photograph on the other. “Scotland Yard. You’re under arrest.”
“Wow!” Lang said, raising his arms. “All my life I’ve dreamed of this, actually meeting someone from the Yard. A real Kodak moment.”
The streetlights’ halogenic jaundice showed that the larger man had suffered a bad case of acne at some point in his life. His suit was ill fitting. The look of something bought off the rack and poorly tailored? No, the jacket had been hurriedly altered to fit around the clearly visible shoulder holster. Not the tailored British look Lang associated with English inspectors. The gun was wrong, too, a Beretta. Scotland Yard, like most American police forces, favored the Glock nine-millimeter, a weapon lighter, faster and holding more rounds than the Italian-made automatic.
The other man was behind the first, shorter and heavy, Costello to his companion’s Abbott. He wore the recognizable butterscotch shoes. Holstering his gun, he stepped to Lang’s rear, pulling his arms behind him. Lang expected to hear the snap of handcuffs. Instead, Costello tightened his grip as Abbott put his weapon away also.
“You’ll be coming with us, Mr. Reilly,” Abbott said politely. “The lads at the Yard have a query or two for you.”
“Don’t suppose it’d do any good to tell you I didn’t do it,” Lang said, testing the man’s grip by pretending to struggle.
“An’ which would be that you didn’t do, now? The one in America or the poor sod in Bond Street?” Abbott was reaching inside his suit jacket.
The light was far from good but sufficed for Lang to see Abbott produce a syringe.
“Since when did Scotland Yard start sedating its prisoners?” Lang asked.
“Easier and more humane than clubbing or pistol-whipping like your coppers do the poor black blokes,” Abbott, said, concentrating on testing the needle. The lights turned the tiny stream of liquid into gold. “Now this won’t hurt a bit.”
Lang felt tingling along his ne
ck just as he had when the would-be killer entered his place in Atlanta. As then, the Agency’s basic training returned like a poem memorized and long forgotten.
Lang suddenly threw his weight forward. Costello’s reaction was the natural impulse to resist by planting a foot forward, the better to pull Lang back. At that instant, Lang shifted his bulk to his back leg, lifted his front foot and brought the heel of his shoe and every bit of one hundred ninety pounds he could manage down on Costello’s instep.
Only an instant separated the sound of crunching bone and Costello’s scream. His grip relaxed and Lang hurled himself forward. Costello took a single hop and fell to the sidewalk where he lay moaning.
Abbott had dropped the needle and was reaching for his Beretta. Lang feinted with a left jab, delaying his draw by the instant it took to lean away. Crouching to make sure the blow would land where he aimed it, Lang placed a right hook right below the rib cage.
Abbott folded as neatly as a jackknife, his knees hitting the pavement in a posture that would have resembled prayer had his hands not been trying to embrace the liver Lang hoped was ruptured by the blow. He gave Lang a baleful look before doing a face-plant on the sidewalk.
As he writhed on the ground, moaning, something fell from his shirt. Lang wasn’t surprised to recognize the Maltese cross in a circle.
Lang used a foot to roll him over, stooped and picked up the Beretta before walking over to the lamppost Costello was using to try to pull himself upright. Lang disarmed him, too, tossing his weapon into some bushes, before jamming the muzzle of Abbott’s weapon into his mouth.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The only fear was Lang’s when he saw none on the man’s face. Just like the man who tried to kill Lang at home, death wasn’t a very scary possibility to these people.
“Who sent you?” Lang could feel his frustration becoming anger. “Answer me, or by God your brains’ll be splattered all over that lamppost.”
His assailant’s answer was a smile, or as much of one as he could manage around the gun’s muzzle.
Lang’s fury at Them was boiling. These pukes were from the organization that had burned Jeff and Janet to death as they slept, had tried both to kill him and frame him for two other murders. If this bastard was so willing to die, Lang was more than willing to accommodate him. His finger tightened on the trigger and his passion to bring pain, destruction and death grew. Revenge was less than a hundredth of a millimeter away.
The man’s eyes moved from Lang’s face, focusing for only a split second on something over Lang’s shoulder. It was enough. Lang dropped to one knee and spun around. Abbott, jimbia in hand, collided with Lang, falling over the top like the victim of a shoestring tackle. Still off balance, he imbedded the blade meant for Lang up to its hilt into his comrade’s chest.
A geyser of arterial blood, black in the streetlight, spurted from the shorter man as he slumped to the ground. He made a sound that could have been a sigh had it not come from around the knife that was splitting his sternum. Eyes open but becoming lifeless stared above.
The accident didn’t seem to shake Abbott at all. He scrambled to his feet in the same motion with which he snatched the knife from the still body. It came free with a sucking sound that made Lang’s stomach heave. Painted with his companion’s blood, Abbott whirled towards Lang, the blade raised for another try.
Still on one knee, Lang raised the Beretta in both hands. “Hold it right there.”
At that moment Lang became aware of three things. First, his attacker wasn’t going to be intimidated by the gun. Second, he had no idea if the weapon had a bullet in the chamber. Third, there was no time to pull the Beretta’s slide back or check its safety to make sure it was ready to fire.
Lang squeezed the trigger.
5
Jacob stared at the statuesque woman in his doorway. “Lang who?”
Gurt shoved past him into the apartment. “I don’t have time for sport, Mr. Annulewicz. Lang is in imminent danger. I need to know where he is.”
Jacob shrugged. Besides his natural suspicion, it was his instinct to evade questions asked in German accents, slight as the inflection might be. “A most popular man. Second time this evening somebody’s popped ’round looking for him. Beginning to think I’d like to meet the bloke m’self.
Gurt stepped closer, maximizing her six-inch height advantage “You were Mossad; Lang, Agency. Thirteen years ago, Hamas planning to bomb the Israeli embassy. You were scheduled to be in the neighborhood. Lang convinced the Agency to let him warn you. You always joked that you wondered what he would have done if they had refused to let him.”
Jacob’s eyes widened. “You do know him! I’m sorry . . .”
Gurt gave him the briefest of smiles. “Apologize later. Right now I need to find him. He’s in more trouble than he realizes.”
Jacob had recovered sufficient composure to begin working on his pipe. “Not likely he doesn’t know he’s in a spot of bother. He left right ahead of the coppers.”
“Unless he was uncharacteristically careless, I doubt that’s who they were. The Agency gave his edited service records to the police but someone else accessed his service file, someone besides the police. That’s how they found out about you, your friendship. Someone needs to tell him that his past, his contacts are known to these people.”
Jacob sat down hard on the leather-and-chrome hammock, his pipe temporarily ignored. “Bloody hell! If they have his service records . . .”
“He has no place to go in London they don’t know about,” Gurt finished. “I need to warn him.”
Jacob looked up at her. “I have no idea where he might have gone. He left here in a hurry.” He pointed the pipe’s stem at the balcony. “Took the quick way down.”
Gurt walked over, sliding the glass open as though she expected Lang to still be there. “What did you two talk about before the ‘cops’ arrived?” She made quotation marks in the air.
Now Jacob remembered his pipe and was stoking it with a match. “He’d just come back from Oxford, went to meet a chap I know, history fellow. Wanted to learn something about the Templars.”
Gurt turned from the opening onto the balcony, her forehead wrinkled. “Templars? As in Knights Templar?”
Apparently despairing of getting the briar going again, Jacob set it down. “The same. He found . . .”
There were two pops from the street below, sounds distinct from the murmur of the city. Jacob and Gurt rushed onto the balcony. If the noise had come from just below, its source was masked by shrubbery and shadows. Both turned and made a dash for the door and the elevator down.
6
London, South Dock
Lang had never killed anyone before. He would never forget each tiny detail, as if everything had slowed to a dreamlike pace. The Beretta bucked as though it were trying to escape his grasp, fell back to center the sight on the dark splotch on the white shirt and jumped again, all before the first shot had echoed off the nearby buildings. Brass shell casings, catching the light, sparkled like twin shooting stars as they arched into darkness.
His attacker grunted in surprise and pain. Unlike the movies, the bullets’ impact didn’t even slow him down. If it hadn’t been for the two red flowers blooming on his shirt, Lang would have thought he had missed. The pistol’s front sight centered again and he was about to squeeze off another round when the man’s knees buckled. As in a slow-motion film, his legs gave way and he hit the ground like a felled tree. His body was sprawled in a position that made Lang wonder if his bones had turned to liquid.
In any major American city, the sound of gunfire would make the neighbors burrow deeper into the safety of their homes. But not in London, where street shootings were still a novelty.
Above Lang’s head, lights were coming on, windows were opening and the curious were calling out, asking each other what had happened.
Lang hurriedly checked both men’s pockets, finding only the bogus police ID. Tucking the Beretta into his b
elt, he took one last look at the two bodies. He expected exultation or at least some degree of satisfaction for the small measure of revenge. Instead he felt a faint nausea. He made himself think of those two open graves on the hillside in Atlanta, but it didn’t help much.
Three of them for the persons he had loved. Scorekeeping was useless. He turned and walked quickly in a direction away from the approach of pulsating sirens.
7
London, South Dock
Inspector Fitzwilliam arrived in a less than jovial mood. These things always seemed to happen during the BBC newscast, calls that took him away from the telly and returned him to a dinner long since gone cold.
A crowd silhouetted by flashing lights was his first view of the crime scene. His next, after shouldering his way through the throng of spectators, made him forget both news and supper. Bodies were scattered about like some red Indian massacre in one of those American Westerns he had enjoyed so much as a lad. Two victims, one bloody as a freshly butchered beef, the other with neat, round holes in the breast of his shirt.
This was London, not New York or Los Angeles where street gangs conducted wars the police were impotent to prevent. What the hell . . . ? But the two victims didn’t look like street criminals. They wore suits with ties.
The detective in charge spotted Fitzwilliam and came over, notebook in hand, wrapped in an odor of curry. The sweat glistening on his dark face made Fitzwilliam suspect this was the first truly grisly murder the young man had seen.
“ ’Lo, Patel,” Fitzwilliam said, “Any idea what happened?”
“Like the shootout at the bloody OK Corral,” Patel said, the whites of his eyes large in contrast to his brown skin. “Both poor sods had shoulder holsters, police identification. I checked, the identities are false. We found one gun, a Beretta, in the shrubs over there,” he pointed. “Other pistol, if there was one, has gone missing.”
Fitzwilliam nodded, digesting this information. The U.K. did not permit the carrying of handguns, let alone concealed handguns, by anyone other than police, military and a very few security types. The presence of weapons and bogus ID indicated organized crime, quite possibly the so-called Russian Mafia that threatened to overrun Europe, or, worse, a part of a Colombian drug cartel.