by Dave Stern
The flower pagoda was opposite them, in the center of the square. Behind it was a newer-looking brick building, with a helipad on top. On noticing it, Lara realized instantly that was how Reiss would come in, where he would want to make the exchange.
“There’s one.” Sheridan pointed toward a dimly lit alley to their right. Light glinted off the grille of a car, waiting there. “Another Mercedes. That’s a half-dozen cars altogether—make it four men in each. Plus the ones we saw creeping in on foot.” He shook his head. “The good doctor isn’t taking any chances.”
“We’ll have to,” Lara said. “To even things up.”
Terry looked up at her now and smiled. “Seems like old times.”
She smiled, as well, remembering what had happened after Terry got her loose from the NKA.
“Thirty, forty against two.”
“Just once I’d like to go somewhere with you where there weren’t people trying to kill us.”
She had to smile at that.
“That’s the first time you’ve smiled because of me, Croft. In a long while.”
“It’s the first time I’ve seen you in a long while, Terry.”
“Yeah. Well…” He shrugged.
Lara turned to him, her face suddenly serious.
“Why’d you do it, Terry? How does someone wake up one day and leave everything they’ve worked for? They offered you a command—”
“They offered me a desk,” Terry snapped. “A nice cozy office. A nice cozy life.”
“All you had to do was say no—”
“That wasn’t it, Croft.” He stood up now, too. “I’d started asking the wrong questions. ‘Why this mission? Why not that one?’ I got tired of doing things somebody else’s way. And it was always going to be somebody else’s way.”
“But deserting your men, your country—”
“I’ve paid my price for that.” He looked her in the eye. “I don’t know what it says about me, but leaving my men, my country, didn’t hurt as much as I thought. Leaving you was what did. You’re a hard act to follow, Croft.”
She didn’t know what to say. Terry had never—not in all the time they’d been together—opened himself up to her like this.
“The reason you and I got along? We both despise being normal. We both love what we do too much to leave room for much else. We’re two of a kind, you and me.”
“Terry.” Lara shook her head. “We’re nothing alike.”
“I don’t think we’re alike. I think we’re a pair. Opposite—and alone.”
He leaned in closer. Almost as if he was going to kiss her.
“Wait,” Lara said.
Terry looked up and then he heard it, too.
The sound of a helicopter, closing fast.
“On your command,” the pilot announced.
Reiss looked down out of his window and saw the helipad lit up below.
“Hold here a moment,” he said and nodded to Sean.
His security chief pulled out the thermal imager and aimed at the square. The imager looked for all the world like a videocamera with an oversize display screen—in its case, though, the screen provided a negative image of whatever the lens was pointed at. In this case, the area immediately surrounding the pagoda.
Sean pressed a button then and the screen filled with red dots. Each dot represented a heat signature—a man—more than likely, one of Sean’s men. Reiss stopped counting at thirty.
“One of those is Croft,” the doctor said.
Sean nodded. “She’ll be somewhere with a vantage point of the helipad.”
“I’ll make the call,” Reiss said. “Have your men start forming teams.”
He picked up the phone and dialed.
“Speak.”
“Xien?”
“Yes.”
“This is Reiss. We are prepared to land.”
“We’re prepared to receive you. Give us your landing coordinates.”
Reiss frowned. He wondered if Xien had any plans to duplicate his brother’s foolish action—to try and hold him up for more money.
“We’re using the helipad. My men have the situation well in hand,” Reiss replied. “But I do appreciate your offer of assistance.”
“Why don’t you set down in the square instead? That way, my men will also have things covered.”
Reiss was about to turn him down, and none too graciously, when he thought of Croft. No doubt she was in position already and, were he in her shoes, the helipad would most certainly be the place she was watching most closely. Surprising her at this stage of the rendezvous could only help them. And as for Xien’s men being in control of the situation on the ground…
Reiss glanced over at the imager, and the handfuls of red dots scattered all over the square, and smiled.
His men were everywhere.
“Fine,” he told Xien. “The square it is. And in case you weren’t aware—Croft is here.”
Xien waited a moment before replying.
“Oh, I’m aware.” Even over the phone, Reiss could hear the menace dripping from the man’s voice. “We’ll deal with her.”
“Please do.”
Reiss hung up the phone then and thought:
And then we’ll deal with you.
The helicopter was coming down.
But not where Lara had expected.
She cursed under her breath and then shouted to Terry.
“They’re not landing on the helipad!”
“I can see that,” he said. “They’re going to use the square!”
Lara looked down. Two men were emerging from the shadows of the pagoda. One carried a large case in his arms. The other was Xien.
She started scurrying across the rooftop, looking at the maze of wires and signs directly beneath her, trying to figure out some way to get down there without getting killed.
“Croft.”
She turned. Terry was looking left; she followed his gaze.
On the building next to the fish market, a huge neon sign, shaped like a dragon, hung from a thick wire cable that stretched completely across the square. Lara smiled.
That would do.
She kicked her pack over to Terry.
“Extra clips. Another gun,” she said. “You’ll need them.”
He nodded.
“See you down there.”
As Reiss’s helicopter roared by, Lara took a running leap and jumped onto the building next door.
They hovered just above the ground, the rotors kicking up dust clouds from the bare earth below. Xien stood almost directly beneath them, giving the all-clear signal. Reiss saw another man standing next to him, holding a case that—this time—looked the proper shape and size to contain the Orb.
Inside the copter, in the seat next to him, Sean was receiving signals from his men on the ground through his earpiece.
“All clear so far,” he told Reiss.
At those words, the pilot glanced back, waiting for the go-ahead to land.
But the doctor hesitated. Something about the idea of touching down, of committing himself to the ground for however brief a period of time, made him suddenly uneasy. He didn’t want those rotors to stop, or slow down, for a second.
Croft, he thought. Sheridan.
His fear was ridiculous, of course. Unreasonable. He had thirty-odd men in position, highly trained every one of them, plus however many Shay Ling Xien had waiting in the shadows. Call it an even dozen—which made the odds forty-something to two. But still…
His instincts told him not to land. And Jonathan Reiss always listened to his instincts.
“This is far enough,” he said. “We’ll make the exchange from here.”
Sean nodded and reached below his seat for the suitcase.
Lara jumped from the roof directly onto the cable. Caught it with both hands and hung there a moment, suspended in the space between the dragon sign and the building. Then she pulled herself up and sat on the cable, her legs dangling.
The helicopter hovered in
the center of the square. Xien and his man stood nearby. As she watched, the copter door opened and a man climbed out onto the landing skid.
Reiss wasn’t even going to land, she realized. They were going to make the exchange right now.
Lara looked down. A secondary steel wire held the sign tight against the building, prevented it from sliding down the cable. She drew one of her Colts and shot that wire away—the sound of the isolated gunshot swallowed up by the roar of the copter’s rotors.
She holstered her gun then and spun around. Braced her feet up against the wall of the building, reached behind with her hands, and held on tight to the dragon’s neck.
Then Lara pushed off.
Slowly at first, then picking up speed, the dragon sign began to slide along the cable, heading toward the center of the square.
Reiss saw Sean holding onto the skid with one hand, holding out the suitcase of money toward Xien with his other. Xien, in turn, was holding up the case with the Orb in it toward the copter.
The doctor allowed himself a small sigh of relief. The exchange was going to come off clean. His fears had been for naught.
He glanced at the imager screen then, and froze.
A single red dot was moving toward them—very quickly.
Reiss spun in his seat and scanned the square.
Which made him the first to see the dragon.
He had a second of total disconnect, when his mind was simply unable to process the information his eyes were presenting to it. There was a dragon—a purely mythological creature, for goodness sake, nothing like it had ever existed on the planet—rushing out of the sky toward them.
It was, Reiss saw, even spitting fire.
For a second he thought he was dreaming.
Then one of the windows next to him shattered and Reiss realized that the sparks of fire were gunshots. He took a second look at the dragon and saw that it was simply a metal sign, sliding toward them along a cable that traversed the square, and that there was a person riding that sign, firing at them, and that person was—
Lara Croft.
Another window panel shattered. Reiss hit the floor. The imager landed next to him—Reiss saw red dots moving every which way on the screen.
All hell was breaking loose.
“Get us out of here!” he yelled to the pilot, and the copter rose into the sky.
Lara ducked just in time.
As the dragon shot past the rising copter, the main rotors chopped off its head, sending a shower of sparks everywhere. The copter wobbled and lurched right. It took out part of a balcony.
The man on the skid jumped to the ground. Lara fired at him and missed. She looked for Xien and the Orb, but they’d already vanished from sight.
All around her, guns were blazing. She returned fire as best she could, vaguely aware of Terry running parallel to her, along the rooftops to her right, providing some degree of covering fire without which she would have been long dead.
But at least she’d managed to prevent the exchange.
So far.
Reiss had to wait several long rings for an answer. In the interim, he imagined worst-case scenarios: Croft had the Orb. The Orb had been destroyed. Xien had been killed, the Orb was somewhere on the ground below.
He forced himself to remain calm.
There was a click on the line.
“Yes?”
“Xien. You have it?”
“Yes, I still have it.”
“Good,” Reiss said. The copter was making long, slow circles of the square—right now, the helipad was directly beneath them. He was about to have Xien rendezvous with them there when his eyes fell on the flower pagoda itself. Set off by itself in the middle of the square. Impossible to reach without being spotted, no wires running near it, the steep pitch of its long, sloping tile roof…
“All right,” the doctor told Xien. “We tried it your way. Now listen carefully.”
Lara had come to the end of the line.
She and her dragon sign had reached the far side of the square and the end of the cable they’d been riding, which was fastened to an uncomfortably solid-looking brick building directly in front of them. Time to get off.
Lara saw only one option: ten feet to the right of the cable tether, there was another large sign. A white rectangle with black lettering, fastened lengthwise to the building. It looked solid enough.
Not like she had much choice anyway.
Lara gathered herself and jumped. She landed on the top of the sign just as the dragon slammed into the building.
The impact was tremendous—dust and pieces of brick, glass from the sign’s shattered neon bulbs rained down on her. The building shook.
Metal groaned beneath her. Lara glanced down to see a rickety-looking fire escape slowly detach itself from the building and topple to the ground.
The bolts holding her sign began to pull free, as well.
The top one went first: Lara slid down the sign as the next one gave, and then the next, her weight pulling out each successive bolt.
Lara was lucky: the last bolt held. The sign toppled toward the ground, falling over like a ladder. She walked down it to the ground below, shaking her head in wonder as she went.
Safe at last.
Windows shattered in the pagoda across from her. Gun barrels poked out and began firing at her.
A Mercedes screeched across the square in her direction. More gunfire.
Lara ran.
Reiss’s phone rang. It was Sean, wanting to know what had happened to the money. Wanting instructions.
“Don’t worry about the money,” the doctor told him. “Don’t worry about the Orb. I’ll handle that end of things. Your job is to handle Croft.”
Sean asked for clarification.
“Kill her,” Reiss explained. “Slowly. Painfully.”
The doctor hung up and directed the pilot forward, toward their new rendezvous point.
Terry reached the ground and paused a moment, listening.
No chopper. Isolated gunfire and the sound of men running.
He risked a quick peek out the building’s front door.
Shay Ling were falling back toward the flower pagoda. Reiss’s men were moving across the square, toward another building. Some of Xien’s people, he saw, were headed down an alley, moving parallel to them.
They were chasing Croft, he decided. Probably thought they had her cornered.
The idea was laughable.
But he decided to go help anyway, on the off-chance it was true.
He reloaded his guns and stepped out the door. Hugged the front of the building, hiding in the shadows until the facade ended and the empty street loomed in front of him.
As he prepared to dart across, one of the Shay Ling—a straggler, apparently—hurried by. Terry walked quickly up behind the man and snapped his neck.
Then he continued on his way.
A Mercedes blocked the entrance to the next alley over—two men stood on either side of the car, talking to each other in hushed tones.
Terry shot each with a single bullet.
Three bodies later, he turned a corner and saw Croft hiding underneath a sign that advertised the best hot and sour soup in Shanghai. She was watching Reiss’s men and the Shay Ling surround the building she was supposed to be in.
Terry approached from behind and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“I heard you two streets over,” she said without turning. “You move like an elephant.”
Terry was preparing an insult of his own when a low, rumbling noise from above made him look up.
Reiss’s helicopter was descending toward the square again.
“They’re going to try it again. Where this time, you think? The helipad?”
Lara shook her head and pointed.
Xien had just emerged from his truck and was now crossing the square, carrying the Orb case. Heading for the flower pagoda.
Terry frowned.
“The pagoda?”
Lara no
dded. “The top. That’s where they’ll make the exchange.”
She was right. Even now Reiss’s men were pulling back toward the pagoda, as well. Surrounding it.
Terry scanned the square and realized that there wasn’t a building within fifty feet of the pagoda that they could use for cover.
“How in the hell are we going to stop them this time?” he muttered.
Croft shook her head. “See any more dragon signs?”
“Ha.” He kept scanning the square and the buildings around it. There was the fish market, there was the structure Croft and her sign had wrecked, and next to it, the building with the helipad, which would have been much easier for them to attack, sandwiched as it was between two equally tall structures. Good choice on Reiss’s part to opt for the pagoda—even though Croft had disrupted their previous exchange, the incident in the square proved there was no need to actually land the copter, given the absence of any meaningful wind shears in the area. The windsock atop the helipad lay limp and still, fastened to the end of a long pole, which towered at least fifty feet above everything else in the square.
Fifty feet, Terry thought, and all of a sudden he had an idea. Crazy idea, but it just might work.
He turned to Croft, and by God if she wasn’t looking up at the windsock herself. She turned to him and smiled.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.
Thirteen
There was no direct route up to the helipad. So they had to improvise.
Under pressure, at times, because halfway up the side of the building a handful of Reiss’s men caught sight of them and began shooting. Lara and Terry returned fire as best they could, all the while using whatever handholds they could find—signs, fire escapes, ridiculous midair jumps worthy of a trapeze act—to keep climbing up.
Finally, they reached the floor just below the helipad. The lip of the roof stuck out a good three feet from the face of the building. Lara was preparing to jump for it when she heard Terry curse under his breath.
She looked down and saw Shay Ling and Reiss’s men pouring out of the pagoda en masse.